Oppenheimer

If you are going to watch a three-hour movie that is driven primarily by its dialogue, then that movie better be pretty darn good.

"Oppenheimer" is that kind of movie.

It's not often that a flick with minimum bursts of action and maximum bursts of speech hold my attention for any sustained period of time. The last movie I saw that was given primarily to the spoken word was Gary Oldham's portrayal of Winston Churchill in "The Darkest Hour." And before that, possibly "The King's Speech," which deals with the speech impediment of England's King George VI as he ascends to the throne at the dawn of World War II.

There might be a couple of others out there, but if there are, I can't think of them right now.

The common thread here, if you look close enough, is history, and primarily World War II history. That automatically captures my attention.

"Oppenheimer" details the adult life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist (he also theorized about black holes in the 1930s) who led a team of brilliant scientists toward the creation of the atomic bomb, thus forever altering the course of human history as well as the political landscape upon which that history travels.

Directed and written by Christopher Nolan (along with co-writers Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin), the movie moves briskly from scene to scene with precision and crispness, building anticipation as the weapon is slowly built from theory to reality.

The ensemble cast is spectacular, with pencil-thin Cillian Murphy in the lead role as a conflicted Oppenheimer; Emily Blount as his betrayed but steadfast wife Kitty; Florence Pugh as Oppenheimer's lover; Matt Damon as stalwart Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, who brought Oppenheimer into the Manhattan Project; Kenneth Branagh as scientist Niels Bohr, and a host of other incredible actors, including Oscar winner Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody), Matthew Modine, Casey Afleck and Tom Conti as Albert Einstein.

But the standout performance, to my mind, was Robert Downey Jr. as politician Lewis Strauss, who serves as Oppenheimer's nemesis in a post-war atomic world. Downey will probably always be remembered for his role as Ironman in the Marvel franchise, but he superbly ascends to a higher role here as Oppenheimer's devious and paranoid antagonist. I almost didn't recognize him.

While the movie about the creation of a world-shattering weapon would seem depressing on the surface, the story – and the subsequent morality tale – is still fascinating. When the ultimate countdown ticks off (bets were placed by the scientists that the chain-reaction detonation would set the atmosphere on fire and thus destroy the world), the moment is breathless. And emotional.

When the explosion engulfs the movie screen (Nolan said there was no CGI involved), it's overwhelming. And thought provoking. This is the dawn of duck-and-cover society. This is us.

The movie's back story, as it were, was Oppenheimer's communist affiliations before the war, which led to a post-war congressional closed-door investigation as to whether or not he should keep his security clearance. He was denied.

Because we still live an a nuclear age, this movie offers relevance as well as critical history. Not many pictures can pull that off as well as this one.

Danger ahead

Back in 2016, when charlatan human being Donald Trump was elected this country's 45th president, I was sorely disappointed, but I still held aloft an ounce of optimism.

I thought Trump, a novice politician with little or no moral character, much less political wisdom, could grow into the job.

Friends with cooler heads told us to be patient, that we will get through this.

We barely did. 

Trump, who said that he and only he could stop the American carnage (American carnage was news to me) and drain the swamp festering in Washington DC, promptly set about not building a wall at the southern border with Mexico (a broken promise); using separation of children from their families as national policy to halt the influx of immigration of brown-skinned people who might also be seeking asylum; the attempted dismantling of a NATO that has helped rebuild global (and American) security since World War II; ignoring the devastation of a ghastly pandemic that eventually killed more than a million Americans, advising people to forsake life-saving vaccinations for Clorox, internal lights or horse medicine.

The evidence is all there in audio and visual for all of us to see.

The American carnage turned out to be projection and confession. You know, where projection and confession are the underlying foundation of a Republican Party that has become a clown-worshiping cult.

And now, Trump is preparing to run for a second term, even in the face of at least two, and possibly four, indictments for stealing government secrets, voter fraud and inciting insurrectionists to storm the Capitol while Congress was in session. This is not to neglect a Federal Judge, Lewis Kaplan, who in reviewing the defamation case of E. Jean Carroll, declared this past week that Trump did indeed commit rape against the writer.

Earlier this week, several former Trump administration workers unveiled plans for what a 2025 Trump administration might look like (see here). The agenda includes expanding the powers of the executive branch to give the president more power.

That's called authoritarianism. It's called Fascism. It's called Mussolini. It's called Hitler. It's called Trumpism.

It's not called democracy, at least, not in the sense of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison or George Washington. There's a reason the Founders didn't give the president absolute powers. Indeed, they could have built our political system around that concept, but they did not. The wisdom of the 1700's is immense and majestic. Why mess with it?

The concept of American democracy is based on the power belonging to the people, and it's the people who are given an avenue to that power through checks and balances in the government they created.

By restricting those checks and balances – or even eliminating them – we open the door to a political system that exploits grievance, retribution and revenge against its political enemies while disguising those actions as policy good for the country. We already saw that on display in the separation of families at the border. We see that when Trump declares that the press is the enemy of the people. We see that with white Republican men attempting to rewrite African-American history books in Florida middle schools, suggesting that slavery was beneficial to African-American society instead of being the basest of human indignity.

Trump was correct about American carnage, but only when you realize it's his carnage that we're dealing with.

The 2024 election is less than 16 months away. It's the time we have left to ponder whether we want to continue with the democracy of our Founders, or something else entirely, something very dangerous indeed.

 

It's getting hot out there

This is getting weird.

The other day, Chris Gloninger, a respected TV meteorologist from Des Moines, Iowa, announced his resignation after 18 years on the job for several different stations across five different states.

He quit because of death threats and other email harassment he was receiving from a climate change denier. He was called a liar by deniers despite the mountain of measurable evidence suggesting – proving – that climate change is a real thing.

Say whut? A death threat against a TV weatherman? Because he was exploring climate change and bringing his message to the people?

He was called a liar by deniers despite the mountain of measurable evidence suggesting – proving – that climate change is a real thing.

Just a few days ago, the Earth experienced its all-time high average global temperature of 63 degrees, according to the University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer. This system has been in effect for 44 years. The global reading had never had a single-day reading higher than 62.6 until this past week. The entire week had an average of 62.6. On Thursday, it reached a single-day record of 63 degrees.

Now 63 degrees seems comfortable enough until you understand that it takes in temperatures from all points on the planet: the ice caps, the deserts, the mountains, the oceans. So you can see how a sustained increase of even one degree can be significant to the planet.

And obvious, even to the layman. Or it should be. Sea levels are rising because glaciers are melting. Fossil fuels help create thermal inversions, which spawn more tornadoes and stronger and more frequent hurricanes. Or even hailstorms that spit golf ball-sized ice bullets at you. 

Kim and I once visited Anchorage, Alaska, in 1992 and one of our stops was to Exit Glacier, which is a landlocked marvel. I recently read where Exit Glacier has retreated a quarter of a mile from where we once visited 31 years ago. Not that long ago, really.

I don't get science deniers. Science is the science of proof and, consequently, it's the science of truth. Science is based on research, empirical evidence and peer review. And, yet, in the contrarian world of right-winging conspiracists, we have flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers who end up causing great harm for the rest of us both socially and physically.

The 19th century parable of the Truth and the Lie recently came to my attention. I'll try to keep it short:

"The Truth and the Lie meet one day. They stroll to a well and the Lie says, 'The water is nice. Let's take a bath together.'

So they disrobe and enter the well. Suddenly, the Lie comes out of the water and puts on the clothes of the Truth and runs away. The Truth comes out of the well but cannot find the Lie to get her clothes back. The World, seeing the unclothed Truth, turns its gaze away with contempt and rage.

The Truth returns to the well and disappears forever, hiding its shame. The Lie travels around the World, dressed as the Truth, satisfying the needs of society because the World, in any case, harbors no wish at all to meet the naked Truth."

Wow. Food for thought.

 

Hail, Mary

When the storm first hit late Monday afternoon, I thought, "Oh, look. It's hailing. Lookit the little hailstones bouncing on the ground."

We don't see hail all that often. I thought watching the little ice nuggets bouncing on the ground like frozen jumping beans was kind of interesting.

For about a minute. 

 

Hailstones bounce up onto our porch.

Then the storm picked up momentum. The wind blew a little harder. The stones got larger. They started banging on the roof. They started banging off the storm windows. They started banging around in my head. We were getting pummeled and I'd never seen anything quite like it. I worried about things I never really worried about before: like our cars; like our roof; like the trees in our front yard.

Yikes.

We went outside to the front porch and watched the hailstones bounce off our cars. We don't have a garage, so there was no place to shelter them from the onslaught. We wondered if they were taking damage.

I worried that hailstorms can be precursors to tornadoes, so it could always get worse, you  know. But we never saw funnel clouds.

And then, after about 10 minutes, it was over. Neighbors cautiously seeped out of their houses and began to gather and assess. Leaves from the trees littered the streets and yards. Kim picked up a hailstone off the porch. It was about the size of a golf ball. I took a picture.

The stones were about the size of a golf ball.

What had we just gone through?

The neighbors had collected into little knots of concern and so we moved from car to car for inspection. When we got to ours, yep, there was damage. Kim was crestfallen. She'd never had so much as a scratch on her 12-year-old car. And now this.

We got the insurance wheels in motion and by Thursday morning, an appraiser combed over our cars. Both had taken hits, but the hood of Kim's car, perhaps made of a thinner gauge metal than mine, was as dimpled as a golf ball. (Does that make her car more aerodynamic? Or more prone to hooking and slicing?). The hood will have to be replaced. Paintless dent repair hopefully will take care of the rest of the damage.

A roof assessor came out the next day and took pictures. We have some decisions to make.

One of the assessors had taken a screenshot of the weather map as the storm passed through and he showed it to me. It looked like Lexington was Ground Zero for the barrage. And it felt like my driveway was Ground Zero for Ground Zero.

Extreme weather is becoming more of the norm these days, it seems. Hurricanes are more violent, tornadoes seem more common. We're in an awful heat dome right now. Climate change is real. Nature has a way of issuing warnings. It might be best if we heed them.