Billy the Kid

The high school years, even for the most popular students, are filled with social awkwardness and rarely prepare you for life afterwards. For those students who lack certain undefined skills, look or act differently and find themselves on the outside of the bubble, looking in, this four year period takes on a hellish quality.

Director, Jennifer Venditti’s documentary, Billy the Kidd takes us inside the life of 15-year-old Billy, a high school “outsider,” growing up in a small Maine town. We witness what it’s like for someone like Billy, navigating high school’s many social landmines and diffiicult encounters, trying to keep it all together and intact.

Venditti, who discovered the main character, while conducting casting calls for another film she was working on in Maine, becomes captivated by Billy and decides to devote eight days of filming and following the young man around. The end result is a masterful, human portrait of a teenager, struggling to cope with a myriad of issues and someone we can all draw inspiration from.

What I think are the strongest qualities of the film are the questions it forces us to ask ourselves about the Billys we know, or meet, in our own lives. In a society that operates on mass conformity, what does Billy teach us about those who won’t, or more importantly, can't conform to standard cultural mores?

The film had an additional attraction for me, as it was shot in the town where I grew up and continue to be attracted to, Lisbon Falls. Much of the filming takes place in the town’s small downtown and centers on a local eatery, the former Mario’s Restaurant. It’s a rare person in town who hasn’t had at least one meal, or takeout dinner, from this local landmark.

During the filming of Billy the Kid, the unexpected happens. Billy meets a 16-year-old girl, Heather, who works as a waitress at the eatery, now called, Little Lisa’s. This chance happening builds an extra dimension of first love into an already compelling story and thoroughly pulls at the audience’s heartstrings.

Venditti’s film has been screened at numerous festivals around the world and was voted Best Documentary at the 2007, SXSW Film Festival and won Best Documentary at the Los Angeles Film Festival. The Melbourne Film Festival resulted in the Audience Award and an additional Best Documentary Award came courtesy of the Edinburgh Film Festival.

Currently being screened in major cities around the country, Brunswick was fortunate to be one of the stops. Frontier Cafe/Cinema, at Fort Andross was the venue for two sold out showings on Friday and four packed screenings on Saturday. The film moves on to Washington, DC and Boston, next.

What was great about the Saturday screenings of the film, was Vendetti’s presence and post-film Q & A with the audience. Vendetti spoke warmly and eloquently about the filming, her process and some of the underlying themes of the film, during the supper showing that my wife and I attended.

One particular exchange with the audience was informing and helped put the character of Billy and the film, into context, for me. When Venditti was asked how she came to choose Billy as her character study, she talked about working in the local high school (Mt. Ararat, where Billy attends school) and talking with students in the lunch room. She was struck by the cliquishness of the school and the daily experience during the lunch hour (saying it hadn't seemed to have changed much in 20 years, since she was in school). Asking students if they always ate with the same people, the students said "yeah." The one time someone tried to break down some of the walls, they all told about an event that happened with a kid who "freaked out;" the student's name was Billy.

Venditti said she found Billy, sitting alone. After speaking with him, finding him to be an intelligent, uniquely insightful young man, she couldn't understand why everyone wasn't sitting at his table. After watching the film, I was left with similar sentiments.

Frontier continues its quest to become a cultural hub, combining food, film and art, reclaiming the former mill space and a real destination for something unique and uncommon for our area.

With events like Saturday's and other food related endeavors, it is succeeding.

No focus on the workforce

[I know most of my posting, of late, has been centered on the political. What can I say? I’m a “junkie” when it comes to politics, particularly pertaining to policy, which has been sorely lacking in substance, IMHO. For those needing a break from politics, you can read an essay that I wrote that leaves politics aside and is a perfect read for this snowy day, in Maine (and elsewhere). For those who haven’t grown tired of the horserace, read on.—JB]


The skills required to succeed in the 21st century have dramatically changed. No longer is merely having a strong back, able to sustain long hours of manual labor, enough to guarantee a foothold on the socio-economic ladder reserved for the middle class.

As Alvin Toffler has said, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Unfortunately, more and more American workers are being left behind, because they lack those requisite skills. Unless the U.S. makes critical investments in education and more specifically, skills-specific training, our national workforce will no longer be competitive and in my opinion, this will dramatically hamper any hopes we have for economic growth that benefits most Americans, not just the wealthy.

Demographic trends are driving the changes that need to happen. While the U.S. labor force doubled during the previous 40 years, it will grow very slowly over the next several decades. No longer do we have the luxury of baby boomer population growth, meaning an available pool of labor, with the required skills that employers want.

Currently, we are finding that the younger workforce, the ones that we’ll require to replace the aging baby boomers, lack the educational attainment of these same boomers. This does not bode well for the future.

Sadly, I’ve heard very little coming from any of the candidates, about workforce specific initiatives that will be required to support any of the new jobs being promised by the likes of McCain, Romney and others. Obviously, when you are campaigning in Michigan, you better talk about job creation, even though you know it will be forgotten once you leave the state.

The U.S. lacks an effective system for adults already in working, but who want to increase their educational attainment and job skills. What I’d love to hear from politicians is that they support a federal policy that supports the education of working adults, including basic education for those hampered by low literacy. We also need English instruction for those who are not proficient and some meaningful funding for postsecondary education/training for those needing educational and occupational credentials for job advancement and increased productivity.

In Maine, there is a tremendous opportunity for those willing to pursue skilled trades. The Cianbro Corporation, Maine’s largest construction firm, has a need for upwards of 200 welders and over 400 skilled trades people. Rather than rely on state and federal monies, Cianbro is doing much of their own training, out of necessity. I commend them for that. However, there should be programs in place that could direct those receiving public assistance and who were physically able, to access these employment opportunities, which by the way, pay living wages.

The only stump speech that I’ve heard that dealt with this with any kind of specificity, was about two weeks ago, when Bill Clinton, campaigning for his wife, rattled off some key points and offered tangible solutions to some of these issues. Unfortunately, Hillary’s website is a bit thin on specifics about this. Obama’s is no better.

Personally, I’m growing tired, as we enter the home stretch for the presidency, to have so many so-called viable candidates offering little, or no meat, on issues so crucial to our nation’s economic health. Furthermore, for Republican candidates, to try to outflank each other on the right and continuing to go to that tired trough of trickle-down economics, while waging war in Iraq and god knows where else, is intellectually vacuous at best, and I would argue, immoral. Adding to my consternation is the gaggle of talk-radio cheerleaders, trying to coax some higher meaning from policies that will cripple us.

We’re now ramping up to the final stages of the horserace and still, nary a candidate that the thought of pulling the lever for, elicits enthusiasm, or rather, even seems tolerable, for that matter.

Despite claims that voters are jazzed and engaged, my sense it that America’s voters are dumber than ever and new media, or not, few writers, bloggers, or anyone else, is holding candidates to any kind of meaningful standard.

Note: I want to credit the Center for American Progress and in particular, Brian Bosworth's report, Lifelong Learning-New Strategies for the Education of Working Adults, for helping me coalesce my thoughts on this topic. This has been a big part of my life for the past 18 months. I've acquired a "crash course" on workforce issues and how they parallel effective strategies for growing the U.S. economy. Sadly, most politicians remain ignorant of their importance, preferring instead, to talk in platitudes that do little to push necessary policies forward.

If you'd like to read more about what political leaders should be focusing on, please visit the website for The Partnership for 21st Century Skills.

The straitjacket of ideology

The straitjacket of political ideology forces many to contort and make choices that are uncomfortable and many times, regrettable.

Given President Bush’s current poll numbers in the 20s and about half the country split on the Iraq War, I’m sure many conservatives feel like veritable pretzels. It’s got to be tough forcing issue-oriented decision-making into a field of candidates, vetted by talk radio’s pantheon of punditry.

Over on the left side of the field of candidates, a choice between Hilary and "the black JFK," Obama, is also an exercise in double-speak and values abandonment. Nothing validates the thought that “politics is an exercise in pragmatism,” like this season’s horserace.

One of the strange things about this election cycle is that there is no real consensus on what the big issues are. Rather than the focus being on the war, or immigration, we’re treated to a new “flavor of the week,” determined by who is deemed that week’s Republican/Democrat front runner.

The diversity of dialogue among candidates has rarely ever been so sophomoric. When Obama’s theme of “change” propelled him to victory in “corn country,” the other candidates were quick to seize that mantra.

While many will justify this strategy by saying that today’s voters have the attention span of gnats, I think it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy to believe that all Americans are morons, when it comes to choosing their leader. My message to both the candidates and the “drive-by” media—try focusing on the real issues. You might be pleasantly surprised by the results.

Not surprisingly, the sycophantic press has gone all “ga-ga” over their favorite sons (and daughters), falling all over themselves to push their candidates forward. Networks, like Fox, have done their damned-well best to spin their coverage favorably for this moment’s conservative champion, the Mittster. For a network that wears a perpetual hard-on for the military, they seem to have an issue with the only real military hero in the Republican field, John McCain.

Now I’m not an idiot. I know where dear old Fox is coming from. Sir McCain can’t receive their support (unless he’s the only thing standing between another Clinton presidency) because he committed the unpardonable sin of not hating Mexicans enough. Poor old John McCain. All he’d have to do is say he wants to kill all the “illegals,” or at least build a wall 100 miles high and 1,000 miles wide and he’d have all the hairstyle boys and augmented bimbos of Fox, swooning. Instead, he tries to run as a moderate to the rest of a field that’s running a typical post-Reagan campaign foisting xenophobia, tax cuts and family values.

Personally, I don’t think McCain will make it. It’s tough to combat 24/7 talk, designed to counter his message and remember, McCain’s war chest isn’t very deep. We’ll know better after South Carolina, whether McCain can go deep in this race.

Sunday, Hillary has an hour-long campaign commercial, courtesy of MSNBC and Tim Russert. The “iron lady” will hold court with “pumpkinhead” and she’ll have the chance to counter charges that her performance in New Hampshire was anything, but staged.

Speaking of Mrs. Clinton, Camile Paglia, a writer I enjoy reading and really admire, has an interesting piece written for Salon, on the wife of Bill.

Paglia, who’s made a career of being bombastic and for a Democrat, she’s an amazingly original thinker. Her article at Salon begins thus;

"A swarm of biographers in miners' gear has tried to plumb the inky depths of Hillary Rodham Clinton's warren-riddled psyche. My metaphor is drawn (as Oscar Wilde's prim Miss Prism would say) from the Scranton coalfields, to which came the Welsh family that produced Hillary's harsh, domineering father.

Hillary's feckless, loutish brothers (who are kept at arm's length by her operation) took the brunt of Hugh Rodham's abuse in their genteel but claustrophobic home. Hillary is the barracuda who fought for dominance at their expense. Flashes of that ruthless old family drama have come out repeatedly in this campaign, as when Hillary could barely conceal her sneers at her fellow debaters onstage -- the wimpy, cringing brothers at the dinner table.

Hillary's willingness to tolerate Bill's compulsive philandering is a function of her general contempt for men. She distrusts them and feels morally superior to them. Following the pattern of her long-suffering mother, she thinks it is her mission to endure every insult and personal degradation for a higher cause -- which, unlike her self-sacrificing mother, she identifies with her near-messianic personal ambition."

It gets even better. Paglia, who regularly goads the “liberal establishment” and in particular, “feminazis” (she borrows the term from Limbaugh in her article) like Gloria Steinem, makes the case that Mrs. Clinton is a man-hating, member of an old-school feminism, lost in the 60s, that Paglia and many other forward-looking women (and men, for that matter) have little use for, in the 21st century.

Read her article. It’s original and thought-provoking. It’s also timely for our political times.

Interestingly, Paglia, who is supporting Obama, writes that she sees him as representing the future, not the past, like the Clintons. However, she will vote for Hillary, if she is the party’s nominee. In my opinion, this is strange thinking and even an original-thinker, like Paglia, refuses to shed her ideological straitjacket. Her rationale is that she wants Democrats appointed to the Cabinet and Supreme Court.

I can respect her choices and freedom to make them. Yet, it disappoints me because there is little difference between Paglia’s pragmatism towards Democrats and that same sentiment and practice of those on the right, who will ultimately suck it up and vote for whoever their nominee ends up being.

This is the challenge of where we are at in 2008. How do we break the nearly 50/50 logjam of partisanship that paralyzes us? Is it possible for a candidate to draw voters across the ideological divide, to the promised land of political partnership?

In my opinion, that’s where Americans need to head, if there is hope of leaving our current political ghetto. Can Obama deliver the goods, or must we wait for a true independent candidate?

Is Ron Paul for real?

Until his 2008 run for the White House, Ron Paul was an obscure (some would say, obscurantist) politician from Texas, who regularly voted against spending measures and was a throwback to the days when a member of the Senate might actually have read the Constitution and was guided by its timeless principles.

While the Republican Party had long ago pissed on writings of the Founding Fathers, becoming just another face on America’s two-headed beast of oligopoly, Paul was a principled holdover from a time long past; a time when there were members of Congress who stood for something and took their oath of office seriously.

It’s obvious to anyone that’s spent anytime investigating a Libertarian reading of the Constitution that Paul is firmly in that camp. Influenced by Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand and Ludwig Von Mises, Paul supports classical liberalism and free market capitalism. It’s a telling indicator that holding these positions in 2008, gets one branded as an anachronism and finds his followers labeled as “kooks.”

This isn’t Paul’s first run for the office of president. In 1988, he was the Libertarian candidate for president. His run was more symbolic than anything and he captured fewer than 500,000 ballots, or 0.5 percent of the popular vote. In 2001, a movement among Libertarians and Constitutionalists couldn’t convince Paul to make another run for the nation’s highest office. Meanwhile, in 2007, Paul was elected to Congress for his 10th term, not bad for the man who refused to bend his firm convictions.

From Wikipedia:

Paul has been described as conservative, Constitutionalist, and libertarian. He advocates a non-interventionist foreign policy having voted against actions such as the Iraq War Resolution, but in favor of force against terrorists in Afghanistan. He favors withdrawal from NATO and the United Nations, instead supporting the idea of strong national sovereignty. Having pledged never to raise taxes, he has long advocated ending the federal income tax and reducing government spending by abolishing most federal agencies; he favors hard money and opposes the Federal Reserve. He also opposes the Patriot Act, the federal War on Drugs, and gun control. Paul is pro-life, but opposes a Federal ban on abortion, advocating overturning Roe v. Wade to let states determine the legality of abortion.

Paul’s 2008 run seems to be a different type of campaign, than his inaugural run, 20 years ago. For one thing, the campaign is much better financed. In fact, on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, Paul’s campaign raised over $4 million in one day, mostly from private citizens. The campaign raised nearly $7 million in the last quarter of 2007. Indications are that funds continue to pour in, at the start of 2008, fueled primarily by working class supporters, making Paul’s campaign a true grassroots movement.

Running on a platform that seeks an immediate end to the war in Iraq (unlike other politicians, like John McCain, who indicates we might be there for another century), reestablish fiscal sanity (tied to the gold standard) and restore lost civil liberties to the American people, Paul is the true conservative. Instead, his rock-ribbed ideals find him ridiculed by the faux conservative blowhards, from Limbaugh, to O’Reilly.

Interestingly, while Paul’s fundraising rivals all other challengers, except Hillary Clinton and with a very respectable finish in Iowa, he was strangely absent in discussions on Sunday’s news programs. Obama this and Hillary that, “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, they said.

Surprisingly, Paul made the cut for Saturday night’s ABC/Facebook debate. On the other hand, Fox (fair and balanced, my ass) snubbed Paul, by excluding him from their Sunday night GOP gathering of dunces.

Appearing on CNN's American Morning program, the internet fundraising phenom said voters had been cheated by Fox's debate protocol, which required participating candidates to notch at least 10 percent support in national polling.

"I think this is an awful embarrassment for Fox to do something like this," said Paul. "We got 10 percent in Iowa, raised more money than any other candidate in the Republican side in the last quarter, and our polls in New Hampshire are much better than Giuliani."

None of this has deterred his rabid band of followers. It’s difficult to get a read just how strong Paul’s support might be. While the media and those wedded to the usual political status quo do all they can to marginalize Paul, he continues to garner new supporters, once they begin to understand that, unlike the glib Obama, who talks about change, Paul actually holds positions that would truly turn politics as usual, on its head.

It's obvious to me that Paul has no home in what passes for today's Republican Party. While he won't get the GOP nod for president, he might go the Indendent, or possibly Libertarian route. If Bloomburg got into the race, these two indies could cause serious havoc and upset the political apple cart and really make voting in November fun again.

Viva la revolution!

Getting the story wrong every time

The elite media, more times than not, get their stories wrong.. In the area of religious faith, or more specifically, evangelical Christianity, they may as well have landed in a foreign country where they don’t know the language, customs, or culture and then, portray themselves as experts on the subject.

Tonight’s apparent Huckabee win in the Iowa caucuses, as projected by CNN, has set off another typical round of hand ringing and analysis of a subject that the media is ill-equipped to report on. For whatever reason, when it comes to the area of faith, journalists seem to get all soft in the head. Case in point is somehow being unable to differentiate between the populist Baptist evangelicalism of Mike Huckabee and the Salt Lake Mormonism of Mitt Romney.

Every born-again Baptist armed with a rudimentary understanding instilled by weekly Sunday School lessons knows that Mormonism is not compatible with a conservative reading of Christian theology. Yet, article, after article penned by journalists who supposedly make their living by providing factual information, fail cub reporting 101, by being unable to get the “what” of the story, when it comes to understanding the Huckabee phenomenon.

The elite media, based in urban centers, like Washington and New York, tends to discount the mindset of rural America. Their cynical, condescending attitude towards the “rubes” living in “flyover country” clouds and obscures their ability to get the story right. You can have all your facts right, but if you don’t get the culture of your subjects—and the elite media never get the culture right, when reporting on rural America—the story will be wrong every time.

Getting back to Huckabee vs. Romney and the subject of their faith. Huckabee, as an evangelical, holds to an essential doctrine that there is only one true God. That God is revealed in three persons; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Mormons, on the other hand, believe that there are many Gods (Mormon Doctrine, p. 163). They believe that the Trinity is three separate Gods, not that God is a Triune being. (Anyone reading this, that doesn’t have a grounding in basic Christian theology is already scratching their heads, yet, to Christians, this matters. The media, on the other hand, just slough it off as unimportant). Christians, therefore, will always be doubtful about Romney, the Mormon, because they believe that his religious faith, while sincere, is diametrically opposed to their won faith. This isn’t bigotry, or intolerance, but part of their Christian worldview.

Despite the hoopla related to various blogs, websites and new media outposts, when all is said and done, this supposed “new” mode of reporting, more times than not, mirrors the shoddy journalism of the old paradigm media, rooted in the world of print. A case in point is Purple States TV, which has been given primetime positioning courtesy of the New York Times. Going to great lengths to legitimize the “citizen journalism” practiced by five ordinary folks, taking “a journey together through the presidential primary contests,” unfortunately, the end result is just more ill-informed reporting, lacking in context and nuance.

Their stories are neither interesting, nor particularly compelling. While one, or two of the five appear to have some basic understanding and historical grounding in American politics, this experiment in journalism would have been just as effective, if not more so, if they had gone out and found five new arrivals, or even illegal immigrants and paid their way around the country, following the candidates and asking them questions. This type of reality political TV is no more interesting than former mainstream brand, delivered by blow-dried talking heads ala CNN, Fox, or the big three of ABC, NBC, or CBS. In fact, it’s even less informed.

Politics matters and the candidate that ultimately triumphs will move our country further down the path to perdition, or, possibly, make some substantive changes in our energy policy and where we allocate our resources. Do we continue to invest our tax dollars in industries, like defense, which breed death and destruction? Will we continue to pursue prison building as a model for economic development in rural areas of the U.S.? Or, could a candidate, like Ron Paul, or even a Michael Bloomburg, who with his billions, might be able to resist the temptation to pander to corporate interests, make investments in the infrastructure of our own country and its citizens and actually develop a new, more sustainable brand of government?

Iowa may not ultimately determine who becomes our next president, but this rural state, nestled in our country’s heartland, does give us our first glimpse into what real Amercans might be thinking about who they want their next leader to be.