A Nuclear Waste of Time

It’s always a mistake to enter a movie theater with high expectations.  Who’s going to get you high in a movie theater?  (Cue rimshot drummer.)  But seriously, folks.  I hadn’t seen a flick in the theater since Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt as the money and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the ball.  That was a boring movie, but at least I got to see it with my parents, so it was quality time with the family misspent.  And the last movie I’d seen in the theater before that was The Artist, which was brilliant.  Like anything else, going to the movies is always hit or miss.  There’s an Elliot Rodger joke buried in there somewhere in that last phrase, but that cat is already yesterday’s news.  At least he reminded everyone that America has a serious gun problem, and that men are pathetic losers, especially when we take ourselves too seriously.

To return to Mr. Godzilla.  I was swayed to see the movie by a review I’d read by Andrew O’Hehir, who writes for Salon, as it was reproduced on Alternet.  He(hir) promised in the title that Godzilla was the greatest action movie since Jaws.  Now I don’t know about you, but Jaws scared the hell out of me when I was a kid and did make swimming in the ocean a harrowing experience for several summers thereafter, not that that stopped me from seeing it three times and continuing to immerse myself in the briny depths on a regular, masochistic, paranoid basis.

I now lament Jaws‘ power, not on account of hydrophobia but because the movie and the Peter Benchley book it was based on compelled a lot of people to hate and fear sharks, and now there aren’t many of them left.  Our species turns out to be a lot scarier than theirs, especially from their points of view.

One nice thing about living in Seoul is you can see movies in the morning.  I had a few hours to slaughter after teaching my first class, and I was curious to see if Godzilla lived up to its promise.  I hadn’t seen the director’s first film, Monsters, which I’ve heard cats describe as their pajamas.  And I wouldn’t be caught dead swimming in the Pajama Canal, unless I somehow ended up in the maw of a finless Great White shark (whose mother suffered from low self-esteem and considered herself merely a Pretty Good White shark, while she felt her husband was Not Bad and her other son was No Great Shakes).

(Did you see the story on Yahoo News about a month ago about some yahoo in Florida who caught a mako shark whose carcass got photographed in the bed of his pickup truck while he was filling up for gas?  This isn’t called the Anthropocene Era for nothing.  Pretty soon we’ll be the only species left, but not for long. . .)

In case you haven’t guessed by now, I don’t have much to say about the goddamned Godzilla movie except that it was far from the greatest action movie since Jaws.  I wish I’d read Anthony Lane’s review of it for the New Yorker beforehand, then I wouldn’t have bothered seeing it.   Then again, I’m kind of glad I did, because it’s good to keep at least one finger on the cultural pulse so you can see what all the hoopla’s all about, or at least try to.

The talented actors in the film were forced to deliver cardboard performances (although Bryan Cranston really hammed it up, reprising Walter White at his most emotional moments), letting the monsters have all the fun.  The “bad” critters reminded me of the Geiger-generated space reptiles in the Alien series, although they were more bug-like, and of course a lot larger.

Godzilla himself was charismatic and he read his lines well.

There was very little humor in the film and few surprises. 

Okay, SPOILER ALERT time.  Skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know what happens at the end of the movie.  Predictably, the military man played by David Strathairn orders his men to blow up the creatures with the most powerful nuclear weapon at their disposal against the advice of wise pagan Ken Watanabe.  Happily, Godzilla, after dispatching the bad critters, survives the blast, despite a rough hangover, and lumbers back into the ocean, his work completed for the time being.  Ho hum, just another catastrophic nuclear blast; nothing to text home about.  There’s a scene near the end of Roland Emmerich’s movie True Lies in which Arnold Schwarzenegger and his girlfriend (played by Jamie Lee Curtis, if I’m not mistaken) embrace while watching a mushroom cloud bloom on the horizon.  How quaint.  And how harmless.  Just a little fireworks display to keep the children happy.

I’ve never watched the show 24, but I saw a series of clips in which Jack Bauer, the character portrayed by Kiefer Sutherland, tortured his captured terrorist antagonist to get him to cough up where he’d hidden the ticking time bomb.  It was a gut-wrenching display.  Nonetheless, too many Americans consider torture a price worth paying in order to defend ourselves (even though the real terrorists are usually too elusive to get caught until after they’ve done their dirty work).  Torture has been practiced in various unseemly situations, probably since the beginning of human history.  But this is the first time in a long time where it’s gotten the thumbs-up from a large percentage of U.S. citizens.  Could they have been brainwashed by the riveting Fox TV series?  Or Dubya’s charm offensive?

The reason I mention it is I’m queasy about casual displays of nuclear explosions in Hollywood films.  There are few survivors left of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but I doubt they’d qualify such inflammable fare as entertainment.  Legitimizing the use of nukes in a fictional setting numbs people to the consequences of their use in real life, and makes such use that much more likely.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

By the way, I did a Google search yesterday on whether it was necessary for the U.S. to nuke Japan in order to end the war and came up with some illuminating facts.  It turns out that Japan was already pretty well wiped out, especially from the incendiary bombs used on Tokyo that roasted 100,000 people in six hours, along with all the other devastated cities.  Their air force and navy were toast.  The only real excuse Truman had to use the bomb was Japan’s unwillingness to accept his terms of unconditional surrender, since they didn’t want Emperor Hirohito to lose his post as a divine figurehead.  (Too bad they didn’t decide to give him the old heave-ho instead; not that I’m blaming them for my country’s doubtful role as a pioneer in the field of nuclear terrorism.)  The irony was that the U.S. decided to keep the emperor in place after taking a nuclear dump on the two cities after all (make that two dumps–the first from the tail of the Enola Gay, a cuddly, genocidal fellow named Little Boy; his successor was designated Fat Man–gotta love those euphemistic military nicknames) in order to keep the natives from getting restless.

I was disappointed to read in Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s Trinity:  A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb, an otherwise excellent account of the history of the Manhattan Project with some invaluable insights into the mind of J. Robert Oppenheimer, that “the Japanese showed no willingness to surrender.”  (That’s actually a paraphrase; I put it in quotes to distance the words from my own view, based on the evidence alluded to in the previous paragraph.)  To be fair, they did refuse to bite the bullet, although one online source claims the emperor himself beseeched the Truman administration for a truce back in January 1945, as long as he could hang onto his gig.  But because Fetter-Vorm doesn’t take any time to delve into the nuances of the matter, he lends the bombings an air of inevitability they evidently didn’t have.  Who said the truth wasn’t complicated?

We need to get rid of all the nukes right away, before they get rid of us.  

And we will, just as soon as we finish watching this really cool movie (christened by both the Pentagon and the U.S. Air Force, whose cooperation in providing high-tech props is much appreciated by the deep-pocketed producers).

By the way, despite its tired predictability and dazzling special effects, Godzilla did have a nice message, which was to be nice to nature for a change.  

Roger Wilco.

In the Beginning, God Created the Religious Fanatic

In case you’re wondering about the title, it’s true.  I’ve done some research into the matter.  Turns out God was lonely and insecure, and wanted someone who’d love him unconditionally.  Reminds me of Pygmalion.

So the Pope has decided to throw in the towel, eh?  What’s the Catholic Church going to do without a pope?  How are they going to cope?  Will they finally appoint a woman for the job, as I humbly hope?  How about someone from Africa or Latin America, who might have a second opinion on the wisdom of the whole being fruitful and multiplying deal?  Dividing and subtracting might be the way to go instead.  (Way to go!)  Or at least encourage men to use rubbers.  You need something to erase your mistakes when you write with a pencil.

Imagine a world without a pope.  While you’re at it, how about a world without presidents, generals, or bosses of banks?  Okay, now wake up and smell the tsunami of raw sewage ringing your doorbell like a Tex Avery cartoon.  Since Kim Jong Un is so eager for attention, why not make him the new pope?  Oh yeah, then he’d have to get a divorce.  Can’t they change that rule?  And the dynasty he’s a part of is not the best ad I’ve ever seen for the whole being fruitful and multiplying thing.  More like starve and drop dead.

I spent last weekend celebrating the Lunar New Year with my Korean in-laws, eating way too much good food, pretending to watch Korean TV while shamelessly reading a book instead, and sleeping on the floor like a dog.  (I have a Korean friend with a dog named Lunch; that’s a really lame joke, especially for someone who’s lived here for seven years, but I can’t pretend to be self-assured enough not to have to go for the cheap laugh sometimes, and my politically correct and culturally sensitive censorship button appears to be out of order.  To be fair, there is a growing resistance to the custom of eating dog meat in Korea, although a few months ago while staying at a hotel in the southern part of the country, I was awakened in the middle of the night by the forlorn and haunting cries of what I finally perceived to be what must have been about a hundred dogs awaiting execution at a local “farm”.)

I love my family-in-law, but I was dismayed to find that my father-in-law suffers from some of the same delusions as my wife Jina.  You’d have to travel a great distance and a long time to find someone crazier than she is, or someone dumber than I am for having married her.  (If she ever reads this, of course, she’ll kill me–not that I have anything against euthanasia.)  While my second-hand dad and I were having lunch (no, we didn’t eat dog, Dawg), he asked if I’d heard about the practice in the U. S. of planting computer chips in people’s forearms (something begun by a company formerly known as Verichip).

How could I not have heard about it, considering Jina wouldn’t stop going on about it for months on end?  I pretended not to be nauseated by the topic–protocol is de rigueur in this culture.  But I did say that the chip was meant as a way to monitor people with severe medical disorders, not that it couldn’t be a Trojan horse for something far more sinister.  As I’ve said before in these pages, we’ve already let our government run wild with all manner of drones, and now that various police forces are making use of surveillance models (as Chris Hedges has written, the ones in Flint, Michigan hover overhead “like vultures”), it’s only a matter of time before people are going to have to defend themselves against attack with their own personal nuclear umbrellas.  Maybe the gun nuts will do something logical for a change and start blowing the drones away, making them fall from the sky like deranged Canadian geese suffering from heart failure.  The Fourth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution protects people against unwarranted searches and seizures; apparently, America’s last two presidents must have run out of toilet paper since they keep using that document to wipe their asses with.

Anyway, my pa-in-law made the ever-so-logical connection between the robo-human-making computer chip and the Mark of the Beast prophesied in the Book of Revelation and popularized by the movie The Omen, the terrifyingly repetitious number 666.  So as not to gauge his eyes out with my chopsticks, I changed the subject instead.  Wouldn’t want to forget my table manners.  I was afraid he was going to start channeling my wife’s already ubiquitous spirit and start going on about the bloody Illuminati or Freemasons and thought I’d best nip the conversation in the bud like Rosemary’s fetus.

One thing I’m having trouble understanding is the sustained popularity of Korean pop singer Psy and his song “Gangnam Stale” (sic).  Psy (sigh)–whose name reminds me of the Japanese word kusai, which means “stinks,” claims he’s working on a new song, which will be ready for launching in April.  The guy writes one song a year?  The Beatles and the Rolling Stones used to crank out two albums a year!  So did Elvis Costello.  But Psy is “the most beloved entertainer in the world.”  So there.

Maybe that’s why it’s okay for him to whore himself for a company that makes instant ramen noodles (the product he’s hawking is called Black, not an ideal color for ramen; maybe it’s licorice flavor–mmm, yummy).  I watched in awe-inspired horror as Mr. Psy (he’s a psycho–get it?  Gosh, he’s so darned edgy!) noisily slurped down a slithering cascade of his toxic treat on the family’s Jumbotron of a TV screen, following this Pavlovian display of untrammeled appetite with an orgasmic sigh (hence the nickname), and concluding the commercial by holding the Styrofoam (Psyrofoam?) container next to his preternaturally glistening, oleaginous cheek as if it were some futuristic Teddy bear, and closing his eyes with calculating affection for money and undeserved international fame.

Of course, like a minstrel singing for his supper, he did his little signature pony dance in the middle of the ad just to remind you that there’s no part of him that isn’t for sale.

Nice to know that tenacious, self-aggrandizing mediocrity will always have a place in this tacky masterpiece of a world.

But, as Billy Preston said, “That’s the way God planned it.”  (Even though I’m an agnostic, I have to admit that the live rendition of that song, which he performs on You Tube with George Harrison, is nothing short of inspirational.  Please check it out if you get the chance.)

So please join me in praying for a better pope, preferably one who was not a member of the Hitler Youth, and someone less disingenuous than Pope John Paul, or George Ringo before him.  Maybe the time has come for Pope Mick Keith, or Pope Sid (and) Nancy.  The Sex Pistols will come and send everyone to heaven.  They did it their way.