The Blob

The Blob I was originally worried about was a piece of protoplasmic, shape-shifting Jello that starred in its own movie in 1958. The Blob's co-star was a young Steve McQueen, although they were mortal enemies in the movie. My older brother saw the horror flick at the Third Avenue theater with a bunch of his no-good delinquent friends, then he couldn't wait to tell me about it.

"It leaps and creeps and slides and glides across the floor," he said.

"I'll just close my door," I said, pretty sure that wasn't going to work.

My brother gleefully confirmed this. "It will just slide under the door," he said.

"I'll stack a bunch of books on the floor." I knew there had to be some advantage to voracious reading, even if I hadn't found it so far.

"The Blob will just eat the books." Great. So The Blob also voraciously devoured books. Not that I thought that Tom Sawyer and a bunch of Zane Grey novels were really going to do the trick anyway.

I had my ace in the hole, Sparky, the collie-shepherd mix with known anti-social tendencies who slept under my bed. Sparky had my back, but a monster which dissolved people, cars and Cleveland probably would not be stopped by a dog.

I was a worried ten year old for a while, meaning I would wake up in the middle of the night for about eight seconds before relapsing into the comatose state typical of my age group. Mom's increasingly shrill and repetitive warnings about being late for school were necessary to arouse me from my nightmarish slumber. The one consolation was that The Blob might dissolve me before the social studies quiz on Friday. I hated social studies. What were the exports from Peru? Llamas, cocaine and misery, I guessed. I could look it up in the World Book later. Right now I have to figure out how to cover all that open terrain between the house and school without being sucked into the digestive tract of The Blob.

I usually walked east on Hemlock to Shoreview, then north half a block to Dale, then up about two blocks to Ocean View, where school was. Mike and Bo lived on Dale, and they were tough kids who could help out with The Blob, if need be. By the way, there was really no shore to view from Shoreview, and the Pacific Ocean was 12 miles due west on the far side of the coastal range, so there was no view of that either. The housing tract didn't have much in the way of amenities, other than sweet-sounding, bucolic names, and it didn't have alleys either, which would have shortened my perilous journey to the safety of the class room. I guess it was safer there; my brother told me the best scene in the movie is where The Blob attacks a movie theater and then its silhouette covers the white screen as it eats the projectionist. Nice effect. That actually made me want to see the movie, sort of. So there was no real safety in numbers. Maybe you were better off on your own, or maybe I could take up residence under the bed with Sparky.

The Blob made its debut in 1958, around the same time as a hundred foot tarantula and mutant giant army ants were wreaking havoc in Southern California. My guess is that The Blob was the result of a lab experiment gone terribly wrong. Usually it was radiation or something like that which produced these monsters; I guess people of the day had an early premonition that fooling around with Mother Nature could result in real-life nightmares, and these were their cinematic warnings, as well as ways for big brothers to scare their little brothers. Technogenic disasters, we could call them.

I didn't worry about The Blob for more than a day or two, of course. I would see it myself during the summer, when they ran movies all day long at the show. It wasn't that scary; in fact, it was hokey, just like the tarantula that a young Clint Eastwood fired at from his F-86. It was better when The Blob was on the screen and not in the Gulf of Mexico, which really is the kind of thing that has me up in the middle of the night.

Clinton Blather, Israeli Accomplishment

The Clintons have published their tax returns for years 2000 through 2006, and have provided the estimate for 2007's income as well. They're an American success story. Over the period in question, they've earned about $110 million. Virtually all of their income is attributable to the celebrity of Bill Clinton's charismatic presidency. $50 million for Bill's speeches, $30 million from Bill's exciting autobiography (I never read it; don't know anyone who has), another $10 mil for Hill's autobiography (ditto, re: readership), something north of $1 million for Hillary's Senate salary (she would not have been elected without Bill's presidency), and then a lot of vague income from Bill's connections to Demo high rollers like Ron Burkle and his Yucaipa Co., and its connections to Dubai, from whence (increasingly) all blessings flow. The only income item you would not connect to the fact of Bill's fame & adulation is his presidential pension, which accounted for only about $1 million during those years.

I think the Clintons always wanted to be rich. It's why, long ago, they got involved in the Whitewater investment, why Hillary dabbled in commodities trading. When Bill was President, I think the Clintons were among the least wealthy inhabitants of the White House in recent memory, just a couple of bright kids from modest backgrounds who yearned, more than anything, to be a power couple. Hillary's tolerance for Bill's sexual antics is not really that surprising. Fidelity was subservient to ambition, even, as Shakespeare said, to a "vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself and falls upon another." The Clintons had no desire to remain commoners; I think the troubles they've gotten into with matters like Whitewater and now Bill's dealings with Ron Burkle and Dubai (which will inevitably get messier as the facts are revealed) arose primarily from their naivete about sophisticated business dealings. The fatcats saw their potential and usefulness and ingratiated themselves with the callow Clintons, who have tended to be smarter than they are wise.

When the Clintons went on vacation, lacking a Western White House or Rancho Cielo or Prairie Chapel Ranch like the Republican plutocrats, they went to Martha's Vineyard and hung with the beautiful people. This is where and how they wanted to be; to be Big Rich like their increasingly rich friends, with a Texas Unit of $100 million. Bill got up from his quintuple bypass in 2004 to resume his dogged pursuit of cash. He didn't slow down at all really. In the seven years covered by the tax returns of 2001 to 2006 and the 2007 estimate, Bill made about $7 million a year, on average, from speaking. That's about $135,000 a week. I imagine that each speech is a variant on a standard template; I would surmise that whatever trade group or conference he's speaking to, his speech is full of standard Renaissance Weekend phrases. Lots of "challenges," and "integrated solutions," and doing things that "scale." Sort of like reading a Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times, in other words, when Friedman dons his "geo-green" outfit. (I hereby bet myself $100 that the book Friedman is working on right now while on leave from the Times contains his pet coinage "Geo-green" in the title. He's been test-marketing the phrase in his columns for about a year now, and he's really pleased with himself.) The growing ranks of Clinton detractors muse that all these groups buying his speeches are seeking "access" to a new Clinton White House. While that might be true to a very limited extent in some cases, it's stretching things in my opinion to generalize across the board. Most people just like that feel-good Clinton blather.

As in his presidency, nothing gets solved by all this jargoneering. The period between 1992-2000 was a critical period for the United States to move toward self-sufficiency in renewable energy, securing water supplies and dealing with climate change. As Al Gore has proudly told us, he knew about these things way, way back in his Harvard undergrad days, and he was in the Administration for eight years with Clinton. The Kyoto Treaty was defeated 95-0 while Clinton was President and Gore was VP. The 1990's were also the heyday of SUV development in the U.S., probably the most retrograde environmental action we could have taken short of burning coal outdoors for no reason at all, including power production. This set the stage for the ruinous deficits of oil importing, the trade imbalances and now the runaway inflation of gasoline prices. All of this usually gets laid at the door of George W. Bush, of course, but it took a long time to get to where we are.

The state of Israel, the American Left's favorite whipping-nation, has been faced with even more intractable environmental problems. While liberal America beats up on Israel for displacing Palestinians in 1947, without, I notice, offering to cede back all of the present United States to the Native Americans, the Israelis have ambitiously undertaken real fixes to the same problems. Israel is building 500,000 recharging stations for electric cars that are being built by a Renault-Nissan consortium. The cars will have a range of 120 miles and operate with the power of a 1.6 liter gasoline engine. The recharging stations, in turn, will be powered by wind turbines and by a giant photovoltaic array being built in the Negev. The electric cars will become the basis of Israeli private transportation, and the system will be in place by 2011. And recognizing that an eventual two-state solution will increase pressure on water supplies for a growing population, Israel has become a world leader in seawater desalination using the reverse osmosis system. Desalinated water now accounts for 15% of all water use in Israel, and this water is also supplied by the Israelis to the Jordanians and Palestinians. The price has been reduced to about 60 cents per cubic yard, a price reaching competitive levels with fresh water supplies.

Israel's response to environmental problems seems to consist of three parts. 1. Figure out what the problem is. 2. Research how to deal with it. 3. Deal with it. The United States, by contrast, is almost good at step 1, does a little of step 2, but never bothers with #3. I think the Clintons (and soon George W. Bush, who wants to do a little speaking himself, to "replenish the ol' coffers" after his term ends) are prime examples of how this process of stagnation happens. We don't deal with pressing environmental problems because, increasingly, the "leaders" see their trajectory as leveraging their public careers into private wealth which will insulate them from -- well, I guess, the natural world and all its problems.

Israel's response to the same dilemmas we face stands as a rebuke to the flaccid inertia of American leadership. Maybe the difference arises from something very fundamental: Israel shares an attitude of common purpose, reinforced by its worldwide pariah status, which no longer exists in the United States. Celebrities like Bill and Hillary Clinton are very good at pandering to the sentimental fiction that such commonality of interest still exists here in America, but it's simply a marketing gimmick, as their private lives demonstrate.