jeffm23's Open Salon Blog

Time to Lower the Pitcher's Mound

Thu, 8 Nov 2012 02:11:23 -0500

I sent a letter to Sens. Boxer and Feinstein back in October '09. I think this is a good time to update it:

Dear Sen. Feinstein and Sen. Boxer,

There’s a thought that I’d like to offer you for your consideration.

In 1968, Major League Baseball came to the conclusion that pitchers had gotten too good, that the balance between pitcher and batter, a balance so critical to what makes the game of baseball what it is, was off. So they decided to lower the pitching mound from 15” to 10” as a way of restoring that balance.

Until recently, the use of the filibuster was rare, requiring cloture only a few times per Congress. Additionally, for example in 1957, when Sen. Thurmond filibustered the 1957 Civil Rights Act, two-thirds vote was required to invoke cloture. In the 92nd Congress, the use of filibusters and the need for cloture jumped dramatically from a few to a few dozen motions per Congress. Partially in response to this, in 1975, Rule 22 was changed to reduce the cloture requirement to 60 votes.

From the 94th Congress through the 109th, the average number of cloture motions and cloture votes were 27 and 20 respectively per session, and never more than 82 and 61 respectively per Congress. In the 110th, there were 139 motions and 112 votes; I lost count in the last two Congresses. I believe this constitutes abuse of the unlimited debate tradition. The filibuster is no longer rare, or even infrequent, it has become routine. The Senate has been transformed into a body that no longer operates on a majority. Clearly, the balance is off. It’s time to lower the pitching mound.

I propose modifying Rule 22 to reduce the number needed to invoke cloture to 55 votes. This would, I believe, adequately address the current imbalance while preserving the ability of the minority to extend debate in extraordinary cases, and in particular where the majority margin is very narrow. I would also support changing that part of the rule that allows for Senators to simply state their intention to filibuster, rather than get out on the floor and do a full Jimmy Stewart.

We really need to do this.

Thank you for your attention.

Sincerely yours,

Jeff Mark

"The Fountainhead" — the Movie

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 19:09:16 -0400

Turner Classic Movies did a "Gary Cooper day" a couple of Sundays ago, a week before the Republican Convention. (It's a bit of cheap fun to go through a day's listings on TCM and try to pick up the theme. It's Veronica Lake day, or it's a day full of movies all of which have "Seven" in their titles…) The very last Cooper film they showed (11:30PM PT, it would have been 2:30AM ET) was 1949's The Fountainhead, based on Ayn Rand's 1943 book, and co-starring Raymond Massey and a very 22-year-old Patricia Neal.

I've never read the book. I'm the right age cohort, but Rand was never really part of my cultural milieu, we we more into Heinlein and Ellison and Herbert.

But considering the currency of her philosophy, I thought I'd give the movie a good look, especially when I learned from the TCM introduction that Rand not only wrote the screenplay, but had final script approval. So I figured it ought to be a fairly faithful expression of her ideology.

Just as a movie, it took me a little while to realize what it was that seemed just a bit off. Let me first indulge a bit, though, by saying that Patricia Neal was totally stunning. She was gorgeous. The Patricia Neal that I'm most familiar with is more mature, from Face in the Crowd and after, and I had no experience with her earlier roles. And the way Director King Vidor and D.P. Robert Burks put together the shots made her almost ethereal. Move over, Hedy Lamarr

But the fashions may have been the only thing in the film that said 1949. The rest of it looked eerily like a pre-war movie, not only visually, in terms of the staging and the neo-Deco art direction, but in the way it was organized dramatically, the dialog pacing, in contrast to the late-40s noir style or snappy patter of Adam's Rib. Indeed, it reminded me most of 1941's Major Barbara (with Robert Morley and Rex Harrison), and a bit like 1936's Things to Come (also with Raymond Massey), two other very philosophically-based films featuring somewhat stilted dialog and contrived situations setting up long speeches about some principle or other. It looked and sounded better than those films, due to the improvement in movie technology by the late 1940s, but that's just about it; and honestly, I'm not really all that sure about the fashions.

But I really paid close attention; I really wanted to understand what she was trying to say, even backing up and re-watching the occasional speech or chunk of dialog. And what I heard was a huge straw man, and a whole bunch of whining.

She postulates this world where all of mainstream culture is dedicated to homogenizing everything at the lowest common denominator level, where the world is divided into elites, who make all the decisions, all the choices for society, and apparently all the money, and "the masses" — the "unwashed" is assumed — who apparently have no expressible sense of taste or esthetic as individuals themselves, and blindly follow the opinions of the newspaper's architecture critic(!), who, like some dime-novel Machiavelli, is intentionally subverting the concept of excellence by promoting a mediocre but compliant architect as the Next Big Thing. (Architecture? Really?)

Roark (Cooper) elicits a certain amount of sympathy, as the Principled Artist fighting for the integrity of his work. The best-known, signature scene is, of course, when Roark, after one of his buildings was changed without his consent, dynamites it, and consequently stands trial. Now, I know a few artists, and I'm quite sure that each one of them has felt at least once like blowing up some installation that didn't come out quite as planned because someone else screwed something up. The difference is that Howard Roark is a gigantic douchebag — especially where Dominique Francon (Neal) is concerned.

I found the sexual politics of this story really disturbing, somewhere between anachronistic and frightening. Francon didn't seem to have a personality of her own, beyond being a spoiled, rich, proto-Kardashian. Rather, she seemed to be the prize, never a truly independent agent, enduring Roark's speeches and his refusal of her love until she became one. But apparently, becoming an independent agent requires her to submit to rape followed by years of humiliating passive-aggressive sublimated hostility until she helps Roark destroy the project — and by the end she's as big a douchebag as he is.

Her character's arc seems to parallel the larger story of Roark's eventual victory over the forces of mediocrity as embodied by critic Ellsworth Toohey, who had managed, by manipulating the unwashed etc. (i.e., unions), to coerce big-deal publisher Gail Wynand (Massey) into publicly opposing Roark, so that when in a prime example of jury nullification Roark is acquitted despite overwhelming evidence and his confession, allowing Francon — Mrs. Wynand — to leave Wynand for Roark, Wynand is so humiliated (go figure) in this mythical dog-eat-dog culture he finds it necessary to shoot himself. The final scene sees Francon — now Mrs. Roark — riding an elevator to meet the triumphant Roark — at the top.

Government is pretty much nowhere to be found. The Fire Department responds to the explosion, but that's all you see. The courts, both times they're mentioned — once for a possible lawsuit and then Roark's trial — are ineffectual. Nobody acts or refrains from acting because it's "the law" — "law" isn't mentioned, even in the "natural law" sense. But yet Rand's elite, her individuals of greatness, never even consider lying or cheating or using violence, at least not against each other. What a wonderfully enlightened bunch of folks! It makes one wonder why Wynand even had a gun.

As I said at the beginning, I like Science (or "Speculative", as Harlan Ellison would have it) Fiction. But if a story is going to postulate some alternative view of modern society (say, if the CSA had won), it has to be plausible. Rand's world, however — it's explicitly supposed to be New York City — is populated by cartoon characters out of a silent melodrama; all that was missing was a villain with a mustache. The "masses" are as faceless as chess pawns and the (ahem) fountainhead of mediocrity. The elites are idealized and one-dimensional, with unrecognizable motivations. The misogyny is as staggering as Patricia Neal is spectacular.

If you get the chance, see it; there'll no doubt be a "Patricia Neal day" on TCM soon. Form your own opinions, reach your own conclusions. Me, I prefer Heinlein.

Synopses are available here and here.

(Cross-posted from http://alameda.patch.com/blog_posts/the-fountainhead-the-movie)

It a Tax! It's a Penalty!

Sat, 7 Jul 2012 18:07:51 -0400

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/shimmer-floor-wax/1056743/

Letter to my Congresscritters

Sat, 7 Jul 2012 15:07:53 -0400

Dear Sens. Feinstein and Boxer, and Rep. Stark:

As a properly authorized and registered California Medical Cannabis Patient, I have become increasingly concerned with what appears to be the Justice Department’s and Drug Enforcement Administration's harassment of legitimate, licensed, medical cannabis dispensaries in California.

In May, Berkeley Patients Group was evicted from their location in Berkeley, the property owner apparently succumbing to pressure from his financial institution. As of July 1, Harborside Health Center is being denied the ability to accept credit cards; they are just the latest of several dispensaries in the area that are being harassed in this manner. In both cases, based on what I’ve been able to learn, the financial institutions are being pressured by threats emanating from the Federal Government.

This tactic seems underhanded at best; they can’t shut them down, so let’s make it as difficult for them to do business as we can. And as it could be considered fostering “combination in restraint of trade”, it might even, very possibly, perhaps, be illegal.

I would think they have better things to do. Please tell them to stop.

Thank you very much for your attention. Happy 4th of July.

Tell That to Gray Davis

Wed, 6 Jun 2012 15:06:50 -0400

A consensus seems to be emerging that one reason the Walker recall failed was that many, or most Wisconsinites didn't think Walker's infractions, whatever they may have been, didn't justify recall.

Although I was disappointed myself, part of me wants to say, "Good for them." I think that's a constructive principle. Would that we Californians had been so wise in 2003 when we threw out a Governor basically because he was too boring and we wanted a shot at Governor Schwarzenegger. That worked out so well...