Getting Mad and Getting Even

One of my favorite films is the 1983 comedy-drama written and directed by Bill Forsythe called Local Hero. It's about a a young oil company executive sent to a village on the coast of Scotland, to buy up all the property in town to make way for a massive refinery. The exec, "Mac" MacIntyre (played by Peter Riegert) starts out the movie as a typical American to much of the world: he has an MBA, he drives a Porche, he's a capitalist city-slicker and so on, your typical "yuppie" in the parlance of the day. As such, Mac is not a little put off by having to travel to a remote part of the British Isles when he could easily close the deal over the phone from his office in Houston. Little does he realize before he sets off, that the only telephone in town is inside a phone booth (phone box in local speak) on the beach.

Once there he slowly falls in love with the place, the fictional village of Ferness, for its charms, its breathtaking scenery, its slower pace of life, and its people, especially the woman who happens to be the wife of his chief contact in town. 

Soon enough, MacIntyre becomes conflicted about his mission to enable the destruction of the lovely Ferness and the countryside surrounding it.  

It turns out the villagers are two steps ahead of him. The moment they learn the plans of the oil company to buy them out, they start planning how best to spend their new found fortune. The devotion for the place they present to MacIntyre is only an act to drive up the price of their property. Even the local pastor is in on the act as his church serves as the meeting place for townsfolk to gather and discuss their plans to best cash in.

The only snag is Ben Knox, whose surname is the same as the oil company's. Ben lives in a dilapidated shack on the beach and, thanks to his family's century's old accord with the Crown, happens to own the entire beach, lock, stock and barrel. He does not intend to sell what turns out to be the most significant parcel of the site. 

So, Mac's boss, Knox Oil's president Felix Happer (played by Burt Lancaster), flies in from Houston to personally negotiate with Ben.

Funny thing, but in a case of life imitating art, another film made a generation later and its sequel documenting real-life events, have several parallels with the fictional Local Hero.

For starters, the documentaries are also set in the Scottish Highlands not far from the city of Aberdeen. An American company sets its sights on developing its own large-scale project on the coast. Many of the locals sell off their land to the developers, but a handful, one in particular whose story the film is centered around, flat out refuse.

The boss of the company in the documentary bears only a slight physical resemblance to Lancaster's Felix Happer, but there are a few parallels between the two. Both are oddball characters, their eccentricities at times defying credibility.  Narcissism also plays a role in both men's characters.

That is where their similarities end.

Happer's narcissism is garden variety, even charming at times.  His true passion is astronomy, and his greatest ambition it seems is to discover a celestial object and have it named after himself. * 

The other's narcissism is off-the-charts and toxic.

The similarities between the stories were not lost on the creator of the documentary, Anthony Baxter, who with the permission of the owner of its rights and the blessing of Bill Forsythe, incorporated scenes from Local Hero into his own films.

Local Hero isn't really about the construction of the plant, nor the planned destruction of the town. It's about history, nature, myths and legends, beauty, wonder, magic, transformation, the bonds that tie all human beings together, and other things that make life worth living. But mostly it's a love poem to Scotland. As such, it could be considered an allegorical fantasy. Here is a link to the original trailer which nicely captures the spirit of the film without giving too much away. 

The two documentaries sadly, are all too real. They are about hubris, deceit, pettiness, greed, the wanton destruction of nature, and people who do everything in their power to stand in the way of all that. 

In that last sense, one theme both films share is the indefatigable human spirit.

The Ben Knox of the original documentary is Michael Forbes, a quarry worker, farmer and part time salmon fisherman who refuses to sell his land and home of over forty years to the Americans who want to build a golf course and resort over it. Forbes is the star of Part I of the documentary as much of the film centers around his life, struggle, and his neighbors' and family's ordeal. The seeds of Part II are planted at the end of Part I, and the role of star switches over to Michael's mother, Molly Forbes. Her beauty, strength, dignity, pride, sense of humor, and love of her home, steal the show. The best line of both films comes at the beginning of Part II when after being informed that the American businessman claimed she reminds him of his mother, Molly responds with both a sneer and a gleam in her eye: "Well he hadn't been very good to her then."

If you haven't guessed by now, the Felix Happer of the documentaries is Donald Trump.

The name of the original documentary is You've Been Trumped, released in 2011, and its sequel, You've been Trumped Too, released in 2016. **

I won't go into all the sordid details other than to say that Part I begins before ground is broken on the project, and over the course of its runtime, we see ancient dunes, at one time protected by the Scottish government as a unique ecosystem, home to numerous endangered species of flora and fauna, lost piece by piece as earth movers build the golf course. Adding insult to injury, the developers created giant berms to block the views of the homes Trump couldn't get his rapacious little hands on. He called the homes he couldn't destroy "eyesores".

Trump reserved his harshest words for Michael Forbes whose property he referred to as a "pigsty", and to Michael himself as a person whom "every Scot should be ashamed of."

That comment no doubt had great influence on the Scottish people because soon after the release of You've been Trumped, Michael Forbes won the "Top Scot" award, an annual popular public vote sponsored by the makers of Glenfiddich Scotch as a part of their Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Awards campaign. In response, Trump threw one of his trademark hissy fits condemning Glenfiddich, pledging never to serve the hooch in any of his properties ever again. I guess that sure showed 'em. 

The conflict between Forbes and Trump received world-wide coverage and some of the most poignant scenes in both films show the tremendous support Michael and his family have received from complete strangers all over the world.

Part I ends with a particularly troubling event. The Forbes family discovers their water supply has dried up after construction workers were seen digging in the vicinity of the natural spring, the source of their water, well as they were building a road. Despite the Forbes's rightful demand to restore their water, nothing happened except broken promises and the Trump Organization calling the police to arrest the filmmakers for having the nerve to ask why the group would not take care of their legal responsibility and repair the damages they made to the Forbes's water supply.

Much of Part II is devoted to Molly, by this time in her nineties, who spends much of her time hauling buckets in a wheelbarrow back and forth to obtain water from a nearby stream so she could flush her toilet. The only potable water available to her and the rest of her family was bottled water. Rather than the one-week fix Team Trump kept promising the Forbes family, the situation lasted for five years until Michael, in defiance of Trump and the local police he had in his pocket, took it upon himself to dig a trench in the access road for the golf course and fix the broken pipes himself. 

During the filming of Part II, before the water situation was resolved, Trump was running for President of the United States and Baxter had the inspired idea to fly Michael Forbes and his wife Sheila to Cleveland during the Republican National Convention. While there they struck up conversations with Trump supporters, some of whom were genuinely moved by their situation while others could not be swayed. One of them in justifying Trump's actions remarked that his man doesn't get mad, he gets even. 

Now where have I heard that before? 

Oh that's right, I heard it a couple weeks ago from Trump himself after winning the New Hampshire primary while he was trashing his opponent, Nikki Haley.

"I don't get mad, I get even" sounds kind of cool and defiant in a Clint Eastwood sort of way.

But what does it really mean?

On the surface, the phrase implies that getting mad and getting even are mutually exclusive things. Getting mad implies loosing one's cool, acting irrationally and uncontrollably, while getting even in this comparison anyway, implies a cool, measured response to an offense. As the saying goes: "revenge is a dish best served cold."

There is a certain logic to getting even, after all, doing unto others as they have done unto us is basic human nature, in stark contrast to the so called "Golden Rule" which suggests quite the opposite.

The Golden Rule in one wording or other, exists as the basis of the justice system of every culture I can think of, the primary tool to help human beings get along with one another by helping settle conflicts if not avoiding them altogether.

Yet doing unto others as we would have done unto us is not a one-size-fits-all rule for successful human relationships as it does not go nearly far enough. It hardly works in truly close relationships such as marriage for example where a more appropriate rule would be do unto her/him as she/he would have done to herself/himself. 

In other words, we're all different and have different expectations of one another, so treating our partner precisely as we would like to be treated ourselves is a recipe for disaster. I consider myself something of an expert on the issue. 

 

In the same vein, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to resolving conflicts because conflicts come in all shapes and sizes from petty to tragic. With the exception of the tragic, we all differ as to what conflict constitutes a true offense.  

For people used to always getting their way like Donald Trump, every conflict is a true offense, a personal affront worthy of getting even. Contrary to what Trump says about not getting mad, as borne out by Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony under oath before Congress, he does indeed get mad, a lot. It was she you might remember who had to clean the ketchup off the walls of the White House dining room after he threw his plate of lunch against it like a two-year-old, when he received some news that displeased him.

In reality, getting mad and getting even are joined at the hip. Getting even is just one of many responses to anger. If a conflict does not make us angry, we feel no need to get even. While it may be useful at times, especially to make the aggrieved party feel better, getting even, especially if it means eye-for-eye style justice, is rarely a useful tool to resolving conflicts, which you must admit is kind of a useful skill for someone who wants to be president.

Let's use Trump as an example. He got mad at Michael Forbes and got even by calling him names and making his ninety-year-old mother haul buckets of water from a stream in a wheelbarrow so she could flush her toilet. 

Yet Michael and Sheila Forbes continue to live in their home as Trump's disgruntled neighbors, no doubt still pissing him off to no end. (Molly unfortunately passed away in 2021 at the age of 96).

He got mad at a whiskey company because they published the results of a public poll he didn't like, so he got even by banning their whiskey at his establishments.

Seems to me Glenfiddich is still the first name most people come up with when they think of single malt scotch. Heck, I can even buy it at my local grocery store. 

And he got mad at the United States for not re-electing him president in 2020. So he got back at us by waging a riot in and around the Capitol in the hopes of overturning two cornerstones of our democracy, a free election and the peaceful transfer of power. 

Four indictments and 92 criminal counts against him later, he's running for president again for the sole purpose of keeping himself out of jail for the rest of his life.  

Seems to me like an awful lot of trouble just to get even with somebody.

CODA

On the flip side, there is no way that Michael and Sheila Forbes or their neighbors could ever get even at Trump for all the grief he put them through.

Yet there's always laughter which is the next best thing. This from 2017:

* The fictional Felix Happer's wish was granted in real life when in 1992, an asteroid was discovered and named by its discoverer (no doubt a fan of the film), 7345Happer.

** You've been Trumped is available on most streaming platforms. You can watch You've been Trumped Too for free on YouTube by clicking here. I don't feel it's necessary to watch them in the order in which they were made. In fact, as the sequel prominently features Molly, if you're like me you'll instantly fall in love with her and her story, so watching them in reverse order may even be preferable. 

The Thrill of Victory, and...?

Quick, finish that phrase! 

If you can, you're old like me. 

If not, it's part of the intro to one of the longest running shows in American television history, ABC's Wide World of Sports. 

Here is the intro's narration in its entirety, written by Stanley Ralph Ross, and read by Jim McKay:

Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport... the thrill of victory... and the agony of defeat... the human drama of athletic competition... This is ABC's Wide World of Sports!

McKay's voiceover and its accompanying musical fanfare remained unchanged for most of the show's run from 1961 until 1998. The visuals, stock footage from sites around the world mixed with action shots of athletes from figure skaters to arm wrestlers to everything in between, were updated every year. 

Except for one clip.

It was the shot of ski jumper Vinko Bogotaj that illustrated the words: "the agony of defeat". Week after week, year after year, decade after decade, fans of the show saw Bogotaj losing control of his skis on the ramp just before he was about to make his jump. Instead of gracefully springing into the wild blue yonder like an eagle soaring off a cliff, his skis providing enough lift to keep him airborne for several seconds until he gently meets the hill below, Bogotaj tumbled off the ramp looking more like a bowling ball than an eagle, knocking down every stationary object in his way. 

If you've seen the clip, even only once, you've never forgotten it.

Here's a link to the 1974 iteration.

There may have been pedestrian reasons not to replace the clip for all those years. Maybe it was difficult convincing other athletes that it would be a good idea to allow footage of themselves screwing up used to illustrate defeat over and over again.

Or maybe the show's producers were sending us a message sticking with that clip of Bogotaj while all the other images of athletes experiencing the thrill of victory came and went. Could the message be that victory is fleeting while defeat is eternal? 

I don't know, I just made that up, kind of profound, isn't it? 

Consider this: in any sporting event, the honor of experiencing the thrill of victory only goes to one competitor, or team of them, while the agony of defeat is shared by many. In that sense, sports are kind of like life, only more so. 

Since I'm writing this the week before the Super Bowl, I have football on my mind, at least a little. The last few weeks of NFL playoffs featured many fantastic games that were competitive until the end, some of them won by three points or less. That means the difference in those games was one field goal. In at least three of those games leading up to the big game this Sunday, field goals not made were the deciding factor. Two of those were attempts missed by the kickers from Buffalo and Green Bay. The third was a field goal not attempted as the head coach of Detroit chose to "go for it" unsuccessfully on fourth down, rather than attempting a much less risky field goal and scoring the three points that go with it.

I propose that defeat is far more agonizing in team sports when the mistake of one member costs the team a victory, or at least the chance of one. Magnify that by at least one hundredfold and you might understand the pressure placed on the football kicker. While his teammates battle in the trenches fighting hand-to-hand combat against the defense, beating themselves up play after play trying to move the ball yard-by-yard into a position to score, the kicker sits and waits. If his teammates don't succeed in moving the ball past the goal line to score a touchdown for six points, the next best thing is to get within thirty or maybe forty yards. When and if that happens, the kicker has only one job, kick the ball between the goalposts for three points. Sounds simple, doesn't it?

Try it sometime.

It looks easy because professional football kickers are successful on average, about 90 percent of the time. If a FG attempt fails in the middle of a game as happened to the Green Bay and Buffalo kickers, hopefully there's time to make up for it. Consequently, there's usually not much public display of agony during a missed field goal, the game just goes on.

But when it happens at the end of a game, that's a different story. Some of the most famous football games in history including a few Super Bowls were decided by a field goal either made or missed in the last seconds.

Make it and you're the hero, miss it and you'd rather be swabbing the deck of a tramp steamer. 

Talk about the agony of defeat.

For me, one play along those lines stands out above the rest. It is known simply as the "double doink". The mere mention of those two words, or the name of the main player involved in the play is enough to drive any Chicago Bears fan into a deep state of melancholia.  

I won't go into much background, suffice it to say the opportunity to move on to the next round of the playoffs after their best season in years*, rested upon the foot of the team's kicker, Cody Parkey. 

Here is a link to the last play of consequence in the Chicago Bears' 2018-19 season. The call is from the Philadelphia Eagles' Spanish language announcer, Rickie Riccardo (I'm not kidding, that's really his name). You may not understand a word he's saying but the tone of his voice from the winning side, and the faces of the players and the head coach on the losing side, contrast the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat better than anything I can think of, with not a little humiliation thrown in for good measure.

If Wide World of Sports is revived and there is ever a need to redo the intro, I think Cody Parkey would be a noble successor to Vinko Bogotaj as the enduring symbol of agony.

There are many who claim that sports are a metaphor for life. There are probably an equal number who reject that assertion, after all, how many average people experience the kind of adulation bestowed upon a sports hero, or the public humiliation of an athlete whose mistake loses the big game for his or her team? But that's missing the point, the fact is, few professional athletes themselves are in a position to experience those things either. 

It's in the details I believe, where sports and real-life merge.  

For example, on the surface, every head-to-head athletic competition can be viewed as a zero-sum game, where you have one winner and at least one loser. But it goes much deeper than that. As much as sports like American football are often compared to war, (Check out George Carlin's brilliant comedy routine comparing baseball to football), in sports, the losers always live to play another day. 

What do running backs Barry Sanders, Gale Sayers, Eric Dickerson, quarterbacks Warren Moon, Dan Fouts, defensive linemen Deacon Jones, Merlin Olsen, the most intimidating tackler in the game, linebacker Dick Butkus, and perhaps the game's greatest wide receiver (before Jerry Rice came on the scene), Steve Largent have in common? They are all professional football Hall of Famers who have never won a championship. In a sense you could say great as they were as players, they were all perpetual losers. 

So obviously there is no shame in losing, it's an integral part of the game. 

What can we learn from that? 

One thing is that we have to look at the bigger picture. In football as in every other sport, the big picture is the Game itself. Teams don't exist in a vacuum, they depend on all the other teams to play against for their existence, otherwise, what would be the point? Teams depend upon the league to provide the structure in which to compete. And that structure depends upon a set of rules in which to play. 

Playing any sport or come to think of it, conducting any reasonable contest without rules that every participant agrees upon would be like a chess player knocking down all the pieces on the board in the middle of a game with the exception of his own king, then declaring himself the winner.

We have enough of that already in our society.

That's not to say the rules are always adjudicated correctly. Sometimes games are decided by bad calls. Check out this notoriously bad call, or more accurately, non-call. It was a foul that everyone in the world watching the game saw, except for the officials. Had a penalty (pass interference in case you're keeping score) been called as it should have, the New Orleans Saints would have been in a very advantageous position to win the game and move on to the Super Bowl. Instead sans call, regulation time ended with the game tied and the L.A. Rams won the game in sudden death overtime by you guessed it, kicking a field goal. Then THEY got the chance to lose to Tom Brady and the New England Patriots in the big game two weeks later. 

Yes the Saints protested and naturally got nowhere, even though the offending player received a fine from the league for his dirty play. It was a terrible no-call, perhaps one of the worst ever in a widely seen playoff game. But the league determined, rightly in my opinion, that it was nothing more than human error, pure and simple. Frustrating as that is, especially if your team is on the short end of the stick, that's part of the game as well.

The best we can do in situations like this is realize life isn't always fair, that the best team, ours of course, doesn't always win, brush ourselves off, and live to play another day, which of course is what they always do in New Orleans: laissez le bon temps rouler.

As with all sports, the Game is bigger than any one athlete or team. To illustrate that, tens of millions of football fans will gather this Sunday to watch a contest featuring two teams most of them are not fans of, as members of the team they root passionately for, having been long eliminated from competition, will also be watching. 

There are lots of reasons to watch the Super Bowl for people who are not football fans. It's an American ritual for starters. It's an excuse to get together with friends and family to have a party. There are the eagerly anticipated commercials, short films created just for the event that in some cases display remarkable creative talent of storyteller-artists, all in 60 seconds or less. There's the halftime show which in my opinion with the exception of one, Prince in 2007, usually sucks. This year there's the additional sideshow of hands down the world's most popular pop star at the moment who also happens to be the girlfriend of one of the players. She'll be there too.

Then on Monday morning, rest assured tens of millions of Americans will be discussing all that around the proverbial water cooler. 

And yes, there's the game itself, the ultimate achievement for any athlete who has ever stepped onto a gridiron wearing pads, cleats and a helmet. History has shown that it too is usually a disappointment, failing to live up to all the hype. We'll just have to wait and see this Sunday. **

Oh I almost forgot about the wagering, something that predates athletes wearing clothes when they perform their magic. 

For a few hours, at least a third of the country will be brought together to participate in a uniquely American ritual that has been around since 1967. 

We have few things to unite us these days and when we are united, it's usually over our mutual hatred of one thing or another, rather than our love of something. 

Maybe we should keep that in mind as we get together with our families, friends, colleagues and complete strangers to watch the game this Sunday, as football fans, and especially as Americans. 

Enjoy the game.

And go Bears!

Oh wait a minute...

 

CODA

*That 2018-19 season was the Chicago Bears' last winning season to date. Being a Chicago sports fan, and having unfortunately passed that trait on to my son, we both happen to know a little something about agony.

POSTSCRIPT

**Well it was a great game, perhaps a classic, at least after halftime. The Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers, 25-22 in overtime in Super Bowl LVIII. Once again, a kicker's miscue factored into the result as Jake Moody of the 49ers missed a one-point conversion after his team scored a touchdown to take the lead with two minutes left in regulation. Had the kick been successful, SF would have been up 4 points meaning the Chiefs would have had to score a touchdown to get back into the game. Instead, they only needed a field goal to tie and force overtime, which they did. 

It could be argued that the KC offense as they say, was running on all eight cylinders by the end of the game, and could have scored a touchdown if they needed one. Moody's attempt was also blocked. Still, I bet he didn't sleep well last night, and will probably relive that moment at least until he gets back onto the field next season. 

Such is the life of a kicker.