Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

I would like to see the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory--I always loved that book. But I don't get why they keep talking about "getting back to the darkness of the original." The original book was not pasrticularly dark, although it WAS controversial. My mother told me that the Oompa Loompas raised quite a few eyebrows, what with they're being small and dark, and living in trees until the rich white man swoops down to lift them out of their miserable existences, and of course they laugh and sing a lot. As a child you read this and the stereotypes go right over your head (partly because you're not as aware of stereotypes at all at that age, it's acquired knowledge) but when you start thinking about it as an adult you're like "Uh, wait---" She also said there was weirdness over the book's title, "Charlie" being black slang for a white guy (at the time, I guess--the book came out in the early '60s) coupled with the phrase "chocolate factory." This makes me think of when I was a kid in Virginia, and the road we took to church went down Lee Highway which goes through the heart of Arlington, including one of their Freetowns (Green Valley/Nauck/Shirlington is the better-known one, but Lee Highway just north of George Mason Drive is another). There used to be this shacky-looking place that had a sign on it saying "Chocolate City" which I just thought sounded like the coolest place ever. I used to imagine what a chocolate city would look like--buildings of dark chocolate, and rivers of cocoa--and I asked my mom if we could go there. She told me it wasn't what I was thinking--I found out later it was some kind of dive/bar/club where fights broke out regularly, and I think someone was even killed there. Anyway, Mom said the potential for offense was why they changed the name from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Willy Wonka..., although I've heard other explanations as well.

So, ANYWAY, the book. The book was not particularly dark. WW was quirky and had a great sense of fun, but I don't think he was dark at all. Apparently, he conceived of the story as a kind of Victorian tale--the belching, Industrial-era factory (God, someone should retool Sweeney Todd and cross it with CatCF, the bad children who come to bad ends and the one good child, the eccentric Victorian gentleman (and the "native" Ooma Loompas are part of this tradition as well). Also, Charlie's family is very poor in a Dickensian way--what darkness there is comes from that. I always remembered the part where Dahl talks about how the toothpaste factory where Charlie's father works goes bust, and he's forced to start shoveling sidewalks and makes even less money than before, and the family is basically starving to death. There's a line that always stuck with me--the weather has turned cold, and Charlie starts fantasizing about yummy things to eat, like applie pie and fresh-baked cookies, like people normally do in the cold. "Because most of us are a great deal luckier than we realize, we are generally able to eat whatever we like. But Charlie could not." I always remembered the gentle reminder of how lucky we are.

Santorum is Latin for "asshole"

From the Washington Post:

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) led a phalanx of Massachusetts politicians yesterday in demanding that the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, apologize for blaming the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal on "liberalism" in Boston...

What drew the concentrated ire of the Bay State's congressional delegation was Santorum's decision this week to repeat his three-year-old comment that liberalism was at the root of the scandal over child sex abuse in the church.

"Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture," Santorum wrote in a July 12, 2002 article for the Web site Catholic Online. "When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm"...

Asked to explain the proper context for Santorum's comments, Traynham [Santorum spokesman] said that "what the senator was talking about was the whole sexual revolution in the 1960s and '70s, and how that unfortunately created a culture where these unfortunate sex abuse scandals occurred."

The abuse, Traynham said, "was particularly worse in Boston and the reason why, according to the senator, is because of some of the social institutions that call Boston home. When you take a look at Harvard University and some of the other universities in Boston, I think it's an open secret that there is a liberal bias, unfortunately."...

Based on statistics publicly reported by many of the country's 195 dioceses, the Boston-based lay activist group BishopAccountability.org has calculated that the highest percentage of abusive priests from 1950 to 2003 was in the diocese of Covington, Ky. Boston was among the 10 worst dioceses, but several other cities commonly regarded as liberal culturally and politically had relatively low rates of abuse. Just 1.6 percent of San Francisco's priests have been accused of abuse, for example, compared to more than 4 percent nationwide.

"The reason we know so much about Boston is that Boston is the diocese where the most church documents have been released," said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the group.

God, that man is an asshole. There are no words for someone who would seek to make political points out of such a tragedy.