To Plundering Politicians: Get Off Our Backs!

by

Eric Paul Nolte

A blurb from Turning Point USA points out the irony that Elizabeth Warren is agitating for a $22/hour minimum wage-- but doesn't pay her interns.

Whether Elizabeth Warren pays her interns or not, support for the minimum wage can only come from a dizzy, feel-good ignorance of the law of supply and demand. 

So if $22/hour is such a good thing, why not $100/hour?  Or how about $1,000/hour?  Why not? 

A minimum wage hurts the very people it is designed to help-- and hurts them worse than anybody else because it makes many unskilled workers unemployable for a first job. If some workers are so unskilled that they can't produce more wealth than their pay, an employer will not hire them. Without such a first job, the unskilled may never get a leg up into the workforce and learn better skills that can lead to their advancement. To be sustainable, workers' pay can never be greater than a fraction of the revenue they are able to generate for their employer. To an employer, workers' pay is just another factor of production, like steel or wheat or energy, and these companies have to compete with each other to attract and keep workers. 

Unbeknownst to Elizabeth Warren, this competition for workers is what explains why 97 percent of the workforce earns more than the minimum wage! And it's not labor unions which goose up the pay for most workers because, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the portion of the workforce belonging to unions in 2016 was barely 11 percent, down from 17 percent in 1983, and down from its peak of 28.3 percent in 1954. (As a telling footnote here, in 2016, the percentage of union workers in the private sector was 6.7 percent, and in the public sector it was 35.3 percent.) 

Warren and her ilk are infected by the ridiculous politics of unwarranted, unearned self-congratulation for how good they feel about their well-intended policies, no matter how badly these policies play out in the real world.

Still worse than their being oblivious to the actual results of their policies, they display a feckless contempt for the legitimate rights of individuals to their own life, liberty, and property.

They support so-called rights to all kinds of goods and services which do not grow on trees and the provision of which will have to be taken from others whose willingness to cough up the goods is deemed irrelevant.  "We're all in this together," so it's a good thing to "spread the wealth around," as President Obama once put it on the campaign trail. Never mind just how this spreading around is to be done.

Warren et al are infected by the idea of economic egalitarianism--not political equality, not the equal treatment of all before the law, but equality of income and wealth, which could never happen unless the government or the mafia were willing to rob Peter to pay Paul. 

On this point, see Don Watkins and Yaron Brook's fabulous books Equal is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality, and Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government.  Those of Warren's mind believe that they know better than we how to run our lives, so they are happy to grab the reins of our lives.  They do not want a government of laws so much as they want a government of Lords (to lord it over us.)  

Let us get this straight: there is no equality among individuals!  It is a destructive delusion to believe otherwise.  We are each unique and irreplaceable in our attributes!  There can be no such equality in the real world!  We differ from each other in every way-- we are unequally endowed in health, intelligence, ambition, the circumstances of our birth.  Moreover, it is this inevitably rainbow panoply of traits that makes the world go around--these differences of gifts and tastes offer the basis for trading to mutual benefit.  One person's trash is another's treasure.  When we are free to deal with each other voluntarily, the outcome in wealth can never be equal, but this freedom to trade with each other without government interference is the road to optimizing the creation of a rising tide of wealth that will lift more of the boats than any other policy.  This freedom is the very basis for any possibility for true cooperation between people and the coordination and direction of all the resources in the world.  Government regulation of these matters usurps the choices of the people.

Leonard Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education often said that government is like a clenched fist.  Government is force.  The role of government should be strictly confined to those areas where a fist can be effective, such as a police force to restrain domestic predators and a military to protect us from foreign aggression.  A fist is incapable of shaking hands or writing a symphony or stroking a crying baby.  Everything apart from wielding protective force in accordance with a rigorous policy of protecting the rights of every peaceful individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, should be left to the citizens' discretion.     

Liberals don't understand that government has no funds of its own. Every dollar government has comes from the citizens, and if we do not cheerfully hand it over to them, they take these funds out of our hides by force.  

If you say that I am mistaken here because the government can create its own money through the printing press, let me remind you that such fiat money dilutes the value of the existing currency and therefore destroys the value of the money we hold as private citizens.  In other words, this phony-baloney printing press money is no different in its effect on us than if the government were simply to steal our money outright. Printing-press money is no different from just another tax on us.  

Liberals truly fail to understand that the root of all evil in the world is the willingness to use other people against their will. Every despicable practice of humans is an example of this concept, if you think about it. 

What else is murder but the willingness to use another against his will? Rape? It's another example of using others against their will. Slavery? Genocide? Theft, fraud--you name it! All of these are examples of using others against their will.

But this willingness to use others against their will is the soul of the "progressive" ... and of sundry others as well... they are political predators, whether they know it or not.

I say learn to live and let live! And lend a helping hand, if you can do so by your own lights and in a way that you believe will actually do any good.

Ms. Warren, you need to learn that making the world a better place will most effectively begin if we each take full responsibility for ourselves, and embrace the challenge of unfolding our gifts in a way that allows us to offer others something that they will value enough to pay us for it. As Ayn Rand formulated it, we should live by the trader principle, voluntarily exchanging values for mutual benefit.

Where, through no fault of their own, some others cannot take care of themselves, help should come to them voluntarily from others who lend a helping hand out of the benevolence of a heart made full perhaps by the gratitude we may come to feel from having achieved a good life.  The situation of the helpless is morally compromised by any aid that comes to them as loot plundered by a welfare state.  Such plunder has the perversely unintended consequence of transforming the goodness of voluntary aid that is given to the helpless as charity, and turns this goodwill into a policy that poisons the relationship between citizens.  Where aid comes as loot taken by force from some citizens and given to others, anyone who owns anything is encouraged to look upon other citizens as a potential threat, not a potential benefit.

Frederic Bastiat captured the nature of this relationship between citizens and governments when he wrote, "Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." And then he pointed out the inevitable consequence of this attitude: "Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone."

To Elizabeth Warren and all the rest of you like-minded predators, I say get off our backs!  Get a life!  Get a life of your own and produce something of real value that others will voluntarily want to trade with you (as opposed to your politics of “trading” our money for our life.)  

                                                 E   P   N

2017.0509

c. 1,490 words

Make Passengers Walk? Let Money Talk!

Make Passengers Walk? Let Money Talk!

Voluntary Trade Benefits Everybody

by

Eric Paul Nolte

As a recently retired airline pilot with 41 years in the business (most recently at United Airlines, not incidentally), I know the airline industry better than I know my family tree, so I speak with authority when I tell you that the media are not telling you the whole story about David Dao, the hapless Vietnamese-American doctor who was recently bullied, bloodied, and dragged off a United Airlines flight in Chicago.

We hear that United Airlines summarily removed four passengers to make room for its own employees.  The reports say that the flight was overbooked, and there is widespread resentment that airlines engage in such perceived selfishness and disdain for the rights of passengers.  

No passengers were willing to give up their seats when the company offered a few hundred dollars for each seat.  When no passengers volunteered, four of them were singled out for involuntary denial of passage according to company procedures.  Since these passengers were already aboard the airplane, they were asked to leave the ship.  Dr. Dao refused to deplane, so the Chicago airport police were called in, and when Dr. Dao resisted arrest, the police cruelly forced him off the airplane, as we know from the video of the horrible scene that shortly went viral on YouTube.com.  Dr. Dao suffered several serious injuries.

We share the outrage over this kind of brutality that we would not expect to see outside of a police state.  But the media’s reporting of this incident displays little understanding of the real situation or of important details of the airline business.

Of course, the first concern is to wonder why did this situation get so out of hand that the airport police were called in?

Airport security these days is spring-loaded to deal with terrorists, not to intervene on behalf of some little misunderstanding over the seating arrangements of passengers and airline employees.  

To call in the cops is overkill, like unleashing attack dogs over a little disagreement at a hot dog stand.  This was an unwarranted and frightening threat of lethal force to resolve a little mix-up between customers and a service provider.

The police should not have been called in to resolve this dispute.  

The airline could have easily solved the problem if they had put into practice a little understanding of the law of supply and demand.  The airline should have realized that they were in an overbooked situation and that the goal here should always be to resolve the problem voluntarily, with good will, and with an eye towards achieving an outcome that is of mutual benefit to company and passengers.  It only makes sense.  To paraphrase a recent ad for Southwest Airlines, we want to beat our competition, not our customers!  This good will is central to maintaining the good reputation that is crucial to prospering in business and life.  

How would this seeding of good will work in this case?  We have an auction here.  If no passengers are willing to give up their seats for $200, then offer them $400.  If $400 is not enough to entice passengers, keep raising the offer until somebody is finally willing to make the trade.

The airline did offer some money for the seats, but no passengers were willing to give up their seats for the amount offered.  The company should have offered more money.  The police should never be called in unless there is a threat to life or limb.

Why would an airline be willing to buy their passengers’ seats back?  It is simple economics, but the press has not displayed much understanding of it.

The media have shown some understanding of why airlines overbook flights —they do so in order to fill seats left empty by no-show passengers, and the actual number overbooked for each flight is artfully calculated on the basis of specific flight data and statistics.  

But I have seen little in the reporting of this incident that displays a grasp of why the company would feel compelled to remove paying passengers to make room for airline employees.  

This is a situation I have seen often enough over the years and the reasons for it are easy to explain. 

For example, suppose an airplane is at an outstation where no aircrew members are based.  At the outstation there will be no crews available to be called into work on short notice.  If a plane at the outstation has a mechanical problem that delays them long enough, the crew will run into a government regulation that prohibits them from being on duty for too many hours.  The flight would either have to be canceled or delayed until the crew has been given a rest period required by the federal aviation regulations.  But if a fresh crew can be called up and ferried out to the outstation to replace the first crew, the flight can be salvaged.  Canceling an airline flight can cost the company millions of dollars!  So it makes good economic sense to pay some customers enough for them to want to give up their seats so as to make room for a replacement crew who can be dispatched to prevent a costly cancellation.

Now, the fine print of an airline ticket reveals a contract that allows the company to deny boarding to passengers under certain conditions.  It is not true that a passenger has a right to an airline seat after purchasing the ticket, contrary to widespread opinion.  There are too many situations where it might not even be possible to transport a passenger as originally agreed by the ticket purchase.

There is a world of confusion and chaos over the nature of rights—those of humans, animals, Gaea herself, welfare rights, liberty rights, positive and negative rights, the rights of races, genders, nations, and, to the point here, airline passenger rights.  

As with so many of the contentious matters with which she wrestled, I believe that Ayn Rand cut through this cloud of confusion with greater clarity than anybody since the time of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government.  Rights are conditions of survival tied to each individual’s life in a social context.  Rights belong to each individual, and these “individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law,” as she put it in her essay on “Man’s Rights.”  The source of these rights is human nature, not an arbitrary social convention dreamed up out of the largesse of governments who bestow goodies on warring special interest groups for political power and advantage.  (Yes, I know that this view is contrary to much of contemporary legal thought.)

So, like all of us, Dr. Dao has a right to his own life, liberty, and property—a right to be protected against the unwarranted initiation of physical force against him.  The purpose of government is the protection of every individual’s right to life, liberty, and property.  The purpose of the police is to restrain the predators among us and keep the peace.  The police are granted the power to intervene and restrain anybody in a civilian dispute until they can figure out what is going on and how to restore law and order.  As an individual who unwittingly wanders into a fight, when the police show up, you are obligated to cooperate with their efforts to sort out the problem, and if you display the poor judgment to resist them you can put yourself in mortal danger, as happened to Dr. Dao.

I believe that the company was legally entitled to deny boarding to those passengers, much as we dislike the way they handled the matter, but to call in the gendarmes under these conditions was to risk creating a big stinking brouhaha, especially when Dr. Dao resisted arrest so adamantly.

So, what of the unfortunate Dr. Dao?  Again, in my humble opinion, the company could have prevented the whole mess by raising the price it was willing to pay until some passengers would have cheerfully given up their seats.  

Nevertheless, what happened to Dr. Dao was reprehensible. 

Having said that the brutality against Dr. Dao was deplorable, I have to ask what on earth was the poor man thinking when he resisted arrest?  

The situation strikes me as comparable to driving your car and being pulled over by a police cruiser.  You may be convinced that you were doing nothing wrong at all, but any fool knows that if you resist arrest, you risk getting your ass pounded or worse!  How could Dr. Dao think that anything good can come out of defying a trio of police officers who are pumped up and primed to fight terrorists?

I hold the police blameworthy for failing to exercise better judgment in this situation.

I hold the unfortunate Dr. Dao responsible for exercising poor judgment in the face of his admittedly terrible predicament. 

I hold the airline responsible for failing to keep the police out of a situation in which they should never have been called out.  

I also hold the airline responsible for failing to arrange matters so that the problems caused by overbooking and crew transportation could have been prevented in the first place through the peaceful, voluntary trading of good things between people for the benefit of all concerned.

E   P   N

2017.0418 

c. 1,550 words

Formulations of a God that Even Ayn Rand Might Embrace

Formulations of a God that Even Ayn Rand Might Embrace

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Recently, M. Zachary Johnson, compelling composer and author of brilliant books on music, posted this thought on Facebook:

“I recall Leonard Peikoff saying that Ayn Rand once told him she had come up with an argument for the existence of God that was better than any of those anyone had come up with. But when he asked her what it was, she wouldn't tell him. Does anybody remember where he said this?”

David Hayes responded to Matt with the reference and wrote:

"Letters of Ayn Rand," pg. 185, within a letter to Isabel Paterson dated August 4, 1945, contains this paragraph by Ayn Rand:

‘Incidentally, I know some very good arguments of my own in favor of the existence of God. But they're not the ones you mention and they're not the ones I've ever read advanced in any religion. They're not proofs, therefore I can't say I accept them. They are merely possibilities, like a hypothesis that could be tenable. But it wouldn't be an omnipotent God and it wouldn't be a limitless God.’

“Following this, an editorial remark has been added which reads: "[AR never mentioned these arguments again.]

“I don't [know] of a passage of Leonard Peikoff's on the same point.”

*   *   *

Why would anybody ever be interested in naming a formulation of god that even Ayn Rand might approve of?

It might seem apparent that the very idea of god is so tainted, so fraught with awful history and practice that surely no good can come of trying to nail down a definition that a rational person could live with.  Why even try?  

I got into a similar spot when I once tried to craft a non-altruistic argument for charity as a sort of “thank you” from me to the universe.  I feel deeply grateful for the lucky roll of the cosmic dice that endowed me with a good mind and health that allowed me to work hard and make something deeply rewarding of my life.  What did I do to deserve this luck?  Nothing.  I could just as deservingly been born dead, or crippled, or in a brutal dictatorship.  My gratitude inspires me to want to lend a helping hand to deserving others who were not so lucky as I.  But to call this impulse “charity” may be wrong-headed because the idea of charity turns out to be so laced with religious calls for mindless self-sacrifice for the lives of others.  Ultimately I found the word untenable for my purposes.

But I do have a couple good ideas about what a rational concept of a god might be, and I believe I can show you how these formulations comport nicely with my Objectivist view of the universe.  

The most important point speaks to why all the peoples of the world have wrestled with some version of a god or gods.  Moreover, these ideas may offer a good tool for outreach to persuade others whose religiosity might otherwise render them deaf to our way of looking at the world.

So let me offer these ideas for your consideration.  

A little background first.

*   *   *

I was born to a communist musician who made of me a “red diaper baby,” as they say of the babies of red-flag waving Marxist-Leninists.  It took me decades to recover my mind!  

I came of age in the Unitarian Church of the 1960s. Then, as now, an atheist or a Buddhist could be welcomed into the fellowship, but back then their book store still sold copies of Atlas Shrugged along with works by and about the iconic figures of the church and secular saints like Jefferson, Darwin, Emerson, Thoreau, Dickens, William Ellery Channing, and many other brilliant lights.  

At that time one could openly profess admiration for Ayn Rand and capitalism without causing Unitarians to suffer a dizzy moral seizure.  

This is no longer true!  

When I grew up in the Unitarian church, one could still openly advocate a morality of reason, objective reality, individual rights to life, liberty, and the peaceful pursuit of personal happiness and profit through trading value-for-value to mutual benefit—in a word, capitalism.  That church is dead.

But, to the point here, I did get something wonderful out of growing up Unitarian, which was the idea that God, or any god or gods, was not irrevocably tied to the God of Abraham—not necessarily an anthropomorphic creator of the universe, not a personality of omniscient or omnipotent powers, and requiring neither mystical nor magical thinking.  

Let me explain.

*   *   *

Why God?  

Not, “Tell me why, oh dear God.”  

Rather, why is there any idea of a god?

Why this imaginary friend, this bizarre delusion that arose nearly everywhere on earth?  Why did an idea of god arise among almost all the ancient peoples of the world?

What gives rise to the concept of a god? 

There is no evidence for a god, the anthropomorphic creator of the universe, that will hold water, much less walk on water, so why and how did any idea of a god ever come to mind?

I believe that the idea of a god arose because, for one thing, Homo saps are in the unique position of knowing that we must die.

Now, you can quote literature that says elephants, dolphins, and chimps are also aware of death among their own kind, but there is an unbridgeable gulf between humans and all the other animals: they are adapted to their environment.  We must daily wrestle with the challenges posed by our being physically ill-suited to living in the wild—we must adapt the environment to us.  It is our uniquely advanced minds that allow us to bend the world to our needs.  We are endowed with the unique power to accumulate knowledge and capital. 

Humans are the only animals who hold their knowledge in fully developed, propositional concepts, and therefore we are the only creatures who can possibly know of our own impending personal death and grapple with the shattering consequences of this foreknowledge.

The foreknowledge of our own death is shattering because it challenges the very meaning of our lives.

If everything we have ever worked to achieve disappears in the flash of death, then … what’s the point?  

If it all disappears with the finality of a falling guillotine’s blade, then what’s it all about?  

If all the wealth and knowledge we have acquired, if all the love we have given and received, if all this earthly web unravels and sinks to the bottom of life’s ocean, then what is the meaning of life?

Death levels the Prince and the Pauper, the saint and the sinner, the wise and the foolish.  Death shatters us.

This is the point that Forrest Church often made, that all religions have as their animating purpose the search for meaning that arises with the foreknowledge of our own death.

(Footnote: Forrest Church was for many years the senior minister of the First Unitarian Church in Manhattan, a prolific author who edited the arresting and wonderful volume, The Jefferson Bible, which shows how Thomas Jefferson was as close to being an outright atheist as one could be in the 18th century without getting burned at the stake.) 

You can say that the idea of god was humanity’s ruse, our self-deception, an aspect of whistling past the graveyard on a moonless night, pretending that though we must die, we don’t really have to die because we can imagine an afterlife in which we persist forever with everyone we ever loved.

You can say that we would all be vastly better off without this pretense, this profound lie, and that embracing reality clear-eyed and brave is always more life-serving than self-deception and cowardice.  I agree.

And yet, there is another aspect of the reason that Homo saps ever dreamed up the idea of god.

If by the idea of god you mean the impersonal force that somehow animates the universe, well then what’s wrong with that?  

I believe that it’s obvious that something is going on in the universe!  Some impersonal force or forces energize everything.  We do not know what all these forces are.  We do know that these forces are real, we do know what many of them are, and by declaring that we do not know what all of them are, we leave open the possibility for discovering them as they become available to us.  By our profession of a certain ignorance here we inspire those who have the goods to go sniffing down that road in search of better answers.

So this is the idea of god as the impersonal force that animates the universe, and surely this is a plausible explanation for why the idea of god might have arisen in the context of early Homo sapiens, before the rise of science.  This explanation also speaks to the point of why people might still turn to the idea of god when they wonder, awestruck about the yawning sea of ignorance that yet lies not so far off the shore we know and on which we live today. 

Here’s another idea of god that even Ayn Rand might entertain as tenable:

Suppose, by “god” you mean the state of mind to which you repair when you feel aware of the cosmic sweep of the universe, when you confront the awe-inspiring beauty of the earth that is available to anybody who pays attention to the amazing phenomena of life and the world.

Think of the astonishing displays of light and its refraction through all the mists of cloud and water.  

Think of the soul-shaking power of a thunderstorm felt up close… or as experienced from inside the belly of the beast, as I myself have seen it up close and first hand as an airline pilot!  My god!  

I think of what I often saw in my 35 years as an airline pilot, plying the high choir loft, miles above the haze layer—when I would sometimes turn down the cockpit lights just to gawk at the stunning spectacle of all those stars on a moonless night!  I think of the many times I saw huge, mind-boggling displays of light, wriggling and dancing in the firmament, the aurora borealis seen from seven miles high while nearing the North Pole!  Oh, my god!  

If by “god” you mean the state of mind by which you engage with the enduring mysteries of existence, who can argue with this?  Nobody knows it all!  What is the universe?  Where does it come from?  Or is it that by simply being everything that is, the concept of the universe does not admit to such a question?  

Is the universe finite?  Is it infinite?  Either one of these propositions once inspired outright dizziness in my mind and those of many others.  Is the universe eternal?  Doomed to destruction by heat death and the second law of thermodynamics? 

Everything in the universe is finite—it is what it is, independent of our wishes, fears, doubts, illusions, prayers, delusions, blindness, or indigestion.  So if everything is finite, surely the universe as a whole must be thus limited.  And if the universe is finite, as Socrates might have put it in the fifth century BC, surely the universe must have a boundary.  If the universe has an edge, surely you could throw a javelin through it!  And if you can throw a spear through the edge of the universe… then… what’s on the other side?

But if the universe is infinite, this would contradict the nature of everything we know about anything, because everything is finite… everything is definite, something specific.  It is what it is, whatever it is, and surely to be infinite would have to mean being open-ended, without limit.

Now, there are rational ways to deal with these apparent problems with the idea of the infinite, but you can plainly see that the matter begins with an intellectually vertigo-inspiring conundrum, like so many things dreamed up by the ancients (think of Zeno’s paradox, for another related example of the problem of the infinite.)

Think of what life must have been like to our ignorant ancient ancestors, cowering before the fear-fraught facts of existence—the storms and earthquakes, the predators and mysteries of the night and day!  My god!

*   *   * 

All right, now we have some ideas of god that may be tenable.  

We have god as the impersonal force that animates the universe.  

There is god as the sacred hall of our awe and wonder at the beauty and power of life and the world.  

We have god as the chapel to which we repair when we wrestle with the enduring mysteries of existence. 

But there is still a big problem here because by calling these ideas “god” we can find ourselves cast adrift in intellectually shark-infested waters!  

Why?  Because the idea of god has a long and tainted history!  We cannot employ any idea of god without risking association with some of the worst craziness that has ever infected the human race!

So why bother with the idea of god at all?  Why not just call it science or poetry or music?

Because we also want to engage people in the world with fact-based values by which to guide us towards harmony with everybody on the earth who can be reached by the power of life-serving reason and evidence.  

So much of the world is wedded to some formulation of Dostoevsky’s notion that without a god everything is permitted.  They say that unless there is a god dispensing rewards and punishments, it’s all subjective, and only moral relativism is available to us.  

But as Objectivists know, there are facts of reality to which we can appeal for moral guidance towards a life of unfolding happiness, a vision like the world as Ayn Rand saw it, and in Aristotle’s Eudaimonia.

So maybe these secular formulations of god can serve to engage those who now believe in some version of god.  

Maybe by our employing these secular conceptions of god, some of these believers might be persuaded to move away from the false and destructive idea that faith offers an alternative to reason. (Remember that faith denotes a belief in the truth of a proposition in the absence of evidence, and so it can never be an efficacious alternative to reason.)  

By the path of offering some rational formulations of the meaning of god, we may be able to persuade more people that reason, logic applied to the evidence of experience, gives us the rational alternative to thinking about values, morality, and happiness.  This outcome would benefit us all. 

E   P   N

2017.0301
revised 2017.1031 

La La Land, The Would-Be Big Musical

La La Land,

The Would-Be Big Musical-- 

A Tease and a Disappointment

Reviewed by 

Eric Paul Nolte

(Spoiler alert…)

Yesterday we saw La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s film about the human conflict between passionate ambition and romantic love.  The film aspires to be a big American musical set on the contemporary scene of Los Angeles.

What a tease!  What a disappointment!  So many big beautiful vistas, so much talent on screen, so much charm and beauty, so much good acting, so much imaginative writing and such a big portrayal of the cityscape of LA!  And yet….  

I believe the film aspires to be a big musical, in the tradition of Singing in the Rain, An American in Paris, and the countless movies featuring such luminaries as Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, and Debbie Reynolds.  We even get some loose paraphrases and quotes from some of those works.  But the film falls short of this goal, if this were its goal, despite such great attributes as having two protagonists (Mia, an aspiring actress and playwright, and Sebastian, a serious jazz pianist) who are winning characters sympathetically written and attractively portrayed by excellent actors (Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling.)

  

Stone and Gosling are radiantly attractive individuals and fine actors, but their skill at singing and dancing pales beside that of their supporting cast.

It’s a musical, right?  So shouldn’t the stars be stellar singers and dancers?  But the stars’ singing and dancing never rises above the level one might expect to see at any good high school performance, and the choreography created for them does not stretch them even to attempt to go beyond such a level.  

For anybody who has ever been on stage in front of an audience, maybe you can imagine how maddening it might be to watch these two if you are one of those in the supporting cast, in the chorus line, so to speak, who can sing and dance so much better than the principals!

The music by Justin Hurwitz gives me a feeling of the almost and the not quite—it is the perfect accompaniment to a film where the point appears to be an embodiment of the meaning of life as being teased and disappointed. 

The big opening production number, placed on a mile-long stretch of log-jammed LA freeway, is an imaginative outburst of energy and acrobatic dancing that sets up our expectation to watch a great new musical, something startling, something maybe as big as Hamilton or The Book of Mormon, or certainly something as compelling (perhaps in its own, more contemporary style) as something by Rodgers and Hammerstein or Stephen Sondheim. But as a musical story we don’t get halfway there and then are left deflated.

The music is disappointing too.  Take “Mia and Sebastian’s Theme” for the perfect example of what I mean: it opens with a lovely tune in a sparse and sweet accompaniment, but not only is this material not developed well, halfway through the piece it veers way off into a gratuitous swirl of spiky jazz riffs which evoke not love fulfilled but love unraveled and lost, and the piece eventually crashes in an ugly smoking hole in the ground for no good reason that we can see.  This destination is not the place where the film set us up to hope it would fly to.  But of course this place is where the film does shore up at the end, namely, love lost and thwarted—and this seems to be the point of the film.

So the worst thing about the film is that it set me up to expect what I long for in art, namely a work that purveys beauty and celebrates the uplifted human spirit, and, in the end, the movie delivered me into the arms of that deflated human spirit that accepts disappointment and the halfway, if not outright crushing defeat, as the proper and normal outcome of our lives.  

I yearn for beauty and uplift.  La La Land falls down a rabbit hole and snuffs out any such hope.

There is a place for tragedy, even on the landscape of the uplifting.  Think of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, Ayn Rand’s We the Living, or to pick a contemporary example, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s stunning film, The Lives of Others.  We do not feel diminished for having lost a hero in these stories. We feel that life is sweeter and that our own venture into the world can be imbued with the most exalted stuff of life.  But I felt that La La Land takes us halfway up the mountain and drops us in a ditch along the way.      

My expectation of such a big inspiring musical was also aroused by how so many of the scenes were painted on a huge canvas in sweeping colors.  But in the end we get a small frame and a big smear of paint where a hero’s face should have glowed.

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2017.0130

Merriment and Mass Murder in Berlin,

and an afterthought I found poignant

by

Eric Paul Nolte

This last week before Christmas, yet another faithful follower of the Religion That Must Not Be Named has righteously taken to the streets to murder and maim more random innocents—dozens of them this time, little children and their mothers and fathers.  This time the atrocity was in Berlin.  

The horrible creature who did this murdered first the Polish driver of an 18 wheeler across town and then drove the truck six miles to find the music and merriment of a colorful Christmas fair around the grounds of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.

Why this place?  Do you know the significance of this church?

This church was bombed out during World War Two.  After the war, the Germans decided to leave the shattered and gaping shell of its steeple as an ugly wound, looming hundreds of feet above the bustle of a renewed and beautiful Berlin.  This shattered sarcophagus of the Kaiser Wilhelm church steeple was to stand forever as a cautionary symbol of the fever that gripped Germany and swept her into a bloody, evil whirlpool that sucked down the crown jewel of civilization, the celebrated land of poets and philosophers, and left a stricken land of grief and desolation in its wake.  Never again!—says the shattered shell of the Kaiser Wilhelm steeple.  Every German knows it!  The broken steeple is a monument to German guilt over the Nazi era and is the symbol of the German resolve always to embody the spirit of the liberalism that champions freedom, democracy, and tolerance.

I can’t help thinking that the choice of this Christmas fair beside the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial could not have been random.  In the same way that the World Trade Center was not only an iconic symbol of the free market, recognized as such everywhere in the world, the WTC was also something like a throbbing engine above one of the most important control rooms of global capitalism.  The hijackers of 9/11 did not choose this target by accident.

The terrorist who perpetrated this most recent atrocity in Berlin may not have had the wits personally to choose this target, but maybe he did.  We learned today that ISIS has claimed credit for this savage attack, and among them are those who would know the significance of this church.

Shortly after these murders at the stalls of this Christmas fair, Chancellor Angela Merkel affirmed that Germans must not abandon the deep values that guide their way in the world today.  Germans must not, in other words, lash out irrationally at the refugees.  

To the vocal critics of her open-door refugee policy, I was very surprised to hear Chancellor Merkel insist that most of the refugees from Syria and Iraq would have to go home, once the war ends, like 70 percent of the refugees from the former Yugoslavia did when peace came to their country.

By contrast, the Interior Minister of the German state of Saarland, Klaus Bouillon, told Saarland Radio that Germany is, “… in a state of war, although some people who always only see good, do not want to see this.”  

Among those who apparently do not want to see that a state of war exists in Germany today is Angela Merkel.  Chancellor Merkel defended the policy she and her party created that has allowed into Germany over a million unvetted  refugee immigrants from war-torn regions which are known to have large populations of people who hate us and all those who do not share their faith.

I do not believe that Germany, Europe, and America are doomed, but we do all need to come around to sniff the smelling salts and take a good hard look at the world.  

We also need to embrace a philosophy of rationality and a politics of individual rights that will uphold every peaceful person’s right to life, liberty, and property.  Without affirming and institutionalizing these ideas, we are indeed doomed.

*   *   *

Here is a little afterthought that I found poignant:

Once again I feel that this war has taken me close enough to its wake that I can smell the stench of its vile breath.  My duties have not sent me personally into combat, but once again I find myself wandering around at the border of a war zone.

The Christmas fair beside the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church is a couple minutes walk from the hotel where my airline puts us up.  It’s on Budapester Strasse, near the zoo and just south of the Tiergarten, the glorious park at the city center.  I’ve been in Berlin on 12 days of the last couple months.  Just last month I had dinner right across the street from this Christmas fair, which was already humming with beer, the laughter of children, and the ringing of bells and Christmas carols.  The crew bus takes us right past this church every time we drive to or from the Tegel airport.  I know the area well.

Moreover, I lived in Germany for four years, the first two while stationed there when I was in the American Army, and then for two years as a civilian flight instructor with American Army flying clubs in Mainz and Hanau.  I was also an adjunct professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University's European residency program that largely served American GIs.  I speak German well enough to make my cabin announcements auf Deutsch.  Germany feels like home to me.

Now, I can’t say that I have actually flitted into the gun sights of the jihadists, but I was at Newark airport on the morning of September 11, 2001, picking up my flight papers next to gate 80, where the airplane I was shortly scheduled to fly to Manchester, New Hampshire was parked.

I witnessed the whole damned spectacle from a ringside seat—my airplane in the foreground and the World Trade Center in the middle distance across the river, morphing into a miles-high, slaughterhouse cloud of cement dust and death, staining what had been the most crystal clear blue sky I had ever seen in the world.

All of the hijacked airplanes that day were taken from gates at Boston, Newark, and Washington National, adjacent to where I had often parked the airplanes I flew.

Among the thousands murdered by the hijackers were 33 airline crew members.  There were eight pilots, half of whom were my murdered colleagues at my airline today.  I fly the very same airplanes these poor souls flew, not just the same type of airplanes, Boeing 757 and 767, but the actual aircraft.  These are the very same flight controls those pilots often put their hands on.  While I didn’t know them personally, many of my colleagues did.  A pilot I have often flown with had a check ride in Denver with the captain of Flight 93 a few days before he was murdered. The captain’s last words to my first officer were, “Well, if you don’t have any more questions, I have a date with my 12 year old for a Nuggets game….”

I’m writing this from Limerick, Ireland, where my company puts us up when we fly to Shannon.  A moment ago my attention was arrested by the sound of big rotors beating the air outside my fifth floor window, here beside the River Shannon.  I’m afraid I’m still a bit of a kid, even now at 64-going-on 65.  Ever since I can remember, I have always looked up every time I heard an airplane and wished I could be up there, doing that.  I couldn’t see the helicopter from my room, so this time I walked down the hall to the public area of the fifth floor with a better view.  I saw a big white Sikorsky CH-53 with orange stripes, hovering over the river.  A hotel staff member joined me and we fell into conversation.  He told me, “Yeah, it’s the Coast Guard.  It’s a violent river here, with a five meter rise and fall of the tide that takes just a few hours to go in or out.  And this time of year… you know, Christmas… I’m afraid a lot of people take their own lives.  I’m sure the Coast Guard are lookin’ for a body in the river…”

Ah, yes, Christmas.  Should be joyful.  Let it never be forgotten that pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Optimism alone is not enough, but it is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for success.  In the end, how you think is everything.

Merry Christmas!

E   P   N

2016.1221b