I'll never understand how some women just can't see how much they're selling themselves out when they willingly choose to associate with men that just take up space and don't do anything to contibute to anyone's life. Shady characters that have a less than ideal life resume. They go from woman to woman and back again. They don't take care of their bodies. They can't hold a steady job that requires at least an ounce of brain power. Would these women want their sons to grow up and be like these men? I doubt it. Can they look at these men and truly feel an admiration for them? I think it's more like this: they stay with these men for how the men can make them feel temporarily. They show them a tiny bit of attention and that's translated to 'he loves me'. He continuously wants to sleep with me so that must mean he's a keeper! He left his wife/girlfriend for me so that MUST mean he loves ME!

Not all of these men are complete failures. Some of them have successful careers but when it comes to personal relationships they fail miserably. These ones are harder to spot but if you just look at their past patterns with women it's clear as day. And what have they done to change? How much time has passed since they left their last victim in shambles? What evidence is there of rehabilitation? Just his word? Well a man can swear up and down he's changed but his actions is what you have to pay attention to.

Not that I was always that smart. If I hadn't been so stupid I'd have seen how my ex-husband also left one woman for the next and never really learned from his mistakes. Of course we were so young so there wasn't a long enough history really but of the girlfriends he did have they were all right after the other. No time spent alone to reflect on mistakes and learn how to properly behave in an intimate relatonship. Naturally his pattern continues...like it does with so many other men (and women who keep going for these men).

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I have found a very special gift for all of you moms! You need to put the bug in someone's ear that you want one of these! It is the Greatest Achievement Medal keychain/pendant for birth. How cool is that? I think I would get one for my mom. I mean, she has six of us! I know I would really love this as I never thought I would have a child of my own. Maybe they will come out with one for stepmoms too! After all, I do have four stepchildren. For you moms that stay at home with your children (or even those that have BM jobs), you can sell these yourself! What a great way to make some money from home. This is a unique gift that would be appropriate for any mother you know. Think about the extra money you could make for those little extras in life. I will definitely be checking on this as a business opportunity that will help me in my pursuit of being a work-at-home mom with a decent income! Check it out and see what you think.

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The release of the DVD of Holocaust, the mini-series starring Michael Moriarty, James Woods, and Meryl Streep, marks the 30th anniversary of its airing. I know Ive seen this miniseries before, and I know it wasnt when I was seven years old, so Im guessing I checked it out in VHS form from Detroit Public Library when I was living there 12 years ago. I seem to remember being better impressed by it then - when I knew significantly less about the Holocaust than I do now.
Ostensibly this is the story of two families, the German Jewish, affluent, educated Weisses ( meaning white, I assume not coincidentally) and the more working class, gentile Dorfs who are, at the beginning of this saga, poor and without work or helpful patronage. However, the scope of this mini-series is more ambitious than careful, believable coverage of two small families would allow for. Instead during the course of the story the viewer is taken to Buchenwald, Theriesenstadt, Auschwitz, and Sobibor, to the Warsaw Ghetto, Babi Yar, and the Wannsee conference which planned it all. We see Reinhard Heydrich in action, as well as Hans Frank, Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Himmler, and Rudolf Hoess, the death farmer. While this gives a school student or entirely unknowledgeable viewer a decent overview of the many horrors perpetrated by the Nazis from 1935-1945, it completely stretches believable narrative by its seams.
The mini-series begins in 1935. The Weiss family is celebrating a wedding between their artist son, Karl, played by James Woods, and his lovely gentile bride, Inga (Streep). The danger of this union is apparent and discussed by several of the wedding guests as the Nuremberg Laws are about to be enacted. One of them clearly has his eye on Inga and is revolted by her choice to marry a Jew. The Weisses feel the tension, but try to diffuse it and laugh it off. Within a very short period of time, it becomes apparent even to matriarch Berta Weiss (Rosemary Harris) that things just arent funny. Josef Weisss longtime medical practice becomes Jew-only by decree and his former patient, Erik Dorf, warns him to leave Germany because worse is coming and he will not help him when it arrives.
Meanwhile the unemployed legal clerk Dorf has a sickly wife and two children to support and no idea how. His wife, Marta, tells him of an opening in Heydrichs office and advises him to be ambitious and confident. So the passive and Jew-neutral Dorf gets sucked into the world of the Nazi party and is soon devising way after way to bring about the downfall of the Jews around him.
After the violence of Kristalnacht, things become harder for the Weisses. They are forced to sell their stately home and medical practice for nearly nothing, and Josef is evicted to Poland where he was born. Soon after that Karl is taken away to Buchenwald, and the women must fend for themselves with Ingas help and connections. It all goes downhill from there into rape, murder, madness, insanity, torture, starvation, illness, overwork, and annihilation, basically in that order.
On the one hand, as I stated before, if you know nothing about the Holocaust, this is a good overview. You see the work camps, the ghetto, the death camps, the death pits. You see the political maneuvering behind the killing. You see the steady progression of Jewish families losing everything - civil rights, employment, homes and belongings, freedom, and, finally, life itself. But the Weisses are really too small a family to illustrate all of the rest. Eleven or twelve characters, all of them from urban Germany, are supposed to have witnessed the above as well as partisan fighting in the Soviet Union, the planned escape from Sobibor, and Wannsee? Um, no.
Erik Dorf is a nobody at the start of the movie, and, while he is bright, his wife has to push him time and again to be more ambitious in his career. Yet he gets an invitation to the secret conference where the Nazis plan everything? Dr. Weiss winds up on the Jewish Council in the Warsaw Ghetto trying to determine who is put on the trains while trying also to sneak some of them off. His brother winds up being a key player in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Karl who is even more passive then Erik Dorf, ends up doing illegal paintings of Theriesenstadt conditions as a form of resistance. Inga allows herself to be used sexually by her previous admirer who happens to get stationed at Buchenwald where Karl is taken first just to be able to get letters to her husband. s all just so unlikely. Yes, millions of unlikely, unbelievable things happened during World War II, but not all to two middle-class German families. I mean, Sobibor. They sort of had me until Sobibor, or maybe Babi Yar. No, thats not right. They lost me when Dr. and Mrs. Weiss and their friends were taken from the Warsaw Ghetto to Auschwitz. Warsaw didnt empty into Auschwitz, it emptied into Treblinka where people got off the trains and were immediately gassed. All the people. Immediately. But historical authenticity would eliminate pages more of drama for Dr. and Mrs. Weiss.
The main problem of this series, though, isnt historical accuracy. Its that the characters are just not three-dimensional. The Weisses are all good, noble, stoic, and brave. Inga and Karl are supposed to have this great love, a love that leads Inga into Hell for Karl, but its just not there on the screen. They have no chemistry. And even if they did, Karl is just so annoying. Passive. Bland. And possessed of a schlocky Bostonish accent. He never seems Jewish. He never seems anything.
Inga isnt much better. Shes the stand in for the Good Gentile. The kind that sees things As They Are. She loves her Jewish relatives - all of them. She defies her own family to protect them. She sleeps with a pasty, fat, antisemitic idiot to give her husband a lifeline. Shes necessary to this movie because, apart from one other passive character, all the other gentiles are high ranking Nazis or foaming antisemites. Its pretty much black/white. She can cry on cue, but the pathos of her situation - I never felt it.
The highlight of the mini-series is definitely the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising because by that point its all action and little melodrama. The only one left in Warsaw is Uncle Moses, and hes an okay guy, but hardly central. But the action, thats well done. You cant help but root for the rag-tag band of insurgents who managed to route the Nazis for nearly a month, even if you dont know any of them. Go, underdogs!
Okay, one last gripe here. I know the Holocaust is Jewish in the public consciousness, but many, many other people went up in flames under the Nazi onslaught. Six million Jews perished, but so did two and a half million Polish civilians, eleven and a half million Soviet civilians (as well as nearly twelve million Soviet troops), as well as a host of other peoples, many of them in the same death machine the Jews perished in. The Nazis hated the Slavs almost as much as they hated the Jews, and they were next on the list of people to go. Roma people were exterminated, gays and mentally disabled people were murdered, and one and half million German civilians also died. These were all people, some of them nice, some of them mean, some of them tolerant, some of them fiercely antisemitic, but all of them victims of the Nazis and all of them tragic stories. is too broad a title to use, if none of these people get a mention. Im waiting for a Holocaust mini-series that shows German, Polish, and Soviet civilians as people overwhelmed by this Great Horror and not as villains and bystanders in a Jew-only drama.

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