Walter White says bye-bye, ‘Baby Blue’

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

Walter White to his wife Skyler in their final scene together: “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really… I was alive.”

Breaking Bad was an unusually good TV show partly because its creator, Vince Gilligan, never stopped exploring contemporary notions of acceptable behavior. For a long while, we could root for Walter the cancer-riddled methamphetamine cook because he was trying to make sure his family would be provided for after he died. Then Gilligan revealed a more ruthless and arrogant Walter, until we couldn’t help but wonder how much of his professed commitment to family was to rationalize the pleasure he took in wielding power.

Most viewers “get” that ours is a dog-eat-dog society in which conventional morality is usually an obstacle to success and well-being, and that the people who wield real power in this country are far more beastly than Walter at his worst. (Dick Cheney is Ozymandias, not Walter White.)

But there are still limits to the amount of nasty behavior a TV audience will accept in a protagonist, even if he’s an anti-hero. Walter crossed the line when he let Jesse’s junkie girlfriend choke to death on her own vomit, a sin that indirectly caused many more deaths. He clearly “deserved” to die, but only after some terrible comeuppance.

He suffered many comeuppances in the show’s final season. His “I did it for my family” became an ironic motif, especially to feminist critics who see patriarchy as the root of all evil. He seemed to have reached the limit of his self-awareness.

But Gilligan threw one final curveball in the finale, when Walter fessed up to having taken pleasure in breaking bad. His “And I was alive” declaration, reminiscent of some existential hipster dreamed up by Norman Mailer, was also an admission that he was tragically flawed, that his quest to do right by his family had corrupted him and done terrible damage to them and others.

Gilligan apparently sensed that fans didn’t want the show to end on a morally simplistic note, so he left us with a Walter whose final actions were about trying to undo some of the damage he’d done. He died fully aware of his guilt but more or less at peace with himself, an Everyman, if Everyman could cook perfect blue meth and had the balls and the means to fight back, however recklessly, against those who would expect him (or her) to die without trying to, yes, provide for his (or her) family.

Footnote: An old Badfinger hit was used in Walter’s death scene as a lament for his killer meth (… the special love I had for you, Baby Blue). Gilligan’s ability to use music in a subversive way is on a par with Tarrentino’s.

Why conservatives should re-read Milton Friedman

~ susie

Pretty good piece in the Times:

So far, it might seem that Friedman envisages only minimal moral constraints on business activity. But in fact he acknowledges the need for a variety of government interventions to keep capitalism on the right track. These include not only laws against deception and fraud, but also control of the money supply, prevention of monopolies and compensation to those involuntarily harmed by pollution and similar “neighborhood effects” of business activities. Most strikingly, Friedman proposed a “negative income tax” to eliminate poverty. Roughly, his idea was to give all those reporting income below the poverty line a rebate that would bring them at least up to the line. Our current earned income tax credit — supported by both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan — is an application of the idea but restricted to those who are employed. Friedman, a major intellectual hero of the right, supported a program most current conservatives would denounce as “socialism.”

Krugman v. Kristol

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

William Kristol hasn’t said anything intellectually coherent in years:

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman on Sunday told Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol that his argument over why President Barack Obama’s health care reform law should be delayed was based on “policy ignorance.”

During a panel discussion on ABC News, Kristol predicted that if the president refused to delay the health care law and Republicans forced a government shutdown, the GOP would not face a backlash.

“There have been shutdowns througout the last over last 25 years and, as you know, they don’t always backfire,” Kristol insisted. “It’s a little delicate. But look, why not delay at least parts of Obamacare for a year?”

“It happens, in fact, to be a very good law,” Krugman insisted. “You see, one of the things, I think, that’s going on here is just a failure on the part of the Republican caucus to actually understand anything about this thing… In fact, almost all of the substantive news about Obamacare over the last couple months has been good. The premiums are coming in well below expectations, health care costs are moderating. Probably there will be some technical glitches with computer systems, but those are not fundamental.”

“Should the president have delayed the employer mandate?” Kristol asked. “Should he, yes or no?”

“Yeah,” Krugman replied.

“But not the individual mandate?” Kristol pressed. “Big businesses get the delay but the individuals don’t.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Krugman declared. “This policy ignorance, not understanding that the employer mandate is basically a trivial add-on to the law, while the individual mandate is central to it. You don’t understand that.”

“You can’t really blame people who ran, saying they would do their best to delay this bad law from happening from trying to do that,” Kristol later added. “Democrats ran in ’06 saying they were going get us out of Iraq, and they spent all of 2007, 2008 undercutting our efforts in Iraq.”

“But, Bill, this law passed and was signed by the president,” President George W. Bush’s former chief strategist Matthew Dowd observed. “Then the president ran a re-election campaign, the American public voted for him overwhelmingly. The Republicans need for fold their tent and say it’s the law.”

Tipped their hand, did they?

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

They claim they had to get rid of the senior teachers in Philly because the results are so bad. So why does this apply to the entire state?

Seniority for public school teachers is in the crosshairs in Philadelphia and soon will be a target across Pennsylvania.

Frustrated by the slow pace of negotiations for a new contract for Philadelphia teachers, a coalition of education and parents’ groups says it will call on the School Reform Commission Monday to immediately pull seniority off the bargaining table and give Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. a free hand in assigning staff.

The announcement urging the move, scheduled for midday Monday, is expected to rekindle fierce debate over powers granted to the SRC under the law that led to the state takeover of city schools in 2001.

“If somebody wanted to create a legal atomic bomb, this is it,” Ralph J. Teti, the lawyer who represents the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said Sunday.

On Tuesday, a bill is to be introduced in Harrisburg that would strip language from the state school code that requires layoffs and recalls to be determined by seniority.

Jonathan Cetel, executive director of the state group PennCan, which seeks to speed the pace of education improvement, said Sunday both efforts were aimed at bringing reform to “an outdated model,” in which the most recent hires are laid off first and brought back last.