Spermboys, Pit Bulls, and Second Chances

Even the most devoted of us common sense conservatives trying to clear Gov. Palin’s path to the White House has to pause every now and again to, as the young people say, “chill out”. Last night, with my two liberal and so-called progressive friends (who said we common sense conservatives are intolerant?) Janet and Nathan, I watched The Kids Are All Right, which has made every Ten Best of 2010 list in sight. I loathed it.

Teen children of a lesbian couple seek out their mom’s sperm donor, a motorcycle-riding organic restauranteur. One of the moms has an affair with him. The other mom is hurt and angry. The two teenaged children feel betrayed (as teenaged children do pretty much regardless of what happens, of course). The two moms remember that marriages and families are hard work, and figure out a way to reconcile. The end.

Performances by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as the moms: good enough to make you feel sorry for their having to work with a rotten script that contains exactly one interesting revelation: that some lesbians sometimes enjoy watching gay porn by virtue, if I got Moore’s character’s explanation right, of men being sexually protuberant. Performance by Mark Ruffalo as Spermboy: far short of mediocre. Photography and set direction: About on a par with Ruffalo’s performance as Spermboy, which is to say the first thing that struck me about the movie was how very ugly it was, how the camera seemed over and over to have been positioned at random.

I have long believed that, if you don’t count Keanu Reeves, who’s in a class all his own, Nicolas Cage is the worst actor of his generation. At least he takes chances, though; indeed, sometimes his awfulness is absolutely riveting. I’d much rather watch him than a non-entity like Ruffalo, about whom you can say nothing more laudatory than that he’s apparently able to remember his lines. He suggests no life beyond the scene in which he’s appearing, has no depth, is never interesting or surprising. You’ve heard movie stars described as so charismatic that it’s impossible not to watch them when they’re on screen, whether or not they’re speaking? Well, I find myself watching everything and everybody but Ruffalo. How does such a guy keep getting cast?

Here. I’ve done it. I’ve thought of someone as bad — the guy who played Ally McBeal’s love interest on television, Gil Bellows. And he was a Canadian.

I would never have dreamed a movie could make me long for Cameron Diaz’s self-delightedly ditzy singing, but the scene in Kids during which Benning’s and Ruffalo’s characters sing Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” over dinner managed it.

I blame myself. I should have known, as a common sense conservative, that a movie about deviates wouldn’t work for me.

In other news, the Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, formerly known for wearing a bow tie, spoke for a great many of us on Tuesday when he objected to President Obama’s commending the Philadelphia Eagles football team for giving a second chance to Michael Vick, who raised pit bulls to tear one another’s throats out. “Now, I’m a Christian,” Carlson said. “I’ve made mistakes myself, I believe fervently in second chances. But Michael Vick…should’ve been executed…”

Naturally, the liberals and so-called progressives have been having a field day with this, pointing out that we common sense conservative Christians almost invariably append a statement beginning with but to such declarations as "I believe in second chances".

Yet another case of the LSCPs just not getting it! There is no logical inconsistency whatever in believing in second chances only for those who genuinely deserve them, just as there is none in believing unwaveringly in freedom of speech only for those who don’t wantonly abuse it. That one believes, for instance, that a television evangelist who has allowed himself to be seduced by a shapely young secretary obviously placed in his path by Satan himself should have a chance to redeem himself in no way compels him or her to believe that a person of color who has sanctioned dog-fighting deserves a comparable opportunity.

Guess Who's Coming to My Blog

The closest I got to black people as a child was as an avid Dodgers fan. I thought when I was an adult that I would like to have centerfielder Willie Davis’s long, lean physique. (And just missed. Willie stood 6-2 and weighed 180. Johnny, 2010: 6-1, 182.) I had a black (I realized later) classmate in fifth and sixth grades, Sandra Lucas, who claimed to be Spanish, and was really beautiful, so the alpha boys intent on wooing her would have bloodied the nose of anyone who gave her shit. Not so the lone black kid at Orville Wright Junior High School, Walter Daniels, who might have had it really bad but for the presence of the spastic Billy Snyder, whose neurological problems the school’s sadists seems to find more offensive than even Walter’s negritude.

The segregation at Santa Monica High School in my day was de facto. White kids, automatically assumed to be bright and ambitious, were put in college preparatory classes, while kids of color were consigned, along with white trash from the wrong side of Olympic Blvd., to normal or remedial classes. Aside from chipper Chris Allen, who I understand went on to own his own janitorial business, my only black classmates were in PE. They never passed me the basketball; I wouldn’t have either.

(Blacks were generally perceived as a cut above Mexicans, we anglos’ contempt for whom was perfectly understandable. They’d had the courage and resolve to leave their own country to try to better themselves in ours, where they worked very hard for rotten pay, doing jobs for which we were too good. Of course we disdained ‘em!)

The summer before junior year, I worked at Zuma Beach, collecting 50¢ from people seeking access to the parking lot. My fellow employees’ favorite recreation was bitching about the man they referred to only as Martin Luther Coon. Billy Davis thought he really had me cornered rhetorically when he demanded, “Well, how would you like to live next door to one?” Better that, I mused, than him, and the boss, a Malibu sheriff who bragged about pulling over and ticketing any [black person] who dared drive on Pacific Coast Highway during his shift, had to step — reluctantly! — between us.

The summer before senior year, I got a job as a busboy. To the infinite chagrin of the redneck existing cook at Ted’s Rancho Restaurant, dishwasher Collins Hall was promoted to cook beside him, and then had the effrontery to work really hard. He was the first black person with whom I'd ever chatted at length. I liked him, and worked up the courage to try to ingratiate myself by revealing that I didn’t hate him because of his color. Only years later did I realize he’d been mocking me when he replied, with the utmost earnestness, “Well, thank you, suh.” I'd deserved to be mocked.

The night after the Watts riots broke out, their apoplectic next door neighbor burst into my girlfriend's parents’ house wanting to know if her dad wanted to go shoot a few of the uppity [black] bastards with him. Meanwhile, at lunchtime in the outdoor free speech area of my university, young black student rabble-rousers were forever bellowing lists of non-negotiable demands. I honestly suspect their primary ambition was the same as every male student’s — to get laid. It seemed to work.

Over time in adulthood, I came to have a couple of short-term black girlfriends, the more beautiful of whom was my worst lover ever, and some black bosses, and lots of black coworkers. Some, in about the same proportion as whites, were assholes, and others angels.

Billy Davis at Zuma Beach had wanted to know how I’d feel living next door to black people. I live next door to black people now. We and Deborah and her adult daughter don’t have worlds in common — Deborah’s a committed Christian, and Claire and I equally committed pantheists — but we have no complaints with each other. It isn’t as though they’re Republicans.

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