Watching an Old Movie, and a Young (very) Nation

Before I begin here, we’ve had another appearance by the Virgin Mary. In Mexico. Now, I was raised – what raising I had – Catholic, and went to a private Catholic high school, but will somebody explain to me why the Blessed Virgin would appear as a stain (I guess that’s what this latest one is) in paneling on a wall? In Corpus Christi a little while after I arrived there, she was a stain on the floor under a carpet, then – no offense intended here; I’m just telling what happened – it was the scum in an obviously dirty shower stall. That last one really had me nonplussed.

An adjunct to my question is: what is a stain, an unusually-shaped potato, or the like supposed to mean? What does it have to do with anything?

Really, folks – this (among a host the like) is becoming worrisome. Hasn’t religion packaged and prostituted to worship “The bitch goddess Success – with the squalid cash interpretation place on the term ‘success’ . . .” caused enough freaking trouble? I mean, we have a nut case like Pat Robertson, who wants to do murder in the name of religion, added to bin Laden, al Zarqawi and the rest of the nut cases there are in Islam, all tangled up with a megalomaniac in the White House who talks to god, and gets answers. It makes me wonder – nay, it makes me want to know - Do the stains in the paneling or carpet at the White House, or vegetables in the salad with unusual shapes talk to the president? Does he answer?

Come on, people – get in the real world. You're needed here. You, too, Mr. Bush.

Speaking of things representing other things (if that's what I was doing): last night, I watched one of those “geez – you mean you’ve never seen . . .” whatever-the-hell, “the movie?” movies. I don’t watch a hell of a lot of movies. They’ve kept doing Titanic and King Kong over and over so many times, the martial arts movies are so damned implausible and nonsensical, ditto the sex scenes no matter what kind of movie it is, and the rest, that I just pass. It’s come to the point that any time a movies gets an Academy Award, I don’t bother to even read the poster outside the theater. Crap. It’s like “popular” music. Two weeks on the charts before being gone to oblivion, and it’s a classic. Like actors, the singer or “artist” will be around for a year or so before vanishing. Then he’s a “legend.” Give me a break!

Better to read a book - the movie is never as good as the book, anyway - and listen to the real classical music on the CD or tape player.

But for anyone who wants to see one of those microcosms I’m always talking about – this one a microcosm of the nation – see the Kevin Costner movie. The bodyguard client and her entourage, including her security, are so much like the United States and its bewildered security that it had me grabbing for the box (we rented the thing) to see when the movie was made. The screenwriter just had to have an ulterior motive (it looks like no such thing, though – just coincidence) in current events.
Get this: There’s someone – individual or group – outside who wants to do Somebody (can’t remember the name) Houston, the actress-singer client, great bodily harm. The enemy has been in the house – bedroom, matter of fact – several times, and when Farmer – the “wrangler” played by Costner – takes the job, he finds the security around the place downright ridiculous. Lugubrious, even. The people who are being paid to protect Houston are clowns, her manager and staff don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground, and everybody who might so much as notice any approaching danger are too busy partying to notice so much as whether they have clothes on.
Costner takes one look and says, “Thanks, but no f------ thanks.” Smart man. But then he notices there’s a little boy in the menagerie, a little guy you like right away for his little kid affability and innocence, and the bodyguard has second thoughts. He takes the job.

Funny thing, Fletcher, the little boy, got me, too – in more ways than one. I was about to hit the “off” button on the remote and pitch “The Bodyguard” when the little kid came into the picture. That made it worth watching. What was going to happen to the little guy?

That, you see, is the only reason I stay here in this sinking ship of a nation. I, of all people, don’t need anything – not one, damned thing - this country has to offer. Sure as hell not its slimeball government. And I sure as hell don’t want to be part of “collateral damaging” innocent women and kids everywhere in the world.
I stay here for the kids. Our children and grandchildren don’t deserve what’s being done to them and their future. I keep hoping I can figure something out, find some way to make the shit-for-brains people partying at life in this country come to their senses and get in the real world. Like Costner tries to do in the movie with Somebody’s Houston’s entourage.

Rent the movie, you’ll see the U.S. before – and after September 11, 2001. In fact, I think the national state of readiness in the aftermath is even less than before, the result of some kind of weird and perverse quirk in the evolved character of the public and its culture. I mean, look around. Listen. This is bedlam. From Bush and the government’s utter, Katrina-and-New-Orleans fecklessness (you don’t see another impending World Trade Center in that?) to the Schroedinger’s Cat incertitude of anything the national bodyguards say, to the profligate and absolute corruption of the Congress, to the illogical and nonsensical machinations of the Supreme Court, the public remains oblivious, partying, satisfied to demand more of the prurient, Natalee Holloway kind of “reporting” being served up by the media, and “do its thing.”

The ghost in the machine of the “Bodyguard” story is a traitor, the client’s own sister. Is that apropos? Is that a metaphor of this benighted looney-bin country? Does anybody still believe 9-11 wasn’t an inside job? In the movie, the traitor goes on concealing her complicity in what’s going on right to the bitter end, her own death at the hands of the assassin. The watch dog, in other words, doesn’t bark. Here in the real world, the post-WTC and 9-11 government goes on dissimulating, “damage controlling,” and covering up the truth of how a thing so impossible without inside help could have happened.

The metaphor goes on right down to excruciating detail. The man who is Somebody Houston’s manager and publicist personifies the U.S. citizenry and culture perfectly. The self-interested capitalist nonpareil, he cares about nothing and no one but the Academy Award he has been striving for to the exclusion of all other interests. Even when the bodyguard has thrown himself between the assassin’s fire and his meal ticket and claim to fame client, the manager’s immediate interest is the card announcing Houston the winner, not the blood that stains it. If you watch that scene and don't think of more than twenty-two hundred bodies and fifteen hundred maimed for life in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the nation’s manager – that’s the public, you know – remains concerned with national prestige to the exclusion of all else, you're brain dead. If you don't see in that bloody card a Super Bowl, Golden Globe Awards and the tawdry like, "Info-tainment" and tabloid news, "Desperate Housewives," soap operas, and who just married or divorced whom in Hollywood, you deserve what happens to you.

Your kids, like little Fletcher in the movie, don't. See the movie "The Bodyguard" again. This time, wake up and really see it.