Category Archives: Big Stone Gap

The Monday Movie: SPOTLIGHT

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spotlight-mv-10I was reading a memoir by a bestselling fiction author, in hopes of making it the Monday Book. But 1) it was the most boring book I’ve read since grad school and 2) I was trying to finish an afghan on a tight deadline so that led to an allnighter with Netflix.

SPOTLIGHT is a movie about the Boston Globe breaking the cover-up of sexual predator priests by the Catholic church, not just in Boston, but internationally. It’s an amazing movie. The journalists are not unbelievable heroes. The tedious build-up of info includes research details I remember from my days behind the desk. I LOVE the scene where they realize they can use annual directories of priests to figure out who is on “sick leave” and other code names.

There’s also an intense moment where the “good guy” reporters confront the “bad guy” lawyer who’s making money off hushing up the scandals, and discover he sent them the names of 20 predator priests five years before, hoping to get off the gravy train and redeem himself. The Globe buried the story. Spoiler alert: the guy who buried the story then is leading the charge now, but not for redemption. He literally doesn’t remember  burying the story.

“Just doing my job.”

Spotlight had me riveted, and now I want to read the books (by the journalists and by Robert Sipe, a psychotherapist who wrote about the problems and was hachet-jobbed by the church). The icky details are handled with sensitivity, and the story of Spotlight centers around how they carefully built the story.

You really want to see this. It deserved its best picture Oscar last year and it is now available on Netflix.

 

Hello Scotland 2020, Farewell Brexit 2016

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scotland hyes

My husband is a Scot who has been waiting for his country to become independent. Many of you know that in 2014 Scotland held a stay-or-go vote regarding its relationship to Britain, and by a margin of 10% decided to stay.

A 4% decision to leave the EU as the United Kingdom means Scotland is going to hold another referendum (as such votes are known) about leaving Britain. Jack is doing a happy dance right now.

Me, I’m the American wife. I do a lot of “yes dear” and “mhmm” because for me it’s about him, not the nation. Big unions break apart, powerless countries try to form unions to become big. As the proverb goes, seven times down, eight times up. And vice versa. I want my husband to be happy; I don’t care what the world does.

And I have to admit, that reaction might be tempered by a lot of writers, women writers, who described great political upheavals and their (often bloody) aftermaths less in terms of the significant impacts for the world, than as stories of the people they saw having their lives involuntarily changed: Anne Bradstreet in the 1600s; Vera Chapman watching her generation’s men fall in World War I; Barbara Tuchman describing Germany’s tug-of-war from the Middle Ages to now. Over and over, big political moments come down to a couple of simple things: peace and prosperity. To get these, men fight about who is going to rule, and then women clean up.

Given that two of the key players in this EU-UK divorce are Angela Merkel and Nicola Sturgeon, women clean up in many different ways. Sturgeon has already announced a Scottish referendum is coming. The promises reneged on after the 2014 vote will probably swing this one to Scotland actually leaving this time—and then promptly joining the EU as its own country. Scotland 2020, in more ways than one.

It will be interesting to see what Brexit does to the stock market, what the rest of the EU countries do. In our house, we already know what Scotland’s going to do, and that’s the ball we’ll be keeping our eye on. Brexit 2016, Scotland 2020. I want what Jack wants. Jack wants what Scotland wants. And the world is a different place now.