The American Culture

There is something rather interesting and revealing in all the recent controversies about celebrities running their mouths and acting like peabrains. You've heard about these controversies on the news, of course, such as Mel Gibson's drunken diatribe against Jews, comedian Michael Richards's racial slurs in response to being interrupted by a heckler during a disastrous nightclub comedy routine, Danny DeVito's drunken rant against President Bush on The View yesterday, etc.

That's the Omniculture for you. Everything happens, and everything gets on TV or the Web, which is the new TV.

In short, expect a lot more of this.

People often act badly under stress—which is when a person's integrity and strength of character shine through or the lack of these bursts forth. And there will always be stressful situations to endure, even for the wealthy, famous, and powerful. Hence, there will be many incidents of crummy behavior by such persons. In a society with strong democratic and egalitarian impulses and consequently little to no sense of noblesse oblige among its most privileged members, such trashy behavior is inevitable.

Given that eveything happens in the Omniculture and is immediately distributed to everybody by way of TV and the Web, this will simply be the way of things for the foreseeable future: Big mouths saying and doing stupid things, and other big mouths complaining about what they said and did. There will be no escape, short of moving to a deserted island without TV or internet access.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 02:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I stirred up some concerns among PKD fans with my Philip K. Dick article, which was cross-posted at The Reform Club site. Francis Poretto commented thoughtfully there, suggesting that there is no way to discern true greatness in a writer. After stating, "For my money, a great writer is one who inspires me to great emotion," Francis asks, "How shall I judge Dick, or any writer, great, even if permitted to use my criterion?"

It's a fair question, and one that I implicitly answered in my original comment on PKD. Francis correctly observes that a numerical analysis of how a particular author measures up to an individual's chosen standards is impossible. Hence, he suggests, it's silly to engage in such discussions. "I think you can see where this is going," he concludes.

I can indeed see where that is going, and I am rather surprised to see someone who is most decidedly not a philosophical relativist taking the position Francis is staking out in regard to literature. Certainly it's true that we cannot hope to judge the quality of literary works and the overall achievements of their authors by some sort of quantitative analysis, but that is absolutely not the same thing as saying that there are no qualitative differences between such works and authors. And if there are such differences, then it is most certainly useful and salutary to discuss the matter.

Francis points out the following as possible standards, but then dismisses them:

-- Widespread critical acclaim?
-- Volume of sales?
-- The length of time his works have been read?
-- His avoidance of modifiers?
-- The effulgence of his imagery?
-- Some other criterion?

The answer, as you will have already guessed, is (f), some other criterion. Or, more accurately, some other criteria.

To wit:

Most assuredly there is a certain something at the heart of all great literary works that cannot quite be identified, much less quantified. Rather like the human soul, we perceive it but cannot isolate it. However, just as the human soul is held in a body that makes identifiable and even quantifiable actions, this heart of a novel is contained in (and indeed suffuses) a book that has identifiable characteristics. These characteristics can even be usefully quantified in some cases, though I believe actual numerical quantification to be unnecessary for a valid literary analysis.

Specifically, it is possible to put individual tastes aside and discuss literature and the other arts in a rational and salubrious way.

We can observe, for example, that some books have deeper, more true, and more convincing characterizations than others. We can see that some have plots that are more interesting and diverting than others. Some have stories that are more plausible, convincing, and usefully reminiscent of reality than others. Some have descriptive passages that make the fictional world come alive more convincingly than others. Some have prose that is so beautiful and artful that it gives us distinct pleasure to contemplate. Some have moral implications that bring our human condition into greater focus and give us real insights into our position in the cosmos. And so on.

Yes, we cannot always quantify such things, but we certainly can make comparisons and discuss what is most worthy of our time and energy. And the point of my post was that a good many of the writings of Philip K. Dick are much more worthy of our time and attention than those of most mainstream American literary artisans of the twentieth century.

So let us indeed feel free to discuss the quality of authors' works, singly and in toto. We should always recognize that there is much room for disagreement, awareness of ambiguity, and differing assessments of how various works measure up to the ideal characteristics of literature, and that individuals can hold different rankings of importance among the various aspects of literary excellence, but that it is nonetheless both possible and necessary to discuss these works objectively and with a sincere search for truth at the heart of the matter.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It's official: Philip K. Dick is a great writer, according to the Library of America. As the Galley Cat at Media Bistro reports:

Buried at the tail end of Mark Sarvas's interview with Jonathan Lethem comes news of one project on the novelist's plate: "I'm helping preside over the utter and irreversible canonization of one of my (formerly outsider) heroes, Philip K. Dick: I'm writing endnotes for The Library of America, which is doing a volume of four of his novels from the sixties, which I also helped select."

I suppose that if Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and H. P. Lovecraft are great writers, then Dick is too. But in my view, this event is most important as further evidence of how poor the mainstream American novel was during the previous century. Solid but unspectactular and fairly uninsightful genre authors (though this last limitation does not apply to Dick) are touted as among the best the nation had to offer, and this is true because the mainstream novelists were so often confused, self-important, and wrongheaded.

A good many of Philip K. Dick's books and stories are well worth reading, but he really worked largely on frankly pulp material. His great contribution was to convey interesting, provocative, and important ideas in a pulp context, but that is like making a really fast production automobile. It's fast, but it can't run with the custom jobbies.

Dick stands out as an author because the "custom cars" of his time were so shabby. 

PKD's prose was usually serviceable at best, although better than, say, Theodore Drieser's glop. But whereas Dreiser's characterizations could be immensely powerful and the conflicts highly real and dramatic, Dick's characters are usually unable to sustain much interest, and the stories depend almost entirely on their ideas and interesting plot angles. Some of those concepts and ideas are so good that his writings have gained a strong foothold in the culture through film adaptations. For that reason, he's certainly one of the more important American writers of the second half of the twentieth century.

Philip K. Dick was indeed a great pulp writer, if there can be such a thing, and a very good writer within his limits. I'll call hiim a very good writer overall when at his best. And his elevation to Library of America status points out once again that genre literature, despite its limitations, was where it was at in American literature during the past century.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This Thursday, the ABC TV daytime serial drama All My Children will introduce a character who was born male and is being "transformed into a woman" through hormone treatments, surgery, and psychological retraining.

This is believed to be the first time an American television show has had such a "transgendering" character. Some programs in the past have had fully "transgendered" characters in the past, but you probably wouldn't remember them given that nobody watched. The L Word, on the Showtime cable network, has a character who is going the other way, from a woman to a "man."

According to the Associated Press,

"All My Children" was looking for something new, and knows its audience is always interested in anything to do with sexuality, said Julie Hanan Carruthers, the show's executive producer.

Like most daytime dramas, the program's ratings have been dropping, falling by almost 2/3 since the early 1990s.

Pardon me for thinking that this isn't going to improve the show's performance.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Two more TV shows representing this season's trend towared "darker," more depressing TV programs have been placed on "hiatus" by their network.

The Nine and Six Degrees are both suspended until later in the season. ABC said that both programs will return later. Programs placed on hiatus, however, often do not return.

The Nine has been temporarily replaced by a "special" edition of the magazine show 20/20 for the last day of the November "ratings sweeps" in which advertisers' rates for TV networks are set.

Both programs were part of a trend toward "darker" network TV shows, as reported earlier here and here. As I suggested in my earlier reports, this is not a good idea, and the ratings have confirmed it.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here are some thoughts in our continuing discussion of political nomenclature, in which we have noted the changing nature of what is really conservative, radical, and liberal in the current era, after the end of the Cold War:

There are two parties of left and right today: liberals and statists.

Liberals see authority as vested in the individual and handed over to the state only as appropriate to maintain both order and liberty. Statists see authority as residing entirely in the state. This is the critical difference between the "social contracts" envisioned by Locke and Rousseau.

True, classical liberals are very different from the people who are commonly called liberals today. The latter are statists, and they are conservative in the sense that we now live in a state-dominated realm, indeed a state-dominated civilization. True liberals treasure individual rights within a framework of social order which sustains and gives reign to those rights.

I believe that this work of clarification will work to the distinct advantage of the true, classical liberals. The left, the statists, live on deception, as Orwell noted. Liberals live on truth. 

I think that if we understand things in those terms and communicate them to people explicitly and then use the terms liberal, statist, conservative, and radical correctly and routinely, we will all have a much better time of it politically. The problem with the Republicans, for example, is that they governed as statists in the past few years. Few people are advocating true liberalism because we have forgotten what it is. It is time to recall the tradition and bring it back to the forefront of American politics, where it belongs.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Time travel fictions are certainly interesting and have been around for a long time. Peter Suderman suggests, in National Review Online, that their appeal is based on a natural human obsession with mortality, which time travel naturally brings to the fore. I can't say I agree that human mortality is a special interest in time travel fictions, given that pretty much any narrative has a good deal to do with human mortality.

I think that the real appeal of time travel is in the possibility of changing things—time travel is the ultimate power trip. We've all done things we wish we hadn't, and failed to do things we wish we had. (Cf. the Lutheran rite of confession and absolution.) And we've all experienced things that we wish hadn't happened. Thinking about what things would be like if we had done things differently is a natural human endeavor, every bit as natural as mortality itself. And this is a particularly strong element in time travel narratives, such as the recent BBC-TV mystery series Life on Mars, and is in fact the central issue in time-repetition stories such as Groundhog Day and Daybreak.

That's what is really behind Deja Vu. Denzel Washington plays a BATF agent investigating a terrorist bombing, who discovers that he might just be able to go into the past—at a good deal of risk to his personal well-being—and prevent the attack, thereby saving several-hundred lives and possibly the lives of his ATF partner and of a beautiful, young, single woman who was murdered as part of the "collateral damage."

Of course, he does what people typically do in such movies, but this being a Denzel Washington film, there is a good deal of Christian imagery and thematic material, including a couple of prominent acts of self-sacrifice and a resurrection from death. There is a brief exchange about morality early in the film, but what is always at the forefront of the story is the desire to change our conditions, to make things right and avert trouble for other people.

As in Back to the Future, The Time Machine, and other such narratives, Deja Vu is most intensely concerned with the here and now, the present conditions of our lives. That's what makes it so absorbing and interesting, and well worth seeing.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 04:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you find current-day FM radio to be extremely boring, as I do, you can credit Clear Channel Communications for a lot of it. They're the corporate giant that bought over 1,100 radio stations all over the dial over the past couple of decades and standardized the U.S. radio airwaves. Clear Channel imposed strict programming formats, limited set lists, automated DJs, little local flavor, and more commercials, except in the case of the inane, vulgar drivetime programs of comedy-team DJs telling dirty jokes, which likewise became very annoying very quickly. (And these programs had, if anything, even more commercials.)

As should not surprise anyone, listeners ultimately tired of the removal of all creativity, fun, and charm from music radio and switched to satellite systems, portable music devices, and the like. And the market has done its magic: Clear Channel's stock has fallen by two-thirds since the beginning of the year 2000.

Now Clear Channel has agreed to be sold to an investment group in one of the largest corporate buyouts ever. It remains to be seen, of course, whether the new owners (if the deal goes through as planned) will remedy the real problems Clear Channel has created, by overturning the corporation's decisions to standardize and homogenize programming and remove local control and content.

Clear Channel has already tried to fix some things, such as cutting down on the number of commercials, so it is possible that somebody has learned something here. In any case, it is clear that the markets will ultimately force the necessary adjustments. The only question is whether radio will be made obsolete in the meantime because of technological and social changes unleashed by Clear Channel's greed and stupidity.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The PBS/BBC police procedural series Prime Suspect premiered in 1991 and began the still-current run of dreary, depressing TV cop shows on both sides of the pond. All of the now-familiar elements were there: sliimy urban streets; an obsession with the seamy side of life; strange and disturbed criminals; a depressed lead detective with an unhappy or nonexistent home life; heavy-handed ironies; a central character's struggle with addiction or some other nagging personal problem; a police team that fights its bosses and one another almost as much as it fights crooks; an unfair, inefficient, and corrupt police force; and on and drearily on

To be sure, Helen Mirren did a great job of making Det. Supt. Jane Tennison seem real, if not particularly interesting. And like Mirren's characterization, the show's allegedly greater realism than the average run of TV cop shows was actually more of a superficial thing. Yes, it is true that Mirren's choice not to smile and decision to keep her hair short do reflect some concerns of real-life policewomen—they are reluctant to smile while on duty, she has observed, because it can too easily be perceived as weakness, and they keep their hair short or restrain it close to the head so that arrestees can't grab it. However, these things are superficial elements, and though the show got those right, it made both life in general and the police force in particular appear relentlessly disappointing and much uglier and sad than either really is.

Tonight is the final episode of the long-running intermittent series, on the PBS program Masterpiece Theater, and I, for one, will be glad to see it go—and I hope that it will take most of its numerous imitators along with it. It would be good to see more TV cop and detective shows show a somewhat better perspective on life and present characters whom we can like and sympathize with a bit more readily. Yes, there is room in life for shows like Prime Suspect, but life is a good deal more complex than the "realism" of Prime Suspect and its imitators see fit to acknowledge.

So let's give Prime Suspect it due recognition—and move on and have a few shows reminiscent of 77 Sunset Strip. Now that would be fun.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Ian Fleming's James Bond is a much tougher egg than most of the Bond movies have portrayed him to be. Sure, he does impossible stunts and kills lots of villains, but he's always cracking smart jokes, hardly breaking a sweat, and knows way too much about fancy drinks and what upper-crust people like to say at parties.

That was a big part of Ian Fleming's conception of the Bond books, of course, but at heart Bond was something of a thug—more Bulldog Drummond than a Dornford Yates smart-set spy. And that's where the new James Bond film, Casino Royale, finds its inspiration. Daniel Craig, the new James Bond, is much more of a bulldog than the Bonds of the past, and the action sequences in this installment, though about as ludicrous as in most Bond films, have a gritty character that matches Craig's roughness and fits well with the current trend in action films.

The opening credits and initial scenes make this very clear: the credits sequence is all stylized images of violence, and none of the naked women reflected in shimmering water that have characterized the Bond series over the years. And the first scenes take up this motif, with nonstop, ultraviolent action. The film then settles down into some very absorbing sequences of very-high-stakes poker involving Bond and the villain—which viewers expecting nothing but action may find surprising but are very effective indeed.

In the end, there are a few nice plot twists, more big action sequences, and a good time is had by all, except such villains are are destroyed in the process. All in all, Casino Royale is a good ride, a fine installment in the series, an excellent debut for Daniel Craig, and a promising rejuvenation of the James Bond movie saga.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have just heard that the economist Milton Friedman died this morning at the age of 94. Dr. Friedman was one of the great economists of the last century, and his wise counsel of economic matters will be greatly missed. He was the author who perhaps most greatly strengthened my interest in the value of free markets and freedom of choice in societies.

In books such as Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose (written with his wife, Rose), Friedman consistently championed free-market capitalism in an era when statism was the norm. His ideas truly changed the world, as Ronald Reagan initiated a turn to free-market economics in the United States that was picked up in countless other nations and is still strong.

Friedman was a superb economist, a brilliant and independent thinker, and an inspiring intellectual leader. Please click here to find his books and read the works of this great thinker and brilliant communicator.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 04:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Another in our ongoing chronicle of fictional TV programs' treatment of religion . . .

In last night's episode of the Fox mystery-criime series Bones, "Aliens in a Spaceship," Jeffersonian Institution scientists and crimefighters Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and Hodgins are buried alive by a serial killer—known as the Grave Digger—and held for ransom, which the corporation to which the demand was made is unable to pay.

After a timely resurrection, Brennan and her usual partner, FBI agent Booth (David Boreanaz), are in a Catholic church. Booth rises from his knees after prayer and sits beside Brennan in the front pew. They discuss religion, as they frequently do. Brennan takes her usual straight-materialist-atheist position, and Booth speaks from his Catholic point of view. Neither tries to persuade the other to change their mind, though both are firm in their convictions.

What is exemplary about the scene is the maturity of their conversation about religion. Brennan sees it all in scientific, materialistic terms, as a matter of probabilities that sometimes come to pass, and Booth sees it in more spiritual terms, seeing God looking down on their team and answering Booth's prayers so that the team can continue to do their work.

In particular, Booth points out that everyone in the team was absolutely necessary to Brennan's and Hodgins's eventual salvation, illustrating the inestimable value of every human life. The symbolism of the two characters' symbolic resurrection entirely escapes Brennan, but she is neither derided nor praised for her spiritual denial. The scene makes it clear that in the producers' opinion, both points of view are valid within their spheres. It's an interesting scene that effectively brings out the greater significance of the events of the episode.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Abortion and homosexual marriage appear on the surface to be very difficult areas for classical liberalism to navigate. There are the twin shoals of excessive libertarianism and over-conservatism to avoid, for the question of government involvement in the matter is the central issue, and those who argue that government should not discriminate between normal and same-sex couples can make their case seem both principled and liberal-minded.

The truth is, however, that it is those who favor homosexual marriage and an abortion "right" who want to suppress freedom, and those who oppose these ideas are the ones who represent greater freedom.

Hence I argue that opposition to homosexual marriage and an abortion right are in fact the true classical liberal positions on these matters.

Classical liberals gravitate toward allowing communities to decide things for themselves, after Edmund Burke's notion of the "little platoons," and we are intensely concerned with protecting both individual human lives and social order. As a result, I would suggest that classical liberals--such as Burke, Smith, Cleveland, Reagan, etc.—would unreservedly oppose legalization of abortion, unless it were proven conclusively that human life begins at some specifiable point after conception. Until then, a classical liberal would say, the law should unerringly protect the individual's right to life, including from decisions by a child's own mother.

In addition, the concern for federalism (aka subsidiarity) would make a true classical liberal unreservedly oppose the Roe v. Wade decision which took away the right of states—the people—to decide the matter.

As to same-sex marriage, classical liberals of the past would have thought the idea absurd. Imanging broaching such a question to Edmund Burke or Adam Smith!

Classical liberals would surely deny that there is any "right" to homosexual marriage. Rights are negative, not positive. That is, people have a right to be left alone by the government to do anything that does not harm others.

Applied to homosexual marriage, the argument following from this principle is clear: If homosexuals want to live together and get married in churches, they have an absolute right to do so, unless their way of doing so harms the community in some real and measurable way. But do they have a right to force others to acknowledge their choice? Absolutely not. The government has no right to force insurance companies, churches, schools, neighbors, etc., to acknowledge homosexual couples as marriages.

Why, then, does the government force these institutions to acknowledge heterosexual marriages? The answer is simple: It does not. These institution acknowledge heterosexual marriages on the basis of historical and cultural preferences developed over centuries. The government didn't decide this; society did. In pursuit of social order, governments have required institutions to acknowledge marriage in their dealings with married couples (by creating marriage licenses, etc., with force of law), which from a classical liberal perspective makes sense as it did not infringe on individual liberties because people were already agreed that marriage was a valid institution. Moreover, even homosexuals agreed, and still agree, that marriage is a valid institution, which they confirm by trying to alter it so that their own couples can be included. The key factor is that the government, in acknowledging heterosexual marriage, does not force anything on the society, instead merely enforcing a contract that all or nearly all people accept as valid and sensible.

Homosexual marriage has no such status in society, as evidenced by the fact that it has little support in law nationwide and that nearly all of the moves to legalize it have come from the courts, not the democratic process. Hence, while the government has no call to prevent such marriages from occurring, it also has no valid authority to force individuals and organizations to acknowledge them.

If, for example, companies want to allow same-sex beneficiaries under their insurance plans, the government should not prevent them; and if insurance companies wish to allow such partnerships to count as marriages under their rules, they should be free do so; etc. And if they wish to exclude such partnerships, that is their right as well.

Homosexuals are already free to marry in America, they just aren't free to force others to acknowledge those marriages. That seems a reasonable position at this time in human history and is most conducive to both liberty and social order.

That is the small-government position, the classical liberal approach.

Of course, proponents of heterosexual marriage argue that the same case could have been made against civil rights for blacks, and was in fact made. The difference, of course, is that the laws themselves discriminated against basic civil rights of blacks. In the case of homosexuals, the law allows them to marry and denies them only the ability to force other individuals and institutions to acknowledge their unions. That situation is extremely different from what blacks suffered under slavery and Jim Crow.

Hence the classical liberal position on this issue would be that it is a matter of choice, not right, as to whether society should choose to codify in law the position of forcing individuals and institutions to acknowledge homosexual unions. And as noted, the classical liberal position would be that forcing such a rule in most states and communities at this time is entirely unjustified.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 01:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

In the latest of our continuing series of observations regarding TV's treatment of religion. . . .

Last night's episode of the Fox TV action drama Prison Break, "Bolshoi Booze," included a very interesting sequence in which the protagonist, escaped convict Michael, has just robbed a store and shoved the elderly clerk to the floor, staring down coldly as the man looks at him in terror. Michael stops in an alley, and in his facial expression and posture he shows great remorse over what he has just done. (The theme of the episode is how easy it is for people to allow themselves to let end justify means.) As his face contorts in anguish, Michael looks up and sees a cross on the steeple of a nearby church. He stares at this cross for several seconds, with the camera lingering on the cross as seen from his point of view.

Interestingly, Michael doesn't return the stolen items. He desperately needs them if he is to make his escape to Mexico and save his brother's life.

What he does do is go into the church, a Catholic sanctuary, and give his confession to a priest. The two discuss, in a very interesting exchange, what is at the heart of the problem: that Michael has allowed himself to justify wrongdoing to himself. In seeking a good end, his brother's life and freedom, Michael has done wrongs and looked the other way while others did even worse things. He feels guilty about it, but he leaves the confessional without real repentance or any attempt to seek forgiveness.

Undoubtedly some viewers will see Michael's failure to seek redemption as a failure on the producers' part. I think quite the opposite is true. Michael's reaction is just right for his character; it is what he really would do. In fact, it's what just about anybody would do. And it is not the end of the story. Michael's conscience is now definitely activated, and the sequence of events thus makes his character even more complex and interesting. That's what good drama is all about.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my article yesterday in National Review Online, and in subsequent discussions here, I have suggested a return to the philosophy of classical liberalism as an antidote to both big-government conservatism (the current-day Republicans) and what I call New Age conservatism (the current-day Democrats). As I pointed out six months ago on Tech Central Station, big-government conservatism is a mess both politically and as policy . And the Democrats' success in the recent elections suggests that they will stick with their New Age conservatism for the near future.

Conservatism, then, is a position for Democrats for the near future. And in my view, they can have it. This nation does not need conservatism; it needs reform. Badly.

Hence, the Republicans really should look to liberalism as their way out of the woods. Fortunately, classical liberalism is a philosophy that is both easy to understand and easy to like. Here is how I outlined it in my Tech Central Station article on "The Crash of Big-Government Conservatism":

The solution for the Republicans, then, must be philosophical at heart, and that philosophy must drive the party's policy prescriptions. Their only real answer is to embrace classical liberalism. This includes in particular embracing its crucial components of individual rights, personal responsibility, the belief that human life in general and every human life in particular has meaning, and respect for the reality of nationality.

This vision of classical liberalism derives from Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and their contemporaries, and incorporates the insights of subsequent great thinkers such as Booker T. Washington, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Thomas Sowell. It is a vision of a true opportunity society, open to all who agree to play by the rules, and one in which the rules are sovereign.

Such a vision provides a comprehensible, consistent, and sensible view of the world and the nation. In this worldview, the nation is a society of free individuals brought together by a common heritage, living under laws that free people to achieve the best that they can and that prevent them from unfairly exploiting one another, a society that respects the need for personal morality regardless of one's religious background. Classical liberalism provides a way to find clear answers in all policy matters by asking the following question: Which policy approach will create the greatest amount of both individual liberty and social order?

Such a vision is by no means a theocracy; it is in fact based largely on utilitarian concerns. However, it also includes a respect for religion because the latter is part of mankind's perpetual search for truth and meaning and because religious faith can encourage personal morality and social charity and give great comfort and purpose to individuals in times both good and bad. In its great and abiding respect for the good things religion brings, however, classical liberalism never allows the two kingdoms (in Martin Luther's great distinction), the City of God and the City of Man, to be conflated or confused with each other.

Classical liberalism holds that the Christian religion is good for society because it encourages the intellectual foundations for an orderly society of free individuals. Whether a particular religion's claims are true or not is a matter for the Church to decide, as Luther pointed out, not the state; and whether a particular policy or political philosophy is good is a matter to be decided by an empirical calculus, as Luther likewise noted, not religious laws developed for a very different group of people six thousand years ago.

About religion, classical liberalism says: Encouragement of religion, yes; imposition of religious-based laws, no.

This philosophy is much more likely to appeal to disaffected Republicans and others on the Right than the watered-down postmodernism now offered by the Grand Old Party. Classical liberalism is the philosophy that Ronald Reagan eloquently represented, and the party of Reagan could rely on that history to provide quick credibility to an effort to renew a commitment to his approach to government. But rhetoric won't be enough. A Bush veto of the bloated, pork-laden spending bill recently passed by the Senate would go a long way toward restoring the GOP's credibility as the party of Reagan, especially if it is followed by a better bill and an intense congressional debate over spending. The policy approach for the rest of the summer and thereafter should likewise be based on the Reaganesque, classical liberal principles outlined here.

That advice went unheeded, of course, although Don Devine reprinted it on his excellent Conservative Battleline Online site, a hotbed of Republican thinking. The Republicans will undoubtedly engage in a good deal of soul-searching in the coming weeks, and getting back to their true, classical liberal roots should be their first priority.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

In our comments section, Jim Faas asks for some more detail about what classical liberalism is. It's a very good question.

Classical liberalism is a major political movement in the West for the past two centuries and more, traceable to the English Whigs of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Its central vision is to expand opportunity.

In understanding classical liberalism, it helps, I think, to look at the idea of political temperaments.

Temperament is an indicator of how much and how quickly an individual would like to see society change, regardless of the direction or political content of the changes desired. Some people are reasonably content with things as they are (although almost no one is ever perfectly happy with the current political and social situation) and hence want to go slowly with any changes. Some see an ideal vision of the future and push for change to make it a reality, regardless of the amount and rapidity of transformation required. And some believe that all human societies are imperfect and inevitably must be so. As a consequence they push for steady reforms toward not a vision of an ideal society (which they believe can never be achieved anyway) but to create the greatest measure of human justice possible in the current place in history.

These three temperaments are the conservative, radical, and liberal, respectively.

Political temperament is revealed in and reflects an individual’s basic concerns in political and social matters, as follows:

Conservatives strive to preserve civilization.

Liberals strive to extend civilization.

Radicals strive to transform civilization.

There are people with all three political temperaments on both Left and Right. Hence, six categories: Conservative Left, Liberal Left, Radical Left, Conservative Right, Liberal Right, Radical Right.

The classical liberal position is basically as follows: Political and social liberty make perpetual change inevitable in modern Western society—because of technological advances, economic development, social movements, changes in religious observance, etc. Freedom ensures that any society will always be changing.

As conditions change in society, political change is necessary, if only to preserve what has been accomplished (as conservatives would wish to do).

In answer to Jim's question regarding whether Barry Goldwater's conservative philosophy of the early 1960s is very close to classical liberalism, I'd say yes, in most ways it is. Later, Goldwater became pretty much what I call in my NRO article a "New Age Conservative," meaning a conservative of the Left. And one place where I can immediately identify a difference between Goldwater and pure classical liberalism is in the Arizonan's opposition to providing civil rights for blacks in the South, as in the Voting Rights Act. The very first classical liberals, such as Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, emphasized the need to spread opportunity as widely as possible, which is what the long-overdue liberalization of the South (which was begun by Republicans such as President Eisenhower and pressed forward by the classical liberal JFK) was meant to accomplish. It was their way of extending the benefits of Western civilization to people being denied them.

In the twentieth century, the best-known great classical liberals are probably the Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Milton Friedman would undoubtedly qualify as well.

When describing classical liberalism, I sometimes refer to it as Reagan-Burke liberalism. Consider the following statement by Ronald Reagan in an interview before he became President:

If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals—if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.

That's as succinct a definition as you could hope for. Reagan uses the term conservatism, but what he's really describing is classical liberalism (as he was undoubtedly well aware).

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

As mentioned earlier on these illustrious pages, the USA Network recently premiered the pilot of a new program, the mystery/espionage comedy Underfunded. This author watched it over the weekend and enjoyed it greatly. It's co-written and -produced, as noted earlier, by David Breckman, a Monk writer and brother of Monk creator and producer Andy Breckman

That's a good bloodline for a mystery-comedy series, of course, and the Underfunded pilot upheld the family honor nicely. Mather Zickel is deadpan funny as Canadian Secret Service agent Darryl Freehorn, who labors under the disadvantage of a pathetically low budget provided by the Canadian government. Freehorn, however, is the son of one of the greatest spies of all time, a CIA agent who was the person who really ended the Cold War, according to the show's conceit. Hence, he always gets 'er done despite the poor resources available to him.

That's a very good theme, I think, and one that should resonate with most audience members. It's also a very salutary message for young people, and the show was clean enough for most kids to see.

As noted, Zickel is very funny by not trying to seem funny, just as Tony Shaloub does so well on Monk. A nice touch in Underfunded is that every time Freehorn introduces himself to someone as being a member of the Canadian Secret Service, he adds, "Yes, we have one too." It's a very Dickensian use of repetition for humor, and works well. Also amusing is the way that the CIA keeps getting credit for Freehorn's accomplishments. The producers are very wise, however, in not making Freehorn's CIA contact antatonistic toward him. (That's the big problem with the first half-season of the USA Network mystery-comedy Psych, where the antagonism is both tedious and implausible. One hopes that they'll correct that for the second half-season that begins in January.) At one important point, the CIA contact tries to give credit to Freehorn but is ignored by the government bigwig who is much more interested in talking than in listening. That certainly rings true.

Another very amusing motif was the puckish use of swingin' mid-1960s images and spy-movie cliches. The producers even give the female lead, played by Joanna Canton, a 1960s Shirley Maclaine look. On top of it all, the story had a murder mystery at the center, which, while not particularly elaborate, was presented well and added further interest to the narrative.

Overall, Underfunded is off to a very good start. Of course, with any TV program the real job is to get enough good stories to last a full season, but Underfunded has the big things right, and looks promising indeed.

USA will show the pilot again tonight at 2 a.m. EST, so set your recorders accordingly. It's well worth seeing. 

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

To get a feel for the new political atmosphere in the wake of the Democrats' takeover of both houses of Congress, I've been listening to Neil Young's most recent album, Living with War, recently, which was released earlier this year. As you may be aware, especially if you've seen the superb Saturday Night Live parody of it, the album is a collection of retro-1960s-style "protest" songs opposing the Bush administration and the American public's sheeplike acceptance of his many atrocities (ooops—overtaken by events, Dude!).

A sympathetic appraisal of one of the most talked-about songs on the album, "Let's Impeach the President," can be found here. It captures what some people find to like about the album—its lyrics.

I'm always much more taken with and interested in the sound of a musical composition rather than its words, and Living with War certainly is a disaster in terms of musicality. Nearly all of the songs are musically primitive, as is apparently Young's intention, presumably to ensure that the listener attends primarily to the lyrics.

The latter, however, are just as mundane and uncreative as the music. Consider these characteristic lines, from the ingeniously titled ditty "Shock and Awe":

Back in the days of "mission accomplished"

Our chief was landing on the deck

The sun was setting on a golden photo op

Back in the days of "mission accomplished"

 

Thousands of bodies in the ground

Brought home in boxes to a trumpet's sound

No one sees them coming home that way

Thousands buried in the ground

 

Thousands of children scarred for life . . .

Well, you get the idea.  The accumulation of cliches such as "the sun was setting," "a trumpet's sound," "photo op," "buried in the ground," and "scarred for life" is truly breathtaking. In addition, the deceptiveness of "thousands buried," when the number of thousands is three (and I agree that one death is too many and tragic) is blatant and will persuade only those who already agree with the author. The rest of the lyrics are dominated by similarly deceptive left-wing cant.

Bob Dylan this certainly is not.

And for Young to allude to Dylan's 1960s protest songs, as he does prominently in "Flags of Freedom," is to invite a comparison so disadvantageous to Young as to be utterly shaming.

It would be nice if the lyrics quoted above were not characteristic of the whole album, but alas they are. It's that infantile: BUSH IS BAD!!!

Thanks for the subtle analysis, Neil. 

The biggest problem with Living with War, however, is simply that it doesn't sound like a Neil Young album. Neil Young, despite his annoyingly adolescent, adenoidal whine of a "singing" voice, has put together a good many appealing songs in the past.  Unfortunately, Living with War is as musically lame as it is lyrically unimaginative, with the sole exception of "Flags of Freedom," which, although rife with lyrical cliches, does have a nice sound to it and could actually have found its way onto a real Neil Young album.

All in all, Living with War is a dreadful bunch of glop, but it does wonderfully typify where the left is today: cant, slogans, open hatred, and disingenuous nonsense.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

If you want to understand the huge tail-whuppin' the Republican Party took this week, there's a great Simpsons episode of a few years back that explained it all in advance.

You may remember the episode, "Sideshow Bob Roberts." In this classic installment, "Diamond" Joe Quimby, the blatantly corrupt, sleazy, porkbarreling, free-spending, incompetent, unprincipled, oversexed, self-indulgent jackass mayor of Springfield, is running for reelection for the umpteenth time, in this instance challenged by Sideshow Bob, the murderous TV clown.

During their televised debate, Quimby, suffering from the flu, flounders badly, and, brushing his hair back off of his sweaty forehead, even looks as if he has devil horns. The TV station broadcasting the debate instantly chooses to surround the beleaguered mayor with a circle of flames, to complete the job of characterizing him as a devil, adding the disclaimer, "Flames added electronically by channel 6."

It's a hilarious moment, and it's exactly what happened to the Republicans this year. They governed all too much like Mayor Quimby in recent years, squandering their hard-earned reputation for fiscal respnsibility, realism, relatively limited government, and efforts to combat political corruption (the latter represented by the Gingrich House's reforms in the '90s). Instead of these things, they came to be known for spending worse than drunken sailors (a correct characterization), sexually sleazy (unfair in that they were probably no worse than the Democrats overall, had anyone cared to look), corrupt (fairly accurate, given the real scandals in which they were involved, although a similar attention to the Democrats would undoubtedly have revealed at least an equal amount of vile ooze), and incompetent (again, fairly accurate, alas).

So the Republicans, despite numerous warnings from many quarters (including the present author), went their merry way and received the just fruits of their efforts. In short, they looked exactly like Mayor Quimby.

The U.S. press, with great glee, added flames for effect, and the deed was done.

Footnote:

Commenter Jordan Ballor notes that he, too, thought of The Simpsons in the wake of last Tuesday's elections. Jordan blogged an amusing item alluding to the show, on the excellent Acton Institute Power Blog. Jordan is vastly more adept than I am at the technical side of blogging, and hence has even managed to place directly on his site the Simpsons video to which his post alludes.

The entire "Sideshow Bob Roberts" episode is available on YouTube here.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The title of this item is a pun, actually. It really refers to a new program on the USA Network, premiering tonight at 10 p.m EST. Underfunded tells the story of Darryl Freehorn, a Canadian secret service agent who suffers perpetual indignities because of the low budget the government gives the organization. He has to use dial-up internet service, for example, and travels by Greyhound bus rather than jet.

Pluck, cleverness, and determination serve him well, however, as he always manages to save the day, "solving world-threatening conspiracies on a small-time budget," according to the program's website.

It sounds like a funny concept, and the program is co-written and co-produced by David Breckman, a Monk staff writer and brother of Monk creator-producer Andy Breckman.

Tonight's episode is in a 90-minute slot and serves as the pilot for a planned series.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 07:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Tuesday's elections were, as widely expected, a solid thrashing for the Republican Party. But the real loser was classical liberalism. And the winner was conservatism.

Republicans lost fewer House and Senate seats than was expected earlier in the year, dropping about the average amount lost in a President's sixth year. They have lost control of the U.S. House of Representatives and very possibly the Senate, as we await likely recounts in races in Virginia and Montana—states that had trended Republican in recent years.

Very tellingly, Republicans lost three House seats in Indiana, where blue-collar voters, who normally provide a good harvest for Republicans, were concerned about the state's necessary economic transformation into a modern knowledge economy. Part of that change involved moving to Daylight Saving Time, which Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels pushed for and which caused huge resentment among conservative voters. In addition, Libertarian candidates took away enough normally Republican votes to turn the tide to the Democrats in the three races where Democrats took Republican seats. These were most certainly votes against the War in Iraq.

The point is, in Indiana as elsewhere, conservatism trended toward the Democrats, as voters sought economic security and reacted strongly against the Republicans' classical liberal vision of a free economy and assertive foreign policy. (Classical liberalism, for those not fully familiar with the term, is the philosophy behind Reaganism: limited government—with the superior competence in governing that it brings—economic freedom, strong defense of the national interest in international affairs, and local control over social issues.)

That, I think, is what happened around the nation: classical liberalism lost big.

But the movement lost because the Republicans failed to govern as classical liberals. Instead, in the economic sphere they ran up huge, unnecessary budget deficits attributable solely to massive spending increases. Small government went out the window as the Republicans massively increased federal control over elementary and secondary schools and passed numerous constraints on political freedom in the Homeland Security Act and the McCain-Feingold restrictions on political speech.

In the foreign policy sphere, Republicans failed to get it done in Iraq and stood idly by while Osama bin Laden laughed at us from his bunker in Pakistan or wherever he is now and Iran and North Korea worked to develop nuclear weapons. And in immigration policy, Republicans embarrassed themselves with an ineffectual, risibly symbolic bill to build a fence along the Mexican border.

In addition, the Republicans threw away their reputation for competence and the value of limited goverment with their inept response to the Katrina disaster. In this as in all other cases, the U.S. press were openly hostile toward the Republicans and sided with their critics, but the Republicans gave them plenty of ammunition.

The Democrats, for their part, ran as conservatives: against prolonging what they characterized successfully as a failed Iraq adventure, against economic giveaways to the rich (meaning tax cuts), against Bush administration failures to reign in outlaws such as bin Laden and Kim Jong-Il, against immigration reform, against, against, against. Very much to the Democrats' benefit, abortion was pretty much off the table as the public waited to see what, if anything, the new Supreme Court will have to say about it. Finally, the Democrats managed to keep the party's proponents of homosexual marriage fairly quiet.

The Democrats found some relatively conservative candidates such as anti-abortion centrist Bob Casey in Pennsylvania and former Reagan administration Secretary of the Navy James Webb, along with a goodly number of Persian Gulf and Iraq War veterans. They were as smart as the Republicans were stupid.

Despite the good economy, the Republicans were hamstrung by an unpopular war and record federal spending, a situation greatly resembling the travails of Presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. It was a recipe for high turnout among those dissatisfied with the war and concerned that the economy is about to go bad. The Republicans governed as Democrats, and the voters unsurprisingly decided to get themselves the real thing.

The problem for the right has been that conservatism is not a winner when there are huge problems for all to see—as there nearly always are. The Republicans have been strongest when they have adhered to classical liberal principles and articulated them boldly, as in the Reagan years and New Gingrich's Republican revolution. They have been weakest when they have attempted to be conservative, as during the two Bush administrations.

When Republicans run as classical liberals but govern as conservatives, they lose.

After all, what Washington politicians are there to conserve (and indeed rebuild) are our high-taxing, high-spending welfare state; a political system in which incumbents have all the advantages; a flood of illegal immigration; increasing state-level socialism; a public education system that appears deliberately designed to keep people ignorant; the worst, most libertine aspects of the Sexual Revolution; a health-care system that is increasingly under government control; and an international situation in which Islam and the West remain just short of open war; and so on.

The right is well aware that the solution to nearly all of these problems is to unleash the creativity and intelligence of the American people, not to place ever-greater restraints on initiative and economic freedom. Yet they simply have not had the courage to defy the mainstream media and walk the walk.

If their failure in this election should cause the Republicans to remember those Reaganite values, it will serve as a salutary wake-up call. If it causes them to think that the voters want a truly conservative, even more controlling government, we're in for a very rough time ahead.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's Election Day, as you've probably heard, incessantly. The race for control of the U.S. House and Senate, between two political parties representing different sets of powerful, elite fatcats, is a close one, and hence the press coverage has been intense and hysterical.

Given that the story is the potential displacement of the Somewhat Left party (the Republicans) by the Rabidly Left party (the Democrats), Republican partisans have identified an excessive glee among the press, who are widely and accurately documented to be composed almost entirely of leftists, in documenting every misstep and failure of Republican politicians and candidates, and giving Derms a free ride even when they make entirely outrageous statements.

There have indeed been plenty of both—Republican idiocies and Democratic demogoguery—to go around, but it appears reasonable to observe that the preponderance of coverage has criticized the Republicans more strongly than it has done to the Democrats.

That, however, does not necessarily indicate a manifestation of widespread liberal bias among the press, argues Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post. Kurtz says what the press really want not is not a leftist government but an interesting one:

After six years of almost uninterrupted GOP control of Washington, divided government would produce what reporters like best: conflict. A spate of investigations and subpoenas of the Bush White House, led by such new committee chairmen as John Dingell, Henry Waxman, Barney Frank and Charlie Rangel, would liven things up for the capital's chroniclers. Even the mundane prospect of the Democrats being able to bring their preferred legislation to the floor -- though most bills might never make it past the president's veto pen -- would give journalists a new script. Divided government may or may not be good for the country, but it's great for the Fourth Estate.

In retrospect, the GOP takeover of Congress in 1994 was a godsend for journalism. The rise of Newt Gingrich, the government shutdowns, the Whitewater investigations, the Monica investigations, the overwhelmingly party-line vote to impeach Bill Clinton, all fueled thousands of stories about scandal and showdowns that boosted ratings and book sales.

One-party rule is, let's face it, rather predictable, especially with a Republican Congress that has basically gotten out of the oversight business during the Bush presidency. . . .

There surely may be some instances of liberal bias. Maybe the press made too much of Sen. George Allen's "macaca" moment, or wallowed too long in the finger-pointing fallout from the Mark Foley page scandal. At the same time, the press can't very well ignore the rising death toll in Iraq, which is also being cast as bad news for President Bush and his party.

I think that Kurtz is correct to observe that the press are indeed gleeful about the possibility of having new stories to write if the Democrats should take one or both Houses of Congress.

Nonetheless, it appears to me that this cannot be the press's ultimate motivation for skewing coverage to favor the Democrats. If the past six years have been anything, they have certainly been interesting. There has been plenty to write about. Yes, with the Democrats out of power there has been no great flood of horrendously asinine congressional investigations into allegations of perfidy in the executive branch, but the press have taken care of that themselves, after all.

Whereas the big congressional scandal hearing was a ridiculous investigation of the Major League Baseball steroid situation, nothing came of the allegations about the Bush administration illegally identifying a CIA agent to the public. That is a good thing, actually, because the allegations were entirely false. The revelation was in fact done by an opponent of the Bush administration. Congressional hearings headed by the President's enemies would not have changed that fact, but they would surely have destroyed the people falsely accused, as they almost did anyway thanks to the press's outrageously biased and out-of-control coverage of that entirely trivial matter.

The press have thoroughly taken on the adversary party role during the past four years, and they have done their level best to try and to convict the Republican Party of incompetence and malfeasance. (The Republicans, for their part, have done all they could to provide plenty of indications of each.)

The press haven't simply been searching for a more interesting story. They have indeed been trying to influence events and move the country further to the left. That is their right and prerogative in a society with a free press, but it is important that we not pretend that things are other than as they are.

The media's treatment of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress has been justified by the mistakes and misjudgments of each, but the press's treatment of the party currently in power and the runup to today's elections has indeed been motivated by a desire that the Democrats would win in order to institute a leftist government of the sort that the press overwhelmingly favor personally.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Critics tend to look down on movies like Flicka, the new film based on the oldtime bestselling novel My Friend Flicka, which has been filmed a couple of times previously, about an adolescent girl who adopts a wild horse against her parents' wishes.

Flicka fails to undermine bourgeois values, show the family to be an outmoded and socially destructive phonomenon, attack free enterprise as an invitation to greed and exploitation, and demonstrate the superiority of personal autonomy and pleasure-seeking over selfish, socially destructive notions such as duty, honor, and decency.

But that is what makes the movie most interesting and gives it a certain amount of moral complexity.

Flicka vividly depicts how individuals' desires can conflict with others' needs, but it comes down strongly on the side of duty, honor, self-sacrifice, and other such traditional notions. Alison Lohman plays Katy McLaughlin, a sixteen-year-old Wyoming girl whose family operates a horse ranch that is on the verge of bankruptcy. She finds a wild mustang horse which she wishes to tame and train, but her father objects.

Naturally, Katy decides to defy him in secret, surreptitiously working to make the exceedingly wild horse trust her. Meanwhile, her father and mother struggle to keep the ranch from financial ruin.

The family conflicts in the film are highly plausible and presented with great realism and persuasiveness. Even though we never believe that the family will be torn apart (this is, after all, a film geared toward children), we do see and understand how easily that can happen but for the strong values and leadership of both parents, played superbly in the film by Maria Bello and Tim McGraw. Flicka never skims over the frustrations of family life, which makes its treatment of the conflicts, and their ultimate resolution, that much more affecting.

The theme of freedom is strong in the film, and it is explicitly connected to contemporary political concerns in a nonpartisan, general way, which works very well. One can see an influence of the great Hollywood director Howard Hawks behind the film, with its strong female characters, thematic conflicts between the individual and the group, love for the American West, assertion of the value of individualism and political and social freedom within a conservative context, and the evident sheer joy in hard work and personal accomplishments.

As those familiar with the book or the previous film versions will be well aware, several other difficulties and conflicts arise, and all ultimately works out as it should. In that way, too, Flicka resembles a Hawks film. Ultimately, it does have a couple of sappy moments—when, for example, unhappy events tend to happen during rainstorms—but overall it's an interesting, morally engaging film that merits more credit than most critics are likely to give it. Let's hope audiences make up for it.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Naturally it's tempting for critics to see Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan as a satire against political correctness, as Peter Suderman has gamely attempted to do on National Review Online. When something gives us pleasure, we really want to believe that it is good. But that's simply not the way things work, and it is certainly not the way Borat works. Sacha Baron Cohen, the comedian who wrote and stars in the film based on his HBO TV show, makes no attempt to tie the film's vulgar humor to American "political correctness" codes or any other political meaning.

On the contrary, the film is simply a string of jokes based on the grotesqely ignorant central character's lack of decorum regarding bodily functions, presumably as a result of his being brought up in a primitive, poverty-stricken country in southwest Asia.

What the movie really delivers is lots of jokes about sex, defecation, sex, religion, sex, mental deficiencies, sex, cruelty to all creatures less powerful than oneself, sex, ethnic prejudice, sex, and sex. Borat simply is not political, and there is in fact nothing useful that we can learn from it, despite critics' attempts to shoehorn some meaning into it.

On the contrary, Cohen's jokes about rape, for example, are funny and politically incorrect, but they manifest a lack of decorum, they don't stand back from it and make a point about manners and morals. What point, after all, could those particular jokes make? That some people don't take rape seriously enough? That is not a point worth making, and I don't believe for a moment that Cohen is attempting to do so. He's just being funny.

And the film is very funny indeed. It's just a string of dirty jokes, and most of them work pretty well, if the audience with whom I saw the film is any indication.

Yes, we do see, in absentia, the value of manners, decorum, and the flush toilet, etc., but that's not really a lesson for most people, nor does it have anything to do with political correctness codes. It's just funny.

There is an interesting moment late in the film, an extended reference to the film comedy team Laurel and Hardy. I think that the comparison is apt. Although Borat bases its humor on subject matter that would not have been acceptable during the era when the great comedy pair made their movies (and is probably not exactly acceptable even today), it is clear that its makers had the exact same goal as the people behind the Laurel and Hardy movies: to make people laugh, and nothing more.

And there's nothing wrong with that. It's good to have a nice laugh once in a while. We shouldn't have to make excuse