Archive for November, 2007

Equal Time

Published
by
Bennett
on November 20, 2007
in Social/Political
. 1 Comment

I kinda hate myself for weighing in on the election process so long before the actual election but something has been annoying me. If you watch the pundits you know that you hear the same names over and over- Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Romney, Giuliani. There are, however, many more people running for president. My problem is with the way the candidates are being covered and the amount of attention each candidate receives in the debates. It is as if the media has decided who should be running for president and chooses to ignore the others. While I concede it is highly unlikely that Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich will earn their party nomination, they, and all the other declared candidates, should be given the chance, especially when you consider some of the tier-two and tier-three candidates are worth listening to. David Brooks made a similar point on the NewsHour on November 16th.

DAVID BROOKS: I have total sympathy with that. We pay attention to this every day; this is what we do for a living. So we’re looking for the little minutia there. But I think for most people who look at it in a normal sense, tune in and out occasionally, I think a couple of things would leap out at you.

One, I always think almost — and especially last night — that Biden, Dodd and Richardson won the debate. I just think, if you didn’t know anything about these people, you saw those three, you’d say they’re pretty qualified to be president.

JIM LEHRER: Not on body language and one-liners, but on its face, huh?

DAVID BROOKS: I thought Richardson had an excellent answer on the illegal immigration issue. He’d actually done it. He knew the safety concerns. Biden had an excellent answer on Musharraf. He’d actually talked to Musharraf. He knows the issue better than any of them, believe me.

And so if you’re president, looking for somebody who actually knows what they’re doing, I think you would gravitate towards those guys.

A Great Writer

Published
by
Bennett
on November 13, 2007
in That's Entertainment
. 1 Comment

What the world needs now is yet another tribute to Norman Mailer. So here goes. Mailer has long been one of my favorite writers (Salman Rushdie and Charles Bukowski rounding out the trinity). Since his death on November 10, 2007, many of the tributes and obituaries have discussed his activism, his personal life, and his massive ego. While interesting, I don’t really care that much about that stuff. I loved his books.

I want to mention one particular element of his writing that goes largely unmentioned; the physical. More than anyone I have ever read, Mailer can make poetry out of men engaging in incredibly difficult, often painful physical activity. In The Naked and the Dead, his first novel, Mailer describes a squad of men pushing a cannon up a hill in the mud and rain. It goes on for pages and every word is perfect. In the same book he describes how two men must carry a wounded man down a hill in a vain attempt to get him medical help. It is picture perfect. In The FightI waited with patience until he finally gets to the Rumble in the Jungle that gives the book its name. I was not disappointed.

Yes, Mailer wrote about sex, politics, God and culture and he did it better than just about anybody, but it was those moments of physical endurance, of pain and anguish, (both physical and mental) and the bonds that those physical acts created among the men that performed them that made Mailer so damn good.