More on mobs 

Thought of another artistic depiction of a mob: in Beauty and the Beast. Lyrics to Kill the Beast.

[Mob:] We don't like
What we don't understand
In fact it scares us
And this monster is mysterious at least
Bring your guns
Bring your knives
Save your children and your wives
We'll save our village and our lives
We'll kill the Beast!

Of course I think some Disney scores are art. How could I not love B&B and its heroine ("With a dreamy far-off look, and her nose snuck in a book. No denying she's a funny girl that Belle.")

I lucked out that my sons were young enough when the movie was popular that they liked it too. Now, The Little Mermaid was a little too sissy for them, but that was OK with me in that case. I think Beauty and the Beast is a classic right up there with Snow White. It also happens to have some similarities with Pride and Prejudice.

I happened to be visiting my hometown in Michigan when the 50th anniversary of Snow White rolled around. Adam was about three, and we took him to see it with his grandma in the same theatre where she saw it originally.

I worked at the Broadway when I was 14 and 15. Two bucks a night to usher the first show, stay through it, usher the second and leave once the feature began. They could get away with not paying minimum wage. Technically we could get tips since food was served there, though nobody ever got tips. I think the practice already must have been fading in 1968, but I actually showed people to their seats. I did get to see a lot of great movies, and I thought it was fun to have a job.

Scared 

I reorganized my story archive into longer, more book-like chapters. Now that I've said I want to make the story better, I've become afraid to write.

Mob mentality and Iraq 

Orson Scott Card has written about mobs in his novels at least three times that I know of: in Crystal City, the final book in the Alvin Maker tales; in Magic Street; and in one of the books in the older Ender series, can't remember which without looking it up.

I found the scene described on Lusitania in the Ender series to be the most comprehensive and frightening. A tribe of Piggies, harmless to the humans in the planet's main village, were attacked in retribution for another war-like tribe's murder of a favorite son. The real enemy was more distant and not convenient enough to attack when the wave of collective passion swept through the human village.

When I was reading about the mob in Crystal City this morning, it struck me that the build-up to the war in Iraq was fueled by the power of mob mentality -- maybe on purpose -- by our president and VP and Wolfowitz and that whole gaggle of hawks.

Remember the famous Bush-with-the-bullhorn speech at ground zero when he vowed to pay back the people who brought down the buildings, and the crowed roared in approval? I have this sneaky feeling that if an attack on Iraq would have been launched that second, many of the people there would have felt just fine about getting somebody back, any somebody in the region. It had to be in the region, though. Couldn't be New Zealand or Andorra. It had to be some country with turbans and mosques, which makes the motivation ugly and racist by definition.

I was at work on the morning of 9/11 and a bunch of us were crowded around a TV in a conference room. Minutes after we watched one of the buildings crumble, a woman in the accounting department was mumbling, "Better get those missiles pointed." I didn't say anything, but I remember thinking, "Pointed at whom?" To this day, I believe she must have been picturing Iraq in her head. After all, Al Quaeda and the Taliban and, by extension, Afghanistan, were not nearly so top-of-mind at that time as the country that everybody watched getting hammered on CNN ten years earlier. Iraq was the familiar enemy.

Bush played us, didn't he? It doesn't make me feel very good about him, or about the citizenry.