Tell me it is not true.
When I was a kid I had a half dozen things I loved.
My Mother of course.
My dog Rocky.
My Daddy.
Santa Claus (the Coke Version)
Baby Jesus
Coca Cola (with peanuts)
As I grew older of course I added and subtracted things on the list but Baby Jesus and Coca Cola stayed on it.
One of the greatest days in my life was when I went down to the Earl's Gas station in town and found them selling KING SIZE COKE!
One of the saddest days was when Coca Cola got rid of real sugar and added corn syrup to Coke.
My uncle Alley, a corn farmer, thought is was great however. We just raised wheat and cotton so it didn't help us none. Recently, I was really happy when a large Mexican Mercado opened down the street selling pure cane sugar Coke in bottles. Of course being a diabetic my consumption is strictly limited.
As I grew up my understanding of Jesus did too. Unfortunately my concept of Coke did not change fast enough.
Jesus became Grace.
Now Coke has become Greed.
How much is enough?
Coke wants the Health Reform Bill killed and is putting $$$ millions in all sorts of places to do so.
Why? How much money do you need? You can double the cost of a coke and they would still sell. But if it is in tax, Coke won't get any of it. Is that it?
My faith in Jesus is still intact, how be it somewhat more mature than when King Size Coke was introduced. But my admiration for Coke is diminished by their stance that profits are more important than the health of our Nation. Seems short sighted to me. The longer people live the more Coke they could drink. I thought about buying some stock and then telling them about my long term idea, but then I found out it was a family owned outfit?
Sad.
Diet Dr. Pepper is my can of choice these days.
(No, No, Dr. Pepper is not bottled by Coke, No NO!)
8 comments:
This is totally off-subject, but with no longer engaging on that social networking site, and I want your advice. I am thinking of purchasing No Country For Old Men. I enjoyed your ruminations and reviews on the film when you saw it. I respect your views on a great many things, and this film seemed to move you, so I just want to know if someone just a tad shy younger than you would be as moved. I like movies that are profound and moving, etc, etc, but I also need to connect with someone in the film. Your opinion would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for the vote of faith in my opinion. Now there are two of us.
The movie is extraordinarily violent. Not excessively violent, because the violence serves a purpose.
Connecting with someone might be interesting. I connected with the cowboy and the sheriff. One's younger and one's older.
The antagonist is evil. True incarnate evil, but at the same time totally dispassionate.
The good in the movie is not incarnate but is amorphous. In fact if there is a cut line for the movie it might be, "death is not avoidable", or maybe "no good deed will go unpunished" but it is not that simple.
It is not easy to watch the movie, and it may offend. It is an allogory not history or a morality tale.
It is a disturbing movie. It has to be watched several times to see what is there. The complex weave and warp of the movie starts in the first seconds and goes all the way to last flicker.
People's first reaction is what the hell was that? Indeed, what was it?
The deals we make in our hunger for wealth and comfort participate in a trickle down, inescapably causative relationship with the need for violence and execution of violence that cannot be ultimately controlled, only shunted toward those who live in less dense or much less powerful communities.
The American West is both, is McCarthy's point.
Our comfort has a cost. That we are a superpower using over half the world's resources has a cost that can be boiled down into the incarnate allegory that is Chigurh.
McCarthy is showing us the devil we ask to work on our behalf so that we can know ourselves as an Empire, and some of the places where that devil works.
He has updated Blood Meridian.
"…when you encounter certain things in the world, the evidence for certain things, you realize that you have come upon something that you may not very well be equal to..."
---Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (No Country....)
Cormac McCarthy has evil visit this book/film in a dozen forms.
The sheriff was a killer, the cowboy was a killer (established as a sniper from Nam in the first minute of the film). There is the evil of the Mexican drug dealers, there is evil of the American Corporate Drug buyers, there's the evil of the angel of death hired by the corporate interest of get Chigurh, there is the natural evil of the killer dogs brought to the drug deal, and there is the natural evil of Anton Chigurh who sometimes kills his victims with slaughter house air compressed stungun.
The only innocent was the cowboy's wife Carla Jean Moss. She may be the real heroine of the story because she will not play Chigurh's game of "you take the blame for my killing you" (another level of evil) even though her own husband betrayed her life.
Carla Jean is the only one with free will and she uses it.
The sheriff, now retired, goes out into the desert to visit his uncle "the oracle":
Uncle Ellis in a wheeled chair and surrounded by cats is addressed bythe sheriff,
"You ain't turned infidel have you Uncle Ellis?"
"No. No. Nothing like that."
"Do you think God knows what's happenin'?"
"I expect he does."
"You think he can stop it?"
"No. I don't."
Sounds both powerful and chilling.
I'd run right out, but can't at the moment. Tomorrow AM, then.
In some ways, sounds like the moral dilemma presented in The Departed. The entire theme of the film is death. There are no rewards, there is no punishment, the good, the bad - it all ends in death. The little corruptions, the big corruptions - they don't seem to matter that much. Does one good deed counter-balance a lifetime of evil? Does one evil act betray an underlying moral purpose? Kind of a wine metaphor, actually: A drop of sewage in a barrel of wine is sewage. A drop of wine in a barrel of sewage is sewage.
I enjoyed Scorcese's quick-cut examination of the lack of any moral center in the dance of death between criminal and cop. In that film, there is also only one innocent, a police psychiatrist, also a woman, who is dating the corrupt Matt Damon, but falls in love with undercover Leo DiCaprio. The two men are mirror images of one another, doing a pax de deux until the final moment, when DiCaprio discovers that even the best plan, the best intention means nothing when it encounters a bullet fired from a 9mm handgun. I have watched the film many times (I love Scorcese, I love gangster films, and this one is a kind of meta-gangster film, even more the Goodfellas).
I look forward to No Country. Sounds like the final lesson might be the one we all learn too late in life - you have to take home what you pay for. . .
"You have to take home what you pay for."
That's somewhat right. But capitalism is an exercise in greater and lesser avoidance of that, hopefully, moral truth.
So GKS, we are expecting a first reaction to No Country.
I like Diet Dr. Pepper too
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