Three Guys Named Mike
Actually, there are four, but it gets complicated and multi-generational. My pal Mike is driving this morning, and I hope he is safe, and the delivery of his daughter to the major Jet Port is accomplished without untoward incident. He is not the subject of any movies that I am aware of, though the elements may not be cooperating. There is a monster cold front coming for the New Year’s Eve observation, and that may be the trigger to getting out of the Imperial City for the winter.
Mike’s morning missive, carefully crafted the afternoon before, normally starts a building firestorm of reaction from the East Coast, amplified by insightful commentary from the Dismal Swamp to the south. That interchange, among others, is what composes the morning, and with the Dazbog dark-roasted coffee, provides the fuel to power the sluggish contents of my arteries.
Nothing like that this morning. Instead, there was some random neural firing from the web after I got up, unfocused and inchoate. There was a editorial from a progressive Wisconsin rag advocating the long-overdue repeal of the Second Amendment, which provoked the usual commentary one would expect- bitter ad hominem attacks and calls for civil war.
Honestly!
Then there was an account of an adoring article about Mr. Cass Sunstein, the Nudger in Chief, who refuses to talk about what he has been up to at the White House. He is a despicable cur, our Mr. Sunstein is, and thinks he knows all sorts of stuff about what is good for us even if he has to jam it down our throats at our expense.
And meanwhile, The Atlantic Magazine rolls in with a 27-page article from James Fallows, an intelligent commentator who has recognized something profound about the nature of America’s all-volunteer military force. I quit my subscription in protest of one of their loonier commentaries earlier this year favoring the payment of reparations for Slavery. I am going to curl up with the article later and see what I think- but Fallows had always been a perceptive commentator (starting with China a couple decades ago) and I am willing to give him a chance.
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/12/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516/
Unlike Mr. Sunstein, who I would cheerfully throw under the nearest bus or locomotive, were one available.
And underlying it all, my girlfriend in California told me to look up an obscure period movie about life as an airline flight attendant in the 1950s. She sad: “It is black and white and was made while I was flying as a stew for AAL. It will show you exactly how my life was between Aug. 1950/54. Jane Wyman plays the stewardess and the Mikes were Howard Keel, Barry Sullivan, and Van Johnson. You might be amused. I was in a storm working a DC 6 in TN and thought it was goodbye world. We were supposed to have landed in Nashville but finally landed in Memphis. Had to take a train to my base in Tulsa, OK.”
I just watched the whole film while crashing around doing other things. It is purely wonderful. Marcy- the stewardess played by the delightful Jane Wyman- is a pert and self-sufficient young woman who becomes the object of attention for three dynamic young men. One is a pilot (Howard Keel), another is a research scientist (Van Johnson) and the third an advertising executive (Barry O’Sullivan). Much hilarity ensures.
(Van Johnson and Jane Wyman in a scene from “Three Guys Named Mike.”)
I am not kidding. It is by turns laugh-out-loud funny and poignant. It is a version of how the world worked when I was tiny. The women were looking for marriage and a little romance. The nuclear family, as it were, at the dawn of the nuclear age. The men, when they woke up to it, wanted the same thing, and were willing to duke it out over it. You will love the unabashed display of testosterone in the third reel.
The idea that the ultimate happy ending for all of us was a committed heterosexual marriage is quaint these days, as is the means by which society protected women from the predations of the world, and everyone got to laugh.
We Boomers are the product of all that, and have bee attempting- successfully- to destroy that world ever since.
I am not surprised that Jane Wyman wound up married to B-list movie star Ronald Reagan, nor that looking at an old Hollywood film would make me feel warm and jolly about a lost world. In the meantime, I am an eagerly awaiting the release of American Sniper, which sums up the product of what James Fallows attempts to describe, and the world we have made.
I respect Clint Eastwood, a peripatetic director whose artistic vision I find appealing. In his version of the Chris Kyle’s autobiography, Bradley Cooper plays the role of America’s most lethal sniper, who racked up 150+ kills in multiple deployments to America’s longest wars. So far. The Hollywood Reporter called it “a taut, vivid and sad account of the brief life of the most accomplished marksman in American military annals, American Sniper feels very much like a companion piece-in subject, theme and quality-to The Hurt Locker.”
There is something special about the one percent of us who have born 100% of the cost of empire. James Fallows had something to say about that.
The alternative is to look up some classic films to watch on Turner Classic Movies and see what it was like when the world made sense. All the Mikes went to war, they all served, and the ones who survived all had to come back, pull up their britches and get on with things.
I would love to strap Cass Sunstein into a chair and force him see how it used to work- and it did, quite nicely. Not that it was perfect- good enough is the enemy of perfect. There is no perfection in this life, nor is there any requirement to make it so. Life is too short for that.
In our quest for perfection, we have quite driven this whole thing into the ground, destroying what was good enough and rendering this all completely nuts.
Vic
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
