Mixed Marriage

America is in the process of losing its mind once again for the British royal family. This time due to the impeding marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, a lowly American without title of pedigree.

You’d think a country that fought a democratic revolution in favor of what Jefferson called “a natural aristocracy” of virtues and talents, and against “an artificial aristocracy” of wealth and birth, would find all of this antique folderol of titled, royal, aristocratic, hereditary privilege revolting. Many Brits do. But no, we’re gaga for it.

Predictably, not all Brits are wild about the bride. Her black mother, Doria Ragland, is descended from Georgia slaves, while her white father Thomas Markle has Dutch and Irish roots with several ancestors who arrived in New England before the Revolution. A shocking development, a divorced American with ancestors from Africa, Ireland and the Netherlands is invading the hallowed bastions of England’s royals.

And yet, turnabout is fair play. it’s worth asking who the groom is. How does Prince Harry sign his checks? Well, he’s Henry Albert David Mountbatten-Windsor. Does that mean he’s English through and through? And therefore superior to a colonial upstart of mixed race? Not exactly.

His grandfather, Prince Phillip, adopted the Mountbatten name when he married Elizabeth Windsor in 1947 because his father’s name might have been troubling to Britain just two years after Hitler’s Third Reich stopped killing his wife’s people. Phillip was actually a member of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg. Mein Gott, what a Teutonic mess.

In truth, the Mountbatten moniker, from his mother’s side of the family, wasn’t that much of an improvement. It too was adopted by British members, this time during World War I to disguise the real name and origin of the family. They were Battenbergs from Hesse, Germany, which might have incited the public to string them up from London lamp posts at a time when the Kaiser was busy killing 700,000 Brits.

Similarly, Queen Elizabeth’s family only became Windsors recently. They borrowed the name from a very nice royal castle built in the 11th century by William the Conquerer. Of course, he was also not British, but a Viking from Normandy. He built the castle to protect his invaders from actual residents of the British Isles while he subdued and exploited them. Treated them, in fact, rather like Americans of British lineage treated Meghan Markle’s enslaved ancestors.

But I digress. Queen Victoria’s husband, dear Prince Albert, bequeathed to the royal family his pedigree. He was Prince Albert Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. And Victoria was his first cousin, which may account for some of the inbred traits of he royals. She was from the House of Hanover, from Brunswick-Luneberg, which ruled Britain from 1714 on. Once again the Germanic name became a problem in WWI, so they morphed magically into Windsors for PR purposes.

I could go on, but you get the drift. It looks like the last time an English monarch was arguably any more English than Meghan Markle was a lot further back than the American Revolution. King Alfred the Great, maybe? On Prince Harry Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Hanover-Schleswig-Battenberg etc.’s Mum’s side, however, there seems to be a glimmer of hope.

Princes Di was a Spencer, and they have a fine, unbroken English pedigree back to the Middle Ages, but there you discover they were Despensers, which looks rather Frenchy. So they too were probably the spawn of Vikings who conquered Normandy in France before conquering England.

On Markle’s side, genealogists have been busy showing that she has oodles of ancestors who were kings and queens, just like Harry. Of course, this is no big deal. So do you and I. As Adam Rutherford demonstrates in “A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived,” There are 8 billion or so people now alive, but there were fewer in each earlier generation. In 1960, there were 3 billion, in 1800 just one billion, in 1000 about 350 million. So, go back far enough and mathematically we are all necessarily related to Charlemagne, Genghis Khan and Cleopatra. And to each other.

Royal or slave, blue blood or black isn’t important. It’s character that counts and Doria Ragland, yoga instructor and social worker, seems to be at least as nice a person as Princess Di. They probably would have liked each other. And could have dissed the royals over tea.

Tennyson had it right

Howe’er it be, it seems to me,
    ’Tis only noble to be good.
Kind hearts are more than coronets,
    And simple faith than Norman blood.

Abnormal Democracy

A friend my age says, “I am having an increasingly difficult time understanding society.” I cynically suggested to him we no longer have a society, but various age, race, gender, socio-economic, political, cyber or media tribes to which we adhere and with whom we war against other tribes.

Still, he’s right. Something is wrong when it becomes normal to sum up our country’s condition with the words: “This is not normal.” That means it must be abnormal, as in abnormal psychology. Is there such a thing as abnormal sociology? Abnormal political science? Abnormal democracy? Apparently so. We’re living it.

For a long time, it was unthinkable that a divorced man could be nominated for, let alone win, the presidency. Nelson Rockefeller was deemed unacceptable on those grounds in 1968, but by 1980 remarried Ronald Reagan was just fine. Now, of course, we are living with the thrice-married Trump, not to mention the porn queens, playmates and molestees. Is this now normal?

It certainly looks like maltreatment of women is the norm. This used to be regarded as the purview of blue collar guys in wife-beater underwear, the Stanley Kowalski’s of the world. But probably it was always going on, just wasn’t discussed. Just as the word cancer was only whispered. One suspects that for alpha males at the top of the food chain, a feeling of entitled machismo has always gone with the territory.

Now, in addition to the molester-in-chief, we’ve got movie moguls, TV heavyweights, film stars, comedians, politicians, bankers, journalists, sports figures, chefs, symphony conductors, venture capitalists, judges and even the head of the Humane Society revealed to have been “ungentlemanly”, shall we say.

This may be the least surprising collapse of social norms. As far as I can tell the world has always been divided into beta males, pathetically grateful for the hint of a smile from a female, and what the ladies. I believe, refer to as pigs, when they aren’t trying to get them to the altar.

I suspect the pigs haven’t gotten more brazen in our time, though perhaps more blatant because they learn their manners from reality TV or from social media, to quote Cary Grant in a different context, “the most dubious inventions since itching powder.” Rather, women have finally decided they’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore. Perhaps society is bifurcating into Wonder Woman’s Themyscira and a pig sty.

Perhaps the Amazons or the Parkland teens can save our society. The rest of us are slouching toward dystopia, where ”the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Fraud and propaganda pose as news. Those unfit for office win, and go about corrupting the government, lowering norms, and serving themselves at the trough.
This isn’t new, and if it gets bad enough the crooks are eventually thrown out, a backlash leads to a cleaning of the Augean Stables. The Progressive Era followed the Gilded Age, Wall Street excesses were curbed by reforms after 1929 and 2008, political guardrails were erected after Watergate.

Now, however, pedophile judges removed from the bench run for Senate and almost win. A racist Sheriff convicted of disobeying a court order is pardoned by a reality TV president and seeks a Senate seat. A mine owner jailed after ignoring safety requirements that killed 29 miners, and a congressman sent to the slammer for felony tax fraud, also believe there’s a revolving door between prison and Capitol Hill.

Why should they be ashamed in an era where billionaires are empowered by the Supreme Court to buy elections, purchase gerrymandering, and legislate voter suppression, all in order to secure a government friendly to their needs and inimical to those of the majority of their fellow Americans?
A presidential race was tampered with by a foreign adversary and the President, Vice President and majority in Congress, beneficiaries of this unprecedented crime against the state, say there’s no need for further investigation.

An Israeli black ops company, Black Cube, that was hired to intimidate accusers of Harvey Weinstein in order to pervert the course of justice, is now also accused of conniving to discredit Obama administration functionaries involved in the Iran nuclear deal. The goal? To justify Trump’s renunciation of the pact. It is rumored the administration hired the spooks, or his backers, but it may have been friends of Israel.

After the Russian hack of our election, it wouldn’t be a surprise to find governments from around the world emboldened to tamper with the government of the United States of America. What worked for Putin might work for them.

And it is now revealed that the personal attorney of the President, when not paying hush money to a porn star, was raking in corporate millions from the likes of ATT, Novartis and Korean Aero. No doubt he was inspired by cabinet secretaries Zinke and Pruitt, as well as Ivanka, Don Jr. and Jared, all cheerfully cashing in on their proximity to power. Or perhaps Cohen, like them, was merely another front man for the head of the family business.

Is anything off limits in this gaudy era of Abnormal Democracy? It is hard to imagine what’s still beyond the pale, though the president, unlike his benefactor in Moscow and his new best friend in Pyongyang, has not yet resorted to sending out goons to eliminate his political enemies with neurotoxins.
So far as we know. If I was Bob Mueller, however, I’ve be watching with great care my back, my food and drink.

Five Days, Nine Films

I learned to love movies from my mother. She took me to libraries, the planetarium, the natural history museum, which was fabulous for me but more like a duty for her. She took me to movies because she grew up in the Golden Age of the 1930s and ‘40s and loved them. When I was six or seven we’d head for Saturday matinees of “War of the Worlds,” “It Came from Outer Space,” and “The Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Occasionally she’d make me accompany her to some inappropriate snoozer, for a kid, like “Party Girl,” with her favorite leading man, an aging Robert Taylor, as a mob lawyer.

I’m still cuckoo for film and have been lucky enough to be able to binge at film festivals in Minneapolis, Santa Barbara and my local version, RiverRun which just celebrated its 20th anniversary. They all come with their annoyances — the lines, too many films to see in too few showings, the feeling of being cattle wrangled. But festivals do offer a chance to view films that will never open in a theater near you, or these days even appear on a streaming service, films from neophytes and from overseas.

This year I managed to squeeze nine films into five days. Three I chose happened to be singled out for recognition by the festival’s end. One of my favorites didn’t, but I am pretty sure I am right and the festival is wrong.

The big prize went to “Angles Wear White,” a muckraking Chinese production. Mia is a teenage girl in a job she shouldn’t have in a place she shouldn’t be. In China one’s opportunities are geographically restricted unless you get a special dispensation, so like our illegal immigrants people like Mia are easy to exploit.

She is working as an ill-paid cleaning woman at a seaside hotel and her desk clerk friend often gets her to take her place on the nightshift while she goes out to party. On one such night Mia witnesses a sex crime when a man arrives with two young girls. A crusading female attorney seeks justice, but by the end a powerful patriarchy hushes up the crime. Mia is beaten and robbed, doctors who examined the girls change their testimony, the parents are silenced with threats, and virtually every woman involved is shown to be powerless. Plucky, resourceful Mia escapes, but her prospects in such a system seem poor.

“Bye Bye Germany” is a joint production by Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg about a group of concentration camp survivors in a displaced persons camp after world War II. It is overseen by American troop as they await permission to emigrate to America or Palestine.

One of their number is a man, Berman ( Moritz Bleibtreu), whose family owned a retail business before the Nazis. He still has connections and creates a scheme whereby he and
his fellow detainees can make a buck on the side selling table linens door to door. He is a cousin to such scroungers as those played by James Garner and William Holden in POW movies. Or perhaps a kind of Schindler after the fact. Mark Ivanir is also excellent as his hangdog bookkeeper.

This is a comedy, but one with tears, since these survivors are haunted men, and with a dark suspicion. Berman is called before Special Agent Sara Simon, a tough Jewish, American lawyer (Antje Traue) who tells him he is being investigated for collaboration with the Nazis and may be going to prison rather than to America.

He tries to prove his innocence while wooing his interrogator. And the story he tells is so ridiculous it has to be true. Dark comedy, farce, love story, tragedy, this mash-up ought to be impossible to pull off, but it succeeds.

Another film singled out for recognition was “Saints Rest,” a family drama with music set in Grinnell, Iowa. In the sort of multiculturalism typical of indie films, it is a USA/Israel production set about as solidly in the American heartland as possible but directed and co-written by Noga Ashkenazi and starring the luminous Hani Furstenberg as Joni, both Israelis.

It concerns two estranged musical sisters. Joni is older and has taken over her mother’s coffee shop and nursed her through her terminal illness while putting her own life on hold. Her younger sister, Allie, has gone off to college in California, hasn’t returned home for three years to lend a hand in her sister’s time of trouble, and now swans into town en route to a small part in a Broadway musical.

The conflict is reminiscent of “The Turning Point” and “Old Acquaintance” about an artist who stayed home and one who went on to success, and focuses on the residue of mixed emotions left behind. This is a sweet, little picture. Furstenberg gives a fine performance in the lead, mixing affection and resentment and sings beautifully. The supporting cast is filled with quirky, charming small town characters.

My favorite film was “Chasing the Blues” which stars Grant Rosenmeyer and Ronald L. Conner as Alan and Paul. Their prickly relationship is reminiscent of the collaborations of Gene Wilder’s sweet schlemiel and Richard Pryor’s hyperkinetic rascal. Alan is a school teacher and fanatical collector of vintage 78 blues records. Paul owns a record shop.

He learns Alan may have discovered the whereabouts of a legendary record that was never released. Only three copies were pressed and would be extremely valuable if found, but they are also said to be cursed — a cross between the Maltese Falcon and Tut’s tomb. The widow of the last owner doesn’t know what she’s got and the two rivals compete to obtain the dingus. This comedy of errors escalates until both wind up in jail, but as soon as they are out, they are on the trail again. Very funny with surprise assists from Steve Guttenberg and Jon Lovitz.

Finally, I will mention three documentaries which may show up on PBS or HBO. “Laddie: The Man Behind The Movies” is an appreciation of the influential movie producer Alan Ladd Jr., by his daughter. “Generation Wealth” is a look at the grotesque and wretched excess of the nouveau riche by photographer Lauren Greenfield. “Far From The Tree” is derived from the book by Andrew Solomon concerning children profoundly different from their parents. It was inspired by Solomon’s personal coming to terms with his parents’ rejection of his gay identity and his realization that experiences as diverse as dwarfism, Down Syndrome, autism, and schizophrenia inflict a similar toll on anyone seen as the other.

All are watchable and interesting. In a sign of the times, to my mind, at least two suffer from a similar flaw. If documentaries are akin to journalism, the credo used to be that the story is not about the reporter. But a good deal of “Generation Wealth” ends up being about the photographer behind it, her work and her relationship with her mother, all of which seem unrelated to the ostensible point of the piece. Similarly, the otherwise fond homage to Ladd by his daughter spends rather a lot of time on his remoteness when she was young and he was working non-stop. In each case these issues may be interesting to the film makers but simply distract the audience from the story they came to see.