ROGER'S ANGLE

Thursday, March 3, 2011

BEAVIS AND KOCH-HEAD

Beavis and Koch-Head are walking down the street. They pass a McDonald's and a drug store.
Beavis: Hey, I got a good idea. Let's feed the people tons of junk food and prescription drugs. Let's get 'em so fat and full of pills we can do anything we want.
Koch-Head: You think we could actually convince them to hate the unions and fear the Muslims and spend all their money on the military?
Beavis: Hell, yes. The people are really stupid.
Koch-Head: Think we could convince 'em to love the Tea Party and hate the Democrats?
Beavis: Sure.
K-H: Think we could get 'em to put up with deregulation of everything, so we can take all their money and make them work for peanuts?
B: Hell, yeah.
K-H: Think we could discredit teachers and make people think they don't need to go to school?
B: Certainly.
K-H: Think we could get 'em to hate foreigners and hate intellectuals and hate those damn people who read books?
B: Damn straight.
K-H: Convince 'em we should cut out government all together?
B: Sure, man, you don't know how stupid the hoople-heads are.
K-H: Convince 'em to love Wall Street and envy the rich, even though the rich are taking away all their rights and all their money?
B: Sure, why not?
K-H: Hell, man. We're already there.
B: Thank God.
K-H: God bless America, man. The land of the rich.
B: Government by the rich, for the rich...
K-H: And of the common man.
B: Screw the common man.
K-H: Right on.

(Link:)
The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers [7th Edition]

THE 'ROCK STAR FROM MARS'

What are we supposed to think about Charlie Sheen?

I saw him on TV the other day and he really did say he is a "rock star from Mars."

My god. How did the highest paid TV star in history -- $1.8 million per episode, I think -- get to be so nuts? Is it ego? Is it drugs? Is it another example of "We loved Elvis to death" as Merle Haggard once said?

Let's start a betting pool. Here are the options:
1 - Charlie gets psychiatric help and goes on meds and gets better.
2 - Charlie lips off to the wrong guy in a bar some night and gets his clock cleaned so badly that he never comes out of the coma.
3 - Charlie drives into a light pole on PCH and that's the sad, bitter end.
4 - Charlie gets hired back on the TV show, "Two And A Half Idiots," ah, er, "Two And A Half Men," and things go on, and on, as they were, forever, like endless re-runs.
5 - Charlie wises up on his own and becomes normal.
6 - Charlie gives all his money to charity and becomes a Buddhist monk.
7 - Ratings on the show drop to zero, but Charlie keeps doing it on his own dime.
8 - We all get sick of talking about him and he goes away.
9 - Charlie goes back to Mars and we are all much happier.
10 - Charlie does one too many lines of coke some night, drinks a few too many shooters, and that's all she wrote.

Let me know what you think. I think the whole thing is really sad.

(Links:)
Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital

"THE PRINCE OF NEWPORT"

Today, I'm going to spend some time working on my own novel, "The Prince of Newport."

It's about a con man who comes to Newport Beach, CA, to seek his fortune. He cons a series of sexy women and wealthy men. Tries to take over a family business worth millions. Seduces a woman who owns a dating service. Gets engaged to the daughter of the rich family. One of the women threatens to rat him out, and he kills her.

Will he get caught?

I don't know. That's what I have to find out. More later. Film at eleven.

I have about 10 writing projects that are current. One is about a former hooker who is trying to live down her past. Another is about a racist Minuteman who falls in love with a Mexican woman, in spite of himself. One is a memoir called "Women."

Anyway, back to work. I'll let you know how it goes.

-- Roger

(Links:)

http://www.rogerangle.com/

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

BALANCE THE BUDGET. HELL, I DID.

A huge fight is going on in Washington, DC, right now over the federal budget and the deficit. Politicians act like they are pulling each others' teeth trying to fix it.

But the other day, taking a break between working out, reading the news online, and writing my two blogs, I balanced the U.S. federal budget in about five minutes, using the NY Times Budget Puzzle:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html?scp=1&sq=online%20tool,%20balance%20the%20budget&st=cse

I bet you can do it, too. Click on the above link and try it yourself.

Let me know how long it takes you. I just did it again, and saved way too much money, and went back and restored some of my cuts. That all took less than four minutes. Not four years or four days.

What is the holdup in Washington? Politics. Every senator and representative has people they have to please, lobbyists who give them money and expect something in return.

I don't have any of that. Maybe I should run for president.

(Links:)

Federal Budget Deficits and the U.S. Economy: A Summary of the Proceedings of the Conference Boards Economic Policy Forum (Conference Board Report)

Taxes, Spending, and the U.S. Government's March Towards Bankruptcy

HENNING MANKELL: “FACELESS KILLERS”

I've been trying to read “Faceless Killers” by Henning Mankell, one of the famous Stieg Larsson's not-so-famous influences.

It started out great, much better than Stieg. Not so much exposition, which is Stieg's great downfall. So I thought, this guy Mankell knows how to write fiction. That was for the first 12 pages. In the beginning, “Faceless Killers” has a strong narrative voice, a well-developed sense of the inner lives of his characters, and a good story setup.

An old farmer wakes in the night because he doesn't hear the horse in the barn whinnying like it usually does.

OK. Dum-dee-dum-dum. Suspense.

Then it gets really boring. Who wants to live in this world of down-and-out farmers and isolated old people? The detective's wife has left him, and you can see why. He’s a downer.

After about 75 pages, I don’t want to spend any more time with him. His daughter tried to kill herself, and that’s another downer. Down-down-down, that’s all it is. And there are no real clues. I caught the hint about the horse having been fed and watered, early on, but I don’t know what it means, and I don’t care.

I’m quitting on Page 76; I don’t care what happens next. I don't care who did it, or why. I don't care about the dead farmer's secret life and his secret mistress, and his millions squirreled away.

Mankell has not made me care, and that is the writer's job.

As Mickey Spillane said, “No one ever read a novel to get to the middle.”

And as the famous writer Ken Follett said, there are three things a successful novel must have:

-- A main character you want to identify with—not some loser.

-- A setting, a place, that people want to visit—not some dump.

-- And a big dramatic question to keep the reader hooked all the way through.

This Henning Mankel novel has a loser in a dump and no dramatic question at all. I can't see why anyone would read the whole thing.

-- Roger

Link:

The Fifth Woman (A Kurt Wallander Mystery)

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

THE GIRL WHO POOPED HER PANTS

I am so tired of all this Stieg Larsson crap.

Jesus. The girl who did everything. I did like the first movie, "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," but the first book, of the same name, was a horrible experience, slogging through miles of slow, boring, tedious exposition, telling us the boring back-story, and reporting the story rather than rendering it.

Not enough scenes, not enough imagery, not enough details so you can bring the story to life like a movie in your head. That's what any good fiction should do.

Now here I am trying to read book 2, "The Girl Who Played With Fire." It is scary at first, and disgusting, with Lisbeth being tortured, I guess by her father. Sick. The next 143 pages were a roller coaster for me. I liked it, then I loved the two or three actually rendered scenes, but the massive exposition finally wore me down.

The exposition is at least clear and relevant, which it isn't in the first book of the trilogy.

I don't see how people can read this crap. I can't do it anymore. I just can't. No fun, no reward, not even any real interest. Please, God, don't make me read any more.

I finally gave up in one of many scenes where the fake dialogue is really exposition for the reader. Nobody talks like this: "I've been so fucking angry that you vanished without a trace that I almost decided never to trust you again."

Sounds like a robot, R2D2, perhaps. In real conversation, people don't spell things out like this. They talk obliquely, revealing themselves and not the back-story. They already know the back-story. This book is full of expository dialogue, and I hate it.

In fact, good dialogue in fiction sounds like real people talking, but it isn't. It makes you think, and it makes you figure out the story while it reveals something about the characters.

Anyway, I've given up. I was going to study the Dragon Tattoo books, to see what made them so popular. Then I was just going to read them, to see what they are like.

Not anymore. Never say never, but right now I just don't care. These books don't do what I want fiction to do.

My advice: Read a good book instead, Faulkner or Fitzgerald or Cormac McCarthy.

-- Roger

(Links:)
As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text (Modern Library)
The Great Gatsby

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

AUSCHWITZ AND EMPATHY

The documentary "Verdict On Auschwitz" is full of surprising revelations. Here are some:

The way they killed the children of Jews, gypsies, and other "enemies" of the Third Reich. The Nazis killed people by the thousands, had prisoners drag the bodies to huge pits in the ground, and poured turpentine on them, and set them on fire.

Sometimes, the children were still alive, and they simply grabbed the little kids and threw them on the fire and burned them alive. That is hard to even imagine, isn't it? Yet it happened.

Some of the prisoners who were assigned by the Germans to load the bodies into the pits threw themselves on the fires, voluntarily, ending their own lives. I guess they couldn't take it.

The bonfires of dead bodies grew so big that people in the nearby town saw the smoke and flames and got worried. They called the "work camp" and were reassured that nothing was wrong. All was normal. Normal? This was normal for them? I'd hate to see abnormal.

Who were these Nazis, these good Germans? How did they get like this?

Later, at the Frankfurt Trials, when former prisoners testified to these atrocities, the good German defense attorney challenged them, "What time was it? What date was it? When did that happen?" He tried to impugn their testimony because they could not remember the dates or the times. Of course, they had no calendars and no watches. Appalling. A good lawyer just doing his job? I don't think so.

These trials were held for 18 months, starting in 1963, and some 350 people testified, including many former prisoners. Also, 85 former Auschwitz SS guards were called to testify. Not one of them saw anything or knew anything or remembered anything.

They were asked to speak out against their former fellow guards. Not one of them did. Not one. The code of silence. Evil protecting evil. They didn't want to incriminate themselves and they didn't want to rat out their fellow Nazis.

To my mind, those Nazis were all cowards. They hid behind their uniforms while they committed those atrocities, or they stood by and watched. Then, later, when called to justice, they hid behind their legal rights.

Those who stand by and do nothing while evil happens are almost as guilty as those who commit evil. That's my opinion.

The documentary included films of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels addressing huge rallies of German people in public squares in the 1930s. He ranted about getting rid of the Jews, and thousands of people cheered wildly, apparently approving the slaughter. It is amazing.

The vast majority of Germans seem to have gone along. Again, amazing. Is such a thing possible today? How do we know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are? The answer: empathy. Those who empathize with other people and try to protect human life are the good guys. Those who preach violence and destruction are the bad guys.

Look out for people who put ideology above humanity. If they are willing to kill innocent people for their ideas, they are most likely evil.

It appears that thousands of former Nazis escaped after the war and were never prosecuted. This article, from The Times of London, seems reliable:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article6716704.ece

I think there are two kinds of people in the world: those that empathize with others, who "feel their pain," in Bill Clinton's phrase, and those who don't.

We usually call people sociopaths if they cannot feel empathy. But in Germany, most of the people must've been sociopaths. Millions of Germans stood by or participated while those atrocities happened.

I don't think Hitler cared anything about the Jews, one way or the other. He just wanted money and power, and was willing to destroy anything or anyone in his way. The Jews were just a convenient scapegoat, a pawn in his game.

Let's not let it happen here. I think it would be all too easy. I leave you with this quote:

“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” -- James Baldwin

(Link:)
http://movies.netflix.com/Movie/Verdict_on_Auschwitz/70061311?trkid=2361637#height2120