meinong

This episode includes a scene where Friday and Gannon discuss whether some kids are born sour or not. Then they discuss how parents are giving their kids too much - too soon.

All true - all too true.

Once again Dragnet predicts the future of what was to become of the spoiled "Baby Boomers" - and now we understand why today's teenagers are lost to the world.

Why - we as a society paid attention to Sociologists instead of the Police who had to deal with all the day to day problems in real time - not in some long terms study where you never actually meet the people who have taken the wrong turns in life - is beyond me.

Joe Friday gives one of his best speeches in the history of Dragnet ! Laying out to suburban druggies that no one becomes a drug addict without first starting out on Mary-Jane - seems all innocent at first but then you wake up one morning and all you can think of is how to get your next fix - not a pretty life.

Kudos to the writer for predicting the gradual legalization of Marijuana.

Once again Dragnet predicts the sad future that America has descended

into and sadly seems determined

to descend even deeper into the abyss.

I saw "Margaret" on IFC last night so I don't know which version/edit of the film I saw but it was a longish movie.

I think Lisa, the main Character, should have been slapped by someone at sometime during the film - she is the cause of the tragedy in the film and by her refusing to accept it - until the bitter end - she just creates more sorrow for everyone involved - and told if there is any fault is is your's - your selfish/self-importuned actions led to all this misery. In many ways this film is not that different from the movie based on Prozac Nation.

Adolescents can be Intolerable Moralists - they think they are wiser than everyone else and purer in their morality. Why no one stops treating Lisa like a young adult and rather as the child she is - proved a stumbling block for me.

Perhaps that is the point of the film - we are not honest with our children and we encourage them to grow up too fast so that we can be less and less responsible for what they do and think, and they, thinking they are wiser than the adults around them, do whatever their impulses bring them to do, and then they blame anyone but themselves when the world does not turn out to be the way they think it must be and must treat them...

The Teaching of "Lear" and the Reading of the poem "Margaret" plus the teachers being 'Friends" with their students is highly indicative that many "Upper West Side Liberals" think/believe that you can treat teenagers like adults - but wisdom only comes, if ever, with age and humbleness and finally humility - usually after great suffering in life -not something you are likely to find much of in an "Upper West Side High School."

Personally the best scene in the movie was when the male student - during the discussion of "Lear" and the lines: As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods... offers the view that perhaps God, having a Universal View has more wisdom than we mere mortals and as such we should not be so sure that what we humans call evil is as purely evil as we insist in our attempts to avoid accepting our own selfish faults.

So it makes you think - this movie "Margaret" but less of "Lisa" screaming and bursting into tears again and again and again would have helped.