Straw Dogs

They say that it is usual for men to come to a point in their lives in which they either snap, or dramatically change their focuses in life or just walk away from familiar surroundings. Therapists speak of a journey to some elusive land that pulls men in even though there are no maps to ensure a safe travel. Those in the know thus make reference to the great myths that involve trips into the unknown: Jason and his Argonauts going after some golden fleece, Ulysses spending 10 years on a trip that he would normally make in few days, or the multitude of knights blazing just as many trails in order to get to the exact place in the dessert in which they would be able to get hold of the Holy Grail. All of these legends speak of a deeply rooted longing in mostly but not exclusively male psychology that impels men to all of a sudden turn their backs and break free. What could be those breaking points that turn a person's life around for better or worse?

With this question in mind I went back to Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” (1971 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067800). A young Dustin Hoffman plays David Summer, a researcher who is breaking ground in the field of Math and thus needs some time away to finish his research. He rents a cottage in England and goes with his wife, Amy (Susan George), on a sabbatical. The cottage belongs to his wife’s family and it’s located in the little town his wife grew up in. Once there, the young professor becomes a foreigner in a rather hostile environment. The men in the village think of him as a weakling while openly lust after his wife, specially her old flame from her teen years. The increasingly escalating tension boils up to an awful mix of rape, violence and murder that provide the context for this young professor to affirm himself as a male. Following a line similar to William Golding’s “The Lord of the Flies” and Jonathan Littell's “The Kindly Ones,” Sam Peckinpah unearth the beast that lies dormant inside of the most civilized and law abiding souls. Whenever it comes to proves one’s mettle, violence seems to present itself as the most appealing route to follow.

Hoffman’s character descends from a pedestal of snobbery on which he has perched his sense of worth to test himself as just another man in a backward village. However, at the end, as he drove away from a destroyed house leaving behind a wife he has neglected all the time, David Summer sports a smile that tells of a newly discovered freedom, as if he has just gotten hold of the Holy Grail, or the golden fleece, or Ulysses’s Ithaca. Yet, in Peckinpah the recovered male self is not marked by either a sense of going back home or finding the way home. Ironically, the final smile of this professor is punctuated by his contradictory words: “I don’t know my way home.” Sadly, violence is presented as a rite of passage that specially men cannot avoid. Does it have to be that way?

Bailout: the Word of the Year 2008

Merry Webster, the dictionary, just released its "word of the year" statement. For 2008, ladies and gentlemen, the word of the year is bailout (http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com/)



Surprise, surprise? Not at all. Bailout made it to the top during the last weeks of the year thanks to US$700 billion that the US Federal Reserve pumped into the pockets of big money makers.



If you feel tempted to think that bailing someone out (or being bailed out, for that matter) is sort of trendy, think twice. A Word of the Year could mean that a stern judgment is being passed on the way things are being handled.



The recipients of the US$700 billion awards, hunger-makers as they are, are showing us that things are not going to improve. Not at least for the ones bailing them out, that is, the pedestrian tax payers. A point in case: one of these very clever winners, Citi Group, managed to get the US people come up with US$25 billion to its rescue so that it could cover its liabilities while pocketing its assets. Cam Harvey, from Duke University, finds this move to be very damaging:

"It wasn't that long ago that Citigroup was considered a "good" bank. Remember October 1, 2008? Citigroup announced it was acquiring Wachovia with the help of the FDIC. You had to be strong to do a favor to the government like that.
"Citi was also a recipient of $25 billion in the first tranche of the $125 billion TARP money. However, we know now Citi was not healthy. On Friday, Citi stock closed at $3.77 implying an approximate market cap of $19 billion -- just a few weeks after the Treasury had injected $25 billion in capital. This implied that the government was throwing $25 billion at something that was worth -$6 billion! It is the classic throw of good money at bad. I am fully aware that some type of intervention was necessary. Citi falling would have created even worse chaos in markets. But the recent injection of a further $20 billion and huge government guarantees on troubled assets is a spectacularly bad deal for the American (sic) taxpayer."