It Goes

 

From George Takei, today. I could not write about this better. 

"On this day 82 years ago, on February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the height of insanity of racism after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, signed Executive Order 9066.

It ordered all Japanese Americans on the West Coast to be summarily rounded up and imprisoned within 10 barbed wire prison camps, with no charges, no trial, no due process.

One day, a few months later, we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway, carrying rifles with shiny bayonets on them. They stopped up the porch right in front of our window and banged on the front door. My father answered, and one of the soldiers pointed the rifle at him, right in front of us, and ordered us out of our home. I had just turned five in April; it was May when they came to take us away. 

My father gave my brother Henry and me two heavy suitcases. And we brought them out onto the driveway and waited for our mother to come out. When she did, she had our baby sister in one arm, a huge duffel bag in the other, and tears were streaming down her cheeks.

That is one morning that is seared into my memory. I will never be able to forget all the innocent people, my family included, who had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor, most of who were law abiding U.S. citizens, who were suddenly categorized as ‘enemy aliens.’

Today, I hear terrifying words from political leaders today that once more raise the specter of what happened before, right here in America. 

Donald Trump and his allies are talking about rounding up 11 million people and putting them into mass detention camps before deporting them. 

There won’t be time for due process, to sort out who is documented and who is not. Homes will be lost. Businesses, too. Families will be torn apart. Lives will be ruined, over fear and ignorance, all to serve the ambitions and agendas of politicians.

I know, because I lived through it.

I say, never again. Not while I have one ounce of fight still left in me. 

Join me. Fight this madness. Help keep America from repeating the mistakes of its past."

***

Me, again.

 Any time, ANY TIME, any goddamned time someone tells you that some horror- any horror- cannot happen here, cannot happen in the United States?

 Not only can it. It probably already _has_.

  Any time someone tells you that the good and just people of the United States simply would not, could not tolerate something, go along with something, approve or put up with something?

 Not only can they. They probably already have. 

 History, as has been said by too many people to cite, in too many ways to remember, is a cycle. Peacetime and war, plenty and famine, profit and loss, growth and decline. Personal histories, national histories, global history and very likely universal history- fill with things that come and go and come again- and go. 

 I shudder to think it, but our nation- and our world- are cycling back toward a harsher reality.  One where we are bound together not by the dream but by The Fear of The Other. 

 I would love to believe that _this_ time, having learned our lessons, having remembered our history_this_ time, we will avoid the worst of it. That we will manage to keep a step or three away from the real muck. Before we cycle back, before, once again, we lean foreward and progress. That we can, having taken our two steps forward, avoid taking that one step back. 

 I often end these things, whatever the hell you want to call them, with a phrase: "And so it goes."  I have been on the fence about this. I like it, but it's not original, and I had been bothered, as it was, I believed, original to Kurt Vonnegut. 

 It is not. "So it goes" is Vonnegut.  "And so it goes" is the late newsman Lloyd Dobbins. Who did the original swiping and updating from Vonnegut. And I got it from Linda Ellerbee, who swiped it from him. So. The hell with guilt, this is now a _tradition_.

 And so it goes.

There Has To Be A Better Way

 Sitting on top of the grandfather clock that dad and I built together, a triangle boxed US flag. Given to him on his retirement from the Veteran's Administration. There was a ceremony. He took it home and put it on the shelf, and as far as I know, never looked at it again. 

 My father worked from his fifteenth year straight through to his seventieth. He mowed lawns, drove a cab, packed meat. He helped support his parents and brother and helped put himself and his brother through college and dental school. When he married and started a family, he added mom and us kids to his responsibilities. When his work took him away from Omaha, he sent money and we drove down to visit his parents regularly. 

 I was proud of my father.  He seemed to be proud of the quality of his work, and he was- as far as I could ever tell- well respected. He went from odd jobs through college to his own practice and then the VA, and worked his way up into management and then executive management. He also became a college professor. I am still hearing from co-workers and former students, who want me to know how much he meant to them. 

 Thing is, he almost never spoke about work. As a kid, I would go into the VA and hang out- having lunch with him, shooting around the office. It was all very impressive to me. He had the lab coat with name and title stitched on, a collection of staff working with him and then reporting to him, and as he moved up in responsibility, he got into larger and larger offices. Moved from having an assistant to having secretaries.  When I overheard him talking with other doctors- some dentists, some other specialists- the terms and the dedication to fixing and curing, to patching up and healing seemed thick enough to bottle. 

 His standard response to questions about it all- was to deflect. Hard work, but necessary. Glad to be done for the day and home. 

 It wasn't until we had moved back to Omaha that I got a better answer. A less "Just happy to be part of the team" answer. Caught him in a reflective mood and pounced. 

 Looking that that flag, what he told me, then. Sitting next to his glowing HAM rig, playing with one of our dogs... resonates strongly with me. Makes me wish he were still alive to talk about it, to add my own perspective. 

 Dad liked what he did well enough. But he hated having to do it.  The reason he was so closed mouthed about it was that he was determined to keep work separated from his home life. Work was what you did to earn money and gain resources to support your life. That's it. You should do your best at it- so you can earn more. You should be proud of your ability. But it had nothing to do with the life it helped you build. 

 A consequence, I am certain, of being made to _get_ work as a young man. To help feed his parents and brother, and to afford schooling. Of watching friends and others going out to do things, when he had to work. Of missing time with his wife and his kids, to work. 

 When my dad did retire, first from the VA and from teaching a few years later... he dedicated himself to travelling with my mom. To seeing places they had always wanted to see, to having experiences they wanted to share. Things that they'd deferred to raise a family. Things that he defered because of work. 

 So. I am approaching retirement age. I have worked from about fifteen- odd jobs and summer jobs and so forth. I, like my father, have rarely taken days off, time off, sick time. At my current job, I have started each of my work years at- or nearly at- the maximum time off accrual. And I have largely treated these jobs as what I did to afford everything else. Same as my dad. Tried not to get into it at home, tried to leave it on the desk when I left. 

 Less successful than he was at that. But it's still my default. How was my day? People brought me problems, I tried to fix them. Some people are jackasses, some are not- everyone is over worked and stressed and snappish. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever. Was. 

 And it's bullshit. 

 Working through your entire life, to afford to do things on the weekends and evenings, to afford things that you haven't the time or energy left to enjoy- it's all so rushed and harried and puts so much stress on moods. Working at a job when you don't particularly enjoy it, because you need to pay the bills and want to afford the occasional good day out.

 It's decades of deferment, in the hopes that, in the end, you can have a few relatively healthy years to fuck around with. 

  There has got to be a better way.  Go to school, get a job, learn a trade- that's all good. Education is good, skills are good, being useful, to yourself and to others? Good. But nose to the grindstone and hop off to Disneyland once a year is bullshit. 

 More We're gonna have to find another way for most people to live _anyway_. Technological advances are eliminating whole categories of jobs. Before too much longer, call center jobs will vanish. Customer service jobs will vanish. The coffee you get from the drive through- as well as the food- will have been made by machinery. Most of it already was, it's just that last step, the finishing touch, the delivery, that needs replacing. Machines don't get sick, need personal days, need a break to use the john. Technology is working on eliminating taxi drivers, pilots- all sorts of factory jobs. 

 How are people going to earn their livings, moving forward, when jobs like these are no longer available? How are they going to pay their bills? My former profession- cooking. Every restaurant owner or chef out there already knows this, but the entire front line of cooks could be replaced by machines, and the food would be _fine_. You don't want or need finesse or artistry from a line cook. You need robot like repetition and the ability to adjust to changes while being faithful to instruction. 

 Every steak, every chop, every appetizer- it's supposed to go out exactly as every other. All the steaks cut to the same weight, all the cheese portioned to the same size, every fish finished to the same standard. 

A good line cook is part robot _anyway_. When I worked the line, the goal was to put out things out, regardless, to the same damned standard. Any artistry in the creation of the food was done long before it got to me. The chef had figured out how to make it, what it had to taste like and look like. 

 Being clever with it was not my job. 

 Going full robot would only help the chef, and the restaurant. And your meals would be the same. 

 Once the robots get good enough to take over, that entire category is gone, overnight. 

 So what do the cooks do? Can't all be chefs, and without the ability to learn- by working that line, by getting that training- a lot of cooks won't have any way _to_ learn how to be a chef. 

 Since we are looking down the barrels of this... why not see how we can reshape the concept of work at the same time? 

 My proposition? A guaranteed stipend for everyone in the US. Lots of parts to it, but basically- everyone gets enough calories and nutrition for their day. Gets enough water. Meal packs, essentially. Probably not fancy, but decent variety, decent nutrition, a guarantee that everyone will survive, and not get malnutrition diseases. That people will be able to concentrate.  National health care, with a bias toward preventative care. Regular checkups and maintenance. Birth control and prenatal care. Child care assistance. Greatly expanded public transportation and housing. 

 How is this going to be paid for? There's plenty of money. We just have to decide to change how we use it and where we get it. What kind of society we want

 Think about this. How much do _you_ make in a year? If I took _half_ of it, but you didn't have to pay for meals, doctor's visits, babysitters and such? If you didn't have to pay a mortgage or rent- how much of that would you actually use? You don't get to use fifty percent of what you make as you might want to _now_. 

 And think about yourself, your parents. Think about what life could be like if you didn't devote a third or more of your time to trying to afford to live the _reast_ of the time. 

Res Ipsa Loqutor. 

 

 

 

 

 

Northern Exposure Rewatch/Review

 "Pilot"

 Written by Joshua Brand and John Falsey, directed by Joshua Brand. Starring Rob Morrow, Barry Corbin, Janine Turner, John Cullum, Darren E. Burrows, John Corbett, Cynthia Geary, Elaine Miles and Peg Phillips.

 The main reason I'm doing this is practice. Practice writing reviews, practice making them interesting. 

 Why a TV show thirty years off the air?

 Because I loved it, when it was on the air, and I love it still. The only time I've been up to Seattle- to visit my brother- I dragged his family off to the small town fictionalized in the series as Cicely, Alaska. I visited the locations that served as the main character's office, the village grocery, the Brick tavern, and ate at the restaurant behind the sign featured in the title. I peered into the window at the KBHR set. All decades too late- things were more memory of location than location- but I did it. 

 Which isn't the sort of thing I do. I don't really need to see filming locations, I've seen plenty of sets before, and frankly? They usually aren't all that damned interesting. 

 But Cicely, Alaska?  Somehow, in watching the series all those years ago, Cicely became very real to me. Not real in the sense that I thought- or think- that I could go there. Real in the sense that it felt real. Fully imagined, and oddly familiar. And it is a show that I tend to revisit, when I feel at odds with myself. 

 I've said, more than once, that nostalgia is a trap, that memories of our halycon days are flawed- as our memories make things all seem better and grander than they actually were.  But for me- Northern Exposure presents a very homey and familiar place. Someplace that feels to me as if I might have been there. As if, had I turned one way, rather than the other, I'd have turned up at The Brick, rather than the Dundee Dell. 

 So.

 Pilots are not like regular episodes of an intended series. They're meant to prove to the financers who are meant to pay for everything and the network or studio meant to show it that it can actually be made. That the production team can build sets, cast the right actors, hire the right writers and tell a decent story. One that will interest viewers and the advertisers who want to sell to those viewers. 

 And, in addition to telling that story, they have to introduce the characters and set up the ongoing series. 

 Some pilots never air- made more to sell the show than actually function as an episode. Others are scrapped- the process of production having revealed a need for changes. 

 Northern Exposure's pilot aired- and it does a fabulous job setting up the leads, the town and the general character of the show. 

 The premise is... After finishing his residency,  M.D. Joel Fleischman lands in Anchorage, Alaska, where he is meant to practice for several years- in exchange for the state paying off his medical school debt. 

 Anchorage doesn't need him, so he's bundled off to Cicely. A small town out in the back of beyond. One of these places surrounded by wilderness, with one of everything- church, bar, restaurant, rich bully trying to run everything, etc. 

 Joel hates it. The residents who aren't strange seem ignorant and hostile. The town handyman seems to have siezed upon him as an entertainment, his landlord as a frustration, and the food is inedible. 

 Of course, none of that is true, exactly. The residents aren't strange so much as they are strange to him. Cicely is better appointed than it appears, and a sizeable number of the locals are Native Americans, who's cultural norms make more sense the more he's around them. 

  The pleasure comes from watching Joel acclimate- largely against his will- and watching the other characters bloom from sketches into paintings. Between the writing, directing and acting, they turn into very real seeming people, with personality, strengths and weaknesses, flaws and delights. 

 Maurice, the rich bully- is nursing a broken heart and feuding with his best friend, who stole away the woman Maurice intended to marry. Holling, the best friend, is a from a long line of awful, awful people and intended never to marry- to let the family line die off. And now he's in love, in his late sixties- with a woman barely into her twenties. Joel's landlord, who's as frustrating as he is, is an unintentional black widow. Her boyfriends don't break up with her so much as drop dead. All accidents, all strange accidents, but she's built a miniature graveyard/shrine to them in her living room. 

 And so on and so forth. No one stays a cipher, native beliefs are respected, modern US beliefs are disrespected, and it all grows into an ensemble show about an accidental family. 

  The plot? Joel arrives, gets shuttled off to Cicely, hates it, and spends the entire episode learning that he has no legal way to break his contract. In the process meeting and mingling with the other characters who'll pop up regularly. 

 That's kinda nothing. Just a bunch of vignettes, really. But it all holds together. The writing and acting, it's all set up, but it's setting up a pleasant place, with interesting people, who it might be nice to drop in on for an hour every week. 

 Errata.

 None of the characters, in the pilot, are quite who they become. They are very close, but not quite there- sort of playing things larger. Rob Morrow plays Fleischman at such a level of strident hectoring that it's a wonder no one just cocks him one in the nose. Janine Turner plays Maggie- obvious eventual love interest- as if she wants to bite someone.  But. John Cullum as Holling and Barry Corbin - while, again, not quite where they get with their characters, later on, are a lot of fun to watch in these rougher versions. Corbin has a lot of fun with Maurice's emotional volatility- flinty one moment, sad and teary eyed literally the next. Cullum displays a mastery of the reaction take. 

 The actual town- Roslyn, Washington- is a lot larger than fictional Cicely. Cicely is basically one street to one side of Roslyn. The series production team does a pretty good job making it look isolated and small- a main street, with some side streets and a few blocks of housing. But it's not perfect here- it never is, really. And you start to get a sense that a town as small as Cicely is meant to be, and as isolated, could not actually survive. Where's the service station for the trucks and cars? The garage? How does Holling get his beer and food? How does Ruth Ann get her store resupplied? Where the hell do all these people in Cicely work? 

 Having set foot in the location set for Dr. Fleischman's office- the studio set is laid out exactly the same way, but it's about five times larger. Which was weird at the time. It's a clothing and mercandise shop now, and- over by those tables is where Marilyn sat, past that door is Joel's private office, etc. But rather than being several feet apart, it is all right to hand.  Made me appreciate the wizardry of cinematography. Joel arges with Maggie in his office, she storms out, he follows her, stomping through his little hall, past Marilyn, and catches her by the door. You can see people moving around outside, the real streets of Roslyn, so that shot is at the location, but you cannot tell that it is so much smaller. 

7 of 10. See you next episode.