Home in the rear-view mirror

When did I first see Evan Mather's Scenic Highway on the Web? Three years ago, maybe?

As I recall, the combination memoir/documentary/mockumentary wasn't in a particularly embeddable format then, so I didn't post it on the blog. Or maybe it was due to a charitable swing of my famously conflicted emotions about my hometown, Baton Rouge.

Baton Rouge is what Scenic Highway is all about. And, no, Scenic Highway, the main thoroughfare into north Baton Rouge, isn't. That irony -- and the spirit behind naming one's film for the decidedly unscenic stretch of road -- is what drives the film.

I am from Baton Rouge. I, too, put the city in my rear-view mirror a long time ago. I totally get the concept of an homage noir to the old hometown -- albeit one conceived, perhaps, by the Monty Python troupe on a bloody terrible bender.

Still, at the time, in the aftermath of Katrina, I was kinda sorta thinking, "Isn't that a little mean?"

THOSE WERE the better angels of my nostalgia talking. The real me knows better.

It's why the hell I hauled ass. It's why I am Omaha's biggest damned fan today; Nebraska's largest city, my home, is pretty much everything Baton Rouge ain't.

If you've been hanging around the blog much, my feelings on this question are no surprise to you. They're . . . well . . . complicated. Intense. Somewhat conflicted.

Bottom line: I am glad I'm here. I am glad I'm not there. And I recognize the unpredictable ebb and flow of how life -- and cities -- often play out can quickly make an ass of you while you're otherwise occupied expounding on crap and plotting out the future.

Still. . . .

I KEEP coming back to what my hometown ain't. Like secure in its identity, for example.

A gag bit in Scenic Highway about a "call" to the state capitol's information hotline has the earnest telephone voice expounding at great length -- and proudly -- about a 1933 Leni Riefenstahl film, Reichitekht, which outlined the great influence the structure had on Nazi architect Albert Speer and the great fascination it held for der Führer himself.

Obviously ridiculous, you say. Pure fiction. And, no, the Germans didn't bomb Pearl Harbor. Of course, I say.

But that doesn't mean I didn't check it out . . . just to make sure. Because it sounded just sooooooo perfectly Baton Rouge.

Does the name David Duke ring a bell? He's a white supremacist. He used to parade around LSU, as a student, in a Nazi uniform. He grew up to become the head of one of the national Ku Klux Klan organizations.

Louisiana almost elected him governor in 1991. Then the feds put him in prison.

ANOTHER THING my hometown ain't, is committed to public education -- or much education of any stripe.

This is why it never will be what its mayor-president keeps saying it is -- "America's Next Great City (TM)." People want to move to great cities; nobody wants to move to Baton Rouge.

The proof is in the population, which hasn't changed much since I was in college there. Thirty years ago.

I was reminded of this by that Elizabeth Warren lecture on the tribulations, and pending extinction, of the American middle class. Here's the part that did it for me, the part that just completely distills why Red Stick is hosed:

There's a great . . . study out of San Diego, where they're having parents do preferences on where they buy. Parents would rather live near a toxic waste dump than a place where they thought the schools were underperforming -- where they thought their children would not have as good a chance in school.

WARREN CITED another study, this one from Boston, that compared side-by-side area municipalities, matched for every factor -- racial composition, mass-transit access . . . you name it. It found that just a 5-point increase in third-grade reading scores in one school district over the other translated into tens of thousands of dollars' difference in housing prices.

"Families are buying schools," she said. Of course, that's obvious. But now there's the data to quantify what we already knew.

Well, at least what some of us in America already knew.

Welcome to Baton Rouge. The toxic waste dump (or at least the next best thing) is the city's biggest employer. This is it, at right -- the Exxon-Mobil refinery, the second largest in the country.

There are lots more like it all around the capital city.

And this is the kind of thing you can expect when dealing with the East Baton Rouge Parish school system.

And here's what my old high school looked like three years ago:


NOW IT'S being renovated, which means all but the main building is being torn down and rebuilt. And the main building, dating back to 1927, is being totally renovated.

Thirty years of neglect will do that for your construction budget.

One can only imagine what 30 years of test-score carnage and resegregation -- a school system that white flight has taken from 65-35 majority-minority to 85-15 minority-majority in a single generation -- has done (and will continue to do) to Baton Rouge.

Probably something not unlike what happened to the one really unique thing Evan Mather found in his -- and my -- hometown, just north of town just off the not-so-scenic Scenic Highway. It was a massive geodesic dome built by Buckminster Fuller in the late 1950s -- the biggest in the world at the time.

It used to belong to the Union Tank Car Co. They used to fix massive numbers of railroad tank cars in there -- until time passed the facility by within a decade or so.

Bucky Fuller's masterpiece soon fell into disrepair. That's how Mather found it almost five years ago.

And the year after Mather released his short film . . . it was torn down.

Because that's what Baton Rouge does.

Understanding the important things

You want to know why The Best Years of Our Lives is my favorite movie ever?

It's because it gets so many things right. It's because there is truth in it -- lots of truth in it. I think that's because it's a story about struggling veterans of a horrible war -- men with newfound and profound impatience for all the pleasant lies and platitudes in which a society immerses itself.

In this respect, it's probably notable that the original story was written by a former war correspondent, and that director William Wyler had seen his share of aerial combat as a filmmaker in the Army Air Forces.

IN THIS FILM, which I watched yet again last night, there is no room for the self-absorbed or the self-righteous. I'll bet most people today would hate the hell out of it.

For example, the view of love and marriage you get from The Best Years of Our Lives isn't one for the squeamish. The clips above and below convict us and all the assumptions we've lived by in the decades since the film's release in November 1946.


IN THE FILM'S no-bull worldview, love is a verb. In the sentence "I love you," "love" is the action born of a decision made by "I." The object of the verb is "you."

And being that "love" is an active verb, it's implied that loving requires significant effort.

In today's world -- created by children who couldn't quite grasp what their postwar parents took for granted -- love has been recast solely as a noun. "Love" is this free-floating, self-actualized thing requiring nothing but to receive it.

Suddenly, the sentence "I love you" is like a sprinkler system without a backflow valve. Things flow the wrong way. We don't love so much as we're "in love" -- that is, until we're out of love again.

It's all about us. And that's not love -- or marriage -- at all. For the theologically inclined, the Catholic catechism puts it this way:

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God who created man out of love also calls him to love — the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. For man is created in the image and likeness of God who is himself love. Since God created him man and woman, their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man. It is good, very good, in the Creator's eyes. And this love which God blesses is intended to be fruitful and to be realized in the common work of watching over creation: "And God blessed them, and God said to them: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.'"

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Holy Scripture affirms that man and woman were created for one another: "It is not good that the man should be alone." The woman, "flesh of his flesh," his equal, his nearest in all things, is given to him by God as a "helpmate"; she thus represents God from whom comes our help. "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh." The Lord himself shows that this signifies an unbreakable union of their two lives by recalling what the plan of the Creator had been "in the beginning": "So they are no longer two, but one flesh."

AND THERE'S this as well:

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This unequivocal insistence on the indissolubility of the marriage bond may have left some perplexed and could seem to be a demand impossible to realize. However, Jesus has not placed on spouses a burden impossible to bear, or too heavy—heavier than the Law of Moses. By coming to restore the original order of creation disturbed by sin, he himself gives the strength and grace to live marriage in the new dimension of the Reign of God. It is by following Christ, renouncing themselves, and taking up their crosses that spouses will be able to "receive" the original meaning of marriage and live it with the help of Christ. This grace of Christian marriage is a fruit of Christ's cross, the source of all Christian life.

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This is what the Apostle Paul makes clear when he says: "Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her," adding at once: "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one. This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the Church."

A CULTURE that could create a film like The Best Years of Our Lives still knew some things. Took for granted some concepts we find totally alien today.

I fear that we may understand the words recorded onto a soundtrack almost 64 years ago yet find that their meaning eludes us completely.

And if, somehow, our powers of comprehension continue to fail us so profoundly, the following scene will become a powerful metaphor for a whole new generation . . . and the country it has created in its own image.

Save the groundhogs!

What's shocking isn't that PETA wants to safeguard Punxsutawney Phil by replacing him with a robotic Groundhog Day prognosticator.

What's shocking is that the press takes seriously claims that the little fellow is not, and never has been, mistreated at the annual celebration. No, the go-along-to-get-along mainstream media is all too quick to take seriously the "debunkers" of claims by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

AND WHAT you get is bunkum like this from Reuters:

Should America's most famous groundhog be replaced with a robot? Organizers of the annual Groundhog Day celebration don't think so.

Animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) called for the move to spare Punxsutawney Phil, who makes a "prognostication" on the length of winter, the glare of the spotlight when he emerges from his burrow.

"It's very ridiculous," said Bill Deeley, president of the Groundhog Club, which runs the event in western Pennsylvania.

But PETA says the dawn ceremony, which is attended by as many as 40,000 people, can be traumatizing for the groundhog that would normally be hibernating at this time of year.

"Groundhogs are typically shy animals and are likely to feel fear and stress when they are out of their burrows," PETA said in a statement. "Each year on Feb 2, Punxsutawney Phil is trotted out to face human handling and hundreds of noisy people, flashing lights and cameras."

But Deeley disagreed, saying groundhogs may be done hibernating and starting to emerge from their burrows to begin the mating season.

Deeley also defended the club against charges of mistreating Phil, saying he gets an annual medical checkup and lives in a zoo enclosure that is air conditioned in the summer and heated in the winter.

YEAH, I'm sure the pickup Phil Connors used in 1993 to catapult a Phil to his fiery death at the bottom of a quarry was nice and warm. Really warm.

Who, then, is unserious here -- PETA or its sneering critics?

After all, it's not like any of this foofarah about the right of groundhogs not to be bothered is one scintilla as crazy as some Jesus-jumper quarterback and his mama making a Super Bowl ad attacking the absolute right of women to eradicate the little humans in their wombs.

Thankfully, however, we Americans are a serious people, fully capable of keeping our priorities straight.

Shutting up the fools

Some people were hating on the trailer for the upcoming A-Team movie.

Of course, this called for someone to step up and be Mr. T. The following comment is all you need to know about the pending action-flick bliss coming to a cinema near you:

They just had a Tank fall out of an exploding plane and then proceed to -- while still in mid air -- blow up a fighter jet. I'm sorry, but that is f****** awesome.

Must-see TV

Before we all repair to Lost Cove, Tenn., to await the apocalypse our culture is working itself up to -- because, of course, the center did not hold -- we can take a moment to watch this on our local public-television station when it comes out later in the year.

Because Walker Percy wasn't just a hell of a writer (and one of the last residents of my home state to make any damn sense), he was a prophet.

HAT TIP: Rod Dreher.