Train the Dragon

2010_3_27 How to Train a Dragon
On Thursday Kaia, who is off from work this week, begged me to go to a kid’s movie with her and Connor on Friday. I am not too keen on kid’s movies, but after looking at a trailer online of How to Train a Dragon I decided to say I would accompany her and the boy to the film. Kaia loaded up with all kinds of goodies to take in to the movie, candy, crackers, popcorn, and bottle water for me, milk for Connor, and a Diet Coke for her. Connor was surprisingly quiet during the movie, seeming more interested in his treats than what was on the screen. Apparently, he is more a super-hero kind of fan, and not so much into dragons. As for my response to the film, well, I reacted like an artist: I thought the images were artfully represented that the story was simple and appealing. I thought the two Scottish actors with their thick brogue were interesting sounding Vikings. (The actors were Gerard Butler and Craig Ferguson.) The boy-hero in the tale had a funny name: Hiccup. His father, a ridiculously huge figure with a curled and braided red beard, was waiting for his scrawny toothpick thin son to slay a dragon for in Viking society that’s how a boy becomes a man and proud Viking. But Hiccup is a different sort. Unbeknownst to his father he has become close to a black purring dragon whose tail was injured and he fixed it, thus gaining the confidence and affection of the beast. He called his dragon Toothless. So when his father finds out he has a pet dragon he dismisses the boy as hopeless. But he proves useful when the tribe goes after a Great Beast that lives inside a fiery mountain, as Hiccup and his friends, who also ride dragons, outwit the Great Dragon and save the day, thus Hiccup’s true worth becomes visible to his father and everyone else. Hiccup even gets the girl who even gives him a kiss—just a peck, mind you, as this is a kid’s movies. I was so pleased by the tale I told Kaia I’d more inclined to go again to an animated kid’s movie if she asked me. She was happy to hear that. I know she wants me to develop more of a relationship with Connor.
I spent a couple of hours yesterday morning writing a letter to Hal Hoverland. Actually, I wrote for the blog and just framed it as a letter to a friend. It was in regard the post-HCB climate, more specifically, the reaction on the far right. But I had a problem: I could not access my blog, another causality of my computer crashing two weeks ago. I called Nasima for help. She got me in via my Gmail account and then, once I was in, I bookmarked the Dashboard and HT, which is how I got in before the crash. Then I discovered that I had also lost Hal’s e-mail address, but fortunately in this case, Suzie had it. Op-ed writer for the NYT, Charles Blow, also had a column about the post-HCB climate on the far right. It was a similar assessment too. He saw the reaction on the far right as an act of desperation, a feeling summed up in their unanimous cry of let’s “take the country back.” Blow thinks that was a hopeless wish because the country has changed and won’t be going back to the way it was when conservatism was dominant. He said the new leadership of a Black president (Barack Obama), and a woman (Nancy Pelosi), a gay man (Barney Frank), and a Jew (Anthony Weiner) was enough to drive the good ole boy’s club crazy. The Tea Party movement was now the base of the Republican Party and they must abide their wishes and to an extent ape their style and decisions, even if they are obscene and violent. They have to ride their rage and try to funnel it, which is going to difficult. Blow quotes a poll that shows who the Tea Party people are: they are predominately white, Christian evangelicals, less educated, and love Sarah Palin. Incidentally, Palin was in Tucson yesterday in support of John McCain’s primary race against J. D. Hayworth, who’s proving to be a formidable opponent. Today she is in Searchlight, Nevada, bad-mouthing Harry Reid in his hometown. In Tucson she was wearing this fancy black biker’s jacket, kind of unusual on the campaign trail. Maybe she is trying to appeal to the Hell’s Angels.
I copied part of a piece by Tony Blakely, the right wing intellectual who has some standing among thoughtful conservatives. As he sees it HCB is a reversal of market capitalism, that is, from now on the government will tell the insurance companies what they can charge, rather than the charge being based on actuarial risk; and in addition this regulation of business is regulation to the extent “that it constitutes effective ownership of the insurance company.” He goes on to say, rather oddly I think, that the new taxes brought on by HCB will allow our economy “to fund the deathbeds of the destitute.” How he came to that conclusion is beyond me. Socialized health care and other “intrusions” into our market based economy, when combined with the nationalization of GM and Chrysler, the partial nationalization of the banks, AIG, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the stimulus package, TARP, and the $10 trillion debt, means “the center of gravity of our economy” has moved “from the private sector to the public sector.” Blakely sees this switch of emphasis as “the yoke of socialism upon our necks.”
From Blakely’s perspective what Congress did last weekend was contrary to “the unambiguous will of the majority” of our citizens. He writes that he looks forward to next November when that self-same majority will reverse the situation once again, this time back to the way it was before Congress forced the socialization of health care delivery system and other central-government intrusions on the “freedom-loving majority.” (One thing Blakely doesn’t consider is the fact Obama will still be president and would veto any effort to repeal HCB.) If perchance that doesn’t come about, Blakely, in a veiled threat, said the change would have to come in less peaceful ways.