The past week or so has been a bit too chaotic for me to have dedicated the proper time and attention to composing a blog entry. So I am posting a link to an article I wrote about two years ago for Mi Gente magazine, about the Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation's annual technology-themed breakfast.
"Leaders in Education Bridging the Digital Divide"
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Edith Grossman, Don't Eat Your Heart Out (Just Yet)
The following is my translation into Spanish of the Wikipedia entry for the late filmmaker John Cassavetes. Feel free to leave comments, suggestions, criticism, and/or notice of any translation error on my part. (Note: The article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cassavetes has been edited a bit (for the better) since I began this translation -- and there is now in fact a translation into Spanish posted on the site.)
Vida y obras
John Nicholas Cassavetes era actor, director de cine, guionista y dramaturgo estadounidense mejor conocido por sus películas naturales e intensas. Se considera el «padrino del cine independiente», y su obra ha influido a directores de cine de varias generaciones, desde contemporáneos suyos tal como Martin Scorsese hasta Paul Thomas Anderson.
Cassavetes nació el 9 de diciembre de 1929, en ciudad de Nueva York, hijo de Nicholas John Cassavetes y Catherine Demetri, inmigrantes griegos. Crecía en Long Island, Nueva York, y asistió a Blair Academy, colegio en Nueva Yérsey, antes de entrar en la American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Después de graduarse en 1950, seguía trabajando de actor teatral, además de haciendo papeles en películas y empezando a actuar en televisión, en series antológicas incluso el Alcoa Theatre.
Primeras películas y actuación
Durante esta época encontró a la actriz Gena Rowlands y se casó con ella. Para 1956 había empezado a dar clases de la actuación del método en ciudad de Nueva York. Shadows (1959), la primera película que escribió y que dirigió Cassavetes, fue inspirado por un ejercicio de teatro improvisado. Cassavetes podía reunir el dinero para hacer la película gracias a sus amigos y familia, y a los oyentes de un programa de radio nocturno de línea abierta al público.
Ninguna compañía norteamericana estaba dispuesta a distribuir Shadows, así que lo llevó a Europa con el fin de conseguir un convenio de distribución. Se estrenó la película en Europa y ganó el Premio de los Críticos en la Feria de Películas de Venecia. Más tarde las distribuidoras Europeas lo estrenaron de una película importación en los Estados Unidos. Aunque lo miraban pocos norteamericanos, Shadows ganaba atención de los estudios de cine, y a principios de los años sesenta Cassavetes dirigió dos películas por Hollywood, Too late blues y A child is waiting.
También representaba dominantemente en películas como tal The dirty dozen (1967), recibiendo la propuesta por el Premio de la Academia de Mejor Actor Secundario por su papel de un soldado raso ansioso. Otros papeles notables de Cassavetes incluye un actor mentiroso en Rosemary’s baby (1968) de Roman Polanski, la victima en The killers, y el justo castigo vicioso del gobierno a Kirk Douglas en The fury (1978).
La próxima película que dirigió Cassavetes fue Faces, también producida independientemente, de la que Rowlands John Marley, Seymour Cassel y Val Avery fueron las estrellas. Representa un matrimonio contemporáneo desintegrándose. Faces fue propuesto por tres Premios de la Academia, Mejor Guión Original, Mejor Actor Secundario y Mejor Actriz.
Cassavetes él mismo fue una de las estrellas de Husbands (1970), junto con Peter Falk y Ben Gazzara. Representan un trío de hombres casados quienes han ido de farra en Londres.
Obras maestras de los años setenta
Sus tres obras maestras de los años setenta fueron producidas independientemente. Rowlands es la estrella de A woman under the influence (1974), en la que representa una ama de casa que se llega a estar cada vez más preocupada, rodeada por gente que no entiende su preocupación. Recibió la propuesta de la Academia por Mejor Actriz, mientras Cassavetes fue propuesto por Mejor Director.
The killing of a chinese bookie (1976) trata de un dueño de club de striptease, Cosmo Vitelli, representado por Ben Gazzara, a quién la mafia le obliga a matar a un bookmaker chino para pagar su hábito de juego descontrolado.
Opening night (1977) es otra obra seminal de Cassavetes que presenta a Rowlands como protagonista, con un reparto que incluye a Cassavetes, Gazarra y Joan Blondell. El personaje de Rowlands es una actriz que envejece se llama Myrtle Gordon, quién hace papel en una obra de teatro mientras sufre una crisis personal. Debido a su celebridad Myrtle es sola y poco querida por sus colegas, y teme su envejecimiento. Después de haber visto la muerte accidental de una aficionada joven, Myrtle empiece de beber en exceso y sufrir alucinaciones. Pero Myrtle se enfrente a sus demonios internos y por último realiza la mejor interpretación de su vida. Según cabe suponer Cassavetes dedicaba varios años a perfeccionar el guió, mientras acabar la producción de la película duró más que un año al costo de más que $1,5 millón. El primero corte corrió más de cinco horas de duración, y estrenaron en los Estados Unidos solamente una copia de la versión final.
Carrera tarde
En Gloria (1980) Rowlands hace el papel de la amiga de un gángster. Ella huye con un niño quien queda huérfano por la Mafia y entonces llega a ser el blanco suyo. Cassavetes volvió a la pantalla grande en Love streams (1984), en la cual representa a un libertino envejeciendo quien sufre la afección imperiosa de su hermana recientemente divorciada. Cassavetes él mismo pudo completar su última película, Big trouble (1986). Andrew Bergman, quien escribió el guión original, reemplazó la producción de la película durante el rodar.
En 1989 Cassavetes murió a la edad de 59 años de la cirrosis. Fue sobrevivido por Rowlands y sus tres hijos.
Nick Cassavetes, su hijo, siguió las huellas de su padre. Hizo papeles en películas tal como Face/off y Life, y dirigió varias películas, incluso John Q. y The notebook. También hizo la película She’s so lovely del guión original que había escrito su padre.
Cassavetes y la improvisación
Con frecuencia se entiende mal la influencia de la improvisación en las películas de Cassavetes. A excepción de Shadows sus películas dependieron de guiones muy detallados. Sin embargo Cassavetes dio a sus actores mucha libertad para crear sus personajes. También, si Cassavetes vio que la interpretación de un personaje o una escena que tuvo un actor fue diferente a lo que había imaginado él, estaba dispuesto a cambiar el guión para acomodar esa interpretación.
Homenajes
En septiembre de 2004 el Criterion Collection estrenó una colección de sus cinco películas independientes: Shadows, Faces, A woman under the influence, The killing of a Chinese bookie y Opening night. La colección también incluye A constant forge, un documentario que trata de la vida y obras de Cassavetes, y un folleto en que unos críticos ofrecen su juicio sobre las obras del director, además de homenajes a Cassavetes por unos amigos suyos.
Cassavetes también es el sujeto de unos libros biográficos. En el volumen comprehensivo Cassavetes on Cassavetes, una colección de entrevistas recopiladas por el historiador de cine Ray Carney, el director habla de sus experiencias, influencias y punta de vista sobre la industria.
En el 2005 un articulo en la revista Vanity fair rendó homenaje a Cassavetes como parte de su edición sobre los premios Oscar.
La banda Fugazi de Washington, D.C., grabó la canción «In on the killtaker» como homenaje a Cassavetes, mientras el álbum epónimo de Le Tigre incluye una grabación que trata del director.
Vida y obrasJohn Nicholas Cassavetes era actor, director de cine, guionista y dramaturgo estadounidense mejor conocido por sus películas naturales e intensas. Se considera el «padrino del cine independiente», y su obra ha influido a directores de cine de varias generaciones, desde contemporáneos suyos tal como Martin Scorsese hasta Paul Thomas Anderson.
Cassavetes nació el 9 de diciembre de 1929, en ciudad de Nueva York, hijo de Nicholas John Cassavetes y Catherine Demetri, inmigrantes griegos. Crecía en Long Island, Nueva York, y asistió a Blair Academy, colegio en Nueva Yérsey, antes de entrar en la American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Después de graduarse en 1950, seguía trabajando de actor teatral, además de haciendo papeles en películas y empezando a actuar en televisión, en series antológicas incluso el Alcoa Theatre.
Primeras películas y actuación
Durante esta época encontró a la actriz Gena Rowlands y se casó con ella. Para 1956 había empezado a dar clases de la actuación del método en ciudad de Nueva York. Shadows (1959), la primera película que escribió y que dirigió Cassavetes, fue inspirado por un ejercicio de teatro improvisado. Cassavetes podía reunir el dinero para hacer la película gracias a sus amigos y familia, y a los oyentes de un programa de radio nocturno de línea abierta al público.
Ninguna compañía norteamericana estaba dispuesta a distribuir Shadows, así que lo llevó a Europa con el fin de conseguir un convenio de distribución. Se estrenó la película en Europa y ganó el Premio de los Críticos en la Feria de Películas de Venecia. Más tarde las distribuidoras Europeas lo estrenaron de una película importación en los Estados Unidos. Aunque lo miraban pocos norteamericanos, Shadows ganaba atención de los estudios de cine, y a principios de los años sesenta Cassavetes dirigió dos películas por Hollywood, Too late blues y A child is waiting.
También representaba dominantemente en películas como tal The dirty dozen (1967), recibiendo la propuesta por el Premio de la Academia de Mejor Actor Secundario por su papel de un soldado raso ansioso. Otros papeles notables de Cassavetes incluye un actor mentiroso en Rosemary’s baby (1968) de Roman Polanski, la victima en The killers, y el justo castigo vicioso del gobierno a Kirk Douglas en The fury (1978).
La próxima película que dirigió Cassavetes fue Faces, también producida independientemente, de la que Rowlands John Marley, Seymour Cassel y Val Avery fueron las estrellas. Representa un matrimonio contemporáneo desintegrándose. Faces fue propuesto por tres Premios de la Academia, Mejor Guión Original, Mejor Actor Secundario y Mejor Actriz.
Cassavetes él mismo fue una de las estrellas de Husbands (1970), junto con Peter Falk y Ben Gazzara. Representan un trío de hombres casados quienes han ido de farra en Londres.
Obras maestras de los años setenta
Sus tres obras maestras de los años setenta fueron producidas independientemente. Rowlands es la estrella de A woman under the influence (1974), en la que representa una ama de casa que se llega a estar cada vez más preocupada, rodeada por gente que no entiende su preocupación. Recibió la propuesta de la Academia por Mejor Actriz, mientras Cassavetes fue propuesto por Mejor Director.
The killing of a chinese bookie (1976) trata de un dueño de club de striptease, Cosmo Vitelli, representado por Ben Gazzara, a quién la mafia le obliga a matar a un bookmaker chino para pagar su hábito de juego descontrolado.
Opening night (1977) es otra obra seminal de Cassavetes que presenta a Rowlands como protagonista, con un reparto que incluye a Cassavetes, Gazarra y Joan Blondell. El personaje de Rowlands es una actriz que envejece se llama Myrtle Gordon, quién hace papel en una obra de teatro mientras sufre una crisis personal. Debido a su celebridad Myrtle es sola y poco querida por sus colegas, y teme su envejecimiento. Después de haber visto la muerte accidental de una aficionada joven, Myrtle empiece de beber en exceso y sufrir alucinaciones. Pero Myrtle se enfrente a sus demonios internos y por último realiza la mejor interpretación de su vida. Según cabe suponer Cassavetes dedicaba varios años a perfeccionar el guió, mientras acabar la producción de la película duró más que un año al costo de más que $1,5 millón. El primero corte corrió más de cinco horas de duración, y estrenaron en los Estados Unidos solamente una copia de la versión final.
Carrera tarde
En Gloria (1980) Rowlands hace el papel de la amiga de un gángster. Ella huye con un niño quien queda huérfano por la Mafia y entonces llega a ser el blanco suyo. Cassavetes volvió a la pantalla grande en Love streams (1984), en la cual representa a un libertino envejeciendo quien sufre la afección imperiosa de su hermana recientemente divorciada. Cassavetes él mismo pudo completar su última película, Big trouble (1986). Andrew Bergman, quien escribió el guión original, reemplazó la producción de la película durante el rodar.
En 1989 Cassavetes murió a la edad de 59 años de la cirrosis. Fue sobrevivido por Rowlands y sus tres hijos.
Nick Cassavetes, su hijo, siguió las huellas de su padre. Hizo papeles en películas tal como Face/off y Life, y dirigió varias películas, incluso John Q. y The notebook. También hizo la película She’s so lovely del guión original que había escrito su padre.
Cassavetes y la improvisación
Con frecuencia se entiende mal la influencia de la improvisación en las películas de Cassavetes. A excepción de Shadows sus películas dependieron de guiones muy detallados. Sin embargo Cassavetes dio a sus actores mucha libertad para crear sus personajes. También, si Cassavetes vio que la interpretación de un personaje o una escena que tuvo un actor fue diferente a lo que había imaginado él, estaba dispuesto a cambiar el guión para acomodar esa interpretación.
Homenajes
En septiembre de 2004 el Criterion Collection estrenó una colección de sus cinco películas independientes: Shadows, Faces, A woman under the influence, The killing of a Chinese bookie y Opening night. La colección también incluye A constant forge, un documentario que trata de la vida y obras de Cassavetes, y un folleto en que unos críticos ofrecen su juicio sobre las obras del director, además de homenajes a Cassavetes por unos amigos suyos.
Cassavetes también es el sujeto de unos libros biográficos. En el volumen comprehensivo Cassavetes on Cassavetes, una colección de entrevistas recopiladas por el historiador de cine Ray Carney, el director habla de sus experiencias, influencias y punta de vista sobre la industria.
En el 2005 un articulo en la revista Vanity fair rendó homenaje a Cassavetes como parte de su edición sobre los premios Oscar.
La banda Fugazi de Washington, D.C., grabó la canción «In on the killtaker» como homenaje a Cassavetes, mientras el álbum epónimo de Le Tigre incluye una grabación que trata del director.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Happy Is As Happy Does, Wherever Happy May Be
The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner
I will admit that I was initially put off by the title of NPR correspondent Eric Weiner’s engaging, highly readable travelogue, The Geography of Bliss. That conjunction of the global and the delightful conjured visions of a frequently flying chick lit heroine named, without irony – you guessed it. Thankfully (happily?), the book’s title is a minor bump along the road to an otherwise largely satisfying read.
While the author’s self-confessed grumpiness kills any chance of a candy-colored happily ever after, the nature of Weiner’s project insures against the opposite extreme: “What if,” Weiner writes in his introduction, “I spent a year traveling the globe, seeking out not the world’s well-trodden trouble spots but, rather, its unheralded happy places?” Candace Bushnell might not have signed up for the journey, but neither would William T. Vollmann have.
That year of traveling keeps Weiner zigzagging over an impressive swath of the Northern hemisphere, with junkets to nine countries spread across various geographic regions of Asia and Europe before return to the United States. Along the way, Weiner examines the pithy conventional wisdom on happiness – that it can’t be bought, and so on – and recent findings on the emotional state. Though Weiner hits enough global-travel clichés (a hashish bar in the Netherlands, a sex show in Thailand, an ashram in India) to make his journey recognizable, the best passages aren’t the ones that evoke place or custom but those in which the author taps locals’ minds for interpretation of their cultures’ emotional well-being. In the chapter on Switzerland, “Happiness Is Boredom,” the ongoing dialogue the author conducts with himself, his Swiss contacts and the more canonical wisdom of such thinkers as Bertrand Russell leads to these insights: the urbane Swiss owe no small part of their collective happiness to their relationship with nature, their lack of envy and ostentation to the small town-like close knitting of their social fabric. Whether or not Swiss happiness truly is boredom is another question, one whose cultural components are indirectly alluded to in the image of an ex-pat Hollywood agent nervously thumbing her Blackberry, and surprise from the Swiss that, statistically speaking, they are happy.
The further Weiner travels, geographically and culturally, the more perspicacious his book seems to become about happiness in the United States. This is partly due to the range of farther flung countries he visits. In India, though Weiner does visit that ashram and socialize among the Indian middle class, he of course glimpses that country’s endemic poverty – and concludes that, in certain fundamental ways, it is less grinding than extreme poverty in the United States, the Indian “houseless” (as Weiner refers to the indigent of India) maintaining strong social and familial ties all but unknown among the American homeless. On the other hand, the oil kingdom of Qatar is, in Weiner’s analysis, a Wahhabite Brave New World whose dry cultural well is greased with Starbucks coffee. Happiness isn’t, it seems, a reserve of iced mocha vast enough to caffeinate the world for the next hundred years.
But Weiner’s a-ha moment in an exotic country comes during a conversation with Karma Ura, who runs Bhutan’s most important think tank (which, as Weiner notes, “also happens to be Bhutan’s only think tank”). “I have achieved happiness,” Ura tells Weiner, “because I don’t have unrealistic expectations.” This perspective is so opposite Weiner’s own (“In America,” he writes, “high expectations are…the force behind our dreams and, by extension, our pursuit of happiness”) that Ura’s expounding temporarily disarms Weiner of his personal guardedness. He drops his guard to tell Ura the story of a recent visit to the hospital, scheduled by the author after be began experiencing numbness in his extremities and shortness of breath; MRI results confirmed that these symptoms were brought on by a panic attack, by hypochondria. “You need to think about death for five minutes every day,” Ura responds. “It will cure you, sanitize you.” His rationale? Human beings must be prepared for death, as most Westerners are not. Ura then reveals that he was once a cancer patient.
“Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so,” wrote John Stuart Mill. Indeed, Weiner’s findings mostly confirm the old adage about the preferability of existing as a happy Forrest Gump rather than as an unhappy Socrates. Weiner relates the story of his firing from the New York Times, which came a few weeks after the paper’s executive editor labeled his work “naïve and unsophisticated.” It is only in Iceland, where “being naïve is okay because you can always start over,” as it’s put by a relatively young music producer on his career, that Weiner finally gets over the insult. “The world, I now conclude, would be a far better place with a bit more naïveté,” writes Weiner.
But Weiner’s book suffers less from simplicity than from not treading certain paths. His travels begin in the Netherlands, with a visit to the Dutch professor who compiles the World Database of Happiness. The ostensibly scientific focus is, for all intents and purposes, mostly forgotten once the WDH has been left behind. And that’s a shame. Some of the most interesting, and promising, recent neurology research has focused on the relationship between the brain’s structure and its functioning. Could happiness be a well-wired brain? Is it possible to rewire one’s brain and thus recalibrate the happiness gauge of one’s psyche? That Weiner devotes almost no space to such questions is understandable on the one hand – it’s the geography, not the neurology, he’s after – and puzzling on the other: as Sharon Begley describes in her book Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, neuroscientists are now beginning how meditation practice actually changes the brain’s physiology; two of the nine countries Weiner visits are predominantly Buddhist; another the birthplace of the Buddha himself. And geography, like all received stimuli, influences the way we think.
The Geography of Bliss ultimately begs larger questions about the nature of happiness. To what extent is happiness a function of culture, and vice versa? And does happiness translate easily from one culture to another? Weiner’s findings suggest a negative answer to the latter, as he admits that much of what accounts for the happiness of other cultures would be an acquired taste for most in the United States.
It’s not a giveaway to say that nowhere does Weiner find utopia. The happiness he does encounter reflects in the book itself: imperfect but charming, and as stimulating for the questions it raises as for those it answers.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Kwame M. Kilpatrick, the Hurricane Katrina of Mayors
I sat out the 2001 Detroit mayoral election, the vote that would bring the city its youngest elected chief executive and current poster boy for corruption in office, Kwame M. Kilpatrick. Sometime before the general election, Kilpatrick injected the race with a nasty shot of homophobia: “I don’t ever want my children to see that kind of lifestyle,” proclaimed the candidate – as if the mere sight of the so-called gay lifestyle were, say, inspiring the Detroit Public Schools pornographic dropout rate. Whatever the intent of Kilpatrick’s denunciation, it also offered an oblique preview of his public response to criticism (and was itself a prescient, though unwitting, auto-criticism). Just as the mayor doesn’t believe his own lifestyle problematic, nor does he, guilty of perjury but for the legal formality of a criminal trial, see himself as legally culpable party in this case. Kilpatrick publicly charges the Detroit Free Press with having illegally obtained the text messages, and the secret deal to keep them from the public, that may well end his reign as mayor.
But as serious as Kilpatrick’s legal trouble is, his lying under oath does not constitute his gravest breach of public confidence.
The mayor’s shameless assumption of a double standard favorable to him should rightly spark Detroiters’ ire. The United States’ poorest city simply cannot afford public “servants” cursed with Kilpatrick’s appetite for excess on the public dime. While the mayor and his posse party like fey, over-privileged high school kids given run of the mansion, actual DPS high school students suffer along with a substandard education doled out by a system in such dire straits that its operation had to be assumed by the state of Michigan. Kilpatrick’s announcements of significant reductions to city bus service nearly coincided with the revelation that he had used public money to lease his wife a brand-new Escalade. And the firing of the three cops who brought the whistle-blower suit against the mayor once again highlighted the fact that Kilpatrick keeps 21 bodyguards on his security detail.
The mayor’s apparent lack of empathy for the plight of his constituents in their majority, combined with his “tin ear for symbolism” (as Governing Magazine Executive Editor Alan Ehrenhalt described Kilpatrick’s indifference to public perception) oddly echoes the tone deafness of George W. Bush. Remember how Bush’s praise for his highly under-qualified then-director of FEMA, Michael Brown, instantly became an oral metonym for Bush administration nepotism gone tragically awry: “Heckuva job, Brownie.” Kilpatrick’s text messages reveal a similar callow fraternal cluelessness. “I’m all the way with that!” he wrote to Christine Beatty, then his chief of staff and mistress, in response to a text message from her defending their firing former Deputy Police Chief Gary Brown, a 24-year veteran of the Detroit force. Brown’s crime? He had begun to investigate allegations of abuse by the mayor’s security detail, including the fatal shooting of Tamara Greene, a Detroit woman rumored to have performed as an exotic dancer at the Manoogian Mansion bash hours before her death.
As the nightmarish images from the internal refugee camp that was the New Orleans Superdome during the fall of 2005 confirmed who was disposable in the eyes of the Bush administration, so do the recently published photos of Greene, a young mother looking to start a business, give the Kilpatrick gang’s expendables a face.
Yet, from the beginning of the scandal, Kilpatrick has sought to portray himself as the victim. “If I was 60 years old, if I came from the 'country club community,' if I came out of an established private firm or something like that, none of these [rumors] would get the lift that they have,” complained the mayor. “I guess it's believable that a 32-year-old black man with an earring would have parties like that.” It is in Kilpatrick’s political best interest to present the case against him as an attack on his surface, his dapperness and swagger, which a significant portion of his electorate no doubt finds inspiring, especially at a moment Detroit faces a perfect storm of economic, social and civil collapse. The disingenuousness of Kilpatrick’s baiting lies not primarily in his attempt to obfuscate the truth but in his knowledge of that obfuscation’s context. The whistle-blower suit would wind up costing Detroit over $9 million, no chump change in a city where over one-third of the children live below poverty level and many quality of life indicators are at Third World levels. Not many Detroiters are part of the country club community, either. The money lost in the suit, essentially another bill racked up by the mayor, could have made an impact on public education or transportation; it could have paid full salaries and benefits to tens of city workers. It could have served as a protective dike of sorts, if you will. But Kilpatrick was willing to exploit his city’s justified fear of racial profiling, all so that he could continue living high, and without consequence, on the labor of predominantly black, mostly poor Detroit. The diamond earrings and oversized gangster couture only costume a soul that is old-school in the manner of the country club community’s starchiest.
And so, no matter the eventual legal and political outcomes of the scandal, Kwame M. Kilpatrick has shown himself to be all he warned of, rightly or wrongly: flamboyant dresser with a flair for jewelry; philandering epicure; fallacious upholder of the unjust end of the status quo.
“Service,” children’s advocate Marian Wright Edleman said, “is the rent we pay for the space we occupy.” The quote is a favorite of Kilpatrick’s, one he frequently tosses into speeches. (It is not so ironic from Kilpatrick’s lips if the pronouns are changed, and the mayor’s enormous physical presence considered.) The canonized formulation of the modern social justice movement that more thoroughly damns the Detroit mayor comes from Martin Luther King, and does not need such an ironic twisting: “An injustice against one is an injustice against all.”
But as serious as Kilpatrick’s legal trouble is, his lying under oath does not constitute his gravest breach of public confidence.
The mayor’s shameless assumption of a double standard favorable to him should rightly spark Detroiters’ ire. The United States’ poorest city simply cannot afford public “servants” cursed with Kilpatrick’s appetite for excess on the public dime. While the mayor and his posse party like fey, over-privileged high school kids given run of the mansion, actual DPS high school students suffer along with a substandard education doled out by a system in such dire straits that its operation had to be assumed by the state of Michigan. Kilpatrick’s announcements of significant reductions to city bus service nearly coincided with the revelation that he had used public money to lease his wife a brand-new Escalade. And the firing of the three cops who brought the whistle-blower suit against the mayor once again highlighted the fact that Kilpatrick keeps 21 bodyguards on his security detail.
The mayor’s apparent lack of empathy for the plight of his constituents in their majority, combined with his “tin ear for symbolism” (as Governing Magazine Executive Editor Alan Ehrenhalt described Kilpatrick’s indifference to public perception) oddly echoes the tone deafness of George W. Bush. Remember how Bush’s praise for his highly under-qualified then-director of FEMA, Michael Brown, instantly became an oral metonym for Bush administration nepotism gone tragically awry: “Heckuva job, Brownie.” Kilpatrick’s text messages reveal a similar callow fraternal cluelessness. “I’m all the way with that!” he wrote to Christine Beatty, then his chief of staff and mistress, in response to a text message from her defending their firing former Deputy Police Chief Gary Brown, a 24-year veteran of the Detroit force. Brown’s crime? He had begun to investigate allegations of abuse by the mayor’s security detail, including the fatal shooting of Tamara Greene, a Detroit woman rumored to have performed as an exotic dancer at the Manoogian Mansion bash hours before her death.
As the nightmarish images from the internal refugee camp that was the New Orleans Superdome during the fall of 2005 confirmed who was disposable in the eyes of the Bush administration, so do the recently published photos of Greene, a young mother looking to start a business, give the Kilpatrick gang’s expendables a face.
Yet, from the beginning of the scandal, Kilpatrick has sought to portray himself as the victim. “If I was 60 years old, if I came from the 'country club community,' if I came out of an established private firm or something like that, none of these [rumors] would get the lift that they have,” complained the mayor. “I guess it's believable that a 32-year-old black man with an earring would have parties like that.” It is in Kilpatrick’s political best interest to present the case against him as an attack on his surface, his dapperness and swagger, which a significant portion of his electorate no doubt finds inspiring, especially at a moment Detroit faces a perfect storm of economic, social and civil collapse. The disingenuousness of Kilpatrick’s baiting lies not primarily in his attempt to obfuscate the truth but in his knowledge of that obfuscation’s context. The whistle-blower suit would wind up costing Detroit over $9 million, no chump change in a city where over one-third of the children live below poverty level and many quality of life indicators are at Third World levels. Not many Detroiters are part of the country club community, either. The money lost in the suit, essentially another bill racked up by the mayor, could have made an impact on public education or transportation; it could have paid full salaries and benefits to tens of city workers. It could have served as a protective dike of sorts, if you will. But Kilpatrick was willing to exploit his city’s justified fear of racial profiling, all so that he could continue living high, and without consequence, on the labor of predominantly black, mostly poor Detroit. The diamond earrings and oversized gangster couture only costume a soul that is old-school in the manner of the country club community’s starchiest.
And so, no matter the eventual legal and political outcomes of the scandal, Kwame M. Kilpatrick has shown himself to be all he warned of, rightly or wrongly: flamboyant dresser with a flair for jewelry; philandering epicure; fallacious upholder of the unjust end of the status quo.
“Service,” children’s advocate Marian Wright Edleman said, “is the rent we pay for the space we occupy.” The quote is a favorite of Kilpatrick’s, one he frequently tosses into speeches. (It is not so ironic from Kilpatrick’s lips if the pronouns are changed, and the mayor’s enormous physical presence considered.) The canonized formulation of the modern social justice movement that more thoroughly damns the Detroit mayor comes from Martin Luther King, and does not need such an ironic twisting: “An injustice against one is an injustice against all.”
Monday, February 11, 2008
Al Gore, King of All Media?
I orginally posted this review ofThe Assault on Reason by Al Gore. on the Good Reads website.
I find it a bit ironic that, after the news media's characterization during the 2000 election of Al Gore as the stiffest of unelectable suits, Gore reinvented himself in the traditionally sexy worlds of publishing and movie-making -- and now has a Nobel to show for his efforts.
If Gore's split public persona reflects in his writing, it serves him well: he brings to the page an admirable combination of restraint and passion, qualities largely absent in most of the current bumper crop of political books aimed at a general audience. The contrast between Gore's tone and that of, say, right-wing megaphone Glenn Bleck should leave fair-minded readers with no doubt as to whose motives are essentially pure here.
The strengths of The Assault on Reason are possibly its weaknesses as well. In his elucidation of the current, titular assault, Gore skims through the European Englightenment and the American independence movement, invoking thinkers from Thomas Paine to Thomas Pynchon along the way. Gore's palate is broad, and squeezing so much information and so many ideas into a relatively short book necessitates superficial treatment of this material. However, at a time when a solid majority of American adults supposedly cannot name a Supreme Court justice, a bit of remedial history is not at all patronizing.
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