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The Crown “Marionettes” ….out with the old!

“Marionettes”, Episode 5 of Season 2 of The Crown on Netflix, is where it all comes to a head! The conservative backward nature of the queen and the court get called out and she is faced with having to get more involved in her public persona, with the job itself, and make decisions about her role in Britian’s every day life.

I knew, as soon as we saw the older gentleman punch the younger man who had written negative things about the Queen, that when the storyline arched back to this moment, that we would agree with what he had written.  But it left me very curious as it’s the most engaging story so far in a season of excellent episodes, as I am fully committed to the Queen as my gal: calm, measured, reasonable, progressive possibly, kind and thoughtful in everything she does.

The old farts in her cabinet are sabotaging her public persona by holding back from the people all of her awesome “cool girl” qualities like hunting and driving trucks.

She’s actually a fantastic individual, and charming, but the public doesn’t know this, because the traditional way of the monarchy is to paint her as stuffy and boring, and all the old white men managing her are just the same story as in the US government, behind the times.

(Let me just say this right here and now: fuck tradition!!!)

You can’t blame the Queen for not wanting to be in the lime light and meet 100 people in a night, if never being in it enough to be comfortable with it.  It would be terrifying, stressful, pure hell, being under that kind of scrutiny, even if you get to sleep in a princess bed and live in a mansion, it’s not worth it.  That being said, she was a little stuck up about it.

A fair amount of this is fiction of course, since we can’t know exactly how Elizabeth II acted in those situations. I do know she was a mechanic in the war, and other interesting facts that made me like her, and I want to know more.

In particular, I’m hoping The Crown will answer the one big question I have: What role did Elizabeth II have in dismantling the British Empire?  A lot, I hope, but I don’t know.  (Feel free to share any links if you have the answer.)

I love this show!

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An explanation for why we have more mass shootings

My husband and I had a heated debate about guns last night. It didn’t turn into a full on fight but he has some passion about this topic. We both think there should be some regulation on guns – he’s not a hard core 2nd Amendment guy – but he feels pretty defensive about them and is generally skeptical about “blaming” guns for anything. And I have sympathy for that argument.

We are gun owners who live in a red state. Hunting to us is a necessary fact of life that enables us to be more self-sufficient, not 100% dependent on grocery stores and confined animal operations that pollute some far off waterway. And if we share a philosophy about life, it is definitely about being more part of, and out in, nature.

Recently the New York Times published an article called What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest An Answer. It shows that social issues like mental health, racial divisiveness or rates of violence cannot explain, statistically speaking, high rates of mass shootings in the U.S. The only factor that correlates across the board with high rates of mass shootings are high rates of gun ownership. Yemen is the only country that competes with the U.S. on rates of mass shootings and gun ownership both.

So the question is, how can there be a connection between an object and violence? It is the person who commits the crime, no doubt about it. A gun is not a magical object.

I would argue, though, that humans have attributed magical qualities to guns. We have imbued them with a fantasy of what they represent to us, perhaps power, strength, or control.

Humans do that, of course, with objects. I see a cult-like following of marijuana, especially lately with numerous states legalizing it. I could even be considered one of those cult members, although I’m not really. To me, it was always simply a path to relaxation and happiness. I don’t hang up pot leaf tapestries and read High Times or anything like that.

It’s not that different with guns. You see guys with their big trucks and a sticker reciting the 2nd Amendment in cursive on the back windows, or some other bumper sticker shining their opinion out in to the world, at least if you live in a rural area. I probably don’t have to name the ways men and women in this country express their reverence for guns and gun rights. It’s kind of a cult, like with pot or anything else that takes on elevated status for long periods of time.

So in this way, using guns can go viral, because they are ideas as much as they are objects. And using them for mass shootings has been trending it seems like.

So imagine a man, young or old, stewing over an argument, or a grudge, or simply fantasizing about the ways he can get revenge on a person, or group of people, whoever they may be. The fact that there is a gun available stimulates a line of thought that may have gone a different direction if the gun wasn’t readily available.

Like the guy who recently killed 8 people in Manhattan with a truck. He did not have access to a gun, I’m assuming, so his revenge plot involved a different object that can be used in a lethal manner, like a hammer, or even a pair of hands. My husband points out that if the man had had a gun he could have climbed out of the truck and proceeded to kill a lot more people, and why wouldn’t he if that’s his overall goal.

So the New York Times does not explain per se why there are more mass shootings, because connecting it to higher gun ownership rates is kind of obvious. The question is how gun ownership can turn into mass shootings because we all know that objects can’t kill people unless used by humans to do so.

The answer is simply, guns are not just objects, they are “ideas”. The idea of shooting tons of people at a time is an idea itself that is inextricably linked to guns. Ideas that get attached to objects can spread like viruses, and I would argue this is what is happening with mass shootings in the U.S.

And yes, I told my husband about this theory. He’s thinking about it.

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Kevin Spacey as “The Rainforest”

From Conservation International, a new line of short spots that highlight all that nature does for us, and how little we do for it.

Kevin Spacey as his usual ironic self….

(For some reason it won’t go directly to the Kevin Spacey one.  Julia Roberts is good as Mother Nature too, but you should really see the Kevin Spacey one.)

 

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The Paradox

It’s hard to wrap your head around two ideas that are seemingly contradictory, and accept them both as truth.

Imagine your grandmother whom you love deeply.  She has taken care of you in times of need.  You’ve seen her caring, compassionate acts, sometimes even directed at total strangers.  You are convinced she is a wonderful person on every level.  Then you hear her call a black person the n-word, and she’s mean about it.  It’s hard to take.  But as we get older we see our loved ones more for what they truly are – a mixture of “good” and “bad” – instead of as the perfect individual that we perceived them to be.  (This is of course the generic situation.  It could be the opposite – where you can’t see the good and only see bad – or somewhere in the middle.)

Your grandmother is of course both “good” and “bad”.  Most of us are.  But this is an ideal introduction to the paradox because we have a very hard time not assigning our grandmother to the “good” category and never thinking about it again.

The whole concept of good/bad is faulty, I know.  We are products of our culture and upbringing and if someone is “bad” in certain ways the explanation could most likely be found by following it back to a source that was beyond their control.

But my argument is that there are tons of paradoxes all over our lives, constantly occurring.  Take a conservative and a liberal going back and forth about the health care mandate:

Conservative: “It’s not right that the government can force us to buy something.”

Liberal:  “It’s not right that people can choose not to buy health insurance then receive the same service that those who pay for it receive, sticking the taxpayers with the cost.”

Both things can be true.  You might think that one argument supersedes the other, but the point is to not think in such a way that puts everything into strict opposing categories.

And I don’t mean to tell anyone how to think.  I just wish humans didn’t have a tendency to think in such reductionist, categorical ways.

I believe that nearly everyone has the ability to accept the paradox, but it’s cultured out of them from birth by adults who can’t accept it.  A vicious cycle.

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Letter to my Step-Father

(This is a letter to my step-father who is so hard of hearing that he is basically deaf.  So I really can’t hold down a conversation with him and when I try, I have to yell so hard that it’s very much not enjoyable.  I may someday give him this letter.)

If there’s anything I know about you Mike, it’s that you love your business.  You love the deal-making, the shop talk, the pieces and parts that you use to create and build things.    You probably wouldn’t want to live without your business, your shop.  You proudly told my mother that you will work until the day you die.

You love business itself, too.  It’s everything to you.  The Wall Street Journal and CNBC can hold you captivated for hours.  You surround yourself with dollar signs and markets.  I’m glad I don’t know how many times a day you curse Obama or say cruel things about the “other side”.  Better yet, I’m glad my mother doesn’t know.

I’ve noticed that you seem to have no relationship with nature.  In fact, could you possibly have disdain for it?  Or maybe it just means nothing to you either way.

Well it means a lot to me.  It’s everything to me.  The woods are my “shop”.  I love the smells and sights and everything about it.  I don’t know if I would want to live without it.  I wish you could see how what I treasure most matters too.

And I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it but not just “business” makes up America.  We also have tons of beautiful landscapes, interesting plants, lakes and streams, forests… so many unbelievable places and things.

Even though you choose not to have a relationship with nature that doesn’t mean millions of children in the future won’t want to.

When you come to me and tell me that some farmers in California aren’t getting irrigated because a tiny little fish (pinching your fingers together to show me how small it is) is endangered, with that look of disgust on your face, all I can do is shake my head in disappointment.

That little fish feeds other bigger fish, and if that little fish disappears it will be another rung on the ladder to a dead river.  I’m not the only one who cares about that.  There are men who like business who care about that too.

When you say we should get rid of the EPA, does that mean you are okay with factories pouring their by-products into waterways when that would either kill the life in the river or poison children that drink it, or both….?  Is that just okay with you?  Or do you tell yourself that the fish really aren’t being killed and the children aren’t really being poisoned?

Perhaps you don’t think about it at all.

But sometimes I wonder.

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Welcome to Walmartland!

Sometimes the best thing about The New York Times are the online comments.  Gail Collins wrote a poignant and funny article called Peculiar Naming Rites linking the Postal Service’s recent decision to attain a line of clothing to the naming (and renaming) of buildings in the U.S.

“The Postal Service is in a tough place. A while back, Congress turned it into a semiprivate entity, which was supposed to operate just like a profit-making organization except for the part where it had to continue to fulfill all the wishes, hopes and whims of Congress.

When you’re strapped for cash, dignity is the first thing to go. Just ask the members of the minor league baseball team in Corpus Christi, Tex., who play their games at Whataburger Field.

Auctioning off your motto is nothing, really. We have lived with the sale of naming rights so long that generations of Americans have grown up taking it for granted that it is a fine thing to see your college team end a season by winning the Beef ‘O’Brady’s Bowl. Remember when Houston was stuck with Enron Field in 2001? Embarrassing for a second, but then the city resold the rights to Minute Maid for $170 million. Naming rights: good. Renaming rights: better.”

But about the comments.

Kenneth Bergman of Ashland, Oregon says “I don;t suppose any of this will stop until the United States has been branded “Walmartland.” Maybe that would be a way to cut the deficit.”

Hah!

And The Poet McTeagle from California says “What about licensing the names of Washington landmarks to raise money for paying off the national debt? Capitol Hill could be Goldman Sachs Capitol Hill. The White House could be The Sam Walton White House. It’s already happened in essence–why not make it official?”

Love it!

Thanks Gail Collins for calling it like it is!  And for being funny about it.

Whataburger FieldPhoto credit:  www.charliesballparks.com