June 19, 2012

1. I’m sticking with my Miami pick over Oklahoma City in 6 games. Miami leads 2-1.

2. Wow! I cannot believe Paul McCartney turned 70 yesterday.

3. Here’s an interesting online ad from last month from The Orlando Women's Center:

"LIMITED TIME SPECIAL! PRINT THIS PAGE AND BRING IT IN FOR $50 SAVINGS. ONLY ON SUNDAYS! VALID FOR ABORTIONS PERFORMED BY 5/31/12. You must present this page to the receptionist at the time of the abortion. ON SUNDAYS ONLY.

$50 credit towards cost of abortion. No cash value."

            What a great idea for a Sunday. I’ve got a suggestion for another ad campaign:

            Next Lord’s Day… Exterminate a Life!

4. The other night my kids received the movie HUGO from Netflix. I was able to watch it with them and was so pleased with the product. It was nominated for various Academy Awards, including best picture, for good reason.

            It contained joy and sadness, conflict and resolution, and the joy of childhood coupled with nostalgia. Martin Scorsese was the producer (along with Johnny Depp) as well as the director.

            Part of his motivation in this movie (based on the children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick) he also wanted to pay tribute to the movies of the great French movie maker, Georges Melies, who began making movies at the turn of the 20^th century.

            This struck a chord with me. When I was almost 9, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. CBS, as part of its coverage, showed a segment from Melies’ movie A TRIP TO THE MOON. I will never forget the humor of seeing the rocket enter into the eyeball of the man in the moon.

            Later, I discovered that Melies lost a lot of money when workers for Thomas Edison basically stole the film’s distribution in the States. (This was highlighted in a segment of FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON–a miniseries that I also treasure.)

            In some ways, HUGO reminded me of one of my five favorite movies of all time–CINEMA PARADISO. Both were about fatherless boys who cultivate a rapport with grandfatherly old men. In the backdrop of these relationships were the movies.

            By the way, although this HUGO is not a biography of Melies, there are some true elements in the movie that paralleled his life.

            When I was a teenager, THE BAD NEWS BEARS was considered family entertainment. I would’ve been embarrassed for the language of that movie to be heard on a ship carrying a bunch of sailors.

            It is so nice today to have high quality movies available that all of the family can see.           

            I have said it before and I will say again–in many ways, we’re living in a golden age of movies for children.

5. Robert Caro has done it again. I have just completed his fourth volume in his biography of Lyndon Johnson. This tome is called THE PASSAGE TWO POWER. I believe this is his best work to date.

            It covers a brief period of time–the end of Johnson’s Senate years through the first few months of his presidency. Caro is intentional about this. He is seeking to illustrate Johnson’s sheer misery during his vice presidential years, and his despair over the fact that–in his own mind–his political career was over. He also seeks to emphasize the enormous pressure Johnson was under as the transition took place after the assassination of Pres. Kennedy to his new administration.

            I have read numerous books on Lyndon Johnson. This is by far the best treatment of this phase of Johnson’s life. Never before have I seen so clearly spelled out the challenges that Johnson faced as he tried to navigate the stormy waters during the months following the Kennedy assassination.

            Caro does an amazing job disproving the idea that Johnson’s success of passing legislation–such as the tax reduction bill and the civil rights bill–was simply the result of a nation emotionally seeking to honor its fallen president. Rather, Johnson called upon a lifetime of congressional relationships and cultivated political skills to achieve what seemed impossible. Indeed, I personally agree that he showed more political skill working with Congress that any other president in US history–including Franklin Roosevelt.

            This volume is the most positive treatment of Johnson Caro has offered to date, and he makes it clear that it will be the last. In the next volume–Caro says it will be his last–the author will tackle Johnson’s unraveling policy concerning the Vietnam War. However, in this book, Caro makes a stronger case that Johnson was the indispensable man when it came to passing civil rights legislation. How ironic–the president with the worst (in my opinion) social skills of any other in US history, is arguably the greatest president when it comes to social justice.

            Let me emphasize that Caro continues to be one of the more effective biographers when it comes to capturing Johnson’s complex personality. He relates concrete accounts, which, I had not seen before, concerning Johnson blackmailing a couple of Texas newspaper publishers in order to assure that he received favorable coverage.

            Another fascinating tidbit–the week of Pres. Kennedy’s assassination Congress had begun investigating Johnson’s top aide–Bobby Baker–for financial impropriety. Had that investigation occurred sooner, Johnson’s political career could have ended before he ever became president. As it was, the coverage of Kennedy’s assassination blunted the investigation’s impact as it related to Johnson.

            It took 10 years for volume 4 to appear after the publication of Master of the Senate. I hope that it will not be 2022 before Caro’s next Johnson volume is presented to the public.

            Robert Caro has now entered into the pantheon of the great biographers: James Boswell (Samuel Johnson), Douglas Southall Freeman (Robert E. Lee and George Washington), and Edmund Morris (Theodore Roosevelt).

*Thanks to Peter King for the inspiration for this blog's title.