I’m varnishing a desk in the garage, decorating an end table in my office, trying to keep up with my orders while finding time to enjoy the last few weeks of Josie’s summer vacation. In less than two weeks I’ll be returning her to school. For her, summer will be over. For me…I’ve got two more months of summer!
This year spring came early. We didn’t believe or trust it when the weather turned nice in early April but it really was spring and it was beautiful. As I’ve written recently, the summer weather could hardly be more perfect. Blue, clear skies nearly every day, not too many really hot ones, not too much humidity and most of the prodigious rain has been overnight. There’s no reason to suppose we aren’t in for an equally gorgeous autumn and that’s the best season of all. So I’m not throwing in the beach towel just because Josie has to go back to school.
They may drain the pool at the park after Labor Day and send all the lifeguards at the lake back to school but they can’t really ‘close’ the beaches, as much as the politicos think they can. Lifeguards? I don’t need no stinkin’ lifeguards.
But I do have to finish the furniture I told her she could take to school with her.
So my days are a bit packed just now.
Oh, my Mom finished stitching the seat for the chair we’re giving Katie as a wedding present, so I’m trying to block it. Soon as I get it back to square, we’ll run it up to the upholsterer. One more project I can check off my list.
The other night I watched the old Charles Bronson movie ‘Death Wish’. Mark Steyn said something about it in a column last week. He was writing about the current NYC administration dismantling all the law and order measures put in place since the seventies and reminding his readers what that great city was like before Giuliani’s time. I remembered that I had enjoyed Death Wish when I saw it, decades ago, so I put it on my list.
It’s actually a much better movie than I had remembered. Yes, Bronson does become a vigilante but the movie is about how and why. Its action/adventure set in the real world. It’s a very right wing movie, not because right wingers want to go around shooting everyone but because it makes the point that if the citizens are armed, violent crime goes down. It makes this point in a couple of different ways. Bronson is able to stop a few robberies, beatings and muggings on a first person basis, so there’s that but the larger issue in the movie is that violent crime plummets as word of an armed vigilante spreads on the street of New York. Also, the middle section of the film takes place in Arizona, where Bronson’s buddy flat out tells him that everyone in AZ is armed, so there’s very little violent crime. The would-be baddies all know they’d get blown away if they tried anything.
Criminals, even violent ones, know how to choose their victims. Like animals in the wild, they go after the weak and unprotected.
The scene that made me gasp was at a cocktail party taking place after the vigilante has been in the news a few weeks. As Bronson makes his way through the room, he passes a couple and hears the guy saying that the vigilante is racist for shooting more black muggers than white ones. His companion immediately tells him he’s an idiot; that there are more black muggers than white ones. Then she asks him if he thinks there should be an affirmative action movement to get more white guys into mugging.
In 2015, forty one years after the fact, that conversation played like satire. No one in Hollywood would dare to allow a character to say anything so sensible.
Anyway, I liked the movie so much I went on Amazon and bought my own copy. It was under $7.00. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes a little justice/vengeance in their movies.
Now I really have to get back to work.