Fireflies

I’m a fan of anime.  One of the most powerful movies I’ve ever seen is the 1988 animated Japanese movie Grave of the Fireflies, directed by Isao Takahata for the famous Studio Ghibli.  It’s about a Japanese boy and his little sister struggling through World War II.  Their mother was killed in a bombing raid, and their father, an officer in the disintegrating Japanese navy, is probably dead too.  Then they live with their aunt, but she scolds them for being parasites and pride eventually drives the boy to leave with the girl and try to survive on their own, making a home in a cave.  The movie makes it clear at the beginning that they’ll die, so that isn’t a spoiler.  (At times we see the boy’s ghost.)

All this sounds grim, and a lot of it is.  But it’s all the details that make it compelling. (The title comes from a scene where the girl collects fireflies in the night, but the next day they’re dead so she buries them.) There’s a scene near the end set to the song “Home, Sweet Home” that brings me to tears, because at this point I see that a movie that seemed to be about death is really about life, not unlike the famous Japanese movie Ikiru.

It’s based on a 1967 short story by Akiyuki Nosata, who was a boy in the hungry times in 1940s Japan whose little sister died.  (He must have felt a certain “survivor’s guilt.”)

This sort of story is more effectively told in animation than it could be in live action.  When we see photographs or films of the horrors of war, we instinctively keep an emotional distance from what we’re seeing, like when we look directly into the sun and our cornea naturally closes.  Drawings somehow get around this.  Another example is Maus, Art Spiegelmann’s comic book telling the story of how his Jewish parents survived the Nazi holocaust, with Jews shown as mice and Nazis as cats.

I’m grateful to Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert for first exposing me to the film on their movie review show!

Pizza

I usually like pizza, so long as it doesn’t have onions or tomato slices.  There used to be a pizza place around the corner from our house, but it closed during the covid lockdown and now there’s a felafel place there instead.  My three preferred toppings were pepperoni, pineapple and ground beef.  I’d always tear off the crust first and eat that while letting the rest of it cool, to avoid burning my mouth.

On the other hand, I can’t eat the stuff they sell at the Pizza Pizza chain—it literally makes me sick!  I wish I knew what they put in it that disagrees with me so badly…

I remember seeing an episode of The Brady Bunch involving competitive jumping frogs, with a moment when the frog got into the pizza! (I watched that show at the time, with no idea that it would become a camp classic…) The reason I remember it is that just as they were showing it, the broadcast got interrupted to report the death of Lyndon Johnson.

When I was young I read a thing about pizza in a Mad magazine paperback reprint. (This was from 1960 or so, when pizza was the new thing…) It had cartoon advice like “When you’re driving home with your pizza and get stuck in a traffic jam, you can always set the passenger seat on fire to keep the pizza warm,” and “If a policeman stops you, you can bribe him with a slice.” This included “How to eat a pizza pie,” which showed three methods, each of them ending with “…getting icky sticky gook all over your $49.50 charcoal-grey suit”! $49.50 would be a good price for a suit today.

Habits

The habit I can’t break is going on Twitter and looking for a quarrel. (My handle is Captain Snark.) I do searches for Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, two of my heroes.

I don’t usually block Tweeters I don’t like.  I sometimes post, “The first one who blocks, loses.” (I’ve also said, “The first one who cusses, loses.”) In a worst-case scenario, I’ll mute instead of blocking. But there’s one exception.  There’s a musician called Corbyn Besson who’s a member of the boy band Why Don’t We.  When I search the name Corbyn I’ve sometimes got fan posts concerning him, so I’ve blocked hundreds of Corbyn Besson fans—I’ll bet some of them are bots set up by Why Don’t We’s publicity machine.

It annoys me when people say about Jeremy Corbyn “He lost twice!” as if that were the last word about him.  Most people would consider the 2017 election a standoff, considering that the ruling Conservatives lost their majority.  And the main reason for the 2019 defeat was the disastrously ill-timed proposal for a second Brexit referendum that future leader Keir Starmer pushed through.

People say that about Bernie Sanders too.  Their position seems to be “The Democrats rejected him twice, therefore he couldn’t win, therefore they were right to reject him!” When I post that line of circular logic, I accompany it with the emoji for rolling eyes.  It’s incredible that some people keep repeating things about Sanders that are easily debunked.  Like “He doesn’t care about African-Americans” or “He hasn’t accomplished anything in Congress but renaming a couple of post offices.” (When they say that, I post “Google ‘amendment king.’”) It particularly annoys me when they keep calling his supporters “Bernie Bros.” That’s a cynical soundbite that Nixon would be proud of, invented by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to depict them as white males!

Clintonites have some nerve blaming her 2016 defeat on Sanders!  Firstly, Bernie could have double-crossed the Democratic Party and defected to the Green ticket, and might even have won!  But he played it safe and campaigned for her, and actually delivered an even more solid majority of his supporters than she’d delivered for Barack Obama in 2008.  They complain that he stayed in the race too long, yet it’s normal for candidates to continue their campaign all the way to the Convention.

Secondly, two can play the blame game.  During the 2016 primaries the polls almost consistently showed Clinton leading Donald Trump by the same dicey narrow margin that she’d have in the fall, while giving Sanders a much wider, safer lead.  Was defeating Trump less of a priority before Hillary clinched the nomination? (Incidentally, if you can believe that she and Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination “fair and square,” you can believe anything!)

I’m still hoping that Bernie will run again next year!

As you can see, I’m a bit opinionated…