My wife and I sat back relaxing this week with after enjoying our favorite dinner out (Mexican - the hotter the better). That's the best time to talk. Especially politics. Everything gets so clear after a Dos Equis and a margarita!
I was complaining to her (as I often do) that there was so much that happened in the past week, I couldn't rightly decide what topic to write about. In writing a weekly column that is a common dilemma I often struggle with. So many people to make mad at me, so little time!
As it happened this week was particularly tough. I mean, an Islamic terrorist attack at Ohio State! Well that's what the majority of my readers (including myself) saw. The others saw a random act of violence. There I go again.
Sabrina and I then talked about the death of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. I was telling her how much I enjoyed Kathleen Parker's opinion column in the Washington Post entitled "Don’t give Fidel Castro the last laugh."
Parker opined that while it is not polite to celebrate anyone’s death, it is another to "sidestep the horrors of a murderous, 60-year military regime." To people like me it was a simple case of good riddance.
Parker was also astonished, as was I, by comments by liberal leaders like Nancy Pelosi who tweeted that Castro’s death “marks the end of an era.” (Stalin’s death did, too, but who’s judging?). Then Parker chided Justin Trudeau, Canada’s "happy-boy" prime minister, for calling Castro a “remarkable leader,” who “made significant improvements” to Cuba ... presumably by taking over all private possessions and culling the island of the middle class. Attaboy.
Not to mention the positive comments from President Barack Obama. Hey, at least he wasn't wearing a Castro shirt like our NFL buddy Colin Kaepernick. Not that I know of anyway.
Pelosi, by the way, just won re-election as the Democrat House Minority Leader over Ohio's Tim Ryan, who advocated a more populist, less elitist liberal formula. To us old timers it was just another example of the absolutely stunning divide in our country.
Parker ended with a shot at Twitter. "No wonder so many chose to express themselves through Twitter — a communication format well-suited to the small and shallow." Amen. Hear that Donald Trump?
Speaking of our Twitter-happy president-elect, I suggested to Sabrina that it would be hard for me to ignore what I see as the cynical and silly Jill Stein vote recounts. By this time, we were both in a pretty good mood courtesy of the margaritas. My funny wife broke me up by imitating one of my favorite movie lines - saying "Recount? Recount?!"
She joked that Trump's recount reaction reminded her of one of our favorite scenes from the great 1979 Oscar winning movie "Breaking Away." The dad in the movie (Ray Stohler, played by Paul Dooley) ran a cheap "buyer beware" kind of used car lot. A dissatisfied customer asks for a refund. "Refund? Refund?!" Dooley keeps repeating incredulously and then collapses with a minor heart attack.
As we laughed about it, it occurred to me that the 38-year-old movie really was touching on the generational and cultural divide that we are seeing in America today.
It was a poignant movie that needed no sex, no violence, no special effects. Just an incredibly literate and humorous script supporting fantastic performances by the entire cast.
The movie was a story about the clash between the cultural elites from the university and the poor "cutters" - locals who worked in the stone quarries. This theme was juxtaposed with a generational clash between dad and son. The dad views the lessons of life as something that makes you tougher and turns you into a man. His bicycle-riding son thinks there must be a better way to live.
It is also the story of four young midwestern men in their late teens who are staring adulthood in the face, and how they deal with watching rich college kids pass them by.
Does that story line sound familiar? I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same. In fact, the movie ended with an exhilarating and unifying sporting event, just like ours did last week, right?
Go Bucks!