… Vince Vaughn plays a shady businessman with a plan to build a high speed rail system through California — only to see one of his business partners (a city manager) mysteriously turn up dead. Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams (she smokes a vape!), and Taylor Kitsch play cops who will investigate the murder.

 

Writer Nic Pizzolatto based this season’s plot on the very real and very corrupt city of Vernon — an industrial town just a few miles south of Los Angeles. In 2009, long-time Vernon mayor Leonis Marburg was convicted of voter fraud and city administrators were found to have spent millions of public funds on trips and other personal expenses. A former finance administrator even turned up dead in 2012 after an audit found that he didn’t perform up to the standards of his million dollar salary. (His death was later ruled an accident).

Supporters of the real-life California bullet train would aggressively challenge the idea that it could be the inspiration for a TV drama plot involving corruption. But as the Los Angeles Times reported last year, an engineering firm says it was asked to issue a deceptive report that would have hidden a nearly $1 billion cost over-run.

It is also of note that California Attorney General Kamala Harris refused to challenge a Sacramento Superior Court judge’s ruling that the California High-Speed Rail Authority didn’t have a legal business plan that properly identified future funding sources for the $68 billion project.

Pop culture shapes memories of history

Whether or not pop culture representations of real-life events are honest or fair, they have a long history of influencing how those events are recalled. For one example, Tom Wolfe’s 1979 best-seller “The Right Stuff,” and the 1983 film based on the book, put a cynical gauze over the simple, patriotic narrative that had usually been invoked in describing the rise of NASA and America’s space program. Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “JFK” has made history buffs and Americans in general more skeptical of the official narrative of a lone gunman assassinating President Kennedy in 1963. (Stone is now routinely treated as an expert on the topic.)

In his 2005 book, “The Dream Life: Movies, Media, And The Mythology Of The Sixties,” veteran Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman offered examples of how Americans’ memories of some events and movements are shaped as much by popular films as by the actual historical record.

Hoberman notes how in the late 1960s, movies romanticized the student protesters who took on the conservative establishment, and then in the 1970s, treated as heroes the fictional cops and vigilantes who took on the liberal establishment for allegedly coddling protesters and criminals. To Clint Eastwood’s surprise, many film critics saw his role as “Dirty Harry” as rationalizing police violence and placing it in a highly favorable light.

The odds appear long that “True Detective,” season two, will prove an American pop culture landmark. But it could have some resonance in national perceptions of the bullet train and California politics. Season one was considered a significant cultural event, and season two was the subject of a huge media buildup in recent weeks.

The second episode of the second season aired Sunday night.

JFK is remembered for the New Frontier, for staring down Khrushchev over Cuba, for early civil rights actions, for “Ich bin ein Berliner,” for youth, optimism and Jackie.

The Gipper is remembered for making America again “stand tall,” for “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!,” for restoring prosperity and for being the Great Communicator with a dash of Hollywood style.

The question I keep wondering about is: Why hasn’t any Republican since advocated Reagan’s economic recovery plan, which won him a landslide over President Carter in 1980, then propelled the country to strong economic growth that lasted until President George H.W. Bush raised taxes in 1990, sparking a recession? Indeed, the Reagan policies even were followed for the most part by President Clinton, who first raised taxes in 1993, then cut taxes three times with Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich from 1995 to 2000.

Reagan program

Reagan’s program was simple:

1. Cut taxes 33 percent across the board. Working with Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill, Reagan settled for 25 percent — good enough for government work.

Note that Reagan did not seek “targeted tax cuts,” “tax cuts only for the middle class” or some other complication. It was simple: 33 percent (25 percent in practice).

2. Stable money, with gold kept at about $350 an ounce. Helping Reagan was Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, a Democrat first appointed by Carter, then re-appointed by Reagan.

3. Spending restraint. Reagan was less effective here, as spending actually rose 90 percent during his eight years in office. Hence the record deficits of that day. Much of the problem was that Reagan built up defense spending to push the Soviet Union into bankruptcy, which worked. There’s no Soviet Union today, and current defense spending — even if one thinks that’s the right amount — is 40 percent what it was under Reagan.

Clinton also worked with Gingrich to restrain spending, resulting in the brief budget surpluses of the late 1990s.

4. Regulation and bureaucracy reform. Reagan could have done more here. But as the late Nobel economics laureate Milton Friedman used to point out, Reagan was the only post-World War II president who actually cut the number of pages of federal regulations.

All the other presidents, including Republicans Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and the Bushes, increased the regulations all of us must obey, upon penalty of fine or an orange jump suit. And the last Bush, George W., brought into law one convoluted economic package after another, culminating in the financial crash of Sept. 2008.

Contrast

Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign came up with “Believe in America: Mitt Romney’s Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth” — 160 pages of details nobody read, even me.

Can anybody remember anything from his economic plan — from this tome or from his stump speech or TV ads, which used the “Believe in America” theme? Which always reminded me of the “I believe in America” opening scent from the first “Godfather” film.

The point is: Why do Republicans always praise Reagan, and want to be associated with him — but don’t run with his popular and successful economic plan?

Happy Birthday, Mr. President!

The biggest ripoff going is textbooks for K-12 and, even worse, college. I know some college kids who spend way more than $1,000 a year for required textbooks for their college classes.

Usually the texts are sub-par regurgitations of P.C. claptrap. And the professors who write the texts “update” them every couple of years, so you can’t buy a used copy.

Enter Apple.

According to Ars Technica, “Apple announced what it’s calling ‘iBooks 2’ during its media event in New York on Thursday, a textbook software program that allows textbook-makers and instructors to create rich, interactive teaching media for the iPad. As we first reported earlier this week, the announcement is akin to ‘GarageBand for e-books,’ giving authors access to easy-to-use tools on the computer in order to create multimedia content for the iPad.”

Steve Jobs lives!

Apple says the price will be no more than $14.99 for high-school books. It’s not clear what could be charged for college texts. But it’s unlikely anyone would be dumb enough to charge the $100 or more kids get stuck with nowadays.

This also will sharply cut costs for private, parochial and home schools.

And instead of kids schlepping around heavy textbooks, they can sprint carrying their iPads, weight 1.34 lbs.

Interactive

The new iBooks also will be interactive. So instead of just reading about the Space Race of the 1950s and 1960s, students could read the text, then watch pictures of rockets taking off, such as the Apollo 11 launching; or listen to JFK’s moon shot speech.

Better yet, kids also will be able to download critiques of their textbooks. Imagine taking a sociology class and getting stuck with a textbook laden with the usual post-modern, deconstructionist, anti-Western, Marxist, anti-capitalist rubbish. But on your iPad, right next to the official text, is snarky commentary from some other student that you uploaded.

The monopoly on students’ thoughts has been broken. The cultural Marxist totalitarian Berlin Wall inside kids’ minds has been torn down.

How appropriate that, on the same day Apple announced this great new tool of liberation, Reuters reported, “Apple Inc’s quarterly results blew past Wall Street’s expectations as U.S. consumers snapped up near-record numbers of iPhones and iPads, sending its shares up 8 percent.”

The truth shall make you free. In color and with a soundtrack. With your iBooks 2.

Jan. 24, 2012