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“…it’s intellectually lazy for both the Left and the Right to try to score cheap political points by pointing to the current weather outside as if it tells us something significant about long-term climate change (or lack thereof)”

If There’s Really Such a Thing as Global Warming, How Come We’re Getting All This Snow?

Conversation had with one Katie (Jonesy) Jones

Some background on the initial comment is that Katie, while employed in California with Invisible Children, swung open a door in the office and nearly took out Ashley Simpson on accident.

Be sure to visit the site, this is simply a re-post of the entry.

In the days preceding her death, Virgina Woolf wrote three letters; one of which was addressed to her sister, Vanessa, the other two to her husband, Leonard. Here we have the final one, discovered at their home by Leonard on the 28th of March, 1941, just days after he had found his wife returning home soaking wet following what he later believed to be a failed suicide attempt. The second time however, Woolf succeeded in her efforts to escape a lifetime of mental illness, and three weeks later was found in the River Ouse, her coat’s pockets filled with heavy rocks.

Transcript follows. If anyone has access to an image of the second page, please get in touch.

Transcript

Tuesday.

Dearest,

I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.

V.

Now, obviously many of you are hip to the happening of the next seasons, but from our current perspective of the unfolding events, the entire fate of the survivors seems to pivot on some character or other’s daddy issues. Sawyer, Jack, Walt; they all have serious problems with their fathers.

I’ve heard it said that J.J. Abrhams (mastermind behind LOST, the recent Star Trek movie, Fox Network’s FRINGE, and the Godzilla Witch Project a.k.a Cloverfield) is constantly drawn to stories laden with the struggles between father and son. Star Trek certainly portrayed Kirk as living in his father’s shadow. FRINGE is a daddy issue tour de force between Joshua Jackson’s character and his slightly insane and absent father. And, as mentioned, LOST certainly seems to be shaping up in the same mold.

As I contemplated this, I started to look for a pattern in modern film. Thing’s started to suddenly make sense.

Our generation’s great event was not a war, music festival, or economic depression. Our generation’s great event was paternal abandonment.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s start with “Luke, I am your father.”

I believe this single, iconic piece of dialogue set off a shockwave of creative concentration on the issue of “Dad”. George Lucas continues the pattern by adding Sean Connery to the last installment in what I’ll refer to as the true Indian Jones trilogy. After following Henry Jones Jr. through a gauntlet of exotic dangers, we suddenly find that the genesis of his adventuring was an attempt to gain the approval of his father’s unmeetable expectations. The high jinx that unfold throughout the film are a light-hearted, action-packed reunion between a son and absentee father. However, the serious subject matter still resonates.

But it’s not just Mr. Lucas who’s writing about this…how about our old friend John Hughes. The Breakfast Club (surely a film that defined a generation) was so addled with paternal discord that it made me wish I hated my dad so I could be a badass like Bender. The two powerful monologs in which Bender describes his Christmas and Andrew talks about his father’s heartless pressing to “WIN” are not just notable scenes in the film, but passionately written and acted words that echo throughout our generational conciousness.

Fight Club, another favorite to the children of the 80′s and 90′s, was laden with daddy issues both in it’s novel form AND in it’s theatrical manifestation. Observe exhibit “A” from the film’s script:

TYLER:
If you could fight anyone… one on
one, whoever you wanted, who would
you fight?

JACK:
Anyone?

TYLER:
Anyone.

Jack thinks.

JACK:
My boss, probably.
(pause)
Who would you fight?

TYLER:
My dad.  No question.

A long pause as Jack studies Tyler’s face.

JACK:
Oh, yeah.
(nodding)
I didn’t know my dad.  Well, I knew
him, till I was six.  He went and
married another woman, had more kids.
Every six years or so he’d do it
again — new city, new family.

TYLER:
He was setting up franchises.  My
father never went to college, so it
was really important that I go.

JACK:
I know that.

TYLER:
After I graduated, I called him long
distance and asked, “Now what?”  He
said, “Get a job.”  When I turned
twenty-five, I called him and asked,
“Now what?”  He said, “I don’t know.
Get married.”

JACK:
Same here.

TYLER:
A generation of men raised by women.
I’m wondering if another woman is the
answer we really need.

I could go on and on and so could you. Christopher Nolan played up Bruce Wayne’s father/son relationship in Batman Begins. Jack Bauer eventually battles his heartless father in 24. HBO’s critically-acclaimed series Six Feet Under was entirely about the Fischer family’s relationship with their dead father/husband. The list runs as long as you have time to add to it. If everything in our parent’s cinema tied back to the A-bomb and the war, everything in our’s ties back to our Dad’s.

It’s not necessarily that these issues are new, it’s just that we as a species are just getting around to dealing with them en mass. Does it have to do with a sky-rocketing divorce rate? Maybe. Is it because we have nothing more pressing to mull over? I don’t think so.

Whatever the reason, I challenge you to contemplate this and even add to or detract from the list of pop-culture and art that is centered around the ominous figure of Dad. You may find comfort in numbers, knowing that you’re not the only one with an uncomfortable third Sunday in June. Or, at best, you’ll be glad that you’re stagnated creatively by your healthy paternal interactions.

He makes some poigniant observations worth checking out.

“In this ‘southern’ city with its profound history of racial discord, prejudice, and injustice (and only more recently some halting movements towards reconciliation) King’s life and message are particularly germane.”

click here for the entire entry.

Below is the link to the story:
Teen Drinking May Cause Irreversible Brain Damage