The buck no longer stops here

Has anyone noticed a massive decrease in buck services? When Harry S Truman occupied the presidency, he was known for having said, "The buck stops here." When I was in school, this statement was held up to me as a shining example of the duty of someone in power to take responsibility when things go awry, particularly if s/he is prone to taking credit when things go well.

I'm reminded of this because the current thinking on management and responsibility has shifted markedly from Mr. Truman's view. Nobody at the top is responsible for anything anymore. We're apparently more enlightened. We now know that when things go wrong, it's always someone else's fault, generally a subordinate, but sometimes it's the fault of a previous holder of the top job. Scooter Libby, a subordinate, was at fault. Previous directors of the CIA were at fault. The soldiers manning Abu Ghraib were at fault. But boy howdy, the man (or infrequently woman) at the top is responsibility-free. No generals were harmed in the investigations at Abu Ghraib. In a pinch, it's -- wait for it -- The Weather's fault. So, now we have fantastic, ever-increasing salaries at the top positions, while the responsibility is decreasing. Let's spend a little money and put buck stops back in all the plush offices of the holders of top positions in government and industry.

Tinman

I'm sorry to report that this production is appalling. It's a shame too, because I like Alan Cumming, but I don't think I'm going to invest any more of my time watching it. The story so far (I've only seen the first part) looks as if a group of 12-year-old gamerdude boys got the actors and the cameras and the sets all together and then developed the story on the fly, melding vague memories of the original Wizard of Oz with random scenes from Stargate and T. J. Hooker.

The dialogue sounds as though it was created from Beavis-and-Butthead reflections like, "Dude, we can have the flying monkeys come out of the wicked witch's tits, man", "Yeah, sweet", "Heh, heh boobage." The flying monkeys actually did emerge from glowing tattoos above actress Kathleen Robertson's cleavage, (opportunity for closeup of breasts, "yeah!"). There is a mean-spirited, gunslinging policeman (Tinman), a fluttering twit whose brain was removed (I imagine this is the Scarecrow character in the book, though here he's named Glitch), the cowardly lion, a quivering, hesitant member of a leonine empath species (because 12-year-old boys can't conceive of the same person being both empathic and strong), and DG (Dorothy) who is peculiarly played by actress Zooey Deschanel who delivers all her lines in a flip monotone which turns out, unfortunately, to be the the appropriate voice for them.

I found out that there's a 2-hour new episode of The Closer on tonight, which is what I'll be watching instead of the second part of this dreadful, wet mess.