Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

A civil war by any other name, II

Another major news agency has decided — in a very public announcement — that it will call the civil war in Iraq what it is. Here is NBC’s Brian Williams (I heard about this from TomPaine.com):

We will also reference our decision today (after much consultation over the weekend with our colleagues, fellow journalists, historians, analysts and members of the military, both present and former) to describe the fighting in Iraq as a Civil War. We believe it is a more accurate reflection of what is happening there, and there was a fair amount of reaction to the decision today… even though a number of news organizations have already made a similar call.

An “accurate reflection”? During the Bush years? Score one for the fact-based community.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

A false compromise

New Jersey conservatives are officially weighing in on the issue of gay marriage. As expected, they are planning to unveil a constitutional amendment defining marriage as only between a man and a woman — an amendment that woudl write discrimination into law.

And they are planning to unveil a compromise domestic benefits bill that would grant all of the rights and benefits of marriage not only to gay couples, but to nearly every non-married living arrangement. On the surface this seems a useful compromise, but it falls short for two reasons. First, it ignores the psychic and social benefits that come with the marriage designation (a purposeful sleight). And, just as importantly, it would not cover heterosexual couples who choose not to marry because they would be eligible to marry — making it both unfair to gays and straights and unnecessarily coercive.

A better and fairer approach would be to include gay couples in a new marriage law while also creating a separate domestic benefits bill that would cover all of those arrangements short of marriage.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Tonic from the left

Milton Friedman was, no doubt, a great thinker. But his approach to economics has wrought serious damage to our economy and the classes of Americans who fail in his winner-take-all world. Leave it to William Greider to remind us of this when much of the press in the wake of Friedman’s death has been so laudatory.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

His name is Bond, lame Bond

I finally have had the chance to see what maybe the worst Bond film ever, Octopussy, the 1983 farewell to the genre from Roger Moore. It was a film that served both as an unfortunate and fitting ending to his tenure as the British spy, displaying everything that had gone wrong with the series over his decade-plus in the lead role.

  1. Moore is obviously too old for the role, making the series of stunts seem even more absurd than they were.
  2. Moore doesn’t sweat — in fact, he never sweats and rarely has a hair out of place.
  3. Forget the story. It’s not even worth getting into, something about stolen jewels and missiles or something. Whatever.
  4. Bond is made at one point to wear a gorilla suit and ride a circus train. And then, if that wasn’t demeaning enough, he dresses as a clown and has to explain to a disbelieving American general that there is a bomb in the circus.
  5. Bond also hangs from a small-engine plane and then fights a crazed, knife-wielding, turban-wearing thug — on the plane.

At least Moonraker, silly and bloated, was fun. This was just a painful wreck.

The series, of course, only gets moderately better. I missed the Dalton years, but at least Pierce Brosnan, trapped in a set of bad stories and buried under an avalanche of bad effects, was a stronger, more sadistic Bond, combining Moore and Connery and returning some of the edge to the series. He brought in the cash, but it was still mired under the weight of irrelevancy.

The new Bond — the magnificent Daniel Craig in the best Bond film since the Connery days — has the chance to redeem the series, or at least atone for films like Octopussy.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.