THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARANASSUS- THE GILLIAM FILM WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR

None of these are Heath Ledger, but each hits a pinch-hit homerun.

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS
Directed and Co-written by Terry Gilliam
2009, 122 mins.
Infinity Features Entertainment

* * * * *

At last! The Terry Gilliam movie we’ve been waiting for. Past projects from the former Monty Python cartoonist such as Brazil and The Fisher King have shown flashes of brilliance accompanied by dollops of sloppiness and structural anarchy. Quite a few—including The Brothers Grimm (2005), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), and Jabberwocky (1977)—are the movie equivalent of a train wreck. Not this time. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a work of genius that’s more creative, thought-provoking, and inventive than anything you’ll see in the overrated Avatar.

Gilliam is (in)famous for having disaster strike on his sets, and this film is no exception. It co-stars Heath Ledger, who died before filming was finished. (In addition, producer Bill Vince died a week after filming ended and Gilliam was struck by a car and suffered a cracked vertebra!) Ledger’s death necessitated radical rewriting and recasting. Although the circumstances requiring this are sad, Ledger would doubtless have been pleased by the finished product.

Terry Gilliam films are seldom constrained by tight plots. The story line of Imaginarium is pretty much a pastiche of Faust and Alice in Wonderland on acid. Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), the title character, gambles with the Devil/Mr. Nick (Tom Waits). Parnassus—the name evokes the home of Apollo and the Muses—is a benevolent soul who wishes to impart Apollonian wisdom to the world and relieve suffering. Like the Greek god, however, he has character flaws, not the least of which is that he shares Nick’s love of gambling. Even when Parnassus wins, Nick is generally more clever, as when Parnassus extracts victory in the form of immortality but forgets to attach eternal youth to the deal. Centuries later—after a long stint as a holy man instructing devotees—Parnassus bargains for temporary youth when he falls in love with a comely lass. His wife dies giving birth to their lovechild, Valentina (Lily Cole), and the deadline for payment is fast approaching. If Parnassus doesn’t win five souls to his cause before Nick claims five, the latter claims Valentina’s soul upon her sixteenth birthday.

This is more of a contest than one might imagine. Gilliam presents a post-belief 21st century world in which people are skeptical of both holy men and devils. Parnassus is a tottering old man traveling in a ramshackle horse-drawn cart that opens into a stage for a show that’s what you’d get if you crossed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with a carnival sideshow. Valentina sits virginally upon the stage, the love-struck Anton (Andrew Garfield) dresses as Mercury and performs a lame juggling act, and Parnassus does cheap mind-reading tricks for tips tossed by passersby. The only truly wise person in the troupe is Percy (Verne Troyer), a dwarf confidant to Parnassus. But there is a secret to the show. The “imaginarium” flogged in the come-on is real—a mirror through which one can pass into a dream world where id meets superego and both salvation and damnation are possible.

Things are bad enough for Parnassus and they get worse when Valentina and Percy cut down a hanging man, Tony (Heath Ledger), from London Bridge and revive him. Is Tony the awaited savior, or one of Nick’s minions? Watch the film to find out and be prepared to take a wild ride through your own imaginarium. Gilliam was able to enlist the late Ledger’s friends—Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell—to finish his parts and did so without resorting to cheap costuming. Because everyone inside the imaginarium has a personally tailored vision, Tony doesn’t *have* to look the same in every scene; he merely has to be believable in the moment.

This film is delicious fun on every level. There are echoes of old Python gags—such as dancing policemen in hose and heels—wonderful special effects, and terrific acting. Each of the Tonys is wonderful, with special kudos to Depp’s performance as the most egocentric of the four. Cole is a fresh new face whose desirability is enhanced by her pre-Raphaelite beauty, Troyer is a pussycat one moment and a tiger the next, and Plummer thunders and blunders across the screen as if he’s Ian McKellen as a Bowery-issue Gandalf. Best of all is Tom Waits as Mr. Nick, a wise Devil who knows that pursuit is more pleasurable than possession, and that the game is more fun than the final outcome. Amen to that. We were so engrossed in this film that it we hated to see it end.

BROKEN EMBRACES: AUTEUR GOES ORDINARY

Penelope Hepburn?

BROKEN EMBRACES
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar
2009, 127 mins., R (nudity, drug usage)
El Deseo S.A.
In Spanish with English subtitles
* * ½

Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar is one of the most important and challenging directors of the past forty years. As such, he has made several certifiable masterpieces, including: Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), High Heels (1991), Talk to Her (2002), and Volver (2006). He’s also made several films with interesting ideas that misfired such as: Matador (1986), Kika (1994), All About My Mother (1999), and Bad Education (2004), the last of which was so bad I almost swore off Almodóvar films. With Broken Embraces, however, Almodóvar gives us something he’s never done before: a film that’s totally ordinary, clichéd, and predictable. It’s neither good nor bad, merely inconsequential. It’s (perhaps) worth seeing if you’ve nothing better to do, but it certainly won’t make you think of Almodóvar as an auteur.

By Almodóvar standards, Broken Embraces has a straightforward narrative. We are introduced to a former filmmaker, Mateo Blanco, who is now a blind writer calling himself Harry Caine (Lluis Homar). He is doted upon by his moonstruck agent, Judit (Blanca Portillo), and her young adult son, Diego (Tamar Novar). When Caine demands that Ray X, a burgeoning director, leave his apartment after sharing his script idea, we begin to learn how Blanco became Caine. From this point on we move back and forth between the present and 1992, where we meet Lena (Penélope Cruz), a former prostitute trying to go straight who is forced by her father’s staggering medical bills to become the mistress of her elderly employer, the wealthy industrialist, Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez). When Lena decides she wants to be an actress and auditions for Blanco, a classic triad develops. Martel establishes himself as the film’s producer, sends his son to the set to videotape everything he sees, and hires a lip reader to decipher conversations between Lena and Blanco. You can probably write the rest of the script from this. We see everything developing from a mile away, including the affair between Blanco and Lena, the relationship between Blanco and Judit, and the identities of both Diego and Ray X. The only real mysteries are how Mateo/Harry became blind and the whereabouts of Lena, and you could probably come up with explanations that are at least as plausible as what Almodóvar gives us.

There is some very nice camera work, including a few stunning aerial shots of a lonely costal highway, but it’s not in the service of much. The actors do a credible job throughout and Cruz has the toughest job. She has to play a marginally competent comedic actress in a star-crossed production. She’s dressed and coiffed to look like Audrey Hepburn and the film-within-a-film has the time warp quality of a 1950s French farce rather than the 1990s. Cruz is fine in this role, and she’s certainly delectable enough to be believable as the mistress of two powerful men, but it’s just not all that interesting watching Cruz being semi-competent. Woman caught between two powerful men, jealousy, revenge, a film-within-a-film, who sired whom…. all of this is very conventional stuff. Almodóvar doesn’t do a bad job with any of it, but it’s no better than what a novice would do. Who goes to an Almodóvar film to see the pedestrian?

In one of the film’s subplots, Martel exacts revenge while Mateo and Lena are off on a tryst. As producer, Martel rushes Mateo’s film into release by assembling the worst cuts of each scene, a ploy Mateo and Lena discover from a newspaper review deriding the film as a disaster. As Broken Embraces closes, Mateo is busy reassembling that film from recently surfaced footage. No surprise—the bad comedy is in the process of becoming a funny one. It’s hard not to see this is a metaphor for Broken Embraces. Surely a much sharper film must reside in Almodóvar’s vault.

Eagle Vs. Shark Video Review

Eagle vs. Shark
Directed and written by Taika Waititi
New Zealand Film Commission, 2007
88 mins.

* * *

New Zealand director Taika Waititi is better known to North Americans as Taika Cohen, the director of the offbeat Flight of the Conchords videos. (He is half Maori and half Jewish.) His 2007 feature film Eagle vs. Shark raised eyebrows at several independent film festivals, won a couple of awards, and was a finalist for the grand prize at Sundance. It didn’t win the latter and we think we know why; it’s simply too weird to evaluate objectively. We found ourselves enjoying this offbeat comedy and would recommend you give it a try, but we also suggest you have a backup film. It’s like licorice ice cream—you’ll either love it or hate it.

There are several reasons to see it. It takes us inside lifestyles that are unlike those of most of us, it treats us to surrealistic flashes of humor, and it’s simply unlike anything Hollywood would ever dream of green lighting. Describing the film is hard, but here goes.

First of all, think of the Wechsler intelligence scale. People with IQs between 80 and 90 are classified as “dull normal.” Most of the characters in this film are decidedly on the “dull” range of the spectrum; they are those often glibly labeled as “losers” by those with greater mental and economic resources (and the ones we picked on in high school). Lily (the angular Loren Holloway) is a hard-luck counter clerk at a fast-food joint called Meaty Boy Burger, a superb send-up of McDonalds-style gut-buster menus. She lives with her brother Damon, who raised her when their parents died, and who ekes out a marginal living as a cartoonist and amuses others with horribly inept impressions of celebrities that poor Lily thinks are spot-on. Lily has a heart of gold, but she’s just bad at everything she does… guitar, poetry, make-up, socializing…. In fact, she’s not even competent enough to keep her job at Meaty Boy. Her saving graces are her goodness and that she has enough sense to realize that the best she’s likely to do is hook up with someone who is her intellectual equal.

Enter Jarrod, who lacks Lily’s self-awareness. He’s vaguely handsome, but most women won’t give him a second look because he’s as dumb as a post. He’s a dweeb who thinks he’s out-grown childhood dorkiness and harbors a revenge fantasy against those who mistreated him in the past. He sells video games, which is pretty much the top of his calling, though he props himself up by surrounding himself with mates who are even duller than he. As the king of this roost—one meaning of the eagle in the film’s title—Jarrod invents a back story of a dead mother, a brother who died in an athletic competition, and a fail-safe plan to exact revenge on past tormenters. His veneer of coolness is hair-thin; his only real talent lies in playing video games.

Jarrod and Lily connect at a theme party where everyone is dressed as their favorite animals. You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to deconstruct the symbolism of Lily’s shark and Jarrod’s eagle costumes. They are projections of what they want to be. Lily is really a milquetoast sardine who gets gobbled by real-life sharks, and Jarrod is a very ordinary sparrow—an awkward fledgling at that. After Lily meets Jarrod in the video game final of the party and deliberately throws the match, the two end up in bed together in one of the more bizarre and funny seduction scenes of recent memory. The two then make their way to Jarrod’s hometown, where Jarrod plans to fight his boyhood nemesis and claim his manhood. We’ll not reveal more except to say that Jarrod hasn’t been on the up-and-up about his family or his friends back home. Be prepared to meet an unforgettable and weird cast of characters. The plot—such as it is—revolves around the question of whether Jarrod will arrive at Lily’s realistic sense of self and stay with her.

We admired this film for its grit. There’s no Hollywood glamour here. For these characters, a person who can actually keep a job is successful, and one flush enough to be able to rent a car is rich. It challenges us to rethink what we mean by happiness. Is it a collection of material objects, a satisfying career, or merely the ability to accept who you are and make the best of it? Whether this film is your cup of tea will depend on your tolerance for occasionally amateurish filmmaking, whether you find Waititi’s animation sequences poignant or mawkish, and if you’ve got the patience to look beyond awkward surfaces. The more we thought of it, the better it seemed, but—as we said—have a backup plan just in case.

A SINGLE MAN IS A MARVEL

A Single Man
Directed and Written by Tom Ford
Artina Films, 2009, 99 mins.
R for gay themes and partial nudity

* * * * *

If you planned to end it all, how would you spend your last day? That’s the simple premise of A Single Man, though there’s nothing simplistic about how the film’s protagonist, George Falconer (Colin Firth), approaches what he hopes will be his swan song to life.

If your take on being gay in America is Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, A Single Man may be too sensual and too multifaceted for your taste. If, on the other hand, you want to get a sense of life in the closet in the days before Stonewall and Harvey Milk, A Single Man is a fine starting point. It’s November, 1962­—just a month after the Cuban Missile Crisis—and George Falconer is a respected English professor at a university somewhere in Los Angeles. Outwardly George has a lot going for him. He drives a flashy car, lives in a book-filled but meticulously clean architect-designed house, and is considered brilliant by his colleagues. Sure he’s a tad eccentric, as befits an Englishman in California, but most think he's as serious as the tailored suits, dry-cleaned white shirts, and heavy black-framed glasses that are his daily uniform.

Very few know that George is gay. It’s a secret known only to intimates, such as his longtime friend and former lover, Charlotte, though immediate neighbors have their suspicions. Charlotte—known affectionately as Charley—is deliciously played as a boozy floozy by Julianne Moore. She is a fellow Londoner who made her way to California via a bad marriage and now wastes her days amidst an empty upscale house and drained gin bottles. Moore has a smallish part, but she’s fabulous in it. She’s a woman on the verge in heavy eye shadow slathered on in a losing battle to mask aging. Physically she walks a wobbly line between desirable and past-its-sell-by-date. She makes no secret of the fact that she’s more than willing to fill George’s void.

And what a void it is. His lover of sixteen years, Jim, was killed in a car crash eight months earlier and George has been in a sleepwalker’s daze ever since. He’s deeply pained and totally drained. As he contemplates his future without Jim, all he can conjure is the past. He’s like the clueless students to whom he vainly tries to teach an Aldous Huxley novel--only tangentially in the moment. So why go on?

There are parallels to A Christmas Carol as George wends his way through what might be his last day on earth. He’s haunted by several ghosts of his past (Charley and vivid memories of Jim), considers a present liaison in the form of a handsome Spanish-speaker—an echo of the missile crisis?—and even contemplates whether there might be a future in hooking up with Kenny Potter (Nicholas Hoult), a blue-eyed student who seems to be flirting with him. No spoilers here—see the film to see how this resolves.

A few things to look for: First of all, there is Tom Ford’s very sharp direction. He enhances George’s numbness by shooting each sequence as if it’s that semi-conscious moment between dreaming and full awakening. He extends it to all aspects of the film, including insightful pan shots of students who seem to be waiting for something—anything—to happen. Kenny’s (perhaps) girlfriend, the blank-faced Alva (Paulette Lamori), is walking ennui, a faux beatnik in a world that scarcely remembers the Beats. Even the terror of Cuba is receding.

All of the performances are worthy of watching closely. Moore and Firth have deservedly won awards at several film festivals. Firth is magnificent and does a turn that’s the equivalent of a frog in a pan of water being slowly heated. There are no histrionics to get in the way of pathos, and no out-of-character moments of blinding revelation to dissolve into triteness. Nor is he afraid to play gay; unlike mainstream studio productions, the men in this film do kiss—passionately—and seductions look like seductions.

Finally, check out this movie as a time capsule. Ford mostly gets 1962 right. It’s easy to forget that the 1960s don’t really get cranked up until after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963; the early '60s were a liminal moment in which it was clear that one set of standards was passing, but no one had much of a handle on what was coming next. This was especially the case for gay men. To put in perspective, Smith College dismissed three gay profs in 1960, and the American Psychiatric Association still classified homosexuality as a mental illness. The George Falconers of the world could have only dreamed of Stonewall. But don’t take my word for it; try the eponymous Christopher Isherwood novel upon which this film’s script is based. Isherwood’s own life as a gay man has been chronicled in Chris & Don: A Love Story. If you’ve not seen that independent gem, rent it after seeing A Single Man.

PS--Don't confuse this film with the Coen brothers' boring A Simple Man.

THE ROAD IS A PATCHY FILM

You might want to read the book and skip the film.

The Road
111 mins
Dir: John Hillcoat

* *


This is the third book of Cormac McCarthy’s to be filmed after All The Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men-- neither of which did either book full justice. Here we go again then with more of the same – a respectful adaptation of a terrifying post-apocalyptic novel with the terrifying bits chopped out. Vigo Mortensen plays a nameless man crossing a ravaged Southern U.S. landscape with his ten-year-old son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) after an unspecified environmental catastrophe has destroyed mostly everything - except for the ‘bad guys’ whom they're trying to avoid. Filmed in near monochrome (the only real color is when Mortensen recalls his past life) and with far too much emphasis on ambient noise, conversations are often muffled and imprecise. McCarthy’s book detailed with sickening precision the idea and execution of cannibalism in such a torturous existence. The film swerves away from this aspect, merely hinting at the possibilities and horror. Instead it concentrates almost entirely on the father/son relationship and its inevitable disintegration. Time and again they come across abandoned houses with secrets held inside. In one, a basement is full of naked prisoners, presumably being held as a future food source. When the house's occupants appear it makes for the only really disturbing scene in the film. Of course father and son escape; there’s a film to complete here!

The final scene is the main cop out. It’s as if the filmmakers suddenly realized they’d run out of money and just slapped on a contrived ending. The finish is not dissimilar to the book, but it lacks the novel’s philosophical energy and exploration. The idea that life may be renewing itself again was perfectly discussed by McCarthy, but here it’s dismissed in a two-minute scene of such contrivance that it spoiled what fragile momentum the film had built.

I can’t share the adulation and praise this film has gathered. It’s acted well, there is some effective cinematography (apparently some filming was done in New Orleans), and the plight of father and son and the occasional person they meet is well detailed, but it lacks the effective horror of the novel. The film would be better served as a TV serial, a form from which it borrows stylistically.

Lloyd Sellus

PLUTOCRACY HIDES BEHIND JUDICIAL ROBES

Here’s a word you should add to your working vocabulary: plutocracy. It means rule by the rich and it’s exactly what the United States of America has just officially become. Unless something changes fast, future scholars will look back upon January 21, 2010 as the day democracy was murdered by the U.S. Supreme Court.

For those of you asleep at the wheel—most Americans, or the streets would have been filled with protesters—the U.S. Supreme Court by its usual 5-4 vote, (with right-wing plutocrats making up the majority) ruled unconstitutional a sixty-three-year-old law that restricted the amount of money that corporations, unions, and advocacy unions can spend on federal elections. That’s right; there is absolutely no limit now. If Fox News wants to spend a billion dollars to convince you that Sarah Palin is presidential timber instead an airheaded jerk, it can do so. And if you think that the electorate is smart enough to see through such obvious attempts to buy votes, you’ve spent way too much time in the sun smoking illegal substances.

As plutocrats generally do, the rightwing Supremes tried to cover their ruling with a blanket of benevolence. The first amendment protection of free speech, they claimed, extends to campaign spending. Besides, advocacy groups such as labor unions are also free from restraint so the ruling is fair to all concerned. Where to start with what’s wrong with this logic?

First, it makes mockery of the Bill of Rights, a document originally drawn to prevent the masses from being run over roughshod by elites, not the other way around. Under prevailing Orwellian Newspeak, the people are somehow or other served by entrusting the protection of free speech to those very elites. We saw yesterday the culmination of more than a century of bad rulings in which courts have misused the 14th amendment to define corporate enterprises as individuals. Great stuff, really; if an inanimate business shell is legally a person, flesh-and-blood plutocrats can fleece the populace in secret.


Second, the ruling rests upon a classic false premise, a lie so enormous that the mind boggles over the amorality of judges who can utter it with a straight face. One can only believe that the ruling is fair to all if one believes that every group has equal access to resources. It’s never been true that labor unions competed on an equal basis with Corporate America and it’s certainly not true today. A mere 14% of Americans belong to unions; by my math reckoning that gives CorpAm a nearly 4:1 outreach advantage. If we parse it further, we find that CorpAm has an even greater leg up in what this really all about: money. Big Labor is one of the biggest whoppers ever invented. The AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation in America, has total assets of around $83 million dollars. Impressive, yes? Chicken feed! J.P. Morgan Chase alone has assets of two trillion dollars. News Corporation, the entity that owns Fox, had assets of over $53 billion. That gives Fox a potential influence advantage that’s 638 times greater than that of the AFL-CIO.


Third, it’s a fantasy worthy of Lewis Carroll to think that any progressive group in America has access to influence that’s even marginally comparable to that of CorpAm. The richest 20% of Americans already own more than three-fourths of *everything*--stocks, bonds, property, money, services, and media outlets. Those in the bottom quarter have access to less than three percent of America’s wealth. Even if they could convince everyone else to join forces against the power of elites, they’re still at a 3:1 asset disadvantage. Big Labor? As I said, it’s a myth and an increasingly toothless one at that. The AFL-CIO can’t even convince its own rank and file how to vote let alone the rest of the nation. (And most of its constituent unions haven’t had an original idea since the 1930s, where many of them live psychically.)


Here’s what we’ll see unless Americans act now to stop this madness. You can kiss goodbye major parts of the Bill of Rights. Well-heeled rightwing heels will spend tens of millions to elect officials who will take away reproductive freedoms, the right to sue corporations, privacy rights, freedom of association, sexual preference protections, civil rights guarantees, affirmative action, banking regulation, and environmental laws. The only amendment that will be sacrosanct will be the second. Look also for major assaults on the few remaining public programs: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education, and the postal service. I sincerely doubt that most anti-poverty programs will survive in useful form, or that Barack Obama will win a second term.


It may already be too late, but Americans need to rise up against plutocracy. Demand that your Congressional representatives, whatever party they may be, reestablish the limits just stricken by the courts. A usual first step would be a hard spending cap on how much can be spent in total during elections, an end-around maneuver of the court ruling. If the United States followed the path of other Western democracies, we could limit both spending and the campaign season. If a Congressional race was restricted to twelve weeks, for example, and no candidate could spend more than half a million dollars, the playing field would level and both candidates and voters would be forced to focus more on issues. This would create an influence balance between plutocrats and (small “d”) democrats.


Need more proof that matters are out of hand? It cost $1.6 billion to elect a president in 2008 and all we got out of it was an old crank losing to a guy whose oratory exceeds his ability. This is not a Democrat versus Republican issue; it's one that dtermines which people have a voice, all of them or just those with obscene wealth. Let’s make no mistake: democracy has one foot in the grave and the other is poised to step. We must act now or the plutocrats have won.

HEARTLESS SEEK ANOTHER HANDOUT

Time again for the GOP tax-cut dance. Think I'll sit this one out.

If American politics was like The Wizard of Oz, President Obama would be pounding the yellow brick road in pursuit of courage, his Democratic allies would be seeking a brain, and his Republican opposition would be in severe need of a heart. I’ve been harping on the Democrats, but let me turn my attention to the biggest band of selfish piggies on the planet: the Republican Party.

As this post goes live, Massachusetts voters are deciding whether to turn the late Ted Kennedy's Senate seat over to a Republican. I can understand how people are disenchanted with the Democrats, but anyone whose income doesn’t hit at least seven figures needs to join the parade for a brain if they think that the GOP cares a damn about them. The Republicans are like a broken talking doll reduced to one phrase: “tax cuts.” If you told the GOP leadership that your spouse left you, your kid was starving, and that you had terminal liver cancer they’d tell you that tax cuts would fix everything.

Their latest fear du jour is their attack on President Obama’s “Jobs for Main Street” stimulus package. They hate it for the same reason they hate every government program: if the government spends money, that’s less they can demand be returned to the rich as tax cuts. “Why don’t we just put everyone in the United States on the federal government payroll and call it a day?” quipped California Representative Jerry Lewis. Is he the comedian of the same name? His state has unemployment of over 12% for heaven’s sake! For the record, just 7.3% of Americans work for the feds, about half of whom work in state or local government and another 20% of whom get a check from the employer Republicans never criticize: the U.S. military (on whom, more in a moment).

If you think Lewis is an idiot—and he is—check out this logic from Lawrence Lindsey, one of George W. Bush's former economic advisors. (That resume alone ought to disqualify him as an authoritative source.) The new Obama plan contains tax credits for small businesses. Lindsey’s remark: “Small business people have too much to do just to keep their businesses afloat to try to figure out some fancy, complex credit.” Presumably Big Business—the ones who fill the GOP coffers—have an army of lawyers who aren’t busy and can figure out how to take advantage of the GOP’s tax-cutting plan. I suggest we take the digging implement from one of Obama's shovel-ready projects and smack this moron on his thick head with it.

The GOP attack on both the proposed and past stimulus packages rests on two very big lies: that the first one didn’t work, hence the second one won’t either; and that government wastes money on undeserving programs when tax cuts for the rich are the real answer. Was some money in the first package wasted? Without a doubt. Here in Massachusetts some money earmarked for education went to defer a rise in student fees rather than program creation. We all know that rich bankers—the same people the GOP would be happy to reward—drifted happily to the ground courtesy of purloined golden parachutes. However, before you criticize the stimulus too loudly take a good look around. Yes, we have ten percent unemployment, but how many signs do you see that read “Project Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act?”

The very biggest Big Lie is that which lies at the heart of tax cut calls. Do any of us like taxes? Nope! But until someone can figure out how we can pay for schools, cops, fire fighters, roads, social programs, and the military without them, why not let those who’ve benefitted the most from American opportunity pay the highest burden? Of course, Republicans are quick to claim that we can give “everyone” a break if we just cut reckless government spending. Horse manure! They don’t mean everyone; they only mean the rich. Welfare is often a cost-cutting target, even though it consumes a mere 2% of the federal budget (down from more than twice that in 1994, when Bill Clinton, not Ronald Reagan, sliced it). There are thirty-four million poor Americans, roughly one of every fourteen citizens. Please don’t hand me any of that Reagan-era mythology about able-bodied welfare cheats. My response to that is two-fold: if you know one and haven’t turned them in, you’re an accessory to a crime; and don’t preach self-reliance until you know what you’re talking about. Five million kids are on welfare and another 1.5 million recipients are over the age of sixty-five. Unless you’re absolutely comfortable with the idea of over 6.5 million of our most vulnerable citizens starving to death in public, keep your nostrums in check. The bulk of the rest of welfare recipients: mothers with dependent children. Don’t criticize them either unless you’re willing to part with your own $2,400 per child yearly tax credit!

So let’s get to the biggest welfare cheats: the Pentagon. Even if every single person in the entire history of the welfare program from 1964 on was a fraud, we’ve shelled out less on them than the Pentagon spends every two years. And don’t tell me that Republican tax cuts will help anyone other than the already-wealthy and the military-industrial complex. When Reagan pulled this crap, just 1700 companies got 80% of all corporate tax cuts; they created a whopping 4% of new jobs in the 1980s. (The bulk was created by the very small businesses that Lindsey doesn’t think needs a tax credit!) Ninety percent of Reagan’s tax cuts for individuals went to the richest one percent. Bush wasn’t quite as bad, but pretty close: more than half of the savings went to the richest five percent. His tax cuts, by the way, cost more than twice as much as a single-payer health care plan would cost.

I’m no lover of the Democratic Party and am on record as saying we need a viable third (and fourth) party, but let us not kid ourselves into thinking that Republican heartlessness is the antidote to Democratic stupidity. My advice is that the next time you hear the GOP mantra “tax cut” you respond with one of your own: “Oink! Oink! Oink!”