Tag: San Francisco

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Ditto.

Rush Limbaugh and I had a lot in common.

We’re both Baby Boomers, both from a small town in Missouri, and both of us grew up in a Republican family. Rush dropped out of college and then moved to Pittsburgh to try to become a radio DJ. I dropped out of college to smoke pot and protest the Vietnam War. Then I moved to San Francisco and became a night watchman and a busker for tourists in Ghirardelli Square. 

Both of our career paths were a bit murky there for a while.

Rush bounced from station to station for a few years, eventually ending up in Kansas City. I bounced from job to job out West and in Columbia, Missouri, where I eventually finished my journalism degree and found semi-honest work in the business where I still ply my trade.

Rush began his climb to glory in the wake of the overturning of the FCC Fairness Doctrine in 1987, when broadcasters were no longer constrained by having to provide equal time for opposing views, or for anyone who was attacked on air.

After getting some attention in Kansas City for his “public affairs” show, Rushbo got hired by WABC in New York and he quickly gained national notoriety for such actions as celebrating the deaths of gay men from AIDS with show tunes, coining the phrase “Femi-Nazis” for women’s rights activists, calling Chelsea Clinton the “White House dog,” and regularly saying revoltingly racist things about African Americans (too many to list here), all under the guise of “conservatism.” It was a truly deplorable schtick before deplorable became a thing, and one that resonated, appallingly, with much of white America. Rush got very rich with it.

In 1996, the Telecommunications Act allowed broadcasting companies to own stations in many markets and spawned radio syndication. Rush quickly got even bigger (literally) and richer and became a major player in the Republican Party. A slew of conservative Rush-clones emerged: Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Mark Levin, to name a few. Stirring up anger and outrage at liberals, Democrats, Blacks, Muslims, and immigrants was, and is, their stock-in-trade. And it’s made them rich.

Then came Fox News, the ultimate benefactor of the abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine. (“Fair and Balanced” being the lie from which all others were spun.) Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes built a television empire on right-wing outrage, angry white male hosts, short-skirted blondes, and lies.

Now, with the internet, the genie is out of the bottle. If you want “fair and balanced,” it’s strictly DIY. Pick your news to suit your views. If you believe climate change and COVID-19 are hoaxes, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, that Texas lost power because of a Green New Deal that hasn’t been passed, that QAnon is onto something, that Antifa spawned the January 6th insurrection, that President Biden’s dog isn’t “presidential,” that the Bidens’ marriage is a “charade” … there’s a whole news ecosystem built just for you. Likewise, if you take the opposing point of view on any or all of those issues.

But it all started with Rush Limbaugh. And now he’s dead of lung cancer, at 70, leaving three ex-wives and a widow and millions of fans to mourn his passing. Lots of Republicans want to honor what they perceive as Limbaugh’s glorious legacy. He’s being called a great American, a true patriot — lauded by GOP politicians all over America. In Florida, the governor wants to fly the flag at half-mast in Limbaugh’s honor. In Rush’s home state of Missouri, legislators are talking about establishing a state holiday in his name. A state holiday! His bust already resides in the state capitol building — kind of like Nathan Bedford Forrest’s up in Nashville.

But let’s speak the truth here: Rush Limbaugh was not a great American by any fair and balanced measure. In his radio persona, he was a divisive, hateful, homophobic, racist, misogynistic asshole. What he was like in private, I can’t say, but I doubt that he and I had much in common when Limbaugh departed this earthly vale — far from his Missouri roots. I do hope he found peace at the end. It’s more than he wished for others.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Economy Class Warfare: The “Joys” of Air Travel

CREDIT: James Copeland | Dreamstime.com

My back’s killing me. I’ve had a pinched nerve in my lower back for over two weeks now. I really don’t know how it happened. I think someone called my name and I turned around funny. I’m sure that dancing at my stepdaughter’s wedding only exacerbated the problem.

We knew the day was coming. We met the young man, they set the date, and we began our ever-growing neurosis about flying to California for the ceremony. The wedding itself was beautiful, but it was an endurance test to just get there. The airlines have stripped customer service to the marrow and just about everything surrounding the industry, from air fares to the sadists who populate the TSA, tests your tolerance and tries your patience.

James Copeland | Dreamstime.com

Planes are a pain.

Once an adventure, today’s air travel more closely resembles flying Trailways buses that were decommissioned in the ’70s. In order to maximize shareholder profits, seats are smaller in both width and legroom and an overweight person might have to slide into the tiny bathroom sideways. And the seats don’t tilt back anymore. Now I know how those prisoners who were tortured at Abu Ghraib felt.

For years after a particularly harassing and humiliating flight, we have tried to avoid air travel and drive whenever possible. But then we drove to Atlanta, and I took the wrong turn-off in Nashville and ended up driving around the city lost for an hour or so — and I lived there for nine years. So, Amtrak and Greyhound aside, if you have a long distance to travel, you’re pretty much captive to the airlines and you will obey the rules or else.

And they keep changing the rules. One fool tries to light his sneakers on fire and for the rest of our lives we have to tiptoe through security in our stocking feet. This trip, we were allowed to keep our shoes on but had to stand in that scanner that exposes your ass to some letch monitoring a flat-screen. I thought I saw him pocketing a printout. A necklace I was wearing set off the metal detector, and I was told to step to one side and wait for a uniformed pencil-neck to come over and pat me down. Melody said I was supposed to put my wallet and phone in a container instead of shoving my whole jacket through the X-ray device with all the stuff in the pockets. I was merely trying to be efficient.

We had an early flight to San Francisco with a layover in Phoenix, and I was surprised to find the gate was packed. The boarding process is totally stupid except no one’s bothered to tell them. Wouldn’t it make more sense to fill the plane back-end first? Then no one would be stuck in the aisle waiting on those passengers attempting to cram an overstuffed valise into an undersized overhead compartment. We brought wedding attire, which meant we had to check two bags at $30 a pop, and we still had carry-ons. Naturally, I drew the middle seat, which meant I had to jockey for the armrest with a stranger for several hours while sitting in a seat more suited for an anorexic aficionado of Deep Vein Thrombosis.

A Columbia School of Law professor has called these airline practices “calculated misery.” With only four airlines controlling 80 percent of air traffic, a wink and a nod translates into every flight slashing comforts to prod customers into paying extra for additional services, like legroom. We did get a small bag of pretzels and a coke, only not the full can. I asked Melody if she would call the stewardess over for a refill, but she told me that the proper term now was flight attendant. I said that, actually, they were air waitresses, to which Melody informed me that the acceptable term now was server. I implored, “Just please ask the soft-drink Nazi if I can have some more cola.”

The American Eagle airplane is the Ford Pinto of the air in that it should be discontinued for commercial use. Melody had insisted that I stop singing “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” by the time we actually got there, and the Xanax was wearing off. The walk to our connecting gate was like the Bataan Death March with a pinched nerve thrown in for laughs. No zippy little trams or golf carts, just us trudging along with grim reserve and bruised knees from lack of legroom.

Arriving in California was like being discharged from the Army. When we reached the hotel, both of us were drained and ready to collapse only to find our room directly above the hotel’s ballroom where a wedding disc jockey was spinning hip-hop music so loudly he may as well have been set up in the bathroom.

I might have copped an attitude had our wedding not been so beautiful. The bride looked so gorgeous that I had to shed a tear. I think I must have snorted a little bit too because my future in-laws were patting my back and comforting me. The band at the reception was so good, I got up and danced, despite myself. My new son-in-law’s father is a minister, and we were told he was very reserved. But by night’s end, Melody had the reverend up and dancing while the band sang, “We’re up all night to get lucky.”

When we returned exhausted to our room, another wedding DJ was blasting away in the ballroom below, and it was all about that bass. Our flights returning to Memphis were the same misery, only in reverse — and I got singled out by security again. We arrived exhausted and grouchy, collected our luggage, and walked an additional mile in the freezing cold to the long-term parking lot.

I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Randy Haspel writes the “Recycled Hippies” blog.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Godzilla Versus Meta-Godzilla

Near the end of Godzilla, a CNN-like cable broadcaster describes the eponymous creature as “King of The Monsters — Savior of the City?” That question mark both highlights mankind’s ambivalence toward Godzilla’s status as its defender and champion and indirectly touches on Godzilla’s eternally evolving status in popular culture. Sixty years after his debut, what has changed? What kind of inhuman hero do we deserve now?

Answering this question is tricky. Filmmakers who downplay or ignore the implicit campiness of a gigantic, fire-breathing lizard that scowls like Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven do so at their own peril. But some form of distancing and detachment seems unavoidable, because Godzilla is one of the few pop-culture icons whose dozens of sequels and reboots strive to be less dark than the source material.

Like George A. Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead, IshirŌ Honda’s 1954 Gojira is both a high-concept genre exercise and a kind of national primal-scream therapy session. Released less than a decade after the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and less than a year after the infamous Castle Bravo nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, Gojira is a Japanese film about the horrors of nuclear war and the dangers of unregulated scientific research. While it is true that Godzilla’s first-ever onscreen appearance isn’t very scary — he peers over a hilltop in broad daylight like a nosy neighbor — Gojira‘s powerful undercurrents eventually surface. When Godzilla returns later in the film to attack Tokyo, which is fortified with military firepower and surrounded by an enormous, multi-storied electric fence, he reduces everything in his path to rubble and sets it ablaze with a shocking, indiscriminate fury that’s effective in part because it’s so impersonal. As flies to wanton boys are we to the Godzilla; he kills us for sport.

Bryan Cranston

Honda’s film unforgettably asserts that “humans are weak animals” whose grim fate is unavoidable. This is never more true than during the chilling scene where a widow crouches amid the flaming Tokyo rubble with her young children and comforts them by saying, “We’ll be with Daddy soon.” Gojira climaxes with an interspecies murder-suicide followed by a stern warning about environmental devastation from an aging, Lorax-like scientist. It’s clever enough to leave room for a sequel, but it’s downbeat enough to make people wonder whether they really want another sobering ecological nightmare.

Releasing a contemporary American blockbuster that condemns the impieties of progress as vigorously as Honda’s film is all but unthinkable. Yet the subtext is part of the Godzilla myth; ignoring it altogether causes just as many problems. If the filmmakers want to stage a simplified conflict between good monsters and bad ones, then Godzilla’s frightening independence and agency lose all meaning. This all-powerful creature shrinks and becomes a scaly, prehistoric Rin Tin Tin that answers the bell for mankind whenever Mothra or King Ghidorah start poking around.

Elizabeth Olsen

With the 2014 Godzilla, director Gareth Edwards and his team of technicians seem aware of the traps and contradictions of the Godzilla mythology, and they split the difference between scary and silly better than you might expect. Their monster is a big, pear-shaped, angry old cuss whose status as an apex predator in a world of enormous, ornery super-beasts unintentionally works in mankind’s favor. But since Godzilla is not human, he feels no remorse for the buildings he topples and the hordes of screaming, terrified people he steps on. The destruction he leaves behind is the price we pay for security — a message relayed through an overhead shot of Godzilla swimming from Hawaii to the mainland while flanked by a pair of Naval battleships.

Edwards keeps his ill-tempered star hidden from view for as long as he can — a visual strategy as old as the classic horror and sci-fi movies he draws from. This secrecy is apparent during Godzilla‘s opening credits, which wed historical photographs of atomic bomb explosions to blocks of text that are quickly redacted as though they conveyed sensitive classified information. (However, the only full credit I got before it was blacked out was “Produced by the fire-breathing Thomas Tull,” which probably means that this is one of the movie’s only jokes.)

Off-screen sounds and blurry photos are parceled out sparingly, and the first appearance of something inhuman is actually a sly fake out: the huge, glowing curlicue emitting radioactive pulses in an abandoned Japanese city is actually a “Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Object” or MUTO, an enormous pointy-headed insectile thing that snacks on warheads and glides around like a leathery stealth bomber.

My favorite example of Edwards’ tendency to withhold what people most want to see occurs just before Godzilla’s big reveal, when the Army fires off a round of flares to see what’s causing all the commotion. The flares soar up into the sky, but they only reveal part of Godzilla’s hindquarters; the full sight of him is still too much to absorb at once.

Those twin senses of moderation and awe fuel the best stretches of the movie. Forget about its all-star cast of puny humans (Juliette Binoche, Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Olsen, and others), who exist largely to fill in plot holes. Godzilla is about imagery, and its shadowy visual poetry excels whenever Edwards and company try to convey the world-flipping emotional impact of an average person coming face to face with something out of a prehistoric creation myth. There’s a great shot from the point of view of an indefatigable military man (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who parachutes into San Francisco and passes by the expanse of Godzilla’s spiny backside before touching down. First, you hear his heavy breathing. Then, almost involuntarily, you start to share his breathlessness.

That moment of fearful excitement sustains you all the way through the final battle, which takes place under the kind of malevolent grey skies that portend the end of history. The monsters have some tricks up their sleeves, and the fight and its aftermath manage to evoke some real pathos. But when it’s all over, it will be hard to suppress a cheer, or a roar, of victory.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: Please Turn Off Your Book

The flight attendant walks the aisle before take-off, checking for reclined seat-backs, open overhead bins, and live electronic devices. The woman seated next to the editor is reading a romance novel on her Kindle.

“Ma’am, please turn off your book,” the attendant says. It’s a phrase the editor hasn’t heard before and he makes a mental note, thinking he might use it in the weekly column he writes for a Memphis newspaper. With a sigh, the woman turns off her book. The editor smugly returns to Freedom, the massive Jonathan Franzen novel he has lugged along for the five-hour journey to San Francisco. The editor is headed to a web conference, where he will learn “best practices” for increasing traffic to his newspaper’s website.

The following day, the editor is told by an earnest woman using a PowerPoint presentation that “the future is mobile.” He notes the roomful of bored people subtly browsing the Internet and checking messages on their cellphones and thinks, No, the present is mobile. The future is unknown, even by well-paid presenters with PowerPoint.

The editor learns about many new mobile apps geared to newspaper websites, including one that tells its users where the nearest happy hours are at surrounding bars. This, he thinks, is totally stupid. He remembers past web conferences, where he was told his newspaper needed to use “recommending” sites such as “Reddit” and “Digg” or else fall by the wayside, buried in a revolutionary avalanche of pixels and meta-tabs. Now Reddit and Digg have fallen by the wayside. The editor takes some satisfaction in this.

That evening, he goes to dinner with editors and publishers from St. Louis, Little Rock, and Salt Lake City and hears what is working and not working for them in their cities. The editor learns more in an hour than he learned all day. As the wine flows, the talk slowly turns from business to personal — children, divorces, career moves, dessert.

Back in his hotel room, Freedom waits on the bedside table and the editor falls back into Franzen’s three-generational tale of family dysfunction. He doesn’t like many of the characters but the story is compelling and he doesn’t stop reading until he’s finished, late in the night. As he closes the book, a foghorn sounds over the bay.

How liberating it must be, the editor thinks, to write in the third person, to tell a story as though it were observed rather than experienced. Should he try writing his column in the third person, he wonders. Why not, he thinks? Why not?

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com