Everyone hold your applause. Like MacArthur's promise at Corregidor I return to this bitch. And true to form I'm going to blog about politics, but not about the presidential race. Soon you will get the Orlando Magic offseason preview/draft prospectus but right now I'm going to make some dipshit Hollywood types bite the curb.
One of my biggest pet peeves is someone who jams a political message down your throat from a position where they have no business doing this. I could digress into a long post on this subject a la the
Vocation Lectures, but I wont. Thank me later. And though in my experience its mainly liberals who do this (think of your college professors), conservatives do it too. Its basically a false pretenses argument- you have to go to class to learn about history, but your professor takes the opportunity to give a captive audience their political views. More egregious is the entertainment industry. You sit down to watch a movie, and you have to put up with a caricatured, stilted view of reality that reflects the political and ideological predilections of its creator(s).
At bottom this is about vanity- people become so convinced of their own importance (because they make good movies) that they feel the need to use this newfound authority to "speak out." To take a particularly pitiful example, think of
Robert Redford. The man knows his way around a film. But when he moves over into the
producer or director's chair because hes got some societal or political ill he wants to address, very quickly he finds out that the audience generally doesn't share his view of the world. This is America, we want to see car crashes, shoot-outs, explosions, tits, and shiny things (not necessarily in that order). We dont want to have to sit through two hours of hectoring and brow-beating by some narcissistic, solipsistic ass. Fuck.
Which brings me to what started this whole bitch session. Last night I watched The Andromeda Strain on A&E. Not
that one,
this one. I was pumped because dudes generally like movies about infections, but man was this one bad. The production values and all were ok, not great but ok. The CGI was shit, which was surprising for a project produced by Ridley Scott. There is also a painfully obvious 28 Days Later rip off, but you will have to sit through this mess to see that one. On the good side, one guy cuts his own head off with a chainsaw which was pretty rad.
But worst of all, the creators were so far up their own asses that they didnt see what a joke their project was becoming. They were so intent on creating a false (not to mention insultingly stupid) dichotomy between liberals=good/conservatives=bad that they fucked up a very promising project. Look. You've got an organism that kills within seconds. Its bad enough. You dont need to puff it up with bullshit subplots about government malfeasance, enviromental degredation and destruction, and corporate 'ner do welling. The novel was so good because everything political was ultra subtle and very ambiguous. In this miniseries, it was about as subtle as kick to the tailbone.
In the
first half an hour they trotted out these predictable and trite cliches:
1. A Republican Administration is in charge. Why bother with actually doing any of the heavy lifting of writing, character development, etc... when you can just use your sure shorthand for incompetence and evil?
2. The sinister defense secretary is a conscious mix of Rumsfeld and Cheney. The perfect villian willing to do everything necessary to protect Andromeda, even lie to the President. There are scattered references to other biological disasters, e.g. "you remember Houston, don't you?" that apparently occurred under his stewardship. Thanks for spelling that out. We now know that he is a win-at-all-costs, bottom line type of guy with extreme, unchecked power and no conscience.
3. The NSA is recording everyone's phone conversations, tracking people down, and executing them. The idea of a rouge intelligence agency secretly controlling everything? Well, at least no one can say you're not original.
4. The President is currently trying to drill for minerals near undersea vents over the objections of environmentalists. Also, the company that is doing the drilling has some financial relationship with the president. I don't remember the exact name of the company (it was on screen for about 3 seconds) but i do remember it rhymed with Halliburton. Seriously.
5. The microbiology team assembled to combat the virus. In the book, it was all white men. OK, it was 1969, perhaps thats a little dated, if reflective of the time. But in 2007 the team is comfortably multicultural/multiracial/gender inclusive- a Hispanic man, a white woman, an Asian man, a black woman, and a gay white man (which actually is an interesting riff on the Odd Man Hypothesis). It looked like a goddamn Volkswagen commercial.
Keep in mind, all this occurred in the FIRST HALF HOUR of a four-hour miniseries. As it goes on you can see some more. Look, someone has to be the bad guy and, given how they've run the country into the ground over the past 8 years it might as well be the Republicans. But having this constantly and crudely shoved down your throat really ruins what could have been a really interesting remake.
So, how do we fix the problem? We can start by not putting the blame for failing schools on others! Teachers, principals, superintendents, teacher prep programs, etc need to look in the mirror and decide what they are in control of. The students are not the problem in this equation. It is the adults-worrying more about their job security than educating children-that are holding us back. NCLB is not the problem in America's classrooms. The problems are unprepared teachers, under-funded facilities, culture wars, poor research quality, etc. The next incarnation of NCLB needs to do a better job of addressing these issues but for now local districts and states need to make more of an investment in the classroom and not hide behind federal law.
