We Are Marshall was on HBO again tonight. I had seen it only for the first time about a week ago, also on HBO, and was left feeling like it was lacking something. At a recent family birthday party, I asked my father if he had seen it. He had and he liked it. On certain genres of movies, our tastes don’t always agree while on others we see eye-to-eye. In general, he tends to overlook a movie’s shortcomings if it pulls on the heartstrings where I lend less weight to the sentiments if I don’t understand the logic of the decisions.

For example, I’ll never understand Serendipity. It just didn’t make sense to me. I just couldn’t swallow that two people who hit it off so well and felt so strongly for one another would act so ridiculously. Kate Beckinsale, who has wow factor, stars as Sara who meets Jonathan, played by a harmless John Cusack, while out Christmas shopping in New York. The two hit it off immediately, seem to fall in love, and then for reasons that aren’t clear to me, throw up their hands and turn it over to “fate.” They write their phone numbers down but instead of exchanging them, they just throw them away. Ok, well maybe they didn’t actually throw them away, but they may as well have. She writes hers in a book and gives it away, and he writes his on a $5 bill that she spends on some candy. Oh, come on! Who does that? I might be willing to concede that somewhere, sometime there were two people who could have been this flighty, but if there were, I’m sure they didn’t act as pithy and seemingly together as the two characters that had been introduced in the beginning of this movie.

To me, the movie plays out like the old joke about the sailor whose boat is sinking so he prays to God for help. When a boat comes by to offer the man a lift, he refuses and instead insists that God will save him.  The boat leaves but the sailor continues to sink. Another boat comes by to offer the man a lift, and he again refuses insisting that God will answer his prayers and save him.  However, the boat leaves and the craft takes on more water until a third boat comes by and offers to take the sailor aboard but he again refuses. Finally, the boat sinks and the sailor dies only to find himself standing in heaven before the Almighty. The sailor drops to his knees and begs the Lord to know what he had done to forsaken Him and why He let him drown. God pauses a moment and then asks, “What about the three boats I sent?”

Even in the frame of the movie, this “serendipitous” decision to let fate decide if the two are meant to be is shown to be an absurd move. Although the phone numbers eventually work themselves into each other’s hands, so much time has gone by in the interim, including marriages to other people, that it can hardly be viewed as a raging success.  I don’t know if he does or not, but I’d be willing to bet my dad liked Serendipity.

None of this is to say that I thought We Are Marshall was as poor as I thought Serendipity was, but I thought they missed the boat with a lot of things. The story is of the true Marshall University football team who was nearly wiped out along with all its coaching staff in a horrific 1970 plane crash. In the film version of events, the real attention grabber was coach Jack Lengyel, played by a cartoonish Matthew McConaughey who evokes a faint glimpse into how he must have looked to the police the night of his infamous bongo playing arrest in October of 1999. Lengyel is a great coach and humanitarian who helped rebuild the Marshall University football team but he was only one player in a story rich with notable characters.

William “Red” Dawson, who was a recruiting coach for the team and had not been aboard the plane while out on a recruiting trip, is viewed as an important figure in both real life and in the film version by being given to the able Matthew Fox from Lost. However, there are just too few scenes or lines of dialog for Red to come across as anything more than a periphery character. Likewise for Marshall University President Donald Dedmon, who had successfully petitioning the NCAA to allow the Marshall frehsman players to take the field. Dedmon is well played by brilliantly by David Strathairn. Although Strathairn has more film to work with than Fox, he isn’t given the dialog he deserves and the film misses a perfect opportunity for his character to plead his case to the NCAA, which would succinctly underline the whole moral of the story and why it was important for the team to take the field to pay respect to their deceased teammates, friends, family, and neighbors.

I think opportunities were also missed by not better profiling more of the returning football players who were suddenly expected to, for lack of a less obvious term, pick up the ball and run with it. After the crash, the team’s surviving kicker, Tom Bogdan, hung up his cleats and never played football again, too overcome with guilt for not having been with the team on the trip. In the film, Bogdan is played by Brian Geraghty, who looks like Wes Bentley from American Beauty with about 25 pounds on his frame - something about the eyes, but the portrayal feels hollow with only scenes of Geraghty brooding and none of him appearing to cope with real emotion.

Reggie Oliver was a Marshall University freshman quarterback who was suddenly one of the teams veterans and the new starting quarterback. It was Oliver who orchestrated the team’s first win of the season on a pass to Terry Gardner. After Marshall, Oliver went on to play professional football in the WFL before going on to coaching. However, although Arlen Escarpeta appears to get more screen time as Oliver than even Fox does as Red, I somehow never felt connected to him either or that he had any struggles fitting into his new position both on and off the field.

Blake Smith‘s sport was soccer and basketball before finding himself in the position as the new kicker for the football team. Even Kathy Ireland was given more to work with during her portrayal of a soccer-player-turned-kicker in the comedy Unnecessary Roughness than was affored to Smith in We Are Marshall. Smith’s life is reduced to only a brief clip in which he gets his shot on the team after a coach sees him kick a ball out of the soccer field. The actor who portays Smith is Billy Bennett who, according to IMDB, doesn’t have any other credited roles as of yet.

It’s not just the portrayals of the team and administration that I thought were lacking, but those of the rest of the community as well. I never really believed that this was a community that was dealing with a loss, much less one as tragic as this. Ian McShane, who may be most known for playing Swearengen in HBO’s Deadwood, plays Paul Griffen, a composite of the grieving parents. McShane is a master at expressing deep emotion through intonationg and expression, but even he comes through as a two-dimensional character stuck on the third stage of loss, anger.

Maybe in a strange way it could be considered fitting that a movie about the calamity that struck Marshall University on November 14, 1970 ended as it did, full of promise, much of it left unrealized. I just can’t help wonder if the community that lost so much didn’t deserve a better shot at getting something back this time around.

"I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.”
Christopher Reeve

CPRInstructor.com is dedicated to the instruction of CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) and those who are trained to practice and train others.  The site offers videos, software, access to training courses, and lesson plans.  They also feature a very nice database of Good Samaritan laws in each state.  Good Samaritan laws are named for the New Testament parable wherein a man, of the despised Samaritans, stops to aid a man who has been beaten, robbed, and left by the side of the road.  The Gospel of Luke teaches that the Samaritan deserves honor and respect above those who had done nothing to aid the poor victim.  These Good Samaritan laws are designed to do the same and protect someone who uses CPR to aid a person in distress.  It’s unfortunate we live in a world that would require such commonsense laws, but personal injury case history shows that people will often forego this commonsense time and time again.  Some times even the lack of commonsense goes in both directions it goes both ways.

http://CPRInstructor.com

It’s great to be an American.  It can never be denied that our government provides well for us.  Each election we debate which areas need improvement, which areas should be left alone, and hopefully elect candidates who will achieve those agendas.  And if not, well, we’ll get ‘em next election.  There’ll always be critics and cynics, but even they would have to admit to more good things about our government than I could ever hope to list here, from the mundane (garbage, sewage, waste treatment) to the critical (food growth, clean water, health, safety, financial assistance) to the spectacular (snow removal, public television, air traffic control).

I’ve always loved how towns and cities build and maintain parks for no gain other than to give their citizens some place to relax or play a game.  I’ll always support the construction of skate parks.  I would never argue against the creation of more parks even if the last time I set foot on a skateboard, it was narrow and made of hard plastic with rubber wheels that would catch on every pebble or patch of sand.  You shouldn’t have to be boarder to get behind the idea of a park for kids to entertain themselves with physical activity.  I also love that if you don’t like the particular parks in your town, you can just go over to a neighboring city and hang out in one of their parks instead.

In most areas of the country there’s even plenty of subsidized transportation to get you there.  I just read somewhere that Boston was ranked #2 in the top list of cities that are accessible by foot.  The transit system, the T, is a great example of government in action.  There are 5 different subway and streetcar lines (red, orange, green, blue, and silver), plus the commuter rail, buses (diesel, electric, or LNG), wheelchair vans, cars for the handicapped or elderly, and even boats.

Or if you prefer, there’s a massive, regulated hansom industry in Boston.  That’s one thing I miss about living out here in the sticks: taxi availability.  We can get on the commuter rail and be in Boston in about 30 minutes, but we can’t get a taxi cab to take us down the road to a St. Patrick’s Day party.  But, I digress.

The government has been providing for us in many areas for a very long time.  Unfortunately, it feels like all the big ideas, all the revolutionary government projects, all the greatest things about this country, were undertaken far too long ago.  In simpler terms, what have you done for me lately?

I don’t mean to be glib, because it’s not something I take lightly, but where’s our space race?  Where’s our Hoover Dam, Statue of Liberty, or Mount Rushmore?  Where’s our Chicago’s World Fair?  Where are the bold projects that lead the way?  Particularly lacking is the government’s involvement in technology.

In the past thirty years, computers have gone from obscure thinking machines for mathematical functions to penetrating most aspect of our daily lives.  A computer was probably involved somewhere along the way in the construction or delivery of everything we buy, wear, eat, use, or consume.  My alarm clock has a computer in it.

With all this heavy reliance on computers for banking, commerce, communication, management, construction, or entertainment, I find it a little disturbing at how hands off the government has been in leading the way.  Instead of action and leadership, we get regulations and bureaucracy.  Of course, the greatest project thus far in computing is the design and implementation of the internet which was performed by a government through DARPA, but since that was over thirty years ago, it can’t be considered a recent input.  Where are the great new projects that show that the government recognizes it’s a digital world and some things need fixing?

A clear example of this lack of leadership is the continued presence of spam.  Why isn’t anything being done about spam?  The government has tried to deal with spam by passing nearly meaningless laws. Even when ledislators “get tough” on spam enforcement, it means that they’ve enacted measures to allow their constituents to do all the heavy lifting and sue some spammers for deceptive advertising or for not providing an opt-out.  These laws are based on the ability of the citizens to track down the spammers, serve them with papers, get them to appear in civil court, and prove the case.  Have these laws had any effect?  Has your inbox noticed the difference?  Mine sure hasn’t.  I still get spam at work and home and that’s after the emails have passed through about 4 different spam and anti-virus filters.

Spam is nearly impossible to fight from the receiving end.  And even if you do stop it from eventually getting to your inbox, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t sent.  There could have been hundreds or thousands of routers, switches, and computers which had to carry the message all the way there only to be refused and then bounce the message back, most likely involving a different path than the way it came, involving even more equipment.  Rejecting spam can take up twice as much bandwidth as having received it.

The worst part about spam is it never, ever stops.  When I first setup the email server at work in about 1995, I got in the habit of reading the email logs.  I remember right from the get-go, we regularly got email addressed to two usernames that didn’t exist at our company.  Our company name is similar to those of many other companies that operate around the country, and clearly two people from one of these other companies with a different, but similar, URL got onto some kind of mailing list.  For years, these same two names appeared every single day as the target of email, even though a message had never gotten through to a recipient - every single one was bounced.  A few years ago we outsourced our email server and I don’t bother reading the logs, but I’m sure that if I did, I’d see the same two email addresses today.

Spammers don’t care if they ever hit their target.  They’re just throwing crap at the wall and hoping something sticks.  They’re just playing the percentages and since it doesn’t cost them anything to send the emails, those percentages can be pretty low and still equate to a fortune.  Why isn’t the government making any real effort to stop it other than enacting regulatory laws that put the burden on the citizen?  Can you imagine the outcry if every night there was a knock at every American’s front door with someone pitching a bottle of snake oil or a peek at some dirty pictures?  Yet that’s exactly what happens to us regularly through email and its left up to every individual, company, or ISP to police the situation ourselves.

The U. S. Postal Service seems to me to be a prime governmental body to be involved in advancing the cause of email.  With the competition that has sprung up in the way of package handling and the reduced volume due to online invoicing and bill paying, an excellent stream of revenue for the U. S. Postal Service would be to charge money to deliver an email in the same way that it charges to deliver a letter.  In exchange for this fee, they could provide services like confidentiality, security, authentication, a confirmed receipt, and tracking information.

Not every email should have to pass through the USPS.  In the same way that you can hand-deliver a card or box of cookies to your neighbor’s house, you should be able to transmit emails peer-to-peer the way it’s done now if you choose.  But, I think a government-protected email address should be afforded every American if they should choose to use it.  I might not use it if I just wanted to ask a friend if he wanted to get together after work some night, but I would if I wanted to send out something important or receive something private.

Another advantage with using the USPS is that tampering with the mail is a federal crime.  So is using the mail for the commission of a crime.  The same could be made true of USPS email.  If some shyster spammer passed an email through the USPS, the weight of the federal government should come down on him.  In the movie, Tom Cruise was only able to take down The Firm after he had gathered evidence of billing fraud and brought down the mighty hammer of the government due to the realization that the fraudulent invoices were sent through the US mail.

Chances are most spam would drop anyway even without the threat of felony prosecution.  If a spammer had to pay money for every email sent, it could change the percentage game enough that spamming wouldn’t be such a lucrative business after all.  At the very minimum, it would get spammers to care more about whether their emails were reaching an audience at all, let alone an interested one, and thus stop knocking at doors that weren’t being opened.

The USPS would also resolve another problem with email: the difficulty in changing email addresses or managing multiple addresses.  You can now keep the same phone number when you change cell phone carriers, but if you change ISP’s, you’re SOL.  I wouldn’t know where to begin if I ever left my job or cancelled my Verizon DSL.  I’d have to plan for at least a month to hope to get half of my subscriptions, correspondence, newsletters, and registrations switched over to a new address, if it’s even possible at all.

There could be other advantages of having a central clearing house for email.  Virus disinfection could be handled on a higher level than it is currently being handled through the “go-out-and-buy-whatever-package-you-think-will-work-update-it-regularly-never-open-any-attachments-and-pray-for-the-best” approach that stands now.  It would also help if the virus could be traced back to the first registered citizen that released it to the internet so it could be stopped at the source.

Email is only one of the problems that I see as affecting us on the technological front.  There are also serious problems with the patent office, the copyright system, open document standards, internet commerce, and allowing some very powerful corporations to have the power to dictate terms for the regular use of the systems on which our country’s computers are based.  These are only the things I can pick off the top of my head, but each is ripe with problems, misguided intentions, and example of a laissez-faire attitude toward technological innovation. I don’t expect these or any of the other problems facing the industry to be corrected with the wave of a wand, but shouldn’t we expect that at least something be seriously attempted?  Let’s build today’s equivalent of the NASA space program and stop pushing the burden onto the citizen.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
George Bernard Shaw