Back in the USA…

Posted on 21 March 2010

I’m back in the states, my mind somewhere over the Atlantic, since I woke up too early to this Sunday (still very dark outside, USA) morning, the day of the vote on Health Care. There is news about this upcoming vote in Europe too, but not like here, not like coming off the plane and feeling the Super Bowl is about to happen – there is nothing really bigger here than the Super Bowl except maybe (almost) a Presidential Election….

And suddenly the whole thing feels like a circus to me. I giant act set up by whomever. Who are the real guys at the top, anyway? A wild circus – set up by them. There is no Public Option. We all know it helps the insurance companies wonderfully, no matter what Obama says. We know millions, billions – strike that: trillions – are going to be made by the wrong people – nasty, conniving, greedy people all up and down the economic ladder. But most effective thievery always happens at the top, so…

Senators and Congressman will crow and strut. In a few hours we’ll know the result. (I suspect it’s all going to pass – it would be too big of a downer – and one thing I know is that downer stories don’t sell well here in the USA (they don’t sell well, anywhere, really) – I work in Hollywood, after all.

So I’m betting that the “good guys” will win, but by – more or less – a whisker. And it will be called history and elections will be won and lost over it and the circus will go on. And – I guess – when I really face facts….

I’m glad for this circus and I’m glad for the passing of this “historic” bill.

It sucks. It’s corrupt. I’m horrified the way we human beings (at this point in our development) function, but it’s a step forward. A small, nasty step – but it’s better than a step backwards. A nasty step forwards is always better than a graceful step backwards So I’m going to celebrate what feels like a victory for Obama and for the American people.

And that’s another thing. I’m really not happy with Obama (that’s been clear on these “pages” for awhile now.) What has happened on Wall Street and in the Banking Industry will one day be looked back on as one of the great swindles of what’s left of our Republic.

Nonetheless we Americans voted ourselves in a black president. Okay, he’s half white. But he’s black as far as the right-wingers are concerned and the right-wingers are right on this one point. And after our horrific history of slavery and brutality, this too is a step forward. Even though he’s amped up the war and kept in place the unconstitutional terrorist laws. He’s almost more Bush than Bush in the areas that really count for the so-called Military Industrial Complex (a phrase coined by that conservative of all conservative Republicans -I might note – Eisenhower).

And while we’re on the subject of war – my last gripe – the Academy Awards. I felt Hurt Locker was an utterly pro war movie I was so upset upon leaving the theater. Every critic loved it. Most of the urbane movie goers loved i . And yet what did it really say that was negative about war? Wasn’t it just a wild, brilliantly made war ride? A roller coaster movie?

And in the end didn’t our “hero’s” family (when he got back home) pale in comparison with the high drama – so back he went to bravely (almost gleefully) fighting again?

I could go on and on about that movie, frankly. I salute Martha P. Nochimson, who wrote so clearly about the movie in Salon.com (Katherine Bigalow: Feminist or Tough Guy in Drag) and was roundly, roundly attacked. I believe this movie will send many young, impressionable boys over to Afghanistan now for the rush of war, for the “drug” of war.

And yet – horrible as this may sound – it matters that finally a woman director won the Oscar. It’s a joke that it took this long. It’s a joke that it took this movie. Half of what goes on with the human race seems like a cruel joke and everything seems to take so, so damn long and along the way it’s done so badly, so often inhumanly, but maybe that’s the only way evolution works for us human, because when all is said and done it looks to me like a little evolution has been happening here.