Ashes to Ashes

Every once in a while you take a dusting. One might say that Ted Cruz and John Kasich both took dustings from Donald Trump who claims not simply to have won but to have knocked them off. Cruz in particular went toe to toe with Trump until he sustained the big knockout in Indiana. George Foreman took a major dusting from Ali in the famous Rumble in the Jungle. Sometimes getting totally routed and having all your dreams smashed can lead to a resurrection. That is what happened to George Foreman. Many people think that the George Foreman we see on TV today, cheerily delivering commercials for InventHelp, was the product of that fateful fight. If you remember, the persona Foreman conveyed throughout much of his fight career was sullen and brooding. He came to fight and he showed it. The reborn George Foreman still came to fight, but he was a delight—a little like his arch rival Ali. Back in l997, after losing in a ridiculous decision to Shannon Briggs, who was not in his league, Foreman had no harsh words for the fighter or the judges. He used the opportunity of a post fight interview to talk about his famous grill. It was both a riot and inspirational. Interestingly Trump opened his arms to both his rivals after roundly defeating them. About Cruz he remarked that he didn’t know what Cruz felt about him, but gave credit to his opponent for being "one hell of a competitor." Whether he really means it or not, he's offered Kasich crack at the VP slot ("Donald Trump's VP Shortlist Isn't As Crazy As It Sounds," Slate, 4/12/16) But what will happen to Cruz, Kassich and the other top runners in the bitterly contested Republican primary— Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Marco Rubio and Ben Carson? Will they rise from the ashes or will their dust simply turn to dust?

Sperm Count: Learning Victoria's Secret

Victoria Secret store at 722 Lexington Avenue (WestportWiki)

If  you want to vote in a primary you generally have to choose to be Democratic or Republican and followers of each party obviously will argue the benefits of each. For instance if you’re against big government entitlements and taxes you are going to be happier as a Republican. But if you believe like Bernie Sanders that health care is a right along with social security and that accumulation of huge amounts of wealth should be prevented by progressive tax policies then you’ll be happier as a Democrat. But what about sex. It used to be that one was born male or female, but now it’s increasingly become a choice and so like with choosing to register as a Democrat or Republican it might be useful to go over the advantages of either keeping the present sex one is born into or switching to the opposite, whether it be male or female. Males have traditionally been regarded as receiving higher wages and preferable consideration when it comes to promotion for major positions in companies (in fact it’s a continuing complaint of feminists). If you join the army and you're interested in actually fighting then you’re better off as a male (though  it looks like women are going to be able to become Seals if they can get through the training, "Navy SEALs set to open to women, top admiral says," Navy Times, 12/3/15).). On a biological note, it can be better to be a male because you don’t have to go through menstruation (and cramps) and especially menopause. So what are the contravening benefits to being female that a male who is thinking of sex reassignment surgery (SRS)? First of all we live in the age of ED. Of course nobody talks about it because they’re too embarrassed, though apparently 40% of males over the age of 40 experience some kind of erectile dysfunction. Can you imagine a life having a vagina and never having to be lying on top of someone who is asking “what’s wrong?” There are other advantages to being female too. Females tend to be more sensitive and empathetic; it’s a mood change you’ll start to notice within a few hours of your gender reassignment becoming finalized. Also, as a discriminated against class of person, you will now begin to enjoy the benefits that can accrue over years of inequity. You may find that you get the position you were after, not because you were qualified but because a)you have become a much better looking woman or man than you used to be b) that as the result of some class action suit you will suddenly become one of a group of women or men hired to fill positions formerly occupied by the opposite sex. In terms of space flight, we’ve had women astronauts so there’s no particular benefit one way or the other with being or not being a woman if you are interested in spending a long period of time in outer space (otherwise known as being a space cadet). Perhaps the biggest enjoyment of being a women is being able to wear lingerie. Men don’t usually get to wear bras, thongs, stockings and garters and converts to womanhood will soon learn Victoria’s Secret.

McPlaymate of the Month

In a review of Nancy Bauer’s How to Do Things With Pornography ("Non-existent thrills,"TLS, 4/7/16), Kate Manne, says the following: “One of Bauer’s main worries about pornography is that it instils false expectations in its consumers. She argues that the pornographic world is a distant sexual utopia – a 'pornutopia' – in which anyone is up for anything, and everyone’s desires are compatible with everybody else’s. The pornutopian world view therefore erases rape and incest. It provides a sexual miseducation.” Manne quotes Bauer to the effect that we don’t need a “a new politics of porn" so much as "a candid phenomenology of it," in order to understand its effect on us. When you were a kid your dentist probably showed you an animation about tooth decay which conceived of cavities in a medieval setting with the teeth as a fortress protected by white knights. If there are pornutopian experiences that are being had at the expense of women’s freedom and autonomy there’s a countervailing world of princesses in shining armor whose crusade can sometimes sound like an inquisition. One of these was the late Andrea Dworkin, a militant feminist who battled vociferously battled pornography. Only the other day a feminist spokesperson, with a lilting British accent, told NPR that women can do whatever they like with their bodies, but when naked pictures of women are appropriated to sell hamburgers, it’s exploitation. The problem with such forms of protest is that they can be contagious. You may never have heard of using nudity to sell hamburgers, but now that the idea has been inserted in your consciousness, you start to feel deprived when your Big Mac doesn’t include the image of a breast in its hefty architecture. McDonald’s throws everything but the kitchen sink into this now mythic confection. You’d think the least you could find when you opened up the bun was an old-fashioned nude centerfold (of the kind Playboy no longer features) with a fetching young Miss Mac of the Month.

Trump Re-ups Berlin Wall

The Great Wall of China in l907 (photo by Herbert Ponting)

President Trump announced that he has accepted a bid on a wall that would run along the Mexican border from the German company that built the Berlin Wall for the GDR back in l961. According to aides to President Trump, the Mexicans will still be fronting the money, but the president wanted to make sure that if he was going to get another country to pay that they would be getting the best bang for their buck. Much discussion has gone into the question of what such a wall would be called and after days of deliberation a bipartisan group of both Mexican and American legislators have decided to call it The Trump Wall. Travelers coming either from Mexico to the United States or traveling South from the United States to Mexico will be greeted with large neon signs visible from miles way with the familiar Trump logo, in place of the usual welcome to the United States or Mexico. When Chris Matthews of MSNBC asked President Trump whether choosing the builder of the Berlin Wall would excite comparisons to the Cold War, Mr. Trump reiterated an earlier controversial statement that women who have abortions should receive "some form of punishment." A White House spokesman commented, “All along people have told President Trump that this was impossible, this was not gong to happen, but now it’s going up right before our eyes and after the whole thing is finished we're planning on buying it back for the same 25 bucks that Peter Minuit paid the Indians for Manhattan. We'll turn the whole thing into a casino. The president is convinced that his wall will make the Great Wall of China look like chump change."

Oedipus in Malibu

What do Ada Ushpiz’s Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt  and Terence Malick’s Knight of Cups, have in common. It would seem nothing. The former is a documentary about one of the greatest and most controversial thinkers of the 20^th Century and the latter is a fiction about an alienated Hollywood screenwriter, Rick, played by Christian Bale. First of all these two unlikely bed fellows both have trouble coming to a timely end and both deal with thinkers. The Ushpiz film, a tiresome attempt to unify a plethora of disjointed material around no theme in particular, repeats the leitmotif of Hannah Arendt thinking with a cigarette in her hand (Arendt was apparently a giant in smoking as well as philosophy, a fact that is also underscored in Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt in which Barbara Sukowa playing Arendt is constantly puffing away).  Rick, like Arendt, is frequently looking out meditatively during the Malick film, but the comparison ends there since what goes on in Rick's head, in contrast to Arendt's well thought out pronunciamentos, can only be called stinking thinking. Do all screen writers walk around Malibu engaging in interior monologues which can be neatly translated into voice overs? Are all seeking to be awakened from an existential sleep and do all of them intermittently find themselves waking up in the middle of conversations that sound like lousy adaptations of Oedipus, Cain and Abel and Macbeth?  Do they all look like they have seen Fellini’s  8 ½ and Stanley Kubrick’s Eye’s Wide Shut one too many times and do all their girl friends and especially the one played by Cate Blanchett (Nancy) also look out vacantly as Monica Vitti did in L’avventura after her friend disappeared? Do all Hollywood screenwriters  wander around the lots of film studios when they’re not attending fashion shoots populated by half naked models? Undoubtedly there are lots of people who have been adversely molded by the unreality of the film industry, but surely not even the most jaded script writer thinks thoughts like the ones that Malick puts into his main character’s head. "I dreamt that we were caught in a huge tall wave that engulfed the city," is an example.Yes it's understood that the movie is about a brooding filmic sensibility who, when he isn’t staring out at the sea, is wandering amongst rock formations in the desert and who on more than one occasion finds himself staring at a craggy road. But get out! Even by Hollywood standards, this is errant nonsense of the highest order.