The Bridge to a True Detective

The rise of television as an equal peer to film has been the big story of the past several years in the entertainment industry.  Shows like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and Mad Men have taken television to a whole new level.  The detective drama subgenre has also benefited from this trend.  In fact, it has produced the best television show of 2014.

True Detective stars Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as detectives with the Louisiana State Police investigating a serial killer who turns out to be connected with a group of men involved in child sex and ritual child murder.  Needless to say, this is not a subject for the easily disturbed.  I was so riveted during each episode that I found myself literally on the edge of my seat while watching the show.  The performances of the main actors and the supporting cast were so fantastic that I will never again look at those actors in the same way.  The wonderful Glenn Fleshler plays the bayou degenerate so well that I can't believe he won't be hitting it big very soon.  Then there's the haunting theme song:

I can only describe True Detective as hypnotic television...it draws you in and won't let go. 

Down the channel dial, on FX, you can find The Bridge, a show I just recently discovered.  Diane Kruger and Demian Bechir star, respectively, as El Paso and Chihuahua detectives brought together by a dead body found on the bridge between the two communities.  Kruger's character, Sonya Cross, is a detective with Asperger Syndrome, and is considered by her colleagues to be a bit weird due to her difficulty negotiating the emotional complexities of human interaction.  The outstanding (and Oscar-nominated) Bechir plays Mexican detective Marco Ruiz, an honest (except when it comes to his romantic relationships) policeman who has to negotiate the complex politics of a city run by drug cartels.

The political and social commentary in the show is often fascinating; a city split by a national border, with remarkably different experiences on each side.  However, what drives this show are the performances.  In particular, Tom Wright as Steven Linder, the oddball loner who travels to Juarez for reasons that are at first unclear, and Ted Levine (whom you might recognize), as Lt. Hank Wade, Cross' boss and the only human being she is close to.  

[Wright and Levine pictured below]

The first season is exclusively on Hulu Plus, which I didn't have.  However, they are currently offering a free 7-day trial, which I used to binge watch the entire first season (sorry, not sorry).  Season 2 premieres this Wednesday (July 9th) on FX.

Flags No Longer (and soon-to-be) Waved

On this occasion of the anniversary of American independence from what is my personal favorite of all colonial powers, it might be a good time for the remembrance of some nations that haven't happened yet, are no more, or probably should never have been.



Kurdistan has never been...but probably will be soon.  The Kurds are the largest nation in the world without a nation-state.  Split between Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, the Kurdish people have been gassed, imprisoned, tortured and generally crapped on for a very long time.  But their time is about to come.



In 1965 Rhodesia declared independence from the British.  The circumstances of their independence would turn out to be highly controversial.  The 223,000 white Rhodesians, wary of the chaos that had accompanied majority rule in other former colonies all around them, kept power for themselves.  Of course, this left the almost 3 million black Rhodesians without any political power.  A long guerrilla war eventually led to an political settlement giving blacks the right to vote.  Thus ended Rhodesia...and Zimbabwe was born.  It has been led by the disgusting Robert Mugabe ever since.  And now, it is an enormous pit of despair.  The white farmers have been systematically dispossessed of their land, murdered, or forced out.  The land has been given to blacks loyal to Mugabe, most of whom having no farming experience.  Thus, it has gone from the breadbasket of Africa to millions of its citizens facing starvation.



For a unique look at the Rhodesian/Zimbabwean experience I recommend several books:  Journalist Peter Godwin's Zimbabwe/Rhodesia books, Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa and When A Crocodile Eats the Sun; and Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight and Scribbling the Cat.



Poor Czechoslovakia...even the coolest president in the world, Vaclav Havel, couldn't keep it together.  "Chikety-Czech! Slovakia was just slowing us down!"  At least, that's what my t-shirt says.  The Czechs had always been a little richer and a little less religious...and they always had Prague.  But mostly the split was about national identity going back a very long ways.  Despite sharing a language they went their separate ways in 1993.



A: "One ticket to Zaire, please."
B: "Sorry, sir, Zaire no longer exists."
A: "Well, is Kinshasa still the capital?"
B: "Not of Zaire."
A: "Wait a sec, I forgot that it's now called The Congo!  Ok, one ticket to The Congo please."
B: "Republic or Democratic Republic?"
A: "I don't know what kind of government they have!"
B: "Sir, there are two different Congos."
A: "Which one was Zaire?"
B: "The one that Kinshasa is in...it's called the Democratic Republic of the Congo."
A: "Oh.  What's difference?"
B: "The Republic was a colony of France and its capital is Brazzaville.  The Democratic Republic was called the Belgian Congo, and at one time was a wholly owned subsidiary of King Leopold II.  It's where the Rumble in the Jungle took place."
A: "Never mind, just sell me a ticket to Rhodesia.
B: [sigh]

Red's Dead, Baby...Red's Dead

It has become fashionable of late for people to pine for the days of the Cold War.  I am not the first to notice this phenomenon.  The anarchy of the post-Cold War world, with its lack of uniforms and greater difficulty in determining the motives of non-state actors, is naturally going to produce a longing for times when it was easier (unless you were one of the New Left critics like Sen. Chris Dodd or John Kerry) to determine who the bad guys were.  The historical distance from the collapse of communism in Europe (almost 25 years now) has enabled people to look upon those days with a certain kind of whimsy.



I am not one to pooh-pooh humor of any sort.  As long as it's a good joke, pretty much any subject is fair game.  However, lest we forget, communism killed about 100 million people in the 20th century.  But because it killed them in pursuit of the oh-so-noble goal of equality for all mankind, we are supposed to temper our outrage in ways that no one would ever do in regard to the other great killer of the 20th century, Nazism.

I just finished reading Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe by Anne Applebaum, who previously won the Pulitzer Prize for Gulag, her history of the enormous Soviet system of concentration camps.  Check out Gulag's 1-star review entitled "Neo Con Propaganda" for evidence that Soviet communism still has its defenders.  I highly recommend Iron Curtain for a view of the sickening ways the people of East Germany, Poland, and Hungary were oppressed immediately after they had just been traumatized by World War II.  For a wider, international view of the dark record of communism, read The Black Book of Communism, a joint project of French, Polish, and Czech historians.

One of the most fascinating revelations of both these texts is the consistency of the communist techniques, regardless of what part of the world they called home.  In order to achieve power, they would first form alliances, or "Popular Fronts", with Left and Center-Left parties to gain power and eliminate the threat from the Right.  Next, purge the government of the non-communist Left through violence and intimidation.  Once in power, they would systemically imprison and/or execute various classes of people, at various times, usually starting with the aristocracy and other elites and work their way through society.  A final step is the legacy of Stalin:  the purging of the Communist Party itself.  Often, it was a never-ending purge.

Communism was a real ideology that REALLY wanted to conquer the world and actively tried to do so.  For much of the Cold War, it seemed like the better bet to win in the contest with the western democracies.  The former communists who fought against it, and they were legion, often felt they had left the winning side.  And then it all collapsed in 1989.  We should all be grateful for that.

Three novels to help you better understand life under communism:

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitszyn
Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler
The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz

The Supreme Court, Birth Control, and Life Control

Actually, I don't care about birth control.  Feel free to use an IUD while reading this...or not.

Today, the Supreme Court gave us the absurd spectacle of our enormous, complex, and inefficient federal government deciding the precise composition of your health plan.  Did you think you would get a choice in deciding the composition of your health plan?  Silly you.  No, actually, you are not able to make that choice.  The federal government will decide which procedures your health insurance plan must or must not include.  It's best that they make that choice for you.  You see, it's much more efficient for the federal government to tell the insurance company what to do...who then tells your doctor what to do.  So elegant and simple!

Today's ruling is a lovely reminder that our government is getting all up in your health care.  The multiple health insurance bureaucracies that we have enjoyed for so many years are now to be coupled with a government bureaucracy.  Surely this will lead to cost-savings...SURELY!  There's nothing better than the melding of one bad system onto another bad system.  Two negatives equals a positive...am I right, math teachers?!?

Imagine, instead, a system where you directly paid a doctor for routine medical care, WITHOUT the involvement of an insurance company.  Then, if something went really badly, you would use your health insurance to pay for that (this is the definition of insurance, before it came to mean "paying for everything").  We have built a system that has an enormous number of people involved in your health care.  Far too many people.  And each of those people take a cut...and we wonder why health care is so expensive.

And guess what, if the insurance industry and government were removed from the equation, your birth control would be a lot cheaper.

Dream Job

Helping people figure out what book comes next...

Ballad of the Shirtless Croatian Warrior

"The AP reports brawls between Croatian and Mexican soccer fans at the World Cup yesterday..."
"Several sources report ethnic cleansing of Mexican section."



Ballad of the Shirtless Croatian Warrior
by Ivano Petrovic
[in broken English with Croatian accent] in 2 stanzas

My name Ivano.
Came to Brazil to watch Croatian football team.
On way to game, got lost in favela...
Bad news for favela. Good news for funeral business.
Not easy to choke man to death in favela AND smoke cigarette.
But doable.

Football game no good.
Mexicans chant "puto" at us Croatian fans.
Don't know if this is insult...
...but beat three men to death with program just in case.
Not easy to beat man to death with program AND smoke cigarette.
But doable.
Worst day at World Cup like best day in Balkan War.

The 9 Best-Selling Books You REALLY Misunderstood

Capital by Thomas Piketty - This anti-grammar screed by Los Angeles 4th grader Thomas "tommy" Piketty rails against his teacher's attempts to get him to capitalize letters even though "lower-case is a lot cooler."

Killing Jesus by Bill O'Reilly - This shocking book-length confession details O'Reilly's participation in the death of his long-time gardener.




Insurgent by Veronica Roth - A memoir by former female Jihadi Veronica al-Hamza that details her journey from Iraqi terrorist to wife of celebrity novelist Philip Roth.



Looking for Alaska by John Green - This acclaimed memoir details Green's lifelong struggle with the little understood, and extraordinarily rare, Geographic Illiteracy Syndrome. Readers will get a birds-eye view of his doctors' race to find a cure.



Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War by Robert Gates - This catty tell-all by Bill Gates' older brother, and personal secretary, reveals the secrets behind the battles between corporate office-staff at Microsoft in the heady dot.com boom times of the late 1990s



The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion - A look back at the 2009 effort by President Obama to create a better health care system.



Hard Choices by Hillary Clinton - A shocking piece of erotica by the former First Lady...it details one woman's struggle to decide between two virile lovers.



Orange Is The New Black by Piper Kerman - This book details the rise of the Wichita Wings in the 1980s.

And finally...

The Fault in Our Lars by James Hetfield - This tell-all memoir details the trials and tribulations of Metallica's lead singer...and his long-standing feud with drummer Lars Ulrich.