Dear Joel,
The great thing about the “Breakfast Table” is that we can collude to ignore the World Bank entirely, if we want to. (And I think we both know how a vote on this would go.) This is our table, and if we both turn first to the metro section or to the Wall Street Journal’s great A-head on why Paraguay venerates Rutherford B. Hayes–there’s even a national holiday–well, that’s just what makes America great.
I have no wisdom about Elián. It’s seemed to me all along like a theatrical confrontation between two systems of values: not communism and democracy, but the world view of people who think lives are determined by the vast forms of social organization that surround them (growing up under Castro will forever warp Elián’s life) vs. the worldview of those who feel that we’re made by our immediate surroundings–family, home, the particular way the lights of passing cars hit the ceiling of your bedroom when they climb the hill in front of your house. (Elián needs his dad and a return, as much as possible, to obscure boyhood.) If forced to choose, I’m heartily with the second camp. But of course in normal life these are not seen as fixed, eternally opposed propositions.
It seems very appropriate (speaking of black and white) that Fail Safe aired as the Elián drama is reaching its crisis. I watched every minute, because I love the original movie beyond reason. I suspect I first saw it when I was about 13, which is the perfect age to have it strike you as the last word in philosophical depth. It’s a total mystery why they bothered to make it again (maybe George Clooney saw the original when he was 13?), since its total lack of irony only looks embarrassing (or–what’s the word?–freakish) now, whereas in the early ‘60s they couldn’t help themselves. You can’t make new ‘60s camp, can you? That its new makers took it very seriously was indicated by the one plot change they made from the original. In the first version, as the patriotic bomber pilot is streaking toward Moscow with his mistaken orders to immolate the city, the U.S. military brings his wife in to beg him, over the radio, to stand down. (Of course he ignores her, as he has been trained to do, because it could be a trick from those crafty Russkies.) In last night’s version, the wife is dead and it’s the pilot’s 10-year-old boy who begs him not to carry out his mission. You know a network is in earnest when it drags in a little kid–another clue to why Elián is in the mess he’s in.
My favorite story of the week so far is the New York Times’ heavy-breathing four-parter about “rampage killers,” which started yesterday. It’s a peachy example of investigative journalism that chews more than it bites off–elaborately computer-assisted, with two-color graphics charting every spree killing in the last several years. The paper of record did an exhaustive analysis of what distinguishes these killers, and do you know what they came up with so far? People who mow down strangers with semiautomatic weapons are nuts! Yes! You heard it here first. Over and over the poor reporters plug in tortuously written paragraphs about how their findings fly in the face of what we all believe about spree killers. But it turns out that … many of these killers showed earlier signs of trouble.
It is not known whether they made heavy use of the caps-lock key, Joel, but I’m betting the answer is yes.
Best,
Marjorie
