The Last Free Mother’s Day

May 8, 2022 ~ Graham Milne ~ Leave a comment

Usually, Mother’s Day arrives with a serene, crisp morning and the promise of flowers, brunch, hugs and chocolate, and shared recollections of tender kisses for scraped childhood knees. It is typically a day as gentle as those we take this time to honor. Not so this year. 2022 Mother’s Day is a nightmare from which there is no waking, as the right wing justices on the United States Supreme Court stand on the precipice of stripping away the very right to decide whether to be a mother at all.

Unless you have been exploring the valleys of Mars or so single-focused on the Stanley Cup that you haven’t bothered to raise your head from the sports page, you have seen the news that the draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, scrawled in dystopian hellfire fashion by W. Bush appointee Samuel Alito, plans to overturn 1973’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision and thus trigger complete bans on abortion in the majority of the states. Forced birth activists across America are salivating at the arrival of the horrific vision that has driven them for decades and will condemn millions of poor women, especially those of color, to imprisonment or death simply for exercising the choice to do with their bodies as they wish (naturally, wealthy women or the mistresses of Republicans will still be able to get safe, expensive abortions whenever they need them). In some states, a woman who has an abortion after being raped will be subject to harsher prison sentences than her rapist. Some Republican lawmakers have boasted that saving a fetus is more important than preserving the life of the person carrying it. This is who they are, and they do not care. Their moment has come.

There is no sugar-coating this. It is as bad as everyone who has been sounding the alarm for years has said it will be. Alito’s “reasoning,” if you can condescend to call it that, falls back on the laughable doctrine of “originalism,” the notion that if slave-holding white men of the 18^th Century didn’t explicitly write it down in the Constitution – men who, it must be said, couldn’t conceive of the concept of the computer that Alito or his fascist clerks are barfing out this rights-crushing jeremiad on – it cannot be allowed to exist. The opinion reaches for justification to the decisions of a judge who literally sentenced women to death for witchcraft and further commodifies children (again, from the party who are accusing everyone who dislikes their agenda of being groomers) by referring to the shortfall in the “domestic supply of infants” in claiming that allowing abortion means there aren’t enough unwanted little orphan Annies for the woebegone would-be Daddy Warbuckses of ‘Murica. In a public statement following the leak of the decision, Alito’s lickspittle, the odious Justice Clarence Thomas, has shrugged “too bad, so sad” to the vast majority of the country who support abortion rights, telling them they have to suck it up with outcomes they don’t like, when his repellent wife Ginni is an open seditionist who backed the January 6^th attempted coup because she didn’t like the result of a fair and free election.

Because the decision undermines the right to privacy, liberals are warning that the right wing has no intention of stopping with abortion. There is a laundry list of freedoms that conservatives are rubbing their hands about the prospect of overturning in the wake of Dobbs, with gay rights being the most tempting target to attack next. For this, now, apparently, is how government works in the United States – Thomas’s patronizing missive aside, conservatives can simply appeal legislation they don’t like to a corrupted, utterly politicized Supreme Court that is happy to twist itself into knots to overturn it for them. Swept aside are any notions of democracy, the majority of the people deciding. This is the endgame of a slow-moving push towards autocracy orchestrated by a scheming, pampered right – captained by Mitch McConnell, Rupert Murdoch and Federalist Society capo Leonard Leo – and frankly, a lazy left hypnotized by overpaid media pundits who served up endless helpings of “don’t fret silly libs, it won’t be so bad” columns every time another crypto-fascist blundered his way into power.

The battle over abortion is about one thing only – the paranoid need of the penis to dominate the uterus. Why is it, do you ever wonder, that the men who bleat on about the unborn are all cut from the same and arguably inferior cloth – the white, bloated, puckered, pasty-faced incel type who’d likely have a prostitute wanting to pay him to avoid getting anywhere near that limp noodle hiding in his pants? The kind who are so unbelievably ignorant that they go on national television and say that well actually, the female body has ways to prevent pregnancy if it senses that it’s being raped? The ones who have perpetuated a misogynist myth of shamefully promiscuous women laughing through dozens of abortions from forgotten one-night stands?

There is an old saying that “politics is show business for ugly people,” and never is that ugliness more evident than in the hearts, minds and words of these otherwise unemployable male clowns whose deep-rooted insecurity manifests in the desperation to dominate innocent people – to show that big bad world how tough they truly are. Plotting away in the basement like Revenge of the Nerds writ large, they get themselves installed in low-profile offices – school boards, local councils, usually through the same rote script about taxes and family values and eking by with 20% support in a negligible-turnout election – and once inside, like the emerald ash borer they burrow quietly into the fabric of decent society, building influence, rising to incrementally higher standing and chipping away at liberty one tax cut at a time until one day they’re on the national stage lecturing that the cause of freedom demands that many will have to be sacrificed – to the thunderous applause of millions, Fox News fellation and the collective amazement that this could actually happen here. These unloved, useless men are angry at the universe that they weren’t born with the faculties to be movie stars or professional athletes or with the choice of a different voracious supermodel to have insatiable sex with every night. And the world – and women – are suffering exponentially at the hands of these irreparably wounded egos and completely flaccid penises. Look across the water to Russia today to see a blatant example of a limp dick struggling to erect itself.

You know this is the case because if it was really about protecting fetuses, then the same legal restrictions would apply equally to men. Employing the same sort of “logic,” it can be argued that a sperm is a living organism that is capable of becoming a human being. Therefore, every time a man masturbates into a sock he is committing billions of homicides. Whichever hand he uses should be confiscated as a deadly weapon. Playboy publishers and creators of hentai videos are accordingly accessories to mass murder, and wet dreams should be recategorized as involuntary manslaughter. Who weeps for those dear, precious unborn, lost forever to that episode of Star Trek: Picard where Seven and Raffi finally give in to their unspoken passions? I am still waiting to see the Oklahoma or Alabama state legislatures table the appropriate bills to address these egregious crimes against humanity. Otherwise, shut up with this ridiculous refrain that you’re defending the rights of the unborn. This is only about keeping the uterus in line – making government small enough not to drown in the bathtub but to fit snugly inside the fallopian tube.

The Dobbs decision will be handed down in June, but it is foregone. The lines are drawn, the votes will not be swayed. The media is, as usual, adopting GOP talking points to focus on the wrong part of the story (pearl-clutching over what foul rapscallion leaked the decision???) and suggesting that this is all in fact a brilliant strategy on the part of the right wing to get the bad news over and done with early so that the rage dies down and that gas prices end up swinging the midterms to the Republicans so they can hold two years of hearings on Hunter Biden’s laptop and refuse to certify any election that doesn’t crown their orange, Putin-fluffing and increasingly senile idol king-for-life. But I really do not think that the uteruses of the nation are going to shrivel up and accept that what Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and the gruesome threesome of Trump-appointed judges (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett) want should take precedence over their ability to govern their own bodies. Here in Canada, where we have far too many forced birthers of our own entrenched in positions of power watching and waiting for their moment to rear their hideous heads, we must remain just as vigilant – lest future Mother’s Days be occasions not to celebrate but to weep for liberties lost at the will of Man.

It’s not over, but it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Perhaps extra reason to ask anyone with a uterus if they need an extra hug today.

Skyfall Countdown Day 5: Tomorrow Never Dies

November 5, 2012November 6, 2012 ~ Graham Milne ~ 1 Comment

Happy Monday! 5 days to go and we’re in the home stretch. Hope you’re getting as excited for Skyfall as I am.

When it comes to dreaming up the new Bond movie, one of the largest stumbling blocks must be conjuring new villains for the hero to fight. After all, how many variations on megalomaniacs bent on world domination are there – particularly ones whose motivations can be believable to a modern audience increasingly regarding such characters as laughable clones of Dr. Evil? The concept at the heart of Tomorrow Never Dies tackled this problem head-on. The game would indeed be world domination, not of territory, but rather of thought and opinion; the very ability to manipulate millions into skewing the course of history. Even in the mid-90’s the phenomenon of the media baron who could bring down governments with a mere flicker of one of his many-tentacled interests was ripe for discussion, especially in Britain, where winning election to national office seemed to require bending knee to Rupert Murdoch and his chain of newspapers. The medium was the message indeed, and it did not take a great leap of imagination to suggest that said message could be manipulated for nefarious ends.

A British naval vessel, the H.M.S. Devonshire, is manipulated into straying into Chinese territorial waters, where it is sunk by mercenaries working for media supermogul Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce), whose empire reaches every country on earth except China. After his men massacre the survivors of the wreck, Carver runs a story in his worldwide newspaper Tomorrow accusing the Chinese air force of murdering the British sailors. James Bond, who has a prior relationship with Carver’s wife Paris (Teri Hatcher) is sent to Carver Media Group headquarters in Hamburg, Germany to try and prove Carver’s involvement to an unconvinced British government, with only 48 hours until the British fleet reaches China for potential retaliation. When Bond rekindles the romance with his old flame, leading him to discover the digital encoder that allowed the Devonshire’s course to be misdirected, Carver has Paris murdered and attempts to frame Bond for it. Escaping Carver’s thugs, Bond travels to the coast of Vietnam, where he discovers that a cruise missile has been stolen from the Devonshire’s wreck. Captured by Carver’s men, Bond gains a reluctant partner in Chinese agent Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh), and following a harrowing escape from his Saigon office tower, the two find that Carver has a stealth boat, undetectable by radar, in the South China Sea that he’s been using as a base to manipulate the two countries towards war. Carver intends to launch the stolen missile from the Devonshire into the heart of Beijing, giving his fellow conspirator, Chinese General Chang, the opportunity to seize control of the government and negotiate a truce to the engineered war, in exchange for which the Carver Media Group will receive exclusive broadcasting rights in China for 100 years.

The premise is solid; the execution, not so much, and many of the more complex moral questions that characterized Goldeneye’s screenplay have been tossed aside here in favour of balls-out action. Pierce Brosnan is clearly more comfortable, looking much broader in the shoulders and more able to handle himself in fights. But he oddly seems a bit bored as well – the nerves he had carrying his first major motion picture are behind him and with them has gone a great deal of energy as well. To the question of Bond’s emotional journey in this film, it’s regrettable that Brosnan and Teri Hatcher have no chemistry whatsoever; it’s not believable that this woman could have gotten under Bond’s skin as he admits. Hatcher, who was cast at the studio’s request for a recognizable American name in the credits, tries her best but is completely wrong for the part – the role demands a more tragic, resigned European sensibility, and Teri Hatcher is more effective at sunny, optimistic characters like Lois Lane. (There’s a rumour that a then-unknown Monica Bellucci was considered for the part but was rejected by the aforementioned studio – she would have been ideal, and totally believable as a woman who could have enraptured James Bond.) Notwithstanding the weaknesses in the performance, the dynamic of the movie shifts when Paris is killed, and any character development for Bond goes with it, abandoned in favour of elaborate action setpieces. A trend I have not been fond of in the recent Bond movies, and it will come more into focus when we deal with The World is Not Enough tomorrow, is the seeming requirement to have at least two love interests in each film – I would rather see a focus on one rather than shoving in another for the sake of additional eye candy, with the result being less screen time available to develop the main relationship properly.

But I digress. For her part, Yeoh is terrific and handles herself in action better than any other Bond girl to date, or since, for that matter. But character-wise, she’s hardly anything new, yet another “Bond’s equal” female agent. Pryce, perhaps best known as the meek clerk Sam Lowry in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and a slew of other roles where he plays a bit of a wuss, has fun devouring the scenery and establishing himself as a formidable intellectual foe for James Bond, with an ego the size of the planet itself. Unfortunately the remainder of the supporting players aren’t nearly as colourful – Gotz Otto has one scowling note as Carver’s German muscleman Stamper, and magician/actor Ricky Jay is forgettable as technogeek Henry Gupta (Gupta was originally to be an expert at flinging playing cards, as is Jay in real life, but this element of his character was edited out). A pure delight in the movie however is Vincent Schiavelli as the “outstanding pistol marksman” and torture expert Dr. Kaufman, who has all the movie’s best lines in one tragically brief five-minute scene. Fans of 300 will want to look quickly at the beginning of the movie for Gerard Butler who has one line as a crewman aboard the doomed Devonshire (his Scots accent is hard to miss).

In writing about A View to a Kill, I commented on the tendency of the filmmakers to lose the character of Bond when he is plugged as a prop into action scenes that either don’t flow organically from the story or have no consequence other than mere survival. In Tomorrow Never Dies, the action scenes have great setup and play out effectively, but they still seem rather uninspired, as though there is simply a perceived need to have some running and shooting and fast music for a few minutes. There is little excitement, or originality, for that matter, in watching James Bond walk around casually machine-gunning anonymous bad guys as he does in the finale; we’ll leave those kinds of scenes to Arnold Schwarzenegger and his ilk, thank you very much. That, I guess is my core issue with Tomorrow Never Dies and the reason why I can recall sitting in the theatre in 1997 feeling the excitement drain out of me as the minutes ticked by – it’s really just a generic action picture that happens to feature James Bond, and feels even in hindsight like a franchise going through the motions rather than attempting to push the envelope. It’s a funny phenomenon that plagues sequels sometimes, where so much money is riding on repeating the success of the first movie that there is great reluctance to do anything differently in round two; and inasmuch as this movie could be seen as the sequel to Goldeneye in the new 007 era, the play-it-safe approach is obvious and disappointing, particularly when so much thought has been put in to crafting a believable antagonist.

Tomorrow Never Dies was the first James Bond movie made without any participation from longtime 007 producer Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, who passed away a few months after the release of Goldeneye, and the film is dedicated to his memory. I have visited Broccoli’s grave in Los Angeles, and I’ll just say that it certainly fits the spirit of showmanship that characterized the big man’s love of bringing entertainment to the masses. He was a man, who, as Bond puts it in this movie, certainly knew how to “give the people what they want,” and to whom every fan of James Bond owes a lifelong debt.

Tomorrow: Equal opportunity villainy.

Pro intelligentia et curiositas

July 18, 2011 ~ Graham Milne ~ 3 Comments

Textspeak frustrates me to no end. That there has been a word coined for a non-language bordering on illiteracy irks me even more than seeing “LOL” dropped into emails as punctuation. If I were an English teacher, I would take a well-deserved dollop of joy in assigning zeroes to any essays that crossed my desk featuring any combination of OMG, BRB, b4, Ur, ppl or ROTFLMAO. To wit: “OMG Shkspr’s Jlius Csr is SO LAME!!!! U agree?” I thought I was on the side of the angels until I read about one of the U.S. states deciding to no longer teach handwriting in its public schools. I guess the ppl thought that was SO LAME too. I get that it’s today’s version of shorthand. I understand that it helps you send messages quickly. I don’t understand why you’d want to sound like a squealing teenage girl woozy over her latest Bieber sighting, but there you are. The aim in any form of communication, spoken or written, should be to sound smart. If you can’t deliver your message without abbreviating words to the point of incomprehension, then a rewrite is required. Even on limited platforms like Twitter. Just try harder. You can get there.

The flourishing of textspeak is only a symptom of a larger issue. Both the triumph and the failing of the Internet is that it has become a leveler, in that anyone with access can share their opinions on all number of things. The problem is that not all opinions are equally valid, but the perception has arisen that they should be. “I’m entitled to my opinion,” whines the anonymous message board commenter. If I’m going in for a triple bypass, I want the opinion of the expert in cardiac surgery. I could not care less what the guy who watched a marathon of House reruns thinks.

This hasn’t been helped by a media so terrified of being accused of bias that they have to shove a knuckle-dragger onto the air to offer “the other side” every time a specialist is interviewed. If Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon last week, the news networks would give equal time to the crackpots who claim that it was all shot in a soundstage in Arizona. Jonas Salk would have to share the stage with a faith healer. Bill O’Reilly would insist to Albert Einstein that you can’t explain the universe anymore than you can explain the tides (because Bill doesn’t remember the moon and its gravitation, but I digress). I suppose things have gotten better in that a screaming match on Fox News would be a far merrier fate than that which befell Galileo, but I’d like to think that in 400 years we’ve come a little further than that.

Still, you could forgive this ignorance if behind it all there weren’t a cabal of very smart people looking to keep things that way. The easiest way to win an election is keep your voters dumb and angry. Rupert Murdoch wouldn’t have as much power as he does and be able to influence as many people if his audience was smart enough to know when they’re being played. As I’ve said before, you do have a choice when you’re standing at the supermarket counter to leave that tabloid in the rack where it belongs. But we’re too conditioned to want the fast-food version of the news rather than taking the time to plumb the depths of the story, to look past the talking points and examine the nuance. I have a feeling we would be so inclined were we a better educated, more curious people. But as I said, a lot of people are making a lot of money keeping us stupid so we’ll buy their crap, so I don’t see a mass effort to change this coming anytime soon, at least not from the top.

It has to start with us as individuals. We have to raise our own game and demand the best from ourselves. I won’t say I’m not upset at watching News Corp being hoisted on its petard over the phone-hacking scandal. But it was our fault that they got as far as they did – because we craved more and more cheap news hamburger. I guess my point is, when it comes to food for your mind, suck it up and go for the filet mignon. You are, after all, what you eat.