Republicans Are Not Interested in Solving Problems

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Marco RubioIt was just the other day that I was writing about how boring politics is. And the fault is entirely the Republicans’. There’s really nothing to discuss. There are no proposals for fixing problems. I mean really: the Republicans are not interested in any problems. It is all faith based politics. Their approach to guns is the perfect example. We can’t do anything about them because doing even the smallest thing would destroy some kind of vague ideological purity. But when it comes to guns, I don’t so much care because even the changes that liberals propose are unlikely to improve matters.

But on the economic front, it’s downright funny. Marco Rubio is running around the country talking about all his new ideas and how we must vote for him because he’s young and “the future.” And his ideas are that we ought to do exactly what Ronald Reagan did. There’s a big problem with this. Even if you think that Reagan’s policies worked great, they haven’t worked great since then. There are diminishing returns. It might well be true that cutting the top tax rate from 90% to 70% had a big effect. But will cutting it from 39.6% to 30.8% have as big an effect? I think the case is much stronger that it will have the opposite effect: we are now at the point that giving rich people even more money hurts the economy.

Noah Smith talked about this last year with regard to deregulation:

So… maybe Free Market Nirvana would get us there. Maybe. But it seems to me that even beneficial types of market liberalization, like every other policy improvement, are subject to diminishing returns — the low-hanging fruit gets picked first. The Kennedy tax cuts seemed to produce a burst of growth, the Reagan tax cuts a more modest bump, and the Bush tax cuts basically nothing. There’s no reason to think the same isn’t true of deregulation.

But this is what Rubio and the rest of the Republicans have on offer. And the point is not that cutting taxes would improve the economy. It is just that they are ideologically committed to cutting taxes because helping the rich is just the right thing to do. It’s like the “small government” obsession that Republicans have. They can’t give you a reason why small government is good. It is just an article of faith that it is good. Of course, they don’t actually believe in small government. They just say they are as a justification for cutting programs that help the poor and middle classes and spending more on programs that help the rich.

Conservatives are not interested in solving problems. In as much as they engage with them, it is simply to stop anything from ever being done about them.

Yesterday, Paul Krugman wrote, TINA and the ACA. It’s about how yet again, the Republicans have failed to come up with an alternative to Obamacare. It all comes down to what I’ve been talking about for year, Obamacare is the conservative policy solution for our broken healthcare system. So it is no surprise that they find it impossible to come up with a conservative alternative to it. They are against doing anything at all — on principle.

Every idea they’ve ever come up with in the past was only proposed defensively. They wanted something they could hold up to stop a more liberal plan from being enacted. This is the basis of Jonathan Chait’s Heritage Uncertainty Principle. If a policy doesn’t involve helping the rich or hurting the poor, the Republicans really aren’t interested in it. That’s a depressing fact about modern American politics.

So we liberals can get together and talk about different approaches to solving problems. But conservatives are not interested in solving problems. In as much as they engage with them, it is simply to stop anything from ever being done about them. What a sad world they live in. And what an awful world they are trying to create for all the rest of us.

Morning Music: Nick Cave

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Door, DoorThe first band that Nick Cave was in was The Birthday Party. They were a punk band of sorts out of Australia in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They were one of those bands that weren’t directly successful but had so much talent that they were nonetheless hugely influential. I want to highlight a song off their first album, Door, Door. Now officially, the album is by the band “The Boys Next Door.” But they were, in fact, The Birthday Party.

The song is, “Shivers.” It is not a Nick Cave song. It was written by the band’s guitarist, Rowland S Howard (although all the songs were credited to the whole band). He wrote it when he was only 16 years old, which is kind of annoying. But he died young, so I guess I will forgive him. It is a very funny song, in the Nick Cave sense. That is to say that I’m not sure that it’s meant to be funny. It does render very much what it’s like to be dumped when you’re 16 years old. But it seems self-aware — that it understands just what a silly song it is.

Boys next door-door door by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

Anniversary Post: The Goldbergs

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The GoldbergsOn this day in 1949. The Goldbergs first appeared on television. It was the first situation comedy to be on television. It was the brainchild of Gertrude Berg. It started as a radio show in 1928. Berg wrote, directed, and starred in it from the start. It is a show about a Jewish family where Berg plays Molly Goldberg, a stereotypical Jewish mother.

I’d never heard of it before yesterday, so I found a couple of episodes to watch. It’s a bit hard to call it a comedy since it doesn’t have much in the way of laughs. It is pleasant enough. But weird. You can definitely see how I Love Lucy would have impressed people. Just the same, The Goldbergs actually had a longer run.

I don’t know quite what to say about The Goldbergs. I’m curious what other people think of it. But I can’t quite recommend watching this episode, “The New Landlord,” from the first season. I can see how it is supposed to be funny. And it wouldn’t be hard to rewrite it to make it work. It is, after all, a standard kind of comedic set up where Molly finds herself in a bad situation and just makes things worse and worse. It’s like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, but before the mechanics of the process had been worked out.

Still, The Goldbergs is very sweet. No one is evil. I suspect it is very much what most people wanted to watch coming out of the World War II.

TheGoldbergs by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

The Vile and Un-American Reality of Shark Tank

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Shark TankI’ve been a big critic of Shark Tank — the venture capital (VC) “reality” show. It’s interesting that I seem to be one of the few people around who has a problem with the very idea of the show. Most of the “sharks” on the show are not what I would consider entrepreneurs. At best, most of them are deal makers. To me, an entrepreneur is someone who comes up with a new idea and brings it to market. It isn’t about money. I would call Richard Stallman an entrepreneur and never call Mitt Romney one. And most of the “sharks” are just people who used other people’s ideas to enrich themselves.

So I find it annoying to watch many actual entrepreneurs stand up, cap in hand, asking their rich “betters” for a little money to move their businesses forward. And I really don’t like the way that the “sharks” are presented as gods. Look at the way the set of the show is designed. Unlike other “reality” contest shows, the “sharks” (judges) are not seated behind a desk where they might, I don’t know, take notes. No, instead they sit in comfy chairs like they are the Council of Nine on Mount Olympus. Or, if you want to be a bit less fanciful: like a king listening to subject requests.

The average deal ends up with the “sharks” taking a 39% share of the company. But in the real (non-television) world, the number is only 15% (or 30% for preferred equity deals). So the show screws the actual entrepreneurs.

But I’ve also had a practical problem with the show: it is not how venture capitalists do their work. Most interactions with VCs are done on paper. It is far more about management teams than it is about what may or may not be the next big thing. You don’t get to talk to a VC until you’ve been checked out pretty thoroughly, because they don’t want their time wasted. But I heard something from Mark Cuban that made me feel that at least this aspect of the show is okay. When asked what happens after a deal is made on the show, Cuban said, “We get the opportunity to do due diligence. Sixty to seventy percent of my deals close.” (According to Inquisitr, Two-Thirds of Shark Tank Deals Never Close Off Air.)

Ah! So they do this work afterward, because it is a television show. That makes sense and it makes me feel that the show is much less of a fraud than I had thought. But this brings up something I discussed before, Herd Mentality on Shark Tank. One of the common things that happens on the show is that they argue about the valuation of the company that is being pitched. If the due diligence gets done after the deals are made, then the valuations that the “sharks” put forward with such assurance are indeed nothing but guesses — guesses that just so happen to benefit the sharks.

I found a very interesting article from a couple of years ago by George Deeb at Forbes, Comparing Shark Tank To Venture Capital Reality. He made some back-of-the-envelope calculations about how much money startups got and how much their valuations were. He compared those on Shark Tank with VC deals that did not take place on television. (Note: the data are not completely compatible, but it’s close enough.)

The average deal ends up with the “sharks” taking a 39% share of the company. But in the real (non-television) world, the number is only 15% (or 30% for preferred equity deals). So the show screws the actual entrepreneurs. A big part of this is that there is incredible pressure on them to make a decision now, now, now! As as I discussed in the article above, there is a lot of shaming that goes on, “How dare you question the combined wisdom of the sharks!” The implication is that if one of the sharks is willing to back a company, the entrepreneur should take it — no questions asked. In point of fact, actual VC negotiations go on for months and even years.

Shark Tank is still a vile show. It tells Americans exactly what they do not need to hear. It’s kind of the thinking person’s Lotto. It is more show than reality. But if you look at it the right way, it is a great illustration of what’s wrong with America. The “sharks” have no information about the companies before they start, yet they speak like they are experts. That’s what the rich in America are all about. They might as well be the kings of old. And this is not what I was raised to think that America was all about.

The Disingenuous Trey Gowdy

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Trey GowdyI just read a remarkable article over at Rolling Stone, The Endless Trial of Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi Committee. It is written by Andy Kroll, who clearly looks at Gowdy was a jaundiced eye, but wants to be super fair to this man who heads the latest and biggest investigation on just what happened in Benghazi three and a half years ago. No, wait. That’s not what they are looking into. They are looking into what happened afterwards, because exactly what Susan Rice said on Sunday talk shows is really important! In the end, the entire Benghazi investigation has come down to whether the Obama administration was spinning the attack for political advantage. So even if everything Gowdy and company says is true, it is a witch hunt.

But reading the article, you get the impression that Trey Gowdy is the true victim here. He used to be a prosecutor, and by all accounts a great prosecutor. And now he is so upset because it is all so partisan and unfair. He has to wait forever to get documents. And then Hillary Clinton would only testify in public, as if a closed door testimony would have disclosed something important. (Let’s face it: the public testimony just showed that the worst things we thought about the hearings and Trey Gowdy were exactly right.) Oh, how the Benghazi chairman wishes he had stayed a prosecutor!

Gowdy just wanted “to run a serious, document-centric, fact-centric investigation.” And that’s why again and again he leaked information to damage Democrats in general, and Clinton in particular.

I don’t doubt that he does. Nowhere in the article is the most important fact here: prosecutors are by far the most powerful members of the legal system. Everything is set up to their advantage. After OJ Simpson was found not guilty, a lot of people claimed that it was unfair that he was able to spend millions on his defense. So what?! The state spent millions prosecuting him. The state can spend as much money as it likes on any given case. So I’m sure that Trey Gowdy is indeed very unhappy that he now finds himself a fair fight where he doesn’t battle against people who have no real weapons.

The amount of whining that he does in this article is amazing. In fact, it is whining from beginning to end. Listening to him, you would think that he was a babe in the woods — totally unaware of just how nasty politics was. And there he is, like a real life Superman standing up for Truth, Justice, and the American Way! It’s just the media and the Democrats who politicized this. He just wanted “to run a serious, document-centric, fact-centric investigation.” And that’s why again and again he leaked information to damage Democrats in general, and Clinton in particular. In fact, this is doubtless why he wanted a private testimony with Clinton — so he could leak selective bits that made her look bad.

But according to Trey Gowdy, the Benghazi hearings were a success. He said, “We have interviewed this number of witnesses nobody else interviewed, including eyewitnesses, [accessed] these documents from these agencies that nobody else accessed, and, oh, by the way, we have the correspondence from the two people who, one knew the most about Libya being the ambassador, and the other arguably knew more about our policy in Libya than anyone else.” So this hearing — the eighth that Congress had — was all about fact finding. So he found some new facts. And they told us squat. Because there is no there there.

But we are supposed to feel sorry for poor old Trey Gowdy because he was just doing the prosecutor’s job of getting to the facts. Of course, we know that Gowdy was just acting as a hit man and that he was willing to lie to do so. This is the problem that prosecutors face when they have to get a real job: they show themselves to be incompetent and immoral. Rolling Stone shouldn’t have given him space to make his case. It was far more fair than Gowdy has ever been to Hillary Clinton or anyone in the Obama administration.

Morning Music: Jimi Hendrix

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Jimi Hendrix - Electric LadylandWhen it comes to guitar sound, Jimi Hendrix is more or less the alpha and omega. Oh yeah, I know that there have been other guitarists who have built a whole lot on what he did. But he’s the guy who really started us on this path where the guitar was something more than just a musical instrument. It probably isn’t a coincidence that he came around at the same time that the Moog really started to enter popular music.

What is there to say about Jimi Hendrix? Really, there isn’t much that I can add. I do think that people tend to forget just how experimental those first few albums were. They are amazing. And I can only imagine what they must have sounded like at the time. When I was introduced to them when I first went to college, they blew me away and I had grown up listening to plenty of people who were ripping him off to one degree or another.

I’d like to highlight something that doesn’t exactly speak to the full complexity of his work, “All Along The Watchtower,” off his third album, Electric Ladyland. It is, of course, a Bob Dylan tune. But Hendrix makes it so much more. And it shows that he could play a straight rock guitar solo as well as anyone. It also shows his absolute mastery of the wah-wah pedal. You don’t much hear that kind of total control of an instrument ever. It’s almost like listening to the very best classical music. And I fully expect that it will still be admired in hundreds of years.

Jimi Hendrix – Electric Ladyland by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

Anniversary Post: Don Quixote

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Don QuixoteOn this day in 1605, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha was published. Notice that it is not Quijote, as Wikipedia claims. That is the modern Spanish spelling of the title character’s name; we in America still spell it as Cervantes himself spelled it, even though it creates many problems like the word “quixotic.”

This, of course, was the first part of the book. We don’t know exactly when the second part was published, except that it was in late 1615. Over time, I’ve come to be less enthusiastic about Part 1. It is still a great novel. And the reason it is great — at least in a historical context — is that Cervantes tells what seems to be an episodic story. Various things happen to our heroes. But then he ties them all together at the end. I don’t think anyone had ever done that before and that is why Don Quixote is called the first modern novel. Certainly it is true that people had been writing long narratives for many years before this book.

The reason people still read Don Quixote has little to do with its historical significance, however. They read it for the same reason they read it at the time: it’s a funny book. But when it came time to write a sequel, Cervantes’ clever mind took it one more step into absurdity. Since the conceit of the first book was that it was just a translation of an Arabic book by Cide Hamete Benengeli, it was a true story. And by that time, Don Quixote himself was very famous because of Cervantes’ translation. It only made sense to a mind as creative as Cervantes’ that further adventures of the unlikely knight errant would be in that world.

Regardless, for the umpteenth time, you really should read the book. In order to understand literature, you need to read Don Quixote. And in a sense, to understand literature, you only need to read Don Quixote. It really does have it all. I can’t say that literature has moved past it. Earlier novels like the five that make up The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel are still fun to read, but they are distinctly from an earlier time. But Don Quixote is not. It could be published today and I think it would still find a sizable audience.

Don Quixote 5. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Getting Knowledge by Giving Knowledge

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Teacher and Students Gaining KnowledgeI spent almost all of yesterday on the road and so I don’t have much time to go looking for things to write about. But there has been something on my mind for a good long time that I would like to related to you: how we gain knowledge by giving it away. But I’ll be honest: I may have written about this before. By the end of this month, Frankly Curious will have published 7,000 articles — the vast majority of them being by me. And I don’t know what I’ve written. The funny thing is that I often find that things I had thought I had written about — obvious things — I hadn’t.

When I was taking math in college, I was always at the top of my class. I remember the first calculus exam I ever took, I got an 86. The next best score was 63. And the rest were in the 40s. I don’t say that to indicate that I am particularly brilliant, even though when it comes to math I am something of a natural. But the point is that I was always helping other people. I was also a tutor of the more basic math students. But I always felt that I was getting far more out it than those I was helping.

But helping others does come naturally to me. I have never been of the mind that giving away knowledge is harming me. Others do not feel this way. I used to take care of all the IT work for a mid-sized real estate investment company. The “stars” of the company were the acquisition agents, who were responsible for purchasing land that could be sold quickly at a profit by the “lesser” agents. And these guys (all men) made a lot of money — between $10,000 and $20,000 per month. I rather liked them, although a few were jerks.

I am not a great mathematician. In graduate school, I met a number of people who blew me away. And I loved it! It’s great to be in a position to appreciate the brilliance of others.

There was one guy I quite liked. He was the most technically savvy of any of them. He was very accomplished with Visual Basic and could do amazing things with Excel. And over the years, I taught him a lot. And he explained a number of things with me. He had no problem answering any question I might have of him. (It wasn’t often; Excel wasn’t even part of our standard work tools.) But he certainly saw me as a guy who gave as much as he took.

But I noticed that he would not help the other agents. If they were having technical problems, they were on their own. And if they saw him do some cool trick, he would refuse to explain it to them. I thought this was very shortsighted. The truth is that he was always going to be top dog and by explaining, he was going to learn more.

Now I understand: he had other work to do. He was paid only on commission. But that attitude toward maintaining one’s knowledge advantage is very common. And it is more or less the basis of our economic system. This is, after all, what patents and copyrights are all about. You will notice that at the bottom of all the pages on Frankly Curious, it says, “© 2009-2016.” But that is the nature of the system. I would gladly change to a system where I do nothing but produce the best content I can in exchange for a reasonable standard of living but no ability to ever get rich. But that isn’t on offer, so I yield to the the realities of life.

Despite the fact that I was by far the best math student in any of my college classes, I am not a great mathematician. In graduate school, I met a number of people who blew me away. And I loved it! It’s great to be in a position to appreciate the brilliance of others. And I think that as time goes on, if our civilization continues to grow, we will get past this petty desire to maintain a knowledge advantage. Because passing on knowledge helps us all. And from a practical standpoint, it helps those who share it most of all.

Afterword: Knowledge Giving in Its Place

There is another side of this that I used to run into when I was doing IT — and which Will still has to deal with. When you are fixing a computer as a contractor, people will often want to sit next to you and “learn how to do it.” This is not the same thing. For one thing, having people ask a stream of questions makes the repair go much slower, and most repairs are not done on an hourly basis. For another thing, it is offensive. The implication is that all you are doing is this one thing — that knowing what to do isn’t part of a vastly larger base of knowledge. No one would ever think it appropriate to ask a plumber to teach them the art while the toilet gets fixed.

Image cropped from Happy, Healthy, and Smart. Make Sleep a Priority! by Army Medicine. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

The Barack Obama Hate Machine Is Transferable

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Obama HateShakezula is a very smart guy, but I think he was wrong yesterday, Yesterday Was All We Had. He noted that there will be a lot of very sad people when Obama leaves the White House, but the saddest of all will be “the people who profit from Barack Obama Hate Machine, Inc.” He is right to some extent. Just in the most general sense, Fox New and other conservative hate organizations do best when the Democrats are in charge. When the Republicans are in charge, the Hate Machine is asleep. Everything is just fine because “our guy” is in charge and they only start to complain at the end when even the truest of the true believers can’t deny how bad things have gotten.

But Shakezula said this, “Assuming the next president isn’t named Trump or Cruz, neither a President H Clinton or B Sanders would generate a tenth of the visceral reaction and hence the money and the power that’s come from using President Barack Hussein Obama to frighten to terminally resentful white people into falling in line and forking over the cash and/or votes.” I don’t think that’s true. I accept that there is something special about Obama because he is a black man and these kinds of people are terrified of black men.

I was amazed at the things that people would say about Clinton. I said about him more or less what I say about Obama today: he’s the best president we can reasonably expect. Yet the conservative vitriol against both men were almost identical.

But Obama has done an amazingly good job of not being a black man. This is part of how he became president. The main thing that the conservative base hates about Obama is that he’s a Democrat. Someone I have to work very closely with is a hate radio addict and, as a result, a bigot. She is certain that Obama is intent on starting a race war. Now that may sound like it goes along with Shakezula’s contention, but I heard the exact same thing about Bill Clinton when he was in office. The big conservative complaint against the Democrats is not that they are black but that they are on the side of the black man against the white man.

Really: in the 1990s, I was a libertarian. And I was amazed at the things that people would say about Clinton. I said about him more or less what I say about Obama today: he’s the best president we can reasonably expect. Yet the conservative vitriol against both men was almost identical. They were both socialists who were determined to use racial tensions to start the revolution. It was the Obama Hate Machine before anyone knew who Obama was. It was nuts then and it is nuts now. I mean, why would the leader of the most powerful nation on earth want to start a revolution? Also stated was that even though nothing big happened during the first term, just you wait until the second! And then nothing happened and they just dropped it.

But you know who did wait until his second term to show his true colors? George W Bush. This was the man who originally ran on “compassionate conservatism” and then got all the evangelicals to vote for him because the gays were coming. And then once he won re-election, he told the nation that he was going to privatize Social Security. This is entirely typical. The Republican Party is all about projection: they see voter fraud everywhere because they commit voter fraud. They see conspiracies everywhere, because they commit conspiracies. And they think the Democrats are always lying because their entire economic and foreign policy positions are based on lies.

If Clinton or Sanders is the next president, the Obama Hate Machine will just change to the Clinton or Sanders Hate Machine. Nothing substantial will change. There will just be new bits of their personal biographies that will prove that they truly want to destroy the country. It will continue on. Sure, Obama being black helped in a certain way. But there is lots of good material coming from a woman or a socialist. In fact, if the next Democratic president happened to be a black man, it might make their work harder. You can only claim that the president wants to destroy America because he’s black for so long. You have to come up with new narrative — new hokum to sell.

It’s not the Obama Hate Machine; it’s the Democratic Hate Machine. And the conservative base will continue to shell out money to fight it for as long as there are angry old white people.

Obama hate image used under fair use.

Morning Music: David Gilmour

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David GilmourWhen I was young, my favorite guitarist (by far) was David Gilmour. That was probably because he is one of the few lead guitar players who thinks in terms of melody. Most guitarists get too lost in scales and not much more. I believe after Roger Waters used his inner pain to banish all other songwriters from Pink Floyd, Gilmour was still given songwriting credit based purely on the basis of his guitar solos. See, for example, “Dogs” off a fairly unlovable album, Animals.

Here is David Gilmour with Richard Wright (who Waters threw out of the band — as you can see, I have a bit of an attitude toward Waters) performing “Comfortably Numb” off The Wall. It’s a great performance:

David Gilmour – live 8 – edited by user:Xett, originally Andy MacLarty. – Originally posted to Flickr as Mr Gilmore looking happy (erm?). Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons.

Anniversary Post: Dennis Rader and the BTK killer

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Dennis Rader - BTK KillerOn this day in 1974, Dennis Rader (known as the BTK killer — “BTK” standing for “bind, torture, kill”) started his string of murders with the Otero family. He tortured them and then killed them. He’s a classic psychopath. In total, he killed ten people. The authorities in Kansas searched desperately for any other murders he might have been guilty of, hoping that one of them might have been after Kansas had enacted the death penalty, so they could kill him.

I understand this. It would be hard to feel too bad for this guy if he were killed. Just the same, he’s a classic example of what I think of as a grizzly bear murderer. It’s just what he does. What was done to him seems appropriate: put him in jail for the rest of his life so that he couldn’t hurt anyone else. I still don’t quite understand a society that thinks that sinking to the level of its worst individuals is a good idea.

One interesting thing about the BTK killer is that from 1974 through 1988 — the time during which he committed 9 of his 10 murders — he worked as an installer for ADT Security Services in Wichita. A lot of the people getting ADT installed were doing so because of their fear of the BTK killer. I don’t know if he ever killed anyone who had an ADT system installed. I do know that they are mostly useless.

He had a wife and two kids. He had been elected president of the council of his local Christ Lutheran Church. He was a Cub Scott leader. And he didn’t seem to have a problem getting or keeping jobs. None of this surprises me. I think that psychopaths are really in a much better position in this regard than normal people. I’ve often noticed in business how total idiots — incompetent in their work — are rewarded because they are so confident.

It seems natural that the United States would have far more than its fair share of serial killers. We are that kind of country. In a fundamental way, we love psychopaths. Sure, we would prefer that they didn’t kill and torture people. But other than that, the BTK killer was kind of the perfect American. It’s no wonder they are so hard to find. In fact, the BTK killer would never have been caught if he hadn’t decided he wanted to get attention long after he had stopped killing. He should have focused his efforts on teaching Sunday School instead.

Dennis Rader by El Dorado Police Department – El Dorado Police Department photographic records. Via Wikipedia.

Alan Rickman: Another Unfair Death

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Alan RickmanOh my! Alan Rickman died earlier today. When I learned earlier this week that David Bowie had died, it made me feel a little old. But there wasn’t much in terms of emotional impact, despite the fact that there are at least three Bowie albums that I love: Hunky Dory, Aladdin Sane, and David Live. And I’m also a huge fan of the film Labyrinth, although not because of him. But my reaction to Alan Rickman’s death is different. It bothers me. I’m actually sad about it.

I discovered him the same place most people did, as Hans Gruber in Die Hard. Despite being a cliche, it is still true that the most important element in a film like that is the villain. This is why the other Die Hard films are not as good (but at least Die Hard 2 had a really good plot). The truth is that Bruce Willis has never been very interesting on the screen. And Rickman added all the charisma that was otherwise lacking. I remember reading that someone on the staff was sending the production company reports indicting that Rickman was destroying the film. It just goes to prove William Goldman’s saying, “No one knows anything.”

As if to prove that wasn’t a fluke, Alan Rickman played the most evil and twisted Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. That was a film that was totally forgettable except for Rickman. It was just such a delight to watch. Check out this scene (which is not at all an especially good one for Rickman) and ask yourself, “How is it that Kevin Costner is a star?” This is the problem with Hollywood: being boring is a good thing. “I shall never fear my father’s sword.” It’s not a terrible line by itself, but Costner makes it as bad as it could possibly be.

I assume that Alan Rickman didn’t especially want to be a star. He was an actor. So he got to play a lot of different kinds of roles. One very early was Ed (the painter) in The January Man. It wasn’t a great film, but it was a fun one. And Rickman showed that he could hold his own on the weird front against Kevin Kline. He was wonderfully sad in, An Awfully Big Adventure. He managed to make Colonel Brandon just cool enough in Sense and Sensibility. And he played the wonderfully snobby, yet likable, Steven Spurrier in Bottle Shock. He was wonderful creepy as Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd. But of course most people will always remember him as Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films. I could go on, because there are other films of his I loved like, Truly, Madly, Deeply. Oh, and Galaxy Quest. Like I said: I could go on.

So I’m very sad that Alan Rickman has died. (And truly: God must hate humanity because Dick Cheney continues to live.) But I’m not “sobbing sad.” I didn’t know Alan Rickman. But the film industry will be all the poorer for his death. First Terry Pratchett. Now this. Is something going on in England? I don’t think I can take much more of this.

Goodnight, sweet prince! And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

Alan Rickman after Seminar (3) by Marie-Lan Nguyen – 6343878187. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons.