Obfuscation now, obfuscation tomorrow, obfuscation forever

It’s pretty scary when I find myself channeling the 1963 George Wallace, the pre-Arthur Bremer George Wallace, if only in terms of meter. But obfuscation is today’s word and it is more ubiquitous than peanut butter.

According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary to obfuscate is to make something obscure, or to confuse. And we are obfuscating to beat the band these days. Take death. That’s a pretty simple concept. It’s binomial. Either you’re alive or you’re dead. You can have a near death experience, go toward the light and all of that but if the rest of us get to hear about it then you weren’t dead. Not yet anyway.

Ever notice how few people can bring themselves to say, Aunt Millie died last night?” You might hear, “we lost Aunt Millie last night.” To which I always want to respond, “did you find her this morning?” I don’t do that but I am tempted and the funny thing about me and temptation is that I rarely resist it indefinitely.

Another way we often put it is to say “Aunt Millie passed away last night.” If Aunt Millie was 93 and died in her sleep that’s probably appropriate but if Millie was 31 and was killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan then we’re not being very honest with ourselves if we say she “passed away” or sometimes simply “passed.” But death is a tough thing to have to deal with and for all my moaning about it I can understand why people want to pad the edges of it either for themselves or for someone else. But we’ve taken this way too far.

Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum was on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” a while ago and coined the term, “National Euphemism Offensive” which he of course attributed to the Obama Administration. I blame the attribution on frustration borne of years of trying to craft intelligent, precisely worded speeches and having to turn them over to President Bush. It must be like leaving your beautiful children in the care of your loopy vegan sister in law who still has the John Kerry bumper sticker on her Geo Prism.

Frum is right of course in the concept, just late to the party blaming it on Obama’s people. I noticed it several years ago when people stopped having “problems.” Ever notice that? Nobody has a “problem” anymore, they have an “issue.” To me they’re different. A problem is something that ought to be dealt with, and one would hope, solved. An issue is just something you probably ought to be aware of. I’m told that in Corporate America they don’t even have “issues” they have “challenges,” which I’m sure they deal with “aggressively and in a forthright manner.”

Driving along route 495 near Lowell recently I saw a sign for the “Gallagher Intermodal Transit Terminal.” How’s that for a mouthful to say parking lot, bus stop and train station? Well at least it has appropriate signage. Instead of simply accurate signs.

When I worked at WNBP, which was then a daytime radio station in Newburyport, Massachusetts, we had three full-time, on air employees. The Program Director, the Operations Manager and the News Director. There could have been some pretty ugly turf wars there let me tell you. Talk about a cat fight in the English Department - a situation where the lesser the stakes the more bitter the feud.

How about “Healthcare System?” Do you see a system anywhere? Me neither. I don’t see much healthcare either. I might be able to make a case that we have an insurance system designed to systematically exclude anyone who costs the insurance companies money but that’s another “issue” entirely.

It’s not just the governmental bureaucratese or the psychobabble leaching into the groundwater of our speech, this stuff is everywhere.

From the man who “utilizes” something he could just “use,” to the weather forecaster I saw on WMUR-TV in Manchester, N.H., referring to “tornadic activity” when he meant there were tornadoes. From the overhyped “very special television event” that’s just the latest installment in a series that produces, what is it these days, 20 shows a year to the next time the Red Sox play the Yankees and it’s hyped as “The Greatest Rivalry in Sports.” Well, I’m thinking that when India plays Pakistan in, say, cricket that may be the greatest rivalry in sports. I mean those people hate the sight of each other AND (unlike most Yankee and Red Sox fans) they have nuclear weapons!

We need to be clear, we need to be accurate and we need to be calm. There are exceptions to every rule. Which is why I’m semi-retired, doing a bit of free-lancing and some consulting instead of simply middle aged and mostly out of work.

Lawyers, Chairs and Hyundais

Abraham Lincoln once said, “A lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a client.” I have to wonder what Mr. Lincoln would have thought of a lawyer who appears on television doing his own commercials. Judging by the ones I’ve seen it’s a wonder any plaintiff gets a penny in a lawsuit against a corporation with these mannequins representing them.

Wooden doesn’t begin to describe the way your average personal injury attorney (read ambulance chaser) comes across. These people generally make the late “Old Man of the Mountains” seem downright engaging on a comparative personality scale. And at least one lawyer that I can think of, although I can’t remember her name at the moment, looks like she’s making a hostage tape. That deer-in-the-headlights, fixed-on-the-camera gaze makes me wonder if she was able to break free from her captors and escape from the studio.

But lawyers aren’t the only ones doing their own commercials. Unfortunately.

It would appear that somewhere along the way somebody passed a law requiring the owners of furniture stores to do their own commercials and, whenever possible, do them badly. It started with radio commercials by Elliot and Barry of Jordan’s Furniture and, as these things go, they weren’t that bad. There actually was something about their not quite professional approach that helped them to stick out during the interminable commercial clusters that have become a part of radio. Eventually they moved over to television and, since they were successful, people started imitating them.

Now things have gotten completely out of hand. Bernie & Phyl’s, Bob’s Discount Furniture, Cardi’s, Rotman’s, Ippolitos and others are all showing up on the tube with way too much enthusiasm for ottomans. Now the primary point of having these people do the commercials is to make you feel like you are getting to see the people in charge, bond with them personally, and buy from them because you relate to and, I guess, trust them. Considering we know Elliot and Barry and Bob and Bernie and Phyl by their first names it probably works.

Of course Elliot and Barry (I hear one of them retired but I never knew which was who and besides I don’t really care) and Bob own only slightly more of their companies than you or I do these days, but they stay around because that advertising approach works and gosh darn it, people like them! It also worked for Frank Perdue who sold chicken mostly because he looked like one I believe.

Car dealers overdo the whole I’ll do my own spots thing too. I blame them all on Ernie Boch. Ernie made a living smashing windshields and selling Ramblers and shouting “Come on down!” He was bad enough. Now his son, Herb Chambers, everybody who works for Ira whatever and too many others are doing the over, over, and further over, the top screaming–at–me-in-my-living room commercials themselves. On the rare occasions when it’s not the car dealer himself mugging the camera it’s some trained, my-voice-is-so-deep-I-have-to-carry-my-balls-to-work-in- a-wheelbarrow announcer who’s demanding that I buy my car somewhere or other.

I could go on. I usually do. Ask my wife. I understand that it’s tough for an advertiser to break through the clutter of advertising and do something that people will remember enough to affect their actual spending decisions. And being annoying can make a really lasting impression. We all have at least one in-law or one cousin to prove that. Howie Mandel has made a whole career out of it.

But I’m asking Bob, Elliot (or Barry-whichever), Bernie, Phyl, Ernie Jr., all of you who do your own commercials to at least consider spending a few of the bucks you made on that last dinette set or that used Hyundai, to go out and hire a few professionals to design and build a really imaginative campaign concept that will make me remember you and what you do in a positive way. There are a lot of people in advertising who can do this for you and with the economy in the crapper they might even cut you a deal just to put food on the table.

Just don’t go to the people who do the W.B. Mason commercials. They deserve to starve.

The old Mary Tyler Moore show was a favorite of mine and while I liked all the characters it seemed that Lou Grant, the News Director of the fictitious WJM-TV, got some of the best lines. One of my favorites was about relationships. “I don’t know what anybody sees in anybody,” Lou once observed.

Trophy wives (and husbands) aside, I have to agree with Mr. Grant. I don’t know what anybody sees in anybody either. So when Vermont’s legislature overrode Governor Jim Douglas’s veto of a bill that made same sex marriage legal in the Green Mountain State in early April, I took it pretty much in stride. For one thing that makes them the fourth state to do so after Massachusetts, Connecticut and, of all places, Iowa.

That three New England states and Iowa are ahead of California on this question is the kind of irony that amuses me. Since that other coast likes to think it’s way ahead of us easterners (10 to 20 years ahead I believe) in social matters it strikes me as, well, ironic, that the Golden State is hanging back there with (insert your favorite Red State here). You could argue that California is even worse on this one since the state’s supreme court legalized gay marriage then the electorate took it away. I’m sure Rush Limbaugh loves that.

As you might have guessed I don’t care who marries who. There are too many man and woman marriages that make absolutely no sense to me for me to get a knot in my shorts if people of the same sex get married. Most of the time I can’t see why anybody would marry either one of them.

Meanwhile in New Hampshire the legislature is deciding whether to raise fines for speeding. It seems the Granite State has fallen behind its neighbors in fining speeders and some legislators want to put the legislative pedal to the metal so New Hampshire can catch up. Fines for driving one to ten miles per hour over the speed limit would double. Okie Dokie.

Try driving the speed limit on Interstate 93 almost day when it’s not so thick with tourists that nothing is moving much, and you’ll find that you’re just about the slowest thing on the road. I haven’t minded being slow since I realized that long division was about as far as my math skills were going to get me. And I usually drive at the speed limit. Honest. Remember I said usually.

Since I usually drive the speed limit on the highways I, of course, consider anyone driving faster than I am to be a menace to society. . . maybe a couple of notches below a serial killer but only for want of opportunity. I take particular note of these miscreants when they’re driving vehicles with signs on them that say things like “New Hampshire Department of Safety” or “U-S Environmental Protection Agency.” If you’re representing the state government or the federal government, shouldn’t you be the one to obey the law?

I wonder whether police cars are ALWAYS on the way to an accident or some other sort of urgent situation when they’re doing 75 or 80 miles per hour but I at least assume they’re doing something job related. Something more than just going faster because they can and because they know THEY’RE not going to get stopped. If you’re the one who is enforcing the law shouldn’t you set an example by obeying the law?

In New Hampshire legislators get license plates signifying their exalted status. They don’t get much in the way of official compensation so that seems fair. But it does frost me when I’m driving along at the legislatively mandated maximum of 65 mph and a car with legislator’s plates passes me going a lot faster than I am. If you’re a legislator shouldn’t you be the one to obey the law? I mean, if it’s a stupid law, you’re a legislator, CHANGE IT.

That’s what you’re getting $100 per year, plus mileage and those nifty license plates for. If the law doesn’t make sense either repeal it or change it. But you, Mr. or Ms. State Legislator, you of all people should obey the law. Even if it is only occasionally enforced you should either obey it or change it.

That’s why the idea of the legislature increasing the fines for speeding and why the idea of marriage being expanded to be available to same sex partners have become linked in my mind by more than chronology. I keep thinking of the warning, “Be careful what you wish for, you may get it.”

A Fairpoint Thanksgiving

It’s a little early to be talking about Thanksgiving I know but if you live in Massachusetts, Connecticut or Rhode Island I would like to suggest something for which you should give thanks every day. Because if you lived in Maine, New Hampshire or Vermont your phone and internet service could be coming from Fairpoint Communications and that would not be a good thing.

A while ago Verizon decided it wanted to get out of the landline phone and internet business in Northern New England so they put the whole thing up for sale. Fairpoint Communications, Inc., a little company begun in 1991 with headquarters in friendly ol’ Charlotte, North Carolina was the winning bidder. Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont have been the losers.

We New Englanders are funny about our utilities. When we turn on the tap, we expect water. When we flip the light switch, we expect light. And when we pick up the phone, we expect a dial tone. Apparently that’s a higher level of service than Fairpoint thought they’d have to deliver.

There are all kinds of horror stories. People waiting weeks to get a phone line installed or assigned. No email service for weeks. Bills arriving after the due date and/or with incorrect amounts. Each time the harried public relations flack asks for patience while Fairpoint deals with the unexpected problem. They’re hiring more people, bringing in outside consultants, calling in the Marines, the Army and the Coast Guard.

Hey come on people. Did you not know that when you bought a phone and internet provider for over two billion dollars that you’d be expected to provide phone and internet service? And that your customers would expect it to be reliable?

There is a more than likely apocryphal story about two baseball managers. Bobby Bragan was fired as manager of the Cleveland Indians and replaced by Joe Gordon. When Joe took over the manager’s office he found a note from Bragan that said, “Inside the top desk drawer you will find two envelopes, marked #1 and #2. Open the one marked #1 when you reach your first crisis.”

Well the team perked up for the new manager and things were going along pretty well for a while, but it was still not a very good ball club and a mediocre baseball team will, like water, seek its own level. Soon the fans were booing Gordon, the talk shows were hammering him, the reporters were hounding him. It was getting to the crisis level so he opened the first envelope. The hand written note inside said simply, “Blame everything on me.”

Gordon called a press conference where he explained that the club he inherited from Bragan was riddled with problems. The line-up was all wrong, the pitching staff was screwed up, etc. Everything he could think of that was wrong he blamed on Bragan. He asked for patience while he sorted the mess out.

Well that quieted things down for a while. But after the passage of time and the making of a few trades the team wasn’t really any more talented than before and once again the team was losing and the sniping began again. When it rose to a crescendo Gordon decided it was his second crisis so he reached into the desk and opened envelope #2. He found another hand written note that said simply, “Prepare two more envelopes.”

Hey Fairpoint, I’d say it’s time to blame everything on Verizon.

Baseball Movies

With a new baseball season underway you may want to a way to satisfy your jones for the national pastime during rain delays and off days with a movie. Here are the ten best ones out there and why they’re worth watching even if you’re not that into the grand old game.

1-Bull Durham – Kevin Costner’s first baseball movie, the best one ever. Written and directed by former minor leaguer Ron Shelton it captures the day in – day out spirit of the game. Baseball groupie/player life coach Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), pitching wunderkind Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) along with Costner’s “Crash Davis” are the leading characters in a movie full of great ones. The score is dreadful but you can pretty much ignore it.

2-Bang the Drum Slowly – A tearjerker for guys. Great pre-expansion baseball ethos in an early film for Michael Moriarty and Robert DeNiro. Moriarty, whose grandfather George Moriarty was a teammate of Ty Cobb, is Henry “Author” Wiggin the star pitcher on the New York Mammoths and the best friend of 2nd or 3rd string catcher Bruce Pearson. Pearson is “too dumb to play a joke on” and he’s dying.

3-Field of Dreams – Costner’s a fan this time, not a player. It’s hard to believe you could be in America since 1989 and not know what this is about. “Hey Dad?...You wanna have a catch?” Nice score by James Horner – the “Titanic” guy.

4- Eight Men Out – The story of the Black Sox scandal. In 1919 eight members of the Chicago White Sox allegedly conspired to lose the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. John Cusack is George “Buck” Weaver the White Sox 3rd baseman and the central figure in this telling of the story. He knew about the fix but kept quiet about it. He and the seven who were in on it were banned from baseball when it was uncovered.

5- The Natural – Robert Redford is the title character “Roy Hobbs.” A lot of people rank this as number one but it’s a mystical tale and those don’t have much appeal to me. Randy Newman’s score is on of the best ever for a sports movie.

6-A League of Their Own – During World War II Phil Wrigley, heir to the chewing gum company and Chicago Cubs owner, decided to start up a league for women. It took me a while to see this one but it is a good movie. Tom Hanks has the classic line, “There’s no crying in baseball.” Anybody whose team has lost the 7th game of the World Series knows that’s not true.

7-Soul of the Game – Another fact based tale. This one’s about Jackie Robinson (Blair Brown), Satchell Paige (Delroy Lindo) and Josh Gibson (Mykelti Williamson), all playing in black baseball in 1945. Satch and Josh are the greatest players, but Brooklyn Dodgers President Branch Rickey (Edward Herrmann) chooses Jack to be the first African American to play in the white Major Leagues. Good choice.

8-61* - Billy Crystal made a movie for HBO about the 1961 baseball season and the duel between New York Yankees Roger Maris (Barry Pepper) and Mickey Mantle (Thomas Jane) to break Babe Ruth’s record of 60 home runs in a season. Billy Crystal made a VERY good movie.

9 – For Love of the Game – Kevin Costner’s third (and so far final) baseball movie. This time he’s Billy Chapel, a Hall of Fame bound pitcher at the end of his career on a dreary Detroit Tigers team. Billy’s relationship with Jane Aubrey (Kelly Preston) is half the movie. The other half is what may be his last game. The athlete’s concentration is represented better than in any other movie albeit very simply. It’s based on a novel by Michael Shaara who also wrote the brilliant novel “The Killer Angels.” Shaara’s book is better than the movie but the movie is worth seeing. The score by Basil Poledouris may be the best ever for a sports film…either that or Jerry Goldsmith’s score for “Rudy”.

10-Cobb – Ty Cobb (Tommy Lee Jones) was a great ballplayer, maybe the greatest ever, but he was also a racist (even for that time), more than a little nuts and in general one enormous asshole. He doesn’t come off any better in Ron Shelton’s other (after Bull Durham) baseball movie.

Extra innings to mention a few more. The original Bad News Bears would be in many people’s top 10. On another day it might be in mine.

In “It Happens Every Spring” Ray Milland is a chemistry professor and a baseball fan who develops a substance that repels wood. (He may have passed the formula on to my first wife but I’m just guessing) Ray Milland looks as much like a ballplayer as I look like a show girl. Paul Douglas – one of his three appearances in baseball movies of this era (circa 1950) which makes him a kind of lesser Kevin Costner.
The biopics “Pride of St. Louis” (about Dizzy Dean), “Pride of the Yankees” (about Lou Gehrig), “The Jackie Robinson Story” (Jackie plays himself), “The Stratton Story”(about 30s pitcher Monty Stratton who blew his leg off in a hunting accident) and “The Rookie” are all worth seeing. Ronald Reagan as Hall of Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander in “The Winning Team” isn’t any worse than Gary Cooper as Gehrig but the film overall is infinitely sappier.

Worst
The one thing most of the above movies have in common is that they are populated by people who are able to look like ballplayers. Some really good actors (see Anthony Perkins in “Fear Strikes Out”) aren’t the least bit athletic and in a baseball movie you should at least LOOK like you’ve played the game … at least once.

1-The Babe Ruth Story – William Bendix plays The Bambino in an absolutely dreadful movie. For long shots they got former big leaguer Babe Herman to play Ruth but the close-up stuff has to be Bendix and is so bad you’re embarrassed for him, his family, his church, his bartender, just everybody.

2- Fever Pitch – Drew Barrymore meets Jimmy Fallon during the off season and he seems pretty cool until opening day when she finds out he’s a typically obsessive Red Sox fan. As a spokesman for the obsessive Red Sox fan community this thing is so full of holes it makes swiss cheese seem solid as granite. Trust me, she would have known right away because he would have been counting the days till Spring Training like the rest of us.
If you want to see a good movie called “Fever Pitch” see the original. Based on a Nick Hornby novel it’s about an equally obsessive British football fan who roots for Arsenal. Everything about it is better except it’s about soccer.

3-Fear Strikes Out – Based on Jim Piersall’s autobiography (with Boston sportswriter Al Hirshberg). Jim was a Red Sox outfielder in the 50s who had what we now call bi-polar disorder. His disruptiveness eventually led to his being sent to a mental hospital but he came back to have a fairly long successful career in baseball. Anthony Perkins plays Jimmy in the movie and it’s obvious he had never played a game of baseball in his life until they began filming. Karl Malden plays his father who would have driven any of us over the edge.

4-The Fan – Robert DeNiro is the obsessed title character who decides to stalk and, he hopes, kill San Francisco Giants star, hotdog and egomaniac Bobby Rayburn (Wesley Snipes). This film has a really good cast with Benicio Del Toro, Ellen Barkin and John Leguizamo (and a cameo by John Kruck) it just doesn’t add up to much.

5 - Damn Yankees – based on a Faustian novel by Douglas Wallop about a fan of the Washington Senators who sells his soul to the Devil, herein known as Mr. Applegate (Ray Walston the best part of the film), to become the player who can lead his team to the pennant. Some great songs but Gwen Verdon as Applegate’s temptress, Lola, is at most oddly sexy. You‘re way better off to read the book originally titled “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant.” Fortunately there have been a lot of those lately.

The Visitor (PG-13) Movie Review

Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) teaches economics at a college in Connecticut. He’s been pretty much sleepwalking through his life since his wife died and maybe for a while before that. The late Mrs. Vale had been a concert pianist and taught piano as well. As the film opens Walter is trying to learn to play his wife’s instrument although, as his fourth would-be teacher tells him, he has no aptitude for it.

Whatever enthusiasm he had for teaching economics, hard to imagine given that it’s known as “the dismal science,” has long since left him and he’s seen creating this semester’s syllabus by taking white out to last year’s. When called upon to give a paper he co-authored with a younger colleague he tries to avoid it by admitting that he hadn’t really done any of the work, just put his name on it to lend his prestige to the work. Boxed in, he has to go. It’s no large imposition though. He has an apartment in New York, where the conference is being held, although he hasn’t been there in a long time.

Arriving at the apartment he finds a young couple, squatters, who’ve been paying someone named “Ivan” to rent the place. Walter doesn’t know Ivan from Adam’s off ox and squatters, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira), quickly pack up their belongings and agree to leave. But Walter offers to let them stay for a few days till they can find a place of their own. A lot can happen in a few days.

Tarek, who plays a drum in a jazz combo, finds that Walter has more aptitude for the drum than he did the piano. Truth be told, Tarek – a warm, engaging young man – is a better teacher than the piano professional. He’s encouraging and reinforcing and Walter quickly gains a measure of confidence with the instrument. Enough that he joins Tarek in playing in an ad hoc drum band in Central Park. On the way home Tarek is caught in the subway turnstile with the drum and police wrongly pull him aside for jumping the fare. It’s all a small understanding that would have been cleared up in a few minutes, a few hours at most, but for the fact that Tarek is an illegal alien.

I’ve read that writer/director Thomas McCarthy says he was making a story about people, but so much of the plot is focused on America’s massively screwed up immigration system that what I saw was a film that centered on that. The only time Walter Vale’s displays any degree of emotion is when he’s gone to visit Tarek in one of immigration’s detention facilities.

I was a little uncomfortable with what appeared to me as Vale as the heroic Anglo figure but you can decide about that for yourself. The film is well acted and the story is engaging and worth seeing.

Charlie Wilson's War - Movie review

Charlie Wilson’s War (R)
If they used this film to teach government in high school every student, make that every straight male student, would enthusiastically seek political office as soon as he became able. This is a film based on a true story about a congressman who makes his mind up to help the Afghans kick the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. Sounds pretty simple when you boil it down to that, probably somewhat wonkish, more than likely more than a little bit boring. Trust me, boring it ain’t.

Even if you can’t tell your three branches of government from your bicameral legislature you can enjoy this congressman at work. Charlie (Tom Hanks) is a great character in the spirit of Harry Gondorf. He gets people to buy things they don’t really understand for people they don’t genuinely care about and like that they’re doing it.

Charlie is a womanizing, drinking, at least occasional cocaine using and very effective congressman. His congressional office staff is made up of attractive young women, nicknamed “Charlie’s Angels,” and one can reasonably conclude that Charlie interviewed each one personally. As one of the Angels explains to a constituent, “Congressman Wilson, he has an expression. He says uhh, ‘You can teach them to type, but you can't teach them to grow tits.’" He summons his staff with one word, “Jailbait!”

Charlie’s allies are Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), the sixth richest woman in Texas and a right-wing Christian, and Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a CIA veteran who has been pushed aside because he doesn’t fit the ivy-league self image of the agency at the time, circa 1980. Joanne prompts Charlie to visit Pakistan to see the plight of the Afghan refugees. When he gets back, he is energized and over the course of the film (a spritely 97 minutes) he gets congress to raise the appropriation for the Afghans from $5-million to $500-million. How does he do it? Two ways.

First, Charlie’s style diverts attention. As Gust put it, “As long as the press sees sex and drugs behind the left hand, you can park a battle carrier behind the right hand and no one’s gonna fuckin’ notice.”

Second, Charlie holds more I-O-U’s than anyone else in congress. He votes for other people’s bills because they ask him to. They vote for his bills because they owe him. And your civics lesson for today is that you can get a lot done on Capitol Hill if people owe you something. The sad part is that once the Afghans drove the Russians out Charlie couldn’t get congress to fund much lesser amounts to rebuild Afghanistan. That allowed the Taliban to take over and we don’t yet know how that all will turn out.

Gust tells the story this way: There's a little boy and on his 14th birthday he gets a horse... and everybody in the village says, "how wonderful. the boy got a horse" And the Zen master says, "we'll see." Two years later the boy falls off the horse, breaks his leg, and everyone in the village says, "how terrible." And the Zen master says, "We'll see." Then, a war breaks out and all the young men have to go off and fight... except the boy can't ‘cause his leg’s all messed up, and everybody in the village says, "How wonderful." Now the Zen master says, "We'll see."

See the movie because it’s a good one and fun to watch. Whether you’ll learn something from it, “we’ll see.”