Crossing Red Lines

"Do you know what swishing is?"-- Oprah Winfrey, shadow empress

The Sand Pebbles arguably belongs to Richard Crenna as an American military officer willing to sacrifice himself for the absurd might is right principle unless the State Department swallows cowardice in the face of being overrun by a half billion righteously enraged Asians; it is both an usually interesting film for its time and place, and chock full of the usual stereotypes we already know and field with familiarity. The Caucasian heat for the exotic, Caucasian guilt for denigration, which in this case is justified, because the Western powers had no business carving up imperial China in the first place, just as in contemporary terms, the Mandarin cyber dragnet has no business making Arthur O. Sulzberger an enemy of state, and yet, it is also a rare piece of entertainment that deals with real historical policy that was morally problematic.

Real time dysentery, though not really, slowing me to the silence is golden cliche, with the additional adduce of moisture saturated air, you would tend to think that a woman of 42 would not hire a girl with a newborn strangled by the umbilical cord at birth emblazoned as a decal on a T-shirt, but dealing with Ingrid Bunton was just as much, if not more, an abusive experience as the woman who threw herself at me. Ingrid turned me into a laughing stock, got sexually involved with a security guard who banged on my door after she had obviously impregnated herself again. I am a seducer. Ingrid is the type of sexually dysfunctional female who usually winds up battered if not murdered, and even the young woman I hired back after I fired Miss Bunton in the baby bump phase said, "There is something wrong with that girl."

The only apartment manager who treated me with dignity had to get involved, invoking the obvious fact that Riverside was not The Love Boat. It would be amusing and it is, in its own way, funny, the lack of control that urban loose legs exhibit, except that it isn't. Opening the door to Ingrid's psyche offers a horrible travesty of silent minorities, the discarded, who are exploited in fairly bestial fashion on a daily basis and have to live with it, and this is the vomit that federally mandated disability centers catapult on the wall like a food fight with mashed potatoes. They do not care about it either in the lowest common denominator. What's a few thousand coolies here or there, after all? As fantastic as high camp, or wearing the dead on our sleeves.