Wednesday, June 11, 2003
FAMILY VALUES Saturday, May 24, 2003
Just saw Rudi Giuliani with his giggling 3rd bride on the nightly news - a great guy for sure and definitely a family values kind of guy. (As a native New Yorker I do admire Rudi but he can shed the family values thingy). Then we have the next really great family values guy, Rush Limbaugh, also on his 3rd wife, (I don't follow this too closely so it might just be hearsay). Then, the greatest family values guy of them all, NEWT GINGRICH (remember Newty??? he is the guy who introduced us all to The Contract With America?, no On America?, for America? (you'll excuse me I've had a few glasses of wine this evening) I think that great family values guy Newty was the one who visited his wife (either#1 or #2) while she was in the hospital for cancer treatment to inform her that he was soon to be gonzo, he had found himself another hot potooty, soon to be Newty family values wifey #3. Well, I could go on, but this is just an example of that rage problem I have that I wrote about in a earlier post.
Guess what maligned high ranking official is still married to his first wife? Guess what high ranking official's daughter has never been caught drunk, or with a faked I.D.? Some former highest ranking official who obviously has the wrong sense of family values.
My dad is a staunch Republican. He's also a former B17 pilot. He's a family values kind of guy. In spite of many affairs (my mom and dad had them safely hidden from public view) they have remained together beause of their "family values". Two years ago (my dad and mom were both 77 at that time)after way too many drinks, my dad tells my mom he had a 15 year affair with the only woman he truely loved and the only reason why he stayed with my mom was because this other woman wouldn't marry him. So what to do? I hear this story from my mom a few weeks after the confession. She is devastated. But she is 77 years old and has been living the old "family values" kind of life for 57 years. After his confession he sobers up. They have a house and swimming pool in Florida. They have had cancer and survived it. She cries, and bites her tongue and makes breakfast and looks back on 57 years of living a "family values" kind of life.
Rudi's love life details:
http://www.dailykos.com/archives/002803.html#002803
DOCUMENTING OURSELVES
A review of the new documentary CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS runs next to an article about photo blogs on the cover of this Sundays NYTimes arts section. The movie would not have been possible without the Friedman family's obession with documenting itself on video; the good, the bad, and the horrific. Photo blogs (and this blog too) seem to be a part of the same phenomena. Did it all start with Andy Warhol? Issues of privacy, voyeurism, ethics are all part of the stew, but the definitions are unclear.
Reality TV, starting with CANDID CAMERA, AMERICAN IDOL, CSI, we can't seem to get enough of ourselves. It is a frenzy of probing and exposing. WE NEED TO KNOW! This is all a good thing. It is what drives us, from an evolutionary standpoint, this need to know who we are as a species. We have all become anthropologists, observing, taking notes, having theories about our behaviour, our appearance etc. The more we know about the intimate lives of our neighbor, our lover, our child and just for laughs I'll throw in "our government", the safer we will all be.
