Books Lying Open
¤ The Lord of Castle Black, Steven Brust
¤ Seabiscuit, Laura Hillenbrand
¤ Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, Al Franken

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ Fluctuating bedtimes.

Answer of the Day:
¤ Because it's warm and it's chocolate.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May you learn several new ways to shatter unsuspecting elbows.

onday's blog, which contained a review of National Treasure and a bunch of news item commentary was not posted until Monday night. If you checked at the usual time and didn't see it, click here to read it now.

In today's blog, which is being posted right on time (for a change) I've got a review of Michael Moore's documentary, Roger and Me. The film was released 15 years ago, but since I just recently saw it... I just recently wrote my review. Before that you'll find a quick book review and excerpt, a strange reader mail, and a news item about euthanasia.  I'd babble on longer, but this is a long blog already, and I've got to try and finish my already-late D2 site article about D3. Until Friday...

¤ I have a short list of recommended books and authors in my wallet; a list that I check every time I'm in the library. I seldom see anything that matches up, but after I semi-recently got a recommendation from a fan of my D2 stories, I added Steven Brust to my list. And as luck would have it, when I was at the library a few weeks ago they actually had a recent paperback by him. Unfortunately, it was book two in a trilogy, but I figured what the hell, it would at least give me a taste of his writing style and if I liked it I could stop reading and hunt up book one and read that first.  As it turned out, I stopped reading very soon, but I shan't be searching out the first volume in the trilogy.

The book I checked out was entitled The Lord of Castle Black, by Steven Brust. The name there is linked to its page on Amazon.com, though I'm certainly not recommending that you go buy it, for reasons I will soon elaborate upon. My main problem with the novel is that it's presented as though it's a tale being told by a historian, and his writing style is so affected and verbose and flowery that I simply got bored with it. You can look inside the book on the Amazon.com page to see the first 10 pages or so, but before I realized that I typed out the following excerpt, from a bit further along than the Amazon preview reveals.  This is an essentially random selection, but one that I thought very typical of the overall writing style and presentation.

And the whole book is like this.

None of this is bad or incorrect or anything, and some of it is funny, but every character talks like this, and even the narrative and paragraphs of exposition are worded in this stilted and overlong style. I don't have that much time to read, and when I do I want the story to keep moving. I made it through 30 pages of this novel, but only by skimming, and since I was missing all of the cleverly-worded details that made it enjoyable, I realized that skimming was no way to get through this book. So I gave up.

The real problem is that these stilted conversations convey most of the information, which is why it's not possible to skim along and skip the strange verbosity of it while still following the story. You have to read every word or you won't have any idea what's happening or who is who. I tried to read slowly over the 30 pages I read, but still had no idea who the four characters talking in this scene were. I knew there was an older man named Morrolan and three women with him, but I thought he was a warlock, and the three women had names. Yet looking at it now, I think the 4th woman is being referred to as the warlock, even though that's a male title. Either that or Morrolan is one of the women and the man is the warlock. In any event, the book has gone back to the library, and while I'll try some other fiction by Chris Brust in the future, it will not be something else from this series, since the writing style of it failed to engage me.

If anyone has read his stuff in the past and has any recommendations or warnings, do let me know.

¤ Now this is an odd reader mail. It's from Nate, and I've snipped the introduction, in which he quoted my comments from Monday's blog.

I'd comment here, but um... what's left to say? I'd imagine you could have some fun dreaming up the most ridiculous chain of events that would result in a person being charged for felony homicide; after all, if you're involved in a crime, and one of your accomplices is killed during it... you can be prosecuted for their murder. How long after the fact does it have to be? Say you and a friend knock off a 7/11 and steal a case of beer along with $40. He's driving, he drops you off, and while pulling back into traffic he drops his beer, gets distracted, and runs into a semi truck. Are you guilty of felony homicide? Was his death close enough to being "in the commission of the crime" for them to hang that on you? Why not? It's certainly less absurd than Nate's legally-accurate example.

A hospital in the Netherlands — the first nation to permit euthanasia — recently proposed guidelines for mercy killings of terminally ill newborns, and then made a startling revelation: It has already begun carrying out such procedures, which include administering a lethal dose of sedatives

The announcement by the Groningen Academic Hospital came amid a growing discussion in Holland on whether to legalize euthanasia on people incapable of deciding for themselves whether they want to end their lives — a prospect viewed with horror by euthanasia opponents and as a natural evolution by advocates.

In August, the main Dutch doctors' association KNMG urged the Health Ministry to create an independent board to review euthanasia cases for terminally ill people "with no free will," including children, the severely mentally retarded and people left in an irreversible coma after an accident.

...

The guideline says euthanasia is acceptable when the child's medical team and independent doctors agree the pain cannot be eased and there is no prospect for improvement, and when parents think it's best.

Examples include extremely premature births, where children suffer brain damage from bleeding and convulsions; and diseases where a child could only survive on life support for the rest of its life, such as severe cases of spina bifida and epidermosis bullosa, a rare blistering illness.

The hospital revealed last month it carried out four such mercy killings in 2003, and reported all cases to government prosecutors. There have been no legal proceedings against the hospital or the doctors.

The usual suspects (the Catholic Church, chiefly) are up in arms over this, and there is much discussion of "slippery slopes" and what not. The reality of the issue though, is mentioned in the article:

Child euthanasia remains illegal everywhere. Experts say doctors outside Holland do not report cases for fear of prosecution.

"As things are, people are doing this secretly and that's wrong," said Eduard Verhagen, head of Groningen's children's clinic. "In the Netherlands we want to expose everything, to let everything be subjected to vetting."

In other words, doctors and nurses and horrified parents have been doing this all along, and they'll continue to perform mercy killings in these situations. The issue is that now that it's been legalized, there is more review, more oversight, and a more objective decision can be made by experts. Rather than just one sympathetic doctor late at night, or one merciful nurse, or one motivated parent "accidentally" unplugging a respirator.

I see it as similar to abortion; if they're legal and safe and the women undergoing them have all the options at hand, they can make an intelligent decision. When abortion is illegal women still have them, but they're dangerous, they're dirty, and complications will result.

Of course if you're of the "all life is sacred no matter what" philosophy, you're bound to disagree, since you're not going to judge the issue from an objective point of view. The Catholic Church, for instance, comes into this debate with their answers pre-determined by what they've decided the Bible says. There's no arguing with them, so I don't really give their comments any credence, since they're totally inflexible. Imagine if there were some religious group that thought their holy book said that any infant born unable to breath on its own within two days must be killed, since God clearly felt displeasure towards it. Would you value their opinions highly in this debate?

Roger and Me was released in 1989, and was Michael Moore's first full length documentary. The Roger of the title is Roger Smith, then the new CEO of General Motors. Roger Smith had come in with a cost-cutting mandate, and was busily-executing it by closing GM plants in the US (mostly in Flint, Michigan, Michael Moore's hometown) and putting tens of thousands of workers out of the jobs, while GM busily built new plants in Mexico where the labor costs were far cheaper.

During the documentary Michael Moore shows the rise and fall of Flint, Michigan, how (horribly) the city is doing now that most of the GM jobs are gone, what GM has been doing with the money they saved, etc. The titular thrust is Moore's efforts to meet and speak with Roger Smith, since he wants to invite the CEO to spend a day in Flint and see the damage his job cuts have wrought.

To the scores:

Roger and Me
Held My Interest: 6
Presents/Explains the Issue Clearly: 4
Contains New Information: 6
Replayability: 4
Is Entertaining: 6
Overall: 5.5

While this documentary was released in 1989, I didn't see it until August 2004, when I checked it out from the library. I'd heard of it, of course, and always been sort of curious, but never curious enough to actually seek it out for my viewing pleasure. And since it's not the type of movie that USA or TNT or AMC or any other channel is going to start showing five times a week for the rest of time (the fate that befalls most popular action movies) I was never going to see it if I didn't make the effort.

I'd seen Fahrenheit 9/11 (my review here) a month or two before I tracked down Roger and Me, and having more or less enjoyed F9/11, I thought I should check out Moore's earlier work, since I'd heard about Roger and Me forever. I knew it would be pretty dated by now, but it was free at the library, and I could afford 90 minutes of my life.

My conclusion? It wasn't bad, but it wasn't very good, and I was a bit disappointed.  Compared to the more historical PBS style documentaries I've seen, Moore is much more of an entertainer. He jumps from topic to topic quite a bit, editing segments together to keep the film moving and keep it from dragging down on one issue for too long. He's good at it, and his technique of changing things up and getting people to admit to absolutely outrageous things on camera makes for some great footage. Plus, changing the subject so quickly is a great effect; 20 straight minutes of just about anything in the film would be boring, but when those 20 minutes are chopped up into 4 or 5 blocks, and shown with other segments between them, it keeps your interest. If he just showed every attempt he made to meet with Roger Smith in a row, it would be death. But by showing one try, then other stuff, then another try 20 minutes later, it builds the impact through repetition, while not boring you with too much of the same thing over and over again.

Yes, this is probably "Documentary 101," but I don't watch many of them in this style, so it was new to me.

The fact that this film was 15 years old when I saw it was also a factor in my reaction and my review. The issues it raises are as relevant now as they were back then, but I imagine back in 1989, when globalization was first really beginning to cut American jobs in the manufacturing industry, this would have been shocking to see. By now we're used to every American company that can get away with it moving all production operations to Mexico, or Indonesia, or whatever they can go to get little brown people to make their products for a fraction of the wages they'd have to pay Americans to make them, so I watched those parts of the film with a shrug.

Of more interest were other fact-finding bits; about how GM started making cars, how the plants were when they first opened, how the US worker used unions and government protection to rise from a virtual slave to a middle class citizen, etc. The movie did more showing than telling, and a lot of the background information was fascinating. As were the pathetic attempts of Flint Michigan to reinvent itself once GM pulled up stakes. They tried for tourism, they built a huge car museum, they tried for honeymoon couples... all miserable failures.

The most amazing footage in the film was of the rich in Flint today. While most of the city is unemployed (the unemployment rate was like 5x higher than the rest of Michigan, which was in turn far higher than the US rate at the time the film was made), some of the most expensive suburbs of Detroit are just miles out of town. Seeing the contrast between the miles and miles of foreclosed homes and empty warehouses, and the unbelievable mansions on manicured lawns, was jarring. There was extensive footage of a foreclosure man going from house to house and turning people out when they'd defaulted on their loans. He took Christmas off, but was hard at work on the 24th and the 26th, and watching him stand by with a court order while people drug all the owned out of a house and dumped it on the street, Xmas trees and presents and all, so he could lock up the house that would then stand empty for years since no one had any money to move in, was both heart-wrenching and incredibly frustrating.

Worse yet was footage from some annual GM company picnic, which was held at a country club and attended by hundreds of very rich, very white, and very happy executives; people whose jobs had not been cut when all of the factories were closed and who had probably gotten bonuses as worker costs were cut. The most appalling part of it was that they had hired local people to work at the party, dressed them in old fashioned clothing, as stood them here and there as sort of living statues. This led to shot after shot of these obscenely rich drunks milling around on the grass in their expensive clothing while dead-eyed workers of every race stood motionless, in their silly costumes, like flesh and blood lawn jockeys. It's hard to imagine a more scathing portrait of the divide between upper and lower class, and Moore's eyes must have bugged out when he entered the party with his cameras and saw the entertainment.

Despite enjoying a lot of the film, and finding it sporadically entertaining, I didn't give it a very high score, and I think a lot of that is just due to the time lag. If I'd seen it in 1990 when all of the stuff in it was still fresh and topical, it would have had a much larger impact on me. Seeing it now, when this sort of thing has been going on for 15 or 20 years and is now seen as inevitable in the US, stole most of the power. The film also tended to go on and on in some segments, and I wanted it to move along more quickly, or include more facts and figures.

Overall, I don't think it was a very effective policy piece, since it never really argued for anything. That Flint has been ruined by the GM job cuts is inarguable, but what was GM's alternative? Were they really losing money? Were higher profits worth ruining the economy of much of Michigan? Did GM have a civic responsibility to Flint? Could they have retrofitted their plants with more machines and cut some jobs while not leaving entirely? Did they really save that much money by moving to Mexico? Was that their only option in the situation? I have no idea, and that's a direct fault of the film. It never told me the reality of the situation, which might have made GM look less heartless, or might have been an even more scathing indictment of their corporate greed.

That approach, going for the reactionary human element rather than facts and figures, was a weakness of Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 as well, at least in my opinion. But since he's done it, to varying degrees, in all three of his films that I've seen, I guess it's a technique he's consciously chosen, rather than some sort of accident. I didn't need that many more facts and figures in Bowling for Columbine, but I needed some of them in Fahrenheit 9/11, and I thought their absence really gutted the power of Roger and Me, turning it into a curiosity, rather than a potentially-powerful position piece.