A Modest Proposal

The next time you buy or rent a DVD, check the "special features." Along with the Director's commentary and deleted scenes, it's often possible to select an alternate language to hear the movie in. Spanish. French. Portuguese. Italian. Whatever. It must not be too terribly difficult or disc-space-consuming to include an alternate audio track, because so many DVD movies now include that feature.

So, here's my question and proposal: Why not include the cleaned-up version of the dialogue that is used for television broadcasts of the same movie? It could be another language option, alongside Spanish and French or whatever else. And for any movie that's been cleaned-up with dubbing for television, that audio already exists. It shouldn't be hard to do. Yet, in all the movies we've rented from Netflix, I've never seen a disc that offers this option.

I'm not talking about the "bad scenes" that are cut for television; I know some Christian groups have tried to produce and sell or rent versions of movies that cut these objectionable scenes, and have been sued. That's not so critical for me; if I know there's a bad scene in a movie, I can skip through it, mute it, or make my kids face away. But I can't press the mute button every time Bruce Willis says the F-word. Sure, "melon farmer" is a silly substitute. But I'd rather my kids hear that than the original words.

What prompted this thought was recently renting Rain Man. It's a wonderful movie, with absolutely superb acting from Tom Cruise and (especially) Dustin Hoffman. In fact, it's hard for me to think of a movie with a better-acted lead than what Hoffman did in Rain Man. And the story itself, with Cruise growing to appreciate his brother for who he is, is powerful and moving. I really wanted to have the whole family watch it.

But it was rated R, and because I hadn't seen it in many years I couldn't remember exactly why. I knew there was at least one sex scene, but if that was the only problem...well, I could skip through that. But I had to know where it was, so I sat down to preview the movie by myself.

I found the sex scene, and it was pretty mild. Really mild, in fact, by Hollywood standards. The much larger problem was Tom Cruise's mouth: the profanity never stopped flowing. The longer I watched, the more dismayed I grew. I loved the story and Hoffman's acting as much as I remembered, but I knew I couldn't share this film with the Yeoman Farm Children. If it'd just been that one sex scene, I easily could've skipped it. But the foul language was far too pervasive.

And you know what's most frustrating? How completely unnecessary the rough language is. Yes, it fits Cruise's character as a rough and profane guy who thinks only about himself. But an actor as good as Cruise could sell that role without dropping F-bombs.

In a similar vein, the first time I saw Coming to America was on an airplane. I was delighted. What a wonderful romantic comedy, I thought. And Eddie Murphy played such a refreshingly clean role! And then I rented it at home, and saw everything that'd been cut out. The language and short clips they'd cut weren't just crude. They were totally unnecessary for the story --- I'd loved it just as I'd seen it. The rough language and innuendo ruined it for me.

So, getting back to my proposal, why not offer cleaned-up dialogue as an alternate DVD audio track? If the film producers think it's important not to exclude potential customers whose primary language is not English, why not show the same attention and concern to those of us who'd like to watch a movie with our kids and without all the four letter words?

Food, Inc.

Last night, Mrs. Yeoman Farmer and I finally made the time to sit down and watch Food, Inc. It's an outstanding documentary film about modern industrial agriculture, where it came from, the strategies it uses to sustain itself, and what the rest of us can do to supply alternatives. If you haven't seen it already, I highly recommend you do so. Put it in your Netflix queue, rent it at your local video store, or buy it from Amazon. Just watch it.

The film is at its best in discussing corn, and how elements of corn (and/or soybeans) have found their way into nearly every corner of the supermarket. I would've liked more detail about the ways in which federal agriculture policy subsidizes corn production, but the bottom line is that corn comes to the market below its real cost. Chemical and food companies have found countless ways to break this artificially cheap commodity apart into component pieces and reassemble them into the dizzying array of ingredients you see listed on package labels --- and these "processed to death," calorie-laden products end up cheaper than more wholesome alternatives. Ever wondered why a package of Twinkies is less expensive than a bunch of carrots? Even though the former is among the most highly engineered and chemical-intensive products in the supermarket and the latter is just several roots yanked out of the ground and rinsed off?

The sections about confinement agriculture, feedlots, and factory meat processing are eye-opening. The narrative was especially powerful in drawing a line between the inhumane ways in which animals are treated to the dehumanizing ways in which agricultural workers are treated. Everything --- animal and human--- is simply another element of industrial production.

One of the film's bigger "lightbulb moments" for me was the degree to which the fast food industry has shaped the way food is produced for all markets. McDonald's, Burger King, and the rest are enormous customers who want their products to taste exactly the same every time. They thus have enormous power to dictate the standardization of beef, pork, chicken, and potato production. And because those products need to be cheap enough for the Dollar Menu, growers need all kinds of "efficiencies" (i.e. feedlots and other animal concentration camps) to reduce their own costs.

The sections showing Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm in Virginia are by far the best in the film. Salatin's books (in particular You Can Farm and Pastured Poultry Profits) greatly inspired us as we were starting out, and it was even more inspiring to see his farm in living color. Salatin has put together a real, workable model of how wholesome food can be produced profitably. It's no wonder that people drive a hundred miles to fill their freezers with Salatin's meat. Although we are not attempting to run a pastured poultry enterprise, his production techniques have provided our family with outstanding chicken, turkey, duck, and goose.

I could've done without the long section with a grieving mother who is now a "food safety activist" seeking to enact legislation named after her son, who died from a e coli infected meat. Although I certainly empathize with her grief, and cannot imagine the pain she has had to endure, I really don't think additional regulations and inspections of mammoth industrial food facilities are the answer; as the film itself shows later, the very agencies charged with creating and enforcing regulations are frequently headed and staffed by former executives and lobbyists from the industrial food companies themselves. In political science, we call this revolving door phenomenon "regulatory capture." In the case of industrial agriculture, it results because the only people with enough experience and expertise to understand the industry are those with extensive ties to the industry itself.

The film's biggest shortcoming, in my mind, is that it doesn't do enough to connect the dots between "food safety legislation" and regulatory capture. My sense is that the former is useless --- or even counterproductive --- unless something is first done about the latter. And given the complexity of the industry, I'm not sure anything can be done about it. The result is a regulatory environment designed by and for the protection of agricultural conglomerates, but too byzantine and expensive for small producers to understand or abide by. The entirely foreseen and intended outcome is even less competition from farmers like Joel Salatin. Want to be able to sell your meat to local restaurants, which would provide a very nice and stable customer base for any farmer? You'll need to have your animals butchered at a USDA-inspected slaughterhouse. Good luck finding one of those anywhere near your farm. And, by the time you transport your animals there and go back to pick up the meat, good luck turning a profit. And don't even think about starting your own small dairy or cheesemaking operation until you're ready to spend a fortune building something that abides by state regulations. Then, have fun with the inspectors showing up to pick through your property whenever they feel like it. I realize that some of these measures are essential for large producers, but there ought to be more exemptions for small entrepreneurs.

The bottom line, though, is that this is a very important documentary. I apologize that it took me over two years to see and review it here. If you haven't yet seen it, I highly recommend that you do so.

Life After People

Suppose the sun came up tomorrow morning...but no one was here to see it rise? That's the fascinating question that a new show on the History Channel, "Life After People," takes two hours (1:28 if you skip the commercials) to explore.

I regret not posting on this sooner; it first aired last weekend, and it aired a few times this week. The last scheduled broadcast is this afternoon at 5pm Eastern --- and I'd highly recommend you set your VCR or DVR to catch it. (For my many readers who don't have cable/satellite or even television...it's available at Apple's iTunes store for $3.99. Just follow that link and do a search on "Life After People".)

The program assumes that something instantly wipes out every human being; we never learn what it was, but we don't see any bodies. It's kind of like the Final Judgment came at 6:59am, we were all taken to Heaven or Hell with our bodies, and God decided to let the solar system continue doing its thing for awhile. The program opens in rather disturbing fashion, with an alarm clock going off at 7am --- and no one is there to turn it off. Everything inside the house is imaculate and orderly...and then we see the family dog trotting around trying to figure out where everyone has gone.

And it was right there that I decided this would be too intense for our kids. The first casualties of our absense will be millions and millions of dogs. Many will be trapped in houses and starve to death. Most of those that get out will discover they've been bred with traits humans desired...but which are severe handicaps for surviving in the wild.

We go hour by hour, then skip to days and weeks, methodically looking at which things will shut down and break down --- and when the wildlife will start to return to cities. (The computer-generated graphics aren't Hollywood Blockbuster quality, but believable enough.)

There is only a passing reference to farmland being easily reclaimed within a year of our absence, and I find that very believable based on what we've seen fields do when allowed to sit for even a few months. And how quickly farmhouses crumble when abandonded. What is completely skipped is any discussion of farm animals, and how many millions of head of livestock will perish in their confinement "farms." What will happen to the unmilked cows? What will the concentration camp egg factory will look like ten days after the people are gone? Because if you think dogs have been bred with some unnatural traits, the livestock are even worse. Easily 99.9% of turkeys will die within days; they are so oversized, they can't even mount each other to mate, let alone find enough food to sustain their girth. Some breeds of chicken and duck (like the ones on our farm which still have enough instinct to brood their young) will do reasonably well, but most will be easy pickings for coyotees. Most sheep are far too stupid to know what to do without us, but I'd put my money on Icelandics (assuming they could migrate a bit further south, where there is more winter forage) and the Gulf Coast Natives still being around decades from now. (There are other fairly self-sufficient breeds of sheep and goats, but these are the ones I know most about.)

As years passed on the program, and infrastructure after infrastructure crumbled, I was struck by something: What an amazing creature man is. How completely different we are from animals. We have so thoroughly re-made our environment to serve our needs and build a flurishing civilization...and without us around to maintain it, it crumbles into dust. There is nothing "accidential" about us or what we've achieved. As we've explained to our kids: dogs and cats have fur, birds have wings, and fish have scales and gills. Human beings don't have any of those things. But what we do have is far greater: an intellect and a free will, which allows us to manufacture clothing and houses that keep us as warm as any animal, build airplanes that fly farther and higher than any bird, and design ships that let us cross the sea.

But the most fascinating questions are raised toward the end, thousands of years in the future, when there is no sign (save, possibly, the Great Wall of China) that we were ever here. Some talking head comes on to philosophize (I'm paraphrasing): "What if intelligent life never re-evoloves? What if humans were just an accident, and there's never another creature that can gaze on the stars and wonder."

I couldn't help thinking: What a sad and impoverished understanding of humanity this guy has. Despite all the letters he probably has after his name, he can't (or won't) acknowledge what it is that makes human beings unique on this earth: our immortal souls, which are spiritual and therefore couldn't possibly have a material source. Spiritual souls cannot evolve within material beings; they can only have their origin in what is higher than ourselves, and higher than the material order. In short, they must have their origin in our Creator. And therefore human beings must be here for a purpose which is higher than satisfying our bodily appetites and building these enormous buildings which will eventually crumble under their own weight.

I could go on and on about various segments of the program that were particularly fascinating, but will leave that to your own discovery. Suffice it to say that this is the sort of "brain food" that the History Channel does best, and I highly recommend it.

The War

This past week, PBS has been airing Ken Burns' new documentary about World War II. The seven-part, fifteen-hour series wrapped up last night...but if you missed it, don't worry. PBS will be airing it again this fall on Wednesday evenings --- beginning tonight.

And if you missed it, I cannot recommend highly enough that you see it the second time around. It is right up there with "The Civil War" and "Baseball." An instant classic, and something I plan on burning to DVD to keep for years.

Like all Ken Burns documentaries, it is superbly written and produced. Burns is a master of interspersing archival video with contemporary interviews, and overlaying narration or interviews with historical photographs in a way that both evokes a deep emotional response and teaches intelligently. He goes for both the heart and the head, and usually manages to hit both of them dead on. The current documentary is no exception.

What is most outstanding about The War is it is told through the eyes and experiences of the people who were there. The interviews are all done with survivors; we never have historians intrude to teach lessons. When it is necessary to broaden the perspective, Burns cuts to newsreels being shown in theaters back home --- so, again, we see and experience WWII in the same way a 1940s civilian would have, and not as a history professor would lecture.

Another excellent technique Burns uses to is focus on four individual towns, building a cast of characters from those places and sticking with them from start to finish. The documentary isn't strictly limited to these towns, however, and we do meet survivors from other places. But by constantly returning to the four towns, it helps bring the enormity of WWII down to a more human scale.

And that, I think, is what this documentary does best: it shows how the entire nation experienced the war, and how it drew all of us together. WWII literally left no family untouched; I'd known that intellectually, but this documentary really brings that to life. I found myself frequently wishing I could call my grandfather, who was a career Naval officer, and ask him to tell me more about the events that took place in the South Pacific --- or my other grandparents, who experienced WWII stateside --- but unfortunately all of them have passed away. And I found myself grateful that Burns made this documentary when he did, while enough of the original participants were still living and could give a coherent account of the original events.

The images that will stick most firmly in my mind are the brief shots we see of Catholic priests celebrating Mass on the decks of ships (sometimes on small and crowded troop transport boats), and of battle-weary Marines in tattered clothing kneeling in the sand to receive Holy Communion.

Another thing that really struck me: watching these 80 and 90 year olds getting choked up and wiping tears as they recalled learning about the passing of Franklin Roosevelt. More than 60 years later, and those memories still evoke those kinds of emotions; I can't imagine anything comparable for our generation.

The only way in which I think it falls short of The Civil War and Baseball is in the music. The music in The War is nice, but it's mostly 1940s jazzy stuff and Sinatra. There is also an original score by Wynton Marsalis that is used to excellent effect. But I think the music in The Civil War and Baseball was better because those scores used a great number of variations on just one or two songs, which gave the whole documentary a somewhat more unified feel. But in the scheme of things, that is a quibble. Another quibble is the narration; I preferred John Chancellor (Baseball) and David McCullough (Civil War) to Keith David.

In telling a story this vast, some things by necessity must be left out. I did think it odd we never saw the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, but that may have been by design --- we all know that story, and it's been done to death. Others will have different specific events that they were looking for and didn't see mentioned. We got the usual litany of groups "other than Jews" exterminated in the Holocaust (homosexuals, gypsies, the handicapped, etc), but no mention of faithful Catholics (i.e. Sts. Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein). There was also no mention of "celebrities," such as JFK and PT 109, George H. W. Bush being shot down, the death of Joseph Kennedy, Jr., etc --- and the omission of these "American celebrities" was actually refreshing. I'm glad Burns stayed disciplined and kept the focus more on the ordinary people than on folks we have all heard of.

The one exception is the amount of screen time given to Daniel Inouye. Granted, I doubt the typical American knows Inouye is a U.S. Senator (though this is mentioned toward the end, almost as an afterthought), and his Medal-of-Honor-winning heroics on the battlefield (while his government kept other Japanese Americans interned in camps back home) make for a truly compelling story. But I kept waiting for even a single mention of Bob Dole; after all, both he and Inouye were severely injured while fighting in Italy in the spring of 1945 --- and the two became lifelong friends when they were recovering from their injuries at the same Army hospital in Michigan. I guess this is the only omission that really surprised me, given how hard Burns worked to keep the Baseball documentary politically balanced (Mario Cuomo got quite a bit of screen time, but so did George Will).

I know I have some readers who have ditched their televisions, and I salute them for it. But if you can see fit to drag the thing out of the closet for just one media event, I highly recommend that this be the one. It is truly outstanding, and television at its best.

Excellent Documentary

Yesterday, by accident, I stumbled onto an excellent documentary about sustainable agriculture. It was on The Documentary Channel, and was called "Broken Limbs: Apples, Agriculture and the New American Farmer." The focus is the filmmaker's own home town in Wenatchee, Washington, and the perils faced by conventional apple farmers such as his father. Between globalization and industry consolidation, small-to-medium sized conventional apple growers are getting squeezed out of business.

The turning point for the filmmaker was discovering the writings of Professor John Ikerd, from the University of Missouri, on sustainable agriculture. The second portion of the film focuses on people who have shifted to an entirely different model of farming. He has since been trying to help his father transition to a more sustainable production model.

One of the farmers profiled was Grant Gibbs. He has put together an amazing farming operation that has almost entirely eliminated off-farm inputs. The livestock provide fertilizer for his fruit and vegetable gardens, and the fruits and vegetables in turn sustain the livestock. How he's managed to integrate this system is truly a beautiful thing to behold. I also found a good book excerpt, with photos, of Gibbs and his operation. Note that Gibbs has internships for those interested in learning first-hand how he does things.

Great Movie

Last night, my wife and I rented "The Pursuit of Happyness." It was one of the best new films we've seen in quite some time. Will Smith plays a single father who's hit hard times, and finds himself out on the streets---while trying to care for his five year old son, and not letting his son know just how bad things are. He has a plan for digging himself out of this hole, but keeps running into obstacle after obstacle. How he manages to hold everything together, all the while growing closer to his son, is truly inspirational.

It was also thought-provoking. Smith's character is a good, hard-working guy who ends up on the skids despite all that effort. Made me think about how transient "success" in this world can be. Despite all our own hard work, sometimes God can have other plans for us. Things can all seem to fall apart, but we need to keep it in perspective and think about what may await us precisely as a result of these present difficulties.

I highly recommend this movie.