Published June 29, 2016

Previously in these pages, I have written about racism, immigration, gun control, Cuba, pollution and the death penalty. Finally, I have decided it is time to tackle a truly controversial subject. Yes, I'm talking about Ghostbusters.

The original Ghostbusters movie was released in 1984 and was not only hugely successful but also a seminal movie in the “special effects comedies” trend of the eighties, the other two being Gremlins and Back to the Future. It spawned an inevitable sequel in 1989, as well as cartoons and comic books. For years, decades in fact, fans have been waiting, even begging for a new Ghostbusters movie. Well, that day is finally upon us. The trailer for the new movie was recently released on YouTube and it reached a surprising milestone. It is, officially, the most disliked trailer of all time. On YouTube, viewers can vote “like” or “dislike” and, as of this writing, the trailer had 255 thousand likes and 888 thousand dislikes. That's a lot of dislikes and it is puzzling for a follow-up to such a beloved movie with a strong comedic pedigree, including three Saturday Night Live alum.

In order to understand the problem, I did something I never recommend: I checked out the comments. Anyone who spends anytime on YouTube knows the comments section is a toxic waste dump of racism, sexism, misstatements, ignorance, imbecilic half-formed opinions and outright lies. So what reasons did most of the commentators give for hating the trailer so much? Well, there were a few generic complaints like “Ugh” and “Looks terrible” and the oh-so-classy “If you are excited for this movie....kill yourselves.” Some complained that it was a reboot, which means rehashing a story we already know. That's a fair criticism and one I am sympathetic to. However, what I saw in the trailer was something faithful to the original but still different enough to be enjoyed as something new. Some folks were unhappy that it was featuring a new cast. They wanted the original gang back. Sorry, that's just not feasible. The original came out over thirty years ago. One cast member, Harold Ramis, has passed away and the others are, frankly, thirty year older. Come on, lets be reasonable about this. Okay, Ernie Hudson looks like he might still be convincing running around New York City with an “unlicensed nuclear accelerator” strapped to his back but, as for the others...have to seen Bill Murray recently? He looks like John McCain with a hangover. (To be fair, John McCain looks like John McCain with a hangover.) Sorry. If you want a new movie, it has to be a new cast.

However, those were the exceptions rather than the rule. Most of the people who actually bothered to post a reason for their animosity made it very clear the problem was with the cast. Specifically, the gender of the cast. Typical comments include, “No thanks Sony, I won't be watching this feminazi reboot” and “Feminists ruin everything” and the ever popular “Political correctness run amok.”

Now it is important to remember that, in internet land, the volume of a movement does not always indicate it's true size. Some of the comments hint that there is an internet campaign to get the trailer to a million dislikes before the movie opens. A website called The Daily Dot has reported that some users have created bots to automatically dislike the trailer page, driving up the numbers. For those upset at the apparent misogyny of this movement, the very fact that they felt the need to artificially skew the numbers shows there aren't as many of them as they would have us believe.

Not only do I not think that the female cast of the new Ghostbusters is the result of political correctness, I think I can prove it. There is, in fact, a long standing tradition in the science fiction and fantasy genres of taking a male-driven property and recasting it with a female lead. This tradition dates back long before the concept, or even the term, political correctness, came to be.

Let's start with comic books. In 1959, DC comics created a companion piece for it's flagship superhero comic Superman, called Supergirl. In 1961 they followed suit with Batgirl. A whole slew of superheroines followed, including Spider-Woman and She-Hulk.

Then there is television. As a science fiction nerd boy in the seventies, you know one of my favorite shows was The Six Million Dollar Man. I was ecstatic when the spin-off series, The Bionic Woman, happened and I didn't care one whit that it had been “ladyfied.” One of the numerous Star Trek series featured a lady captain. Then the SyFy network decided to reboot Battlestar Galactica and pulled off the seeming impossible task of, in the words of Harlan Ellison, “making one of the worst television series ever made into one of the best television series ever made.” Nobody had an issue with some of the previously male characters becoming female (Starbuck and Boomer), especially those people who handed out Emmys, Hugos, Saturns and the various other awards the series won. While it hasn't happened yet on Doctor Who, there is little doubt a lady Doctor is on the way.

And these are just the official examples. There are a whole host of unofficial sex-changes in SF. After all, what is Lara Croft of Tomb Raider fame but Indiana Jones in a tank top?

So, you see? Lady Ghostbusters was almost inevitable. Obviously, that brings us to Harriet Tubman.

Okay, maybe it isn't that obvious, but go with me on this. Harriet Tubman is an icon of American history, so when folk were looking for a new face for the twenty dollar bill, she was the obvious choice. I can't imagine a less controversial choice, and yet, there is controversy in abundance. The notion that an anti-slavery activist should replace a slave owner on our modern currency has engendered howls of outrage. Only no one can seem to give a cogent argument against the change that doesn't boil down to “fight political correctness.” Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump weighed in on the subject, naturally, “Political correctness run amok.” Sound familiar?

Now there is a tendency, when something is slapped with the label “politically correct” for an automatic backlash. This is not entirely a bad this. Political correctness can hinder discourse and hamstring art. Unfortunately, we have now reach a state where any change of the status quo has reactionaries pointing their fingers and screeching “political correctness” like Donald Sutherland at the end of the “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” remake. A movie, by the way, that shows remakes aren't always a bad thing.

Published July 6, 2016

Well, that didn't last long. When I first started with the paper, I wrote the occasional editorial, just when I felt like it. I was excited at first when I was offered my own weekly column. But now, after only a handful of columns, I've already begun to dread the deadline. “What? Another one? Didn't I just write one of these things a week ago?”

Anyway, I was looking forward to the Independence Day weekend, so I banged out yet another grumpfest about politics early on. Now that the weekend is over, I decided to toss it aside.

It is too easy to become, as Hunter S. Thompson put it, a “political junky.” I know people who seem incapable of turning away from the twenty-four hour news cycle. Those people become grouchy and paranoid. They bite their nails and tremble uncontrollably with rage. They become wan and pasty from lack of sun and ill-mannered from lack of normal human interaction. It is fine to be informed about the state of the world but news and politics, just like food, alcohol and The Real Housewives of New Jersey, are best taken in moderation. Most importantly, you need to turn off the T.V., close the newspaper, shut down the computer, and go outside once in a while. Spend some time with friends, family, or just anyone who doesn't want to talk about Donald Trump or Hilary Clinton.

A nice, long 4^th of July weekend is the perfect time for such a “politics vacation.” My mother made a big pot of chili. With beans. Some people think chili with beans isn't really chili. Don't get started with all that guff. I have no patience for it. It doesn't stop being chili just because you add beans. If I add marshmallows to the chili, it doesn't stop being chili, it just becomes chili with marshmallows. Therefore, chili with beans is still chili. Case closed.

As you can tell, that's a sore spot with me. Anyway, we had chili on Sunday and chili dogs on Monday.

On Sunday, I went to the flea market with my niece and her husband. I had never been before. It was held at the city park and I was genuinely surprised at the size of the whole operation. At one point, we got separated and my niece called me on my cell phone to ask me where I was. I said I didn't know. I was standing next to a place that sold snow cones but that wasn't terribly helpful. She asked me if I was on the east side of the park and I said I didn't know. It was quite a cloudy day and I couldn't see the sun, so the whole “rises in the east and sets in the west” thing didn't help me much. At one point, a couple of white-haired ladies walked past me. One of them was looking for something, I don't know what, but couldn't find it. I heard her walking companion declare, “Oh, that's way over on the east side.”

I still didn't know where I was but I called my niece back and told her, “I'm pretty sure I'm not on the east side.”

Items for sale ran the gamut from unmitigated junk to fine art. A surprising number of old doors were available for sale. That struck me as odd at first but I thought about it and decided, when you need a door, you need a door.

Other stuff puzzled me a bit. There was a bucket full of glass bottles that I thought it was recycling until I realize they were also for sale. There were old watering cans painted to look like minions. There were wooden poles painted to look like Uncle Sam. There were croquet sets and vintage tools and hand-made furniture and saddles and even a Radio Flyer wagon. I couldn't possibly list all the categories of stuff.

Some stuff I wondered how they ended up for sale in the first place. Signs were everywhere. Signs for old restaurants and businesses, signs with pithy sayings, signs offering beer for sale and lots and lots of streets signs (which I have no reason to believe were stolen...cough, cough).

I spent five minutes looking for a price tag on a fire hydrant before I realized it was actually a fire hydrant.

Despite the shear quantity of goods for sale, I actually bought very little. Most of my money was spent on food. All told, we were out there about five hours and you can work up quite an appetite trying to convince yourself you don't need a box full of cigar boxes or an ironing board painted with the words, “God Bless America.” The food you get at flea markets and county fairs and other such “home-town” events is like no other and where else are you going to get it? Don't bother with those soggy, frozen corn dogs from the freezer section in your grocery store. This is the real deal. And don't try walking into a McDonald's and ordering a funnel cake (McFunnel?), cuz' it ain't happening. Periodically, huge clouds of smoke wafted across the park, carrying the scent of barbecued meat.

The next night, I went with the family to watch the fireworks at the ball park. I was wearing my red, white and blue tie-dye t-shirt, because I believe you can be both a hippy and patriotic. The night went pretty much as expected. There were lots of “oohs” and “aahs” and I got bit by by mosquitoes the size of small eagles. Fairbury actually runs a pretty impressive fireworks display for a small town. At one point, the concussion from one blast was enough to set off someone's car alarm. The music selection was the standard mix of patriotic songs with rock favorites like Thunderstruck and Danger Zone, which got giggles from the Archer fans. If you don't watch the T.V. show, Archer, it's not worth trying to explain why they think this is funny.

Frankly, the most impressive thing I saw that night was Tucker. Tucker is a Lhasa Apso/Poodle Mix (a Lhoodle?) Bringing a dog to watch repeated explosions in the sky seems like a spectacularly studied idea, and yet, I've never seen an animal seem so calm so close to fireworks. Good for you, Tucker.

The next morning, as I trudge to work, remnants of the previous night's festivities littered the sidewalk: singed cardboard shrapnel and smears of color. Clearly, good time was had by all.



Published August 3, 2016

Did you every stumble across the death notice of someone, perhaps a celebrity you hadn’t seen in a long time or an acquaintance who had passed out of your social circle many moons ago, and say to yourself, “I thought that guy died along time ago?” That’s how I felt when I heard that the last ever video cassette recorder (VCR) rolled off the assembly line in July.

We all knew this day was coming. Well, except for those of us who thought that day had already come and gone. With the advent of DVDs and Blu-rays and downloads and digital video recorders, the VCR no longer serves a real purpose, except as clocks that no one can figure out how to set. The quality of alternatives are vastly superior. We no longer have to worry about those white “tracking” lines or fading color or that weird rainbow effect at the very beginning of a recording (What the heck was that, anyway?). It’s time to let it go.

Still, I can’t help but feel a bit sad. I acknowledge it is purely nostalgia. My family got our first VCR in the early 80s, when they were still fairly new. It was Christmas Day. Actually, it was Christmas night. My parents debated long and hard about getting one. “It’s so much money. What if it doesn’t work like they say? What if the kids get bored with it?” In the end, they decided against it. “Maybe next year.”

Only, when Christmas Day came around, they regretted the decision. “Maybe we should have gotten one after all.” There was an electronics store open. I don’t know why it was open on Christmas or how my parents knew it was open. I only know that, after Christmas dinner, my folks loaded us kids into the car and we went and bought our very first VCR. We then stopped at a video store to rent some videos for the very first time. That was a great Christmas. I don’t remember for sure but I think I rented Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I was a bit of a nerd in those days.

I used to edit the commercials out when I recorded programs off television, so the pause button was always the first button on the remote to get worn out. However, my primary interest was in renting videos that would never be shown on television. My video addiction got much worse when I moved to San Francisco.

In Omaha, we had Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, and you could always rent from the grocery store. I think there were a few independent rental places back then as well but even those rarely had more than the usual blockbusters and classics. Hey, The Wolf Man is a great flick, but I can only watch it so many times. Once in the city by the bay, I discovered Le Video. I lived on the north side of Golden Gate Park. Le Video was on the south side. So, every weekend, I would make the trek across the park and rent some obscurity I had never seen before. Foreign films ran the gamut from Kurosawa to Italian slasher flicks to spaghetti westerns. There was an entire section dedicated to Edgar Wallace movies. In the early part of last century, Wallace was the biggest seller of crime thrillers, eventually writing over 170 novels in his lifetime. He was the James Patterson of his day. The stories all tended to be rather similar (again like Patterson), usually about some secret criminal cult led by a mysterious character in a weird mask. British and, especially, German studios cranked out a whole slew of adaptations in the 60s, with titles like: The Fellowship of the Frog, The Crimson Circle, The Avenger and The Dark Eyes of London. It was fabulous. Where else would I get to see The Creature with the Blue Hand?

Then there were bootlegs. A thriving mail-order bootleg video business existed once, now largely defunct thanks to internet downloading. I admit it. I bought a few less-than-legal bootlegs in my day. That’s how I got to see Roger Corman’s infamous, unreleased Fantastic Four movie. I was (and still am) a major Doctor Who fanboy. I’d seen every existing Doctor Who story except one: The Ultimate Adventure. It was produced in England as a stage play. Without the funds to travel to the UK, chances were I would never get the chance to see it. That is, until some kid snuck a video camera into a performance and recorded the whole thing over someone’s shoulder. The sound was distant and the picture quality abysmal but I was happy to pay $20 for that cassette, which arrived in the mail with no label in a plain brown wrapper like a dirty magazine.

Now I know why I feel bad about the last VCR. It was the hunt. That thrill I got when I found some show I’d only heard about and thought I’d never see. Look, I’m not a Luddite. I have a Blu-ray player and a Netflix account. I like streaming high quality video on my flat screen TV. Maybe I’m just an old guy and I know its not an original notion, but I think I appreciated movies more when I had to work harder to find them.



Published March 30, 2016

My grandparents used to take regular trips to Cuba. In the forties and fifties, most Americans knew Cuba only as a a tourist destination, a place of casinos and resorts and beaches. It was not without reason that Cuba was called the “Las Vegas of the Caribbean.” Then the revolution came. Cuba became a Communist country. This could not stand. Something had to be done, but what? Economic sanctions seemed the only viable option to military action.

It is difficult to explain to younger generations the panic that ensued at the notion of a Communist regime less than a hundred miles from the U.S. Mainland. To anyone under the age of thirty, the paranoia of “the commies” must seem quaint. I grew up during the Cold War, meaning I grew up being taught that the entire human race could face nuclear annihilation. Indeed, the U.S. never came closer to a genuine nuclear exchange than during the infamous Cuban Missile Crisis. Even in our modern world, which sees terrorists around every corner, it is impossible to explain what that is like.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. The Cold War was over, but the decades old embargo remains. Why? Well, some say it is response to the human rights abuses inflicted on the Cuban people by Fidel Castro and his younger brother and successor, Raul. There can be no doubt that the treatment of dissidents by the Castro family are nothing short of monstrous but pale in comparison to some of our other economic partners, such as China and Saudi Arabia. So why the disparity? There's no mystery, really. Those countries are enormous economies and our own economic well-being is hopelessly entangled with theirs. Cuba, on the other hand, is a tiny island. We can “take the high road,” if you want to call it that, and it doesn't cost us much at all, except perhaps embarrassment when someone points out the hypocrisy.

Complaints against the Cuban government are legitimate and I don't want to make light of them but more than half a century of economic sanctions have had little impact on the Cuban government's human rights abuses. Mostly, the embargo has hurt the Cuban people and it is important to remember that the people are not the government.

Perhaps it is time to try a different tack. In his ongoing effort at “normalizing relations”, Barack Obama recently made a trip to Cuba. He would be the first serving President to visit the island nation since Calvin Coolidge in 1928. It was undeniably a historic moment.

Alas, the rest of the world does not stop even for Presidents making history. While Mr. Obama was attempting to heal one of the last remaining open wounds of the cold war, an altogether hotter form of warfare of happening in Europe. In an agonizingly familiar story, a group of angry, young men set off bombs and killed 30 innocents.

The narrative (as news readers like to call it) changed.

In between coverage of the bombing, it's aftermath and the search for suspects still alive, media coverage of the President's Cuban trip has been dominated by images of him attending a ball game and then dancing the tango in Argentina, apparently intending to show... what, exactly? He was in contact with his advisers. He knew what was going on. This is the 21^st century, an era of instantaneous electronic communication. There is not a single thing Obama could do from the White House that he couldn't do from Cuba. Nevertheless, angry politicos berated the president for not dropping everything and immediately returning to the States. Now one could claim Obama didn't show enough gravitas while events were unfolding and that is a legitimate criticism. However, one could equally argue, as Obama did, that abandoning this important and historic diplomatic mission, putting life on hold every time a handful of psychos with inexplicable grievances decides to act out, is exactly what terrorists want. People who do the kind of things that happened in Belgium last week are furious that the entire world does not revolve around them. The worst thing we can do is give them what they want.

So, what effect has the embargo has and is ending it a good idea? It's easy to speculate from afar but I prefer to hear from those on the front lines. It has never been difficult to circumvent the travel bans. Through a friend, I made contact with someone who has visited Cuba. Here is what I learned. When you arrive in Havana, you can feel like you've stepped back in time. Art Deco buildings, Gothic facades and vintage cars create a picturesque image for the tourist but, remember, when you see a 1950s Chevy, chances are that motorist would love to own a newer model if one could be had. The U.S. embargo is, unsurprisingly, a hot topic of conversation but it you quickly realize no one is blaming the Castros for the economic hardships. Blame falls squarely on the U.S.'s shoulders. The best educated, like doctors, can often be found working in bars where they can earn more in tips from tourists than working in a hospital. Despite the poverty, Cubans are very well educated. The literacy rate in Cuba is near 100%. For perspective, the literacy rate in the United States is just 86%, according to the Census Bureau. Tourism jobs are the most sought after. The countryside is extremely fertile but housing is very basic. Most farms employ manual labor only, using no advanced farming techniques. In more rural areas the use of horses and carts are common and roads are in terrible condition.

That's not to say the Castros are immune to criticism, despite the country's reputation for dealing harshly with dissidents. Outside the capitol, people are more liberal in denouncing Fidel and Raul. Many still agree with communist ideology but are quick to point out badly needed checks and balances are missing. Cuban possesses a Strong national pride, found not in their politics but in their culture.

My friend also put me in touch with a Cuban, who has a surprising concern about lifting the embargo that never occurred to me. Over the decade, many Cubans have made there way to the U.S. He was worried that if Cubans were allowed to enter the U.S. more easily that there would be a sizable exodus from Cuba for those wishing to reunite with long lost family members. He also pointed out that one of the biggest changes has already taken place, there is renewed hope.

So it seems the embargo has been entirely counter-productive, but will lifting it make things better? Only time will tell, but consider this. The United States imposed sanctions against Iran in 1979 after the Iranian hostage crisis. Far from cowing Iran, the country became more belligerent as the decades wore on. Last year, President Obama signed a treaty ending those sanctions. That treaty was roundly pilloried by most conservatives, barring a few exceptions, most notably General Colin Powell. Months later, Iran held an election for 30 parliamentary seats. Reformists one every single seat.

Perhaps there is reason for optimism after all.