Don't lose hope.

Sometimes, if you're looking for wisdom, the best thing to do is turn to a children's story.

DVD cover art, used without permission

This year is the 40th anniversary of the release of The NeverEnding Story, a fantasy film based on a children's book. In honor of the anniversary, the movie, with its 1980s vintage special effects intact, is having a limited theatrical release. I went to see it today.

It's not the first time I've seen it -- not by a long shot. The NeverEnding Story was in heavy rotation in our house when my daughters were small. I encouraged them to watch it because I wanted my kids to be readers and in a way, reading is the star of the film.

The main character is Bastian, a boy who has recently lost his mother (the implication is that she's dead). He's being bullied at school, and his father isn't much use. On the run from the bullies, Bastian takes refuge in a bookshop, where the owner is reading an intriguing-looking book. The owner tells him it's not safe for Bastian to read it, then steps away. So of course Bastian pinches the book (he leaves a note saying he'll bring it back, bless his heart) and races off to school. But he doesn't go to class. Instead, he runs up to the attic, which is appropriately dusty and creepy, makes himself comfy on an old gym mat, and begins to read.

(These aren't spoilers. The movie's been out for 40 years, for crying out loud.)

The land in the book, Fantasia, is being devoured by a mysterious menace called the Nothing. The people turn to the Childlike Empress, their ruler, but she is near death. Still, she summons a great warrior named Atreyu and charges him to find a cure for her illness, which will also stop the Nothing.

Atreyu turns out to be very young -- merely a boy -- but brave and stout of heart. He accepts the Empress's charge and goes off adventuring. In his search for the cure, Atreyu loses everything. And at the very last, he must confront a vile, wolflike creature named G'mork.

G'mork explains a lot more to Atreyu than anyone else has so far. The creature says that the Nothing is "like a despair", and it has been growing stronger because "people have begun to lose their hopes and forget their dreams." The wolf goes on to say that "people who have no hopes are easy to control, and whoever has control has the power!"

Atreyu then kills the creature and, with his trusty luck dragon, Falkor, returns to the Empress to tell her that he has failed in his quest. 

But he hasn't, she explains. His real mission was to find a human boy, who is the only one who actually has the power to save Fantasia -- and who has been with Atreyu on his adventures, reading them, all along.

Bastian can't believe that the characters in the book know about him and are expecting him to save them. But finally, he does what the Empress asks and gives her a new name: his mother's -- Moon Child. And then he imagines Fantasia all put back the way it was before the Nothing, and it is.

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It's been a rough day for those of us who wanted to see President Biden win a second term. He announced today that he's ending his campaign, endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, and giving all his delegates to her.

It was a good afternoon to go to the movies and have a good cry, and I did -- when Atreyu's horse succumbed to the Swamp of Sadness, and when the Empress pleaded with Bastian to save Fantasia.

But it was G'mork's words that really struck me today. So much of political campaigning -- of marketing in general, really -- involves emotional manipulation. One of the most powerful emotions is fear, and so a politician will try to scare people about the world their opponent will create, so that the people will be afraid and lose hope -- making it easier for that politician to control them. 

Both sides do it. The difference for Democrats is that we've seen Trump's craziness with our own eyes. We've experienced his idea of governing. We've at least heard about Project 2025, the playbook his team intends to implement if he's elected again. We watched his supporters storm the Capitol when he lost in 2020. So when Democratic politicians talk about what could happen in a second Trump term, it rings true. We're know we're right to be scared.

I don't know what's going to happen over the next few weeks and months. Presumably Harris will win the Democratic nomination for president. (We now get to endure the breathless speculation about who her vice president will be. Lucky us?) She may debate Donald Trump at some point; Biden and Trump were supposed to debate on September 10th, but who knows whether that date will stand now. Before today, Harris's polling numbers against Trump were about the same as Biden's -- but it's still a little early in the process to put any faith in polling. Trump says he can beat her, but he also said he would beat Biden in 2020 (and of course, he still says he actually won).

In short, things are pretty crazy right now. But we should not lose hope. We, the voters, have all the power. Don't give up and give it away.

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These moments of moviegoing blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Vote blue this fall!

A little bit about the mass shooting grabbing the headlines.

 

amuzica | Deposit Photos

I owe y'all a blog post tonight, and of course yesterday's shooting in Pennsylvania is at the top of my mind. 

I have a lot of thoughts about it. I'm just not sure how many of them I ought to memorialize in a blog post.

I think we can all agree -- I hope we can, at least -- that violence has no place in political discourse. I also think we can agree that Americans have a history of attempting to settle our differences, real or perceived, with firearms.

The shooter -- whose name I'm not going to mention, in keeping with recent trends -- appears to be a natural suspect in some respects but not in others. He was young -- just a couple of years out of high school -- and worked at an entry-level job in a nursing home. Former classmates said he was quiet and very smart; one said he'd been bullied in school every day. The gunman had donated to ActBlue, the Democratic donation machine, once in the past, but he registered as a Republican for this, his first presidential election. He used an AR-15 that apparently was owned by his father. 

The victims include a volunteer firefighter who was shot while shielding his family from the gunfire. Two more people are in critical condition. All three were in the stands behind Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president and the assailant's apparent target. Trump suffered only a damaged earlobe.

There are lots of questions about how the shooter got to his vantage point without running afoul of the Secret Service, which had ten days' notice of the rally -- plenty of time, presumably, to scope out the venue for potential sniper nests.

And really, right now, that's pretty much everything we know. We don't know the shooter's motivation. We've heard from both Republicans and Democrats who want to make this a partisan thing. A Republican member of Congress has publicly blamed President Biden. Other Republicans want to make Democrats responsible because of their dislike of Trump. Democrats have speculated on whether this was a false flag operation to make Trump into a martyr. That spectators were also shot might discount that theory -- except that the pro-gun lobby hasn't shown much empathy for victims in previous mass shootings, preferring to accept them as collateral damage in their crusade to preserve their presumed Second Amendment right to shoot anyone they want to.

(See, that's the sort of opinion I probably shouldn't preserve in a blog post. I guess it's too late now, though.)

Anyway, armchair speculation is a fun parlor game until someone gets hurt -- and someone has. Let's ratchet back the rhetoric, let the professional investigators do their job, and get on with the election without further violence.

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These moments of targeted blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe out there, everybody.

Whither the CD player?

I'm going to take a break from current events this week and talk about another facet of our late-stage capitalist dystopia: electronics. Specifically CD players.

While I'm a progressive politically, I'm old, so I'm a Luddite when it comes to certain things. I admit freely that I have not yet embraced the digital age 100 percent. Yes, I publish my books as ebooks; yes, I own a Kindle; yes, I have a smartphone and a laptop (and a several-generations-old iPad that has sat unused in a desk drawer since I moved here four years ago). But I have not yet succumbed to digitizing my music collection. Strike that: At one point I spent hours over several days uploading a bunch of my CDs to Apple Music on my laptop. Then I got a new laptop. Everything made the migration to the new machine except my CDs; the album cover images that I'd painstakingly uploaded made it, and I think maybe the playlists, but not the actual songs. Then I learned that Apple uses a proprietary format for music files, and there was probably no way to get those songs to transfer from my old machine to the new one.

What I took away from the experience is that uploading stuff to the cloud gives the cloud owner the rights to your stuff, and they may or may not let you keep it. Which I already knew from a debacle many years ago involving ebook files that disappeared from users' devices because reasons. Hence, I have not given up my actual, tangible CDs.

The challenge these days is to find something to play them on. For maybe a couple of decades, I owned a Bose Wave music system with the add-on CD changer. It looked like this: 

Stolen from the internet

It was hella expensive. I used to get really nice holiday gift cards from my bosses at the law firm, and one year I used my gift card to buy this system. It worked great for many years. But then, as Facebook reminded me earlier today, the changer started giving me error messages on various CDs and finally refused to play any of them. When I got hold of someone at Bose customer service, I was told it was a known issue, and they recommended that I unplug the changer or it might mess up my main unit. Reluctantly, I did. 

That was four years ago. The main CD/radio soldiered on for another couple of years, but then the CD player in it started to die, too. So a few months back, I started looking for a replacement. Of course Bose doesn't make Wave radios anymore; you can get a rebuilt one in random places, but they're super expensive, and I'm not getting those really nice gift cards anymore. So I looked for something less bougie.

My options were pretty limited: either I could go back to the component setup that I'd ditched in favor of the Wave or buy a glorified boom box. I settled on this: an AIWA Exos Home Speaker. (Note that it's marketed as an external speaker that just happens to include a CD player; this is where we are, kids.) I figured that AIWA used to be a decent brand and the unit would probably have acceptable sound quality.

When it arrived, I pulled it out of the box and set it up. I put a CD in the slot and tried to get the drawer to retract. Didn't work. Shoved it shut with my hand. Of course then it wouldn't open again and it wouldn't play.

AIWA customer service was very nice about it. The unit was clearly still under warranty -- I'd just bought it! -- and the rep told me to pack it up and send it to them on their dime, and they'd send me a replacement. He also assured me that I'd get my CD back.

So I sent the broken machine back, and in the fullness of time, the replacement arrived. And it works! But then I tried putting it in the space where the Wave radio used to live. Of course it's about a quarter of an inch too tall. 

The Wave radio fit on the shelf under the TV. The AIWA does not.
Lynne Cantwell 2024

But I can play my CDs again. The sound quality isn't as good as the old Bose, but I didn't expect it to be, and part of the problem might be my hearing issue. 

Did I get my CD back? Of course not. Is it worth calling AIWA again? Not to me!

But now I'm tempted to replace my TV stand so that the CD player will fit. In fact, a full entertainment center would look great on that wall. I could use more bookshelf space, as well as more storage space for my DVDs and Blu-Rays (which I am also hanging onto, thank you very much).

The answer to every problem in our late-stage capitalist dystopia is to spend more money, right?

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The hearing issue: I can't remember whether I've mentioned this here before, but I have an acoustic neuroma in my left ear that has been affecting my hearing for the past four years. It's to the point now where we need to do something about it, so I'm going in next month for a "gamma knife" radiation treatment. It will be a couple of years before we find out whether the treatment is effective, and I won't get my hearing back regardless. But I'm hoping that it's successful, as the other treatment option is brain surgery. Which I would rather, y'know, avoid.

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These moments of bloggy retro consumerism have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Sturm und drang, presidential debate edition.

inueng | Deposit Photos

Let's just start off with the obvious, shall we? The debate Thursday night between President Joe Biden and former president and convicted felon Donald Trump was, for anyone with a grain of sensitivity, painful to watch. Biden was off his game, for whatever reason (I've seen several theories, ranging from "he's 81 and tired" to "he has a cold" to "maybe the Trump team slipped him a mickey" -- yes, I really did see that one, although not in exactly those words). Biden dropped the rhetorical ball a couple of times. His "I can't believe the bullshit coming out of this guy's mouth" expression -- I assume that's what he was going for -- came off as slack-jawed, but not in a good way. 

About an hour after it was over, when I finally shook off my shock and disbelief, all I could say to myself was: "That was bad."

Indeed, the performance handed all the pundits who have never liked Biden the ammunition they've been looking for. He's lost it, they said, some muttering amongst themselves and some aloud; he should step aside and let somebody else run, they said. The New York Times editorial board agreed, and went so far as to publish it.* 

Never mind how something like that would throw the electoral process into chaos. What about all the voters who have already cast their primary ballots for Biden? Wouldn't that disenfranchise us?

And never mind how things turned out when President Lyndon Johnson pulled out of his primary race for a second term in 1968. Chaos ensued. The Democratic Party ended up nominating Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey -- who lost to Richard Nixon.

Historian Allan Lichtman has correctly predicted the winner of nine out of the past ten presidential elections.** He has no time for the pundits who want to kick Biden to the curb right now; debates don't matter, he told CNN. Lichtman has developed 13 keys to determine which candidate will win, and even after Thursday's debate, his system is still leaning toward a Biden win in the fall.

Another historian, Heather Cox Richardson, who blogs at Substack, has pointed out that Trump used a technique called a Gish gallop during the debate: "It's a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don't know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them. It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has."

The editorial board of the Philadelphia Inquirer saw through Trump's bullshit. In an editorial this weekend, the board said it was Trump who should drop out of the race. The editorial recapped Trump's greatest hits, among them his 31 felony convictions and three additional felony trials to come, and his bombastic rhetoric about how awful everything in America is: "Throughout the debate, Trump repeatedly said we are a 'failing' country. He called the United States a 'third world nation.' He said, 'we're living in hell' and 'very close to World War III.'

"'People are dying all over the place,' Trump said, later adding 'we're literally an uncivilized country now.'" Trump, the editorial goes on to note, told 30 lies during the 90-minute debate. There's more -- read it yourself at the link -- but it wraps up with, "There was only one person at the debate who does not deserve to be running for president. The sooner Trump exits the stage, the better off the country will be."

I could not agree more. 

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*That editorial was the last straw for me. I've finally canceled my NYT subscription.

**The only election out of the past ten that Lichtman's system didn't get right is Bush vs. Gore in 2000. He said Gore would win. Given that the Supreme Court had to decide the winner, I think we can give him a pass on that one.

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These moments of decisive blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get out and vote!