Monthly Archives: December 2004

Jerry Orbach

I just heard that actor Jerry Orbach died yesterday of prostate cancer. Damn shame, on so many levels. He was only 69, just a few years older than my mom, and his cancer was apparently discovered too late for treatment.

He was one of our finest character actors, a familiar face that has been appearing in stage, television, and film work for years. He appeared in 42nd Street and Chicago on Broadway, was the voice of Lumiere in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (the film, not the stage musical), and starred in TV’s Law and Order for twelve years. Despite all these roles, however, my first thought on hearing the news was that Baby’s dad from Dirty Dancing was gone.

Don’t laugh — I really like Dirty Dancing. It’s a highly underrated film, a solidly entertaining crowd-pleaser of a sort we don’t see much anymore. Orbach treated the material with dignity, taking a character that could have been one-dimensional and unlikable, and making him sympathetic. Like John Lithgow did in a similar role in Footloose, Orbach found the humanity in the role and made damn sure the audience understood that when the character behaves unreasonably, it’s only because his heart is breaking for his daughter. The film belongs to Patrick Swayze, of course, but Orbach is in many ways more impressive. While Swayze remains the same character at the end that he was to start with, Orbach’s character follows a definite arc: he’s a good man who eventually finds the strength to let his daughter become the woman she’s going to be. It was a great performance in a career filled with them.

I’m going to miss seeing Orbach’s hound-dog features, which could be cruel and imperious or gentle and kind, and everything in-between. The best, most detailed obituary I’ve found is from the New York Times. Be warned, you’ll have to register to see it…

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Tsunami

Hi, kids. Hope everyone had a good Christmas. Mine was pleasant, if pretty unremarkable overall.

I’ve been thinking this morning about the tragedy that hit Southeast Asia over the holiday weekend, the massive, earthquake-generated waves that battered so many countries and claimed so many lives. I know everyone is talking about this, and there really isn’t much to say in the wake of such death and destruction that hasn’t been said already. Nevertheless, I can’t help but think I’ve got to say something. This event is too big to let it pass without some sort of acknowledgement.

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Bennion’s Christmas Eve Movie List

My little family doesn’t have much in the way of Christmas traditions. There are a lot of reasons for this, most of them involving the dysfunctional dynamics of my extended family and one too many of what my friend Jack accurately calls “family hostage situations.” Without delving into the gory details, I’ll just say that circumstances prevented my folks and me from developing any annual rituals of our own, and now that I’m grown and haven’t yet produced any children for Mom and Dad to spoil, Christmas tends to be a pretty dull affair for the three of us. In recent years, December 25th has consisted mostly of my nuclear trio shuffling around the house and trying to think of some way to tap into the joyful zeitgeist everyone else seems to enjoy, while grumbling quietly to ourselves that there really isn’t much difference between Christmas and any other day off from work. (Like I said in the previous entry, I’m not very sentimental about this particular holiday.)

Even though I don’t share any particular tradition with my parents, however, there is something I personally do every year. Every Christmas Eve, I make it a point to sit down, have a glass of eggnog and watch a Christmas-themed movie. Sometimes one or both of my folks join in, sometimes Anne is there, but even if I’m the only one in the room, the lights go down and the DVD starts to spin right around the time little children are imagining they hear sleigh bells overhead.

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Seasons Readings

I’m not one to get all sentimental about Christmas. I tend to approach it with some degree of indifference, actually. I’m not religious, I don’t need the pressures brought on by this time of the year, and frankly I resent the time-creep that is erasing all sense of passing seasons because the retailers have got to get the decorations on sale before Halloween has even come. I don’t think I’ve reached full-fledged Scrooge levels of anti-Yuletide hostility yet, but Christmas for me simply isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I just don’t buy all the Hallmark-card saccharine.

I was therefore surprised by the depth of my reaction when I recently read a feature article about the World War I “Christmas truce.”

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Ten Cheesy Lines

My three loyal readers have probably noticed that there hasn’t been much action here on Simple Tricks over the past few weeks. Sorry, kids. Real Life dropped by for a visit and hasn’t seemed too interested in going home. I’ve been hamstrung by a million things to do in the offline world, not to mention a deep, all-consuming sense of blog-fatigue brought on by my extensive comments about the recent election season. In other words, after I finished all those rambling political dissertations, I just didn’t feel like writing for awhile.

Now, however, my Christmas shopping is mostly complete, I’m pretty much stuck indoors because the weather is miserably cold and gray, and I figure that any holiday cards I haven’t managed to send out yet probably won’t arrive before the big day anyhow, so there’s little sense in knocking myself out. Which means, since I have nothing else to distract me, that my thoughts are once again turning toward my little soap box here. Have no fear, though — I suspect you folks out there in InternetLand are as sick of reading my political opinions as I am of thinking them, so I’m going to do my best to avoid the subject for a while. For the next few weeks, nothing but pop culture and pointless nostalgia!

For our first subject in that vein, have you heard about the recently released list of the Ten Cheesiest Lines in Movie History?

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Final Wrap-up (And There Was Much Rejoicing…)

[Ed. Note: If you haven’t already, read the previous entry before this one.

In the last entry, I said that the Democrats need to figure out what our vision of the country and the future actually is. This is perhaps the biggest problem the Democratic Party has: what do we stand for, and what will we do if we’re elected? What are our core beliefs?

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Attitude Adjustments

I’d like to finish my ruminations on this long dark midnight of the liberal soul with my thoughts about what I believe the Democratic Party needs to do in order to regain some influence over our country’s trajectory. Not that my lone voice is going to make any difference, of course. The odds that anyone in a position to actually accomplish anything will ever see this little blog, let alone adopt the ideas expressed herein, are approximately equal to the chances of Ozzy Osbourne being invited to speak at the next LDS General Conference. Nevertheless, there is a whole galaxy of liberal blogs and message boards out there that have been buzzing on this same topic for the last six weeks, so perhaps our collective din will somehow become loud enough for the DNC to hear.

The most important thing, I think, is that all Democrats, from the most liberal whack-job hippies to the “Republican Lite” Clintonian centrists, need to make a major attitude adjustment. Several, in fact, starting with the way we on the left handle defeat. I disagree with Republicans on damn near every matter of policy and a whole lot of philosophical points, too, and I certainly despise their contemptuous attitude toward their defeated opponents. But they’re absolutely correct about one thing: we lost, and we need to get over it. That motto should be printed on giant banners and prominently displayed at every Democratic meeting until we get the point and start acting differently.

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Dean on Moral Values

Trying to disprove the old adage that there are no second acts in American life, former Vermont governor/presidential candidate Howard Dean is now apparently pursuing the chair of the Democratic National Committee, which, as I understand it, is essentially the core of the Democratic Party itself (somebody correct me if I’ve got that wrong). I was fairly dubious about the idea of Dean as President, but I think the idea of Dean as Chairman of the Party is pretty intriguing, especially after reading the transcript of a speech he delivered this afternoon at George Washington University. It’s a good speech, if you’re interested in such things, and a compelling vision of what the Democrats ought to be all about. (As it so happens, Governor Dean’s ideas about what the party needs to do correspond pretty heavily with my own. Make of that what you will.)

What really caught my eye, however, was a brief section in which Dean addresses the moral values issue I’ve been discussing here on Simple Tricks:

The pundits have said that this election was decided on the issue of moral values. I don’t believe that. It is a moral value to provide health care. It is a moral value to educate our young people. The sense of community that comes from full participation in our Democracy is a moral value. Honesty is a moral value.

 

If this election had been decided on moral values, Democrats would have won.

 

It is time for the Democratic Party to start framing the debate.

I don’t have anything more to add; I believe those ideas speak for themselves.

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Meyer on Moral Values

I’ve run across an interesting addendum to my previous entry, an article from the Washington Post called “The Anatomy of a Myth”. To view the article, you’ll need to register with the WaPo — which is free and painless — or you could try a generic login courtesy of bugmenot.com. If you’re at all interested in this “moral values” angle on the election, it’s well worth a look. The author, Dick Meyer, is the editorial director of CBSNews.com, and he provides an insider’s perspective into how this story evolved from a simple question into accepted fact, even though, in his opinion, it’s total bunk.

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Post-Mortem, Part II

[Ed. Note: Hiya, kids! Sorry it’s taken so long to get the rest of my election analysis up for public consumption, but Real Life sometimes pulls even me away from the keyboard, and besides, it’s taken me a while to figure out exactly what I want to say about all this “moral values” stuff. If you missed Part I of this post or you just want to refresh your memory, click here. As always, I invite you to skip this one if you’re tired of reading about politics or don’t have time for a lengthy rant.]

[Ed. Note 2: the language in this post is a little rough in spots, so consider yourself warned.]

The post-election discussion has focused mainly on John Kerry’s loss, which makes sense since the presidential race always gets the most media attention. However, Democrats also lost seats in both houses of Congress this year as well as in many state governments. (From what I understand, we apparently did fairly well at the local, grass-roots level. Go figure.) While I personally believe there are a number of reasons for these defeats, the pundits and bloggers have been looking for a one-size-fits-all explanation. The one they seem to have fixed upon is exit-poll data which suggest that “moral values” were the deciding factor for a significant number of people.

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