As AP reports, a wealthy leftist sugar daddy has come to the rescue of beleaguered, bankrupt radio network Air America:
Air America Radio, a liberal talk radio network, said Monday that it had reached a tentative agreement to be sold to the founder of a New York area real estate company. The network also said that Al Franken, its longtime headline personality, would depart next month.
The agreement with Stephen Green, the founder and chairman of SL Green Realty Corp., appears to rescue the struggling network, which has been seeking a buyer since last fall when it filed for bankruptcy reorganization after reaching an impasse with one of its creditors.
Any sale would have to be approved by the bankruptcy court. The company has signed what is called a letter of intent to sell itself to Green and expects to agree on financial terms soon, Air America spokeswoman Jaime Horn said.
I love that description of Air America as "a liberal talk radio network," as if it were one of many such.
Stephen Green is a brother of Mark Green, a particularly obnoxious leftist political commentator and landslide failure in a run for mayor of New York City several years ago.
The rumor is that Franken is leaving to make a run for a U.S. Senate seat in Minnesota.
The network has been in disarray from the beginning, both on the air and behind the scenes. Although the founders had what appears to have been a reasonable, achievable goal, the venture never took off and failed to develop a following. Many reasons have been suggested as to why this was so—and this analyst has contributed in the past here and elsewhere—but it appears to me that the main reason for the network's failure was that nobody wanted it.
I rather doubt that the change of ownership will alter that market reality. The only way for Air America to survive will be to change. Real change at the net, however, hardly seems likely.
It's not often that Hollywood depicts stockbrokers positively. That's only one of several nice surprises in The Pursuit of Happyness, a light drama based on a true story and starring Will Smith in a modern-day Horatio Alger tale.
Alger's popular stories were all about the value of hard work. The Pursuit of Happyness includes plenty of hard work on the part of the protagonist, but we live in an investment society today, so in this film the emphasis is on the value of the investments—of time, talent, and money—the various characters make.
The way he does so is through applying the film's central theme: investment. Smith plays Chris Gardner, a floundering medical-device salesman in early 1980s San Francisco. Gardner, heading fast toward middle age, with grey in his hair, wants to make it in life—he is pursuing happiness rigorously—but has flopped at his work and failed in his marriage. He's a decidedly poor provider, and the friction caused by the family's economically dire situation results in his wife leaving him and moving across the country.
Left alone with his five-year-old son, Gardner takes an internship at a big brokerage firm in hopes of getting that one big break.
The problem is that the internship doesn't pay a salary, and he has virtually no money at all. All he has is several hard-to-sell bone-density scanners, in which he invested all of his savings—unwisely, it turns out, as the machines aren't very good and are consequently difficult to sell.
It is clear, however, that he is an enormously intelligent individual; he simply hasn't invested his talents well. After his wife leaves, his situation becomes even worse, as her steady income as a nurse is no longer there to tide the family over the economic rough spots.
And rough spots there are indeed, as President Reagan and his team struggle to fix the economy after the depredations of Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Chris works diligently at the brokerage firm, having to do in six hours what the others have nine to do: he cannot work full days because he has to pick up his son after school and get in line at the homeless center lest he not get a room. As it happens, he and his son even have to sleep in a public restroom one night.
But Chris redoubles his efforts to sell the machines, and somehow he is now able to do so. Here too the theme is investment, as the machines Chris sells are investments in medical practices. Hence, as he spends his weekdays learning about the meaning of investment, we surmise that he is now better able to speak to the sales prospects about how the machine will pay off for them.
The film doesn't dwell on how Chris got to be in the poor situation he was in at the beginning of the story, but clearly he didn't use his gifts as well as he might have. Instead of continuing to work steadily and save a little each week, he went for the big time with the medical devices, but obviously hadn't invested enough time in research before deciding to plunge all of his family's savings into it. Otherwise, he would have known, as is revealed early in the film, that the devices are really unnecessary.
His wife has invested much in her marriage to him, but she decides to cut her losses and leave. The rest of the film will tell us whether her investment would have paid off, anc consequently whether she should have remained with him (beyond, of course, our opinions regarding divorce in general).
At the brokerage firm, only one of the twenty interns will get a job after the six-month trial, so this too might seem a bad investment. But Chris is so smart and so much more mature, motivated, and diligent than the others that one suspects he might just have a chance. Hence it's not so much a gamble as an investment—one that might not pay off, but certainly one well worth making.
His work at the brokerage firm, of course, is all about investments as well. And it's interesting how Chris makes his sales pitch: he talks exclusively about the individual being able to make the most of their resources and retire well, etc.
But most important of all to Chris is his son, Christopher, played by Smith's real-life son Jaden Smith. Despite several instances in which circumstances are conspiring to take the boy away—especially when Chris's wife leaves him—Chris won't let the boy go. He invests everything he can in him, playing little learning-games with him as they walk the streets or ride subway trains. This is an investment too, and it is an investment entirely of love.
Of course, investments don't always pay off, but as Chris learns, no one can guarantee happiness; having a chance at the pursuit of happiness is enough. And in Chris's case, it is.
Malanga makes a strong case for Rudy as a Reagan-style conservative. He recounts well Giuliani's record as mayor of New York City, in which, as Malanga establishes firmly, Rudy supported free markets and individual responsibility, as exemplified vividly in his tax cuts , welfare reform success, "zero tolerance" crimefighting, and firm rejection of racial politics.
As Malanga notes, Giuliani did this in what was one of the most leftist cities in the United States until he became mayor.
There's no question in my mind that Giuliani was a superb mayor and is a solid man of the right in most of his public stances. What many conservatives question, of course, is his record on social issues (such as support for legality of abortions, homosexual marriage, and gun control) and his occasionally unsteady personal life (such as his divorce from his somewhat eccentric wife).
None of this, Malanga argues, should preclude conservatives from supporting Giuliani for President:
[I]n a GOP presidential field in which cultural and religious conservatives may find something to object to in every candidate who could really get nominated (and, more important, elected), Giuliani may be the most conservative candidate on a wide range of issues. Far from being a liberal, he ran New York with a conservative’s priorities: government exists above all to keep people safe in their homes and in the streets, he said, not to redistribute income, run a welfare state, or perform social engineering. The private economy, not government, creates opportunity, he argued; government should just deliver basic services well and then get out of the private sector’s way. He denied that cities and their citizens were victims of vast forces outside their control, and he urged New Yorkers to take personal responsibility for their lives. “Over the last century, millions of people from all over the world have come to New York City,” Giuliani once observed. “They didn’t come here to be taken care of and to be dependent on city government. They came here for the freedom to take care of themselves.” It was that spirit of opportunity and can-do-ism that Giuliani tried to re-instill in New York and that he himself exemplified not only in the hours and weeks after 9/11 but in his heroic and successful effort to bring a dying city back to life.
Malanga's argument against conservative rejection of Giuliani is twofold. Point one is that the social issues are not as important as the economic and national defense policies which are Giuliani's great strength. Point two is that Giuliani is conservative in the really important ways:
As part of Giuliani’s quintessentially conservative belief that dysfunctional behavior, not our economic system, lay at the heart of intergenerational poverty, he also spoke out against illegitimacy and the rise of fatherless families. A child born out of wedlock, he observed in one speech, was three times more likely to wind up on welfare than a child from a two-parent family. “Seventy percent of long-term prisoners and 75 percent of adolescents charged with murder grew up without fathers,” Giuliani told the city. He insisted that the city and the nation had to reestablish the “responsibility that accompanies bringing a child into the world,” and to that end he required deadbeat fathers either to find a private-sector job or to work in the city’s workfare program as a way of contributing to their child’s upbringing. But he added that changing society’s attitude toward marriage was more important than anything government could do: “[I]f you wanted a social program that would really save these kids, . . . I guess the social program would be called fatherhood.”
As a consequence of his rejection of the time-honored New York liberal belief in congenital black victimhood, Giuliani set out to change the city’s conversation about race. He objected to affirmative action, ending Gotham’s set-aside program for minority contractors, and he rejected the idea of lowering standards for minorities. Accordingly, he ended open enrollment at the City University of New York, a 1970s policy aimed at increasing the minority population at the nation’s third-largest public college system but one that also led to a steep decline in standards and in graduation rates.
This is a strong and important argument, and it will be good for the right to argue this one out.
Later in the article, Malanga makes the case that Giuliani is an important enough figure to merit presidential consideration:
The national, and even world, press marveled at the spectacular success of Giuliani’s policies. The combination of a safer city and a better budget environment ignited an economic boom unlike any other on record. Construction permits increased by more than 50 percent, to 70,000 a year under Giuliani, compared with just 46,000 in Dinkins’s last year. Meanwhile, as crime plunged, New Yorkers took to the newly safe streets to go out at night to shows and restaurants, and the number of tourists soared from 24 million in the early 1990s to 38 million in 2000, the year before the 9/11 attacks. Under Giuliani, the city gained some 430,000 new jobs to reach its all-time employment peak of 3.72 million jobs in 2000, while the unemployment rate plummeted from 10.3 to 5.1 percent. Personal income earned by New Yorkers, meanwhile, soared by $100 million, or 50 percent, while the percentage of their income that they paid in taxes declined from 8.8 to 7.3 percent. During Giuliani’s second term, for virtually the only time since World War II, the city’s economy consistently grew faster than the nation’s.
Today, Americans see Giuliani as presidential material because of his leadership in the wake of the terrorist attacks, but to those of us who watched him first manage America’s biggest city when it was crime-ridden, financially shaky, and plagued by doubts about its future as employers and educated and prosperous residents fled in droves, Giuliani’s leadership on 9/11 came as no surprise. What Americans saw after the attacks is a combination of attributes that Giuliani governed with all along: the tough-mindedness that had gotten him through earlier civic crises, a no-nonsense and efficient management style, and a clarity and directness of speech that made plain what he thought needed to be done and how he would do it.
Like great wartime leaders, Giuliani displayed unflinching courage on 9/11. A minute after the first plane struck, he rushed downtown, arriving at the World Trade Center just after the second plane hit the South Tower, when it became obvious to everyone that New York was under attack. Fearing that more strikes were on the way—and without access to City Hall, the police department, or the city’s command center because of damage from the attacks—Giuliani hurried to reestablish city government, narrowly escaping death himself as the towers came down next to a temporary command post he had set up in lower Manhattan. “There is no playbook for a mayor on how to organize city government when you are standing on a street covered by dust from the city’s worst calamity,” one of his deputy mayors, Anthony Coles, later observed.
This is all true, and I think that Malanga is right to conclude that Rudy Giuliani merits serious consideration as a presidential candidate.
In addition to that, I think that the discussion of Giuliani's qualifications for national leadership could be very salutary for the right. Those who define themselves as conservatives find it hard to support someone with Guiliiani's record on social issues.
As a liberal of the right, I too disagree with Guiliani's positions supporting abortion, gay marriage, and the like. However, I think that Guiliani would have to move a little to the right on these issues in order to secure the Republican nomination, and that as president he would not be any less supportive of the Right's social agenda than Ronald Reagan was as president.
Guiliani reminds me rather strongly of Reagan, in fact. Although Reagan talked the talk on social issues, he didn't really walk the walk, unless I wasn't looking when Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Casey voted to turn back Roe v. Wade in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision. Similarly, Reagan had been divorced and had a rather less than perfectly salubrious family life. But on the big things Reagan was the best president of the past century.
If Rudy Guiliani could be half that good, that would make hiim a superior president indeed. His candidacy merits serious consideration.
A comment on our Academy Awards post below asked our opinion about the controversies regarding this year's Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford's annual forum for what Hollywood types see as quirky and interesting films and what usually turns out to be a collection of rubbishy postmodern cliches. It's a good question.
Child endangerment is nothing new to the movies; it's just that audiences are more accustomed to shameless emotional peril and physical but non-sexual scenarios.
But the kids are definitely not all right at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
Prior to its world premiere screening Monday, "Hounddog," starring 12-year-old Dakota Fanning as an incest and rape survivor in 1950s Bayou country, drew intense if uninformed criticism, mostly from pundits who hadn't yet seen the film. . . .
Objections to "Hounddog" have focused on the drama's theme of dangerously sexualized pre-teens; a rape scene, in which Fanning's Elvis-loving Lewellen (shown only from the shoulders up) is assaulted by the local milkman, and the question of whether Fanning should have been allowed to participate at all.
"Hounddog" is one film among many in this year's festival roster dealing with child and teen endangerment, mostly non-sexual but persistently grisly. In "An American Crime," based on a true story, Catherine Keener plays Gertrude Baniszewski, the Indiana mother who imprisoned the daughter of carnival workers in her cellar, burned her with cigarettes and allowed her children to participate in the torture. The film isn't exactly tortuous, but it isn't revealing, either: Despite valiant work from Keener, who keeps us guessing about the depths of this hard-luck woman's capacity for viciousness, "An American Crime" settles for a drab visual and narrative recounting of a very, very bad situation.
"Weapons," a drama in which disaffected teenagers enact a chain of revenge killings while looking for something to do, may have been one of the festival's early non-favorites, but it sold for a modest sum to Sony Pictures Classics.
Tuesday evening brought the world premiere of "Trade," a fact-based story like "An American Crime." It is described in the Sundance festival program notes as "an undeniably disturbing film set in a sinister world where young, virginal children are kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery."
Now that officials of the Sundance Film Festival, and those associated with the movie Hounddog, have been blasted for exploiting 12-year-old Dakota Fanning, they have tried to blunt the attacks by saying that the film contains a "carefully choreographed rape scene" that was done in an "artistic way."
Simulated child rape, then, is okay as long as it doesn't offend Hollywood sensibilities. The problem is that no one knows what offends Hollywood save for a movie about the death of Jesus.
It certainly doesn't bother Hollywood to feature a movie about a man having sex with a horse, which is what the Sundance entry Zoo is all about. Indeed, this movie was deemed by Sundance judges as a "humanizing look at the life and bizarre death of a seemingly normal Seattle family man who met his untimely death after an unusual encounter with a horse."
To be blunt about it, the movie tries to sanitize the sick death of an obviously deranged Seattle pervert who perforated his colon after he molested a horse.
Kenneth [Turan] of the Los Angeles Times was unhappy with Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ because of its "almost sadistic violence," but he loved the bestiality in Zoo, calling it "an elegant, eerily lyrical film."
Well, I haven't seen any of these films, but the descriptions here don't surprise me at all. This is what all too often passes for wit these days, and everything happens in the Omniculture.
What I think is significant is that our culture has room for both Sundance explorations of depravity and the Heartland Film Festival's celebration of "filmmakers whose work explores the human journey by artistically expressing hope and respect for the positive values of life," as the annual event's organizers express it.
I am not at all impressed by most of the films that garner adoration at Sundance, but there are more than enough movies out there that are well worth watching, so I'll just continue to do my best to point people towards them.
Money talks, and if you really want to change the culture for the better, you should see more movies, as I argued in my Weekly Standard article on the subject. It's better to be a customer than a scold.
The notion that the left is more liberal-minded than the right is one of those thoroughly wrong ideas that nearly everybody believes despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Consider, for example, the specter of censorship of the press.
While in possession of the presidency or Congress for most of the past three decades, the right has done a grand total of . . . nothing . . . to censor the press on the national level.
Which is as it should be. True liberalisam and a respect for America's federalist system recognize that Congress shall make no law restricting freedom of the press, and that's that. According to the U.S. Constitution, that is entirely up to the states, and they may indeed regulate public dissemination of information pretty much to their heart's content, contra a half-century of asinine rulings against state authority in the matter by the U.S. Supreme Court.
And the right has done nothing substantive to censor the media on a national level. On the contrary, the Federal Communications Commission under President Reagan added immeasurably to the freedom of the American media by jettisoning rules that restricted freedom of the press.
The left takes a far different attitude toward the media.
When an outcry against rock music lyrics arose in the 1980s and led to congressional hearings, it was from the left, from Tipper Gore and other Democrats.
Similarly, Democrats have been complaining about violence in the media for decades now, although they heartily approve of obscenity and depictions of all sorts of sexual activities.
Then there was the atrocious McCain-Feingold "campaign finance" political speech censorship bill, one of the most outrageous incursions against freedom of speech in the nation's history. Yes, McCain is indeed a leftist on issues such as these.
Despite efforts to quell complaints that they air too much death, blood and mayhem, broadcasters are facing a renewed battle over regulating televised violence.
With a fresh Congress sworn in and a major federal report expected soon on TV gore, pressure is likely to mount to more aggressively stem graphic and gratuitous scenes in shows. One proposal would give regulators powers similar to those they have now to punish indecency and coarse language over the airwaves.
In addition, TV violence is shaping up as a 2008 presidential campaign issue with some of the leading potential candidates already at the forefront of the issue. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has long talked about the effect of gory TV shows and video games on children. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) favors allowing families to buy cable channels separately so they can spurn objectionable shows. Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) also have bemoaned TV violence.
Yes, conservative Sen. Sam Brownback has "bemoaned TV violence," but he voted against the aforementioned, atrocious McCain-Feingold Bill after originally co-sponsoring it. So when the chips were down, he supported free speech.
It's true that Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and other figures on the religious right continually complain about things they don't like in the culture, but they're preachers, after all, and that's their job. And as noted earlier, their complaints amount to exactly nothing when it comes to actual government action. They have done no harm to freedom of speech, other than to make some people yearn for a chance to censor them.
Let's hope that the left will be all talk and no action as well.
FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps, a Democrat, this month warned that the door might be opening to regulation of violent programs.
"In the absence of action from the industry, I think we need to be looking at all our options," Copps said.
This should not be a federal issue, if the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has any meaning at all, but that's not stopping anybody, the LA Times article notes:
But although the FCC has regulatory power over coarse language and sexual content, it has no clear authority to fine broadcasters for excessive bloodshed and mayhem.
Some in Congress have been eager to change that. In 2004, a bipartisan group of 39 House members—including the new Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.)—asked the FCC to study the effect of violent programming on children and how its airing might be restricted.
One option pushed by Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) would give the FCC the authority to address graphic violence in TV programming, including cable and satellite. His 2005 bill went nowhere, but he plans to reintroduce it. With his own party now in the majority, Rockefeller may get hearings and a vote, further propelling the issue.
"Obviously, the preference would be to have the industry police itself when it comes to excessive violence," Rockefeller said. "However, if they can't or won't do it, then Congress must step in and address this growing societal problem."
"Obviously, the preference" for normal, sensible people would be for Congress and the FCC to stay the hell out of this, but that's clearly too much too wish for.
Academy Award Nominations Reflect Cultural Shibboleths
The nominations for this year's Motion Picture Academy Awards were announced today, and they basically repeated those made earlier this year by the Golden Globes. Dreamgirls was left out of the Best Picture nominations, rather surprisingly according to Hollywood insiders, and Sacha Baron Cohen was not nominated for his performance in Borat, which was not a surprise. (The Academy seldom honors broad comic performances, except those that are intended as serious. . . .)
The AP story noted that ethnicity appeared to be a plus this year:
With five blacks, two Hispanics and an Asian, it was the most ethnically diverse lineup ever among the 20 acting nominees. After decades in which the Oscars were a virtual whites-only club, with minority actors only occasionally breaking into the field, the awards have featured a much broader mix of nominees in the last few years.
The nominations are indeed much more "diverse" ethnically than in prior years, and in fact much more so than the population of the country. A non-caucasian is now decidedly more likely to receive an Academy Award nomination than a caucasian is.
Can affirmative action for caucasian actors be on the way?
Peter O'Toole was nominated for Best Actor for his role in Venus, which nobody saw, which suggests that he will miss out with a record eighth time nominated and no award. Forrest Whittaker is favored to win for his performance as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. Meryl Streep was nominated for a record 14th time, in this instance for her performance as Cruella DeVille in The Devil Wears Prada. Eddie Murphy was nominated for his daring and uncharacteristic choice to play a character less than fifty feet tall and under 700 pounds in Dreamgirls.
Little Miss Sunshine received a Best Picture nomination and a couple of performance nominations for being the comedy version of last year's winner, Crash (that is, the spunky little independent movie that could). And Babel received a Best Picture nomination for being both epic and disturbing and for being another variation on Crash in telling multiple stories.
All in all, another great year for postmodern Hollywood cliches.
"The Curse of the Golden Flower" and Two Ideas of Tragedy
The Curse of the Golden Flower, Zhang Yimou's latest film to be released in America, is a brilliant motion picture that interestingly exemplifies important differences between East and West.
Following on the heels of two superb, epic dramas released in the United States in 2004—Hero (Ying xiong) and House of Flying Daggers—the Chinese director manages to top those films. The Curse of the Golden Flower is even more visually gorgeous than its recent predecessors, which is saying a lot. Zhang has been making brilliant, critically acclaimed films since his 1987 debut with Red Sorghum.
In Curse,the visual themes are even more cohesive than in the beautifully photographed Hero and Flying Daggers. Red and gold dominate, and the symbolism is carried through thematically, with red characteristically representing blood and life, and gold suggesting both riches and the power and beauty of nature, in its evocation of the sun. Black intrudes as the specter of death. Though these visual cues are truisms nearly to the point of being cliched, Zhang's intelligent use of them, and the astounding beauty of the compositions, enable the visuals to add meaning to the narrative without being annoyingly assertive about it.
As in Zhang's other recent dramas, the interiors of buildings are puzzling mazes, in which the viewer often becomes as lost in the architecture as the characters are in the complex plot.
The plot is indeed complex but told with great clarity and coherence. Gong Li plays Empress Phoenix, who is being slowly poisoned by her husband, the Emperor Ping, played by Chow Yun-Fat. Phoenix is aware of the poisoning but cannot openly disobey the emperor and must continue to take her deadly daily dose of fungus-laced medicine. However, she is plotting to take the kingdom away by conspiring with her elder son, the emperor's second son. (He has a son by a previous wife who is identified later in the film.) On the night of the Chrysanthemum Festival, an army of ten thousand will storm the palace under the command of Prince Jay.
Of course, things don't work out as planned, and the plot twists are truly Shakespearean in character, with the tawdriness of the characters' schemes making a great contrast with the grandeur of the settings and the importance of the events to the empire's future.
And there's the rub. In the end—without giving away any plot secrets—much happens, but nothing changes. And that is so very Eastern, with the cyclical sense of history common in the East. Ultimately, nothing changes. Yin and yang go out of balance, and in the end, they are back in balance. But that is all. Things don't get appreciably better for anybody, and the great irony of The Curse of the Golden Flower is that after all the effort to change who will sit on the throne, none of it changes anything—and, more importantly, it's clear that things wouldn't be noticeably different in the realm if Prince Jay had the throne. The individuals' loves, hatreds, and ambitions put things out of balance, and once the conflicts are resolved, balance is restored. But that's all.
American critics seem to sense this but not understand it at all. For example, Boston Globe critic Wesley Morris claims, "once it's all over, 'Golden Flower,' like 'Hero' and 'Flying Daggers,' leaves a flat taste." Other critics have had the same complaint.
But it's only a flat taste if you're expecting a Chinese director to make Western-style dramas. Which is, of course, a silly thing to ask.
Things are very different in Western drama of the past two millenia. One could surely argue that Greek tragedies exhibit a cyclical sense of history, driven as they are by the idea of fate. In the Christian era, however, Western tragedies have often been driven by a sense of progress. In Shakespeare, for example, there is frequently a great sense of a malign presence being driven out of society. By the end of Hamlet, for example, the stage is littered with the corpses of schemers, miscreants, the indecisive, and the weak, yet the playwright conveys a powerful sense of optimism about the future for the Danish kingdom. At the end of Macbeth, both tyrant and his evil muse are gone. The same is often true of the history plays.
In contemporary times, consider former Hong Kong and now American director John Woo, whose films tend to reflect a belief in the possibility (indeed the necessity) of personal and social transformation. (One of his Hong King films is even named A Better Tomorrow in English translation.) Woo, though born and raised in Hong Kong, was educated in a conservative Lutheran missionary school. His ideas are thus quite Western.
The Curse of the Golden Flower comes from a very different tradition. As in Hamlet, the stage is littered with corpses at the end, but the vision for the future is altogether different. Understanding that difference makes the film a richer and more rewarding experience.
American Muslims' Protests of Fox TV Show "24" Are Misdirected
American Muslim groups have protested to Fox Television for the use of Muslims as terrorists on the Fox TV program 24,CNN reports:
Two years ago, Muslim groups protested when the plot of the hit Fox drama '24' cast Islamic terrorists as the villains who launched a stolen nuclear missile in an attack on America.
Now, after a one-year respite during which Russian separatists played the bad guys on the critically acclaimed series, Muslims are back in the evil spotlight. Unlike last time, when agent Jack Bauer saved the day, the terrorists this time have already succeeded in detonating a nuclear bomb in a Los Angeles suburb.
As we noted earlier this week on this site, the attribution of the fictional terrorists as Muslims actually makes a good deal of sense. After all, if you are going to have the premise that terrorists are operating on American soil, then Muslims would indeed seem to be the most likely ones to do so at this point in time. That much should be obvious.
If anything, the program has gone too far in the opposite direction over the years, pretending that threats other than Islam are predominant. As Fox pointed out in a written statement reprinted in the CNN story:
Over the past several seasons, the villains have included shadowy Anglo businessmen, Baltic Europeans, Germans, Russians, Islamic fundamentalists, and even the (Anglo-American) president of the United States. The show has made a concerted effort to show ethnic, religious and political groups as multidimensional, and political issues are debated from multiple viewpoints.
The Fox statement also pointed out that the show's audience is not grotesquely stupid:
24 is a heightened drama about anti-terrorism. After five seasons, the audience clearly understands this, and realizes that any individual, family, or group (ethnic or otherwise) that engages in violence is not meant to be typical.
What is most annoying about the protests, however, is the blatant lying being perpetrated by some of the complainers, as in this quote from the CNN story:
Engy Abdelkader, a member of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee from Howell, New Jersey, launched a campaign Wednesday to encourage Muslims offended by the program to complain to Fox.
"I found the portrayal of American Muslims to be pretty horrendous," she said. "It was denigrating from beginning to end. This is one of the most popular programs on television today. It's pretty distressing."
That is bunk. The program is taking great care to ensure that viewers do not see all Muslims as jihadists, as I noted in my comment here on Monday, and as the CNN report also observed:
Concerns about Muslims' civil rights, detention of terror suspects in Guantanamo-like holding centers, and stereotyping are given vastly expanded treatment on '24' this year. In one exchange, the show depicts the president's national security adviser challenging the White House chief of staff over the detention of Muslims without criminal charges.
"Right now the American Muslim community is our greatest asset," the security adviser says. "They have provided law enforcement with hundreds of tips, and not a single member of that community has been implicated in these attacks."
"So far," the chief of staff responds.
Those American Muslims who fear being tarred with the same brush as the jihadists should simply take care to ensure that the U.S. Muslim community stresses its full loyalty to the United States and the rejection of jihad here and everywhere else. Whether that changes their relationships with Muslims elsewhere in the world is for them to work out for themselves. Fictional TV shows can't change that reality.
Another item in our Everything Happens in the Omniculture series: professional pillow fights. Reuters reports:
Welcome to the Pillow Fight League, which has been drawing growing crowds in Toronto since it formed early last year, and is now set to export its campy fun to New York City.
The league is the brainchild of 38-year-old Stacey Case, a T-shirt printer and musician who came up with the idea that people would pay to see young women in costumes beat the tar out of each other with pillows -- and that women would volunteer to whap each other in front of a crowd. . . .
However, they're quick to point out it's not really just about young women in revealing costumes tussling in front of a largely male audience. Well, maybe it is a bit.
Rather like professional wrestling but with scantily clad women as the fighters, the bouts are presented as if they were real contests, and the performers adopt amusing stage personae:
But it's the fighters that make the show, and they come in all shapes and sizes, with names like Sarah Bellum, the smart one, and Boozy Suzie, who enters the ring with a beer that referee Patterson confiscates with a stern wave of his finger.
Lynn Somnia staggers to the ring in a hospital gown with electrodes dangling, apparently released from her sleep-deprivation chamber.
Top contenders include Betty Clock'er -- by day a financial editor and by night a cushion-swinging housewife who brings a plate of cookies to ringside -- and Polly Esther, billed as the waitress from hell ("And somebody's gonna get served!," The Mouth bellows as she struts toward the ring).
While the personas are all good fun, the action in the ring is real, and as Case is quick to point out, unscripted.
The rules are simple: women only, no lewd behavior, and moves such as leg drops or submission holds are allowed as long as a pillow is used. After that, it's up to the combatants. . . .
This past weekend, Polly didn't disappoint, torquing her long arms to deliver punishing pillow blows to Betty Clock'er in a fight to decide who will travel to New York this week to face PFL title holder Champain, an event Case is hoping will give an adrenaline shot to the league's profile.
Of course, the real money, and the promoters' real goal, is in TV:
The bigger picture involves a TV deal. Case says he has already turned down bids that didn't offer the mix of attention to the action and characters that he says makes the league more of a draw to the arts community than the mud-wrestling crowd.
In recent days National Review Online has published a couple of very good articles on the value of fathers, using cultural products as their examples and evidence. First, Kathryn Lopez wrote about Rocky Balboa, noting that the title character presents a strong image of fatherhood in his dealings with his son and with the fatherless son of a woman he meets in a tavern and eventually hires to help out in his restaurant. I would add that Rocky also acts as a surrogate father to several other characters in the film, such as his buddy played by Burt Young, and the ex-boxer he defeated in an earlier film
Lopez quotes an excellent and memorable speech from the film, in a scene where Rocky talks to his self-pitying son:
Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It is a very mean and nasty place and it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t how hard you hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done. Now, if you know what you’re worth, then go out and get what you’re worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hit, and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you are because of him, or her, or anybody. Cowards do that and that ain’t you. You’re better than that!
Lopez then gives some real-life facts about fatherhood:
That’s notable because, as Dr. Meg Meeker writes in her recent book Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters, pop culture isn’t exactly overflowing with messages encouraging men to be manly and to take pride in knowing they have something their families need. In what is a bit of a motivational seminar, Meeker writes to dads: “You were made a man for a reason, and your daughter is looking to you for guidance that she cannot get from her mother.”
Meeker, focusing on girls, goes on to contend that girls with a dad in their lives have higher self-esteem, are less likely to get pregnant as a teen (are less likely to lose their virginity before they turn 16), and find themselves with fewer learning and behavioral problems. And the list goes on. The National Fatherhood Initiative has its own long scary-stat list. Kids without dads are more likely to be poor, to wind up in jail. Absent fathers can affect weight, dropout rates, smoking, and drug and alcohol abuse.
Looking at Sweden, where big government (Hillary’s village) steps in to take over where a dad isn’t providing, a 2006 Institute for American Values study finds that “boys reared in single-parent homes were more than 50 percent more likely to die from a range of cause — such as suicide, accidents, or addiction — than were boys reared in two-parent homes.” How’s that for a dire dadless picture?
I have long thought that a strong and loving father is a critical element in ensuring that a girl does not grow up to be promiscuous and easily abused emotionally and physically by romantic partners—which are characteristics very much to the detriment of any individual of either sex but especially to women (as one should hardly have to point out)—and the statistics certainly confirm this.
Hence it's good when the Omniculture offers up positive figures such as Rocky Balboa. Of course, everything happens in the Omniculture, so there are plenty of alternative examples, of bad fathers, but even these can provide valid lessons if seen correctly, as Rebecca Cusey points out in today's issue of NRO. Citing prominently featured laudable fathers in Friday Night Lights, Ugly Betty, and Everybody Hates Chris, Cusey identifies what is good about these fathers:
These three dads have one thing in common: They’re there and they care. In the real world, study after study confirms what humanity has always known: Dads matter. Kids who grow up in homes with dads who are there and who care are less likely to do drugs, drop out of school, become sexually active, and engage in criminal behavior. TV has come a long way since Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, or The Cosby Show, but TV still reflects society’s view of dads. Fathers on TV can be broken into three basic categories: The good, the bad, and the bumbling.
These men are a strong contrast to the many bad dads on TV. Cusey writes:
But some TV fathers are just plain bad. This often comes, as in real life, when parents put their own desires above the welfare of their children. Bimbo after bimbo parades through Two and a Half Men. Uncle Charlie (Charlie Sheen) instructs young Jake to manipulate, ogle women, and swear despite the bleating protestations of dad Alan (Jon Cryer). In The New Adventures of Old Christine both parents are more interested in bedding new people than in their son. Scrubs, often a thought-provoking show, has reached a post-modern low with a story line in which star Dr. Dorian (Zach Braf) impregnates casual date Kim. In a series of scenes that is intended to be lighthearted, but is more sickening, they whimsically try to decide: parenthood or abortion? Usually intended to be shockingly funny, these dads’ indifference to their children comes off as just mean. In The War at Home, parents wage a losing battle against kids’ behavior, refusing to set any standards higher than emerging from adolescence without a police record. Melodramatic dramas, such as Desperate Housewives and The OC portray parents as selfish and poorly behaved as their children. Sometimes more so. These are the postmodern dads, who figure kids will be kids, teens will party and sleep around, and character is not worth molding. They reflect real-life parents whose biggest fear is to be seen as judgmental or hypocritical.
Given the prevalence of bad fathers in real life, the variety of rotten ones found on TV is realistic and a source of good moral lessons for all of us. As Cusey notes, however, "Happily, good fathers aren’t as hard to find on TV as one might think."
Conservative critics tend to look at the surfaces of things and complain that the media send bad messages to the society as a whole. As Cusey's article exemplifies, and as I've pointed out on frequent occasions, surface events are not what is really important in cultural products. What really counts is what the events mean. These articles show a good trend in right-of-center media criticism: a desire actually to understand things before pontificating on them.
This Sunday, the two coaches will be leading teams in the NFL conference championship games, with the possibility that both will coach in the Super Bowl this year. And of course reporters have characterized this as a significant event, which of course it is, insofar as football is significant.
But there is a thorn in the acknowledgment of the men's accomplishment. Smith noted in a TV interview that he is forced to bear an additional responsibility because he is black.
It's unfortunate that a black American cannot just be a coach, or an entrepreneur, or a housewife but must be seen as a black coach, entrepreneur, or housewife. Americans tend to see each black or woman as a representative of a group rather than an individual.
As Smith put it yesterday,
I hope for a day when it is unnoticed, but that day isn’t here. This is the first time. You have to acknowledge that. We do. I do. I realize the responsibility that comes with that.
But as much as anything, I realize my responsibility of just being the head coach of the Chicago Bears, and it’s been a long time since we’ve been in this position. I’m just excited for our football team to be able to take another step.
Smith and Dungy have both handled these expectations admirably over the years, but they shouldn't have to. New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton and New England Patriots coach Bill Bellichik are coaches, not white coaches, and that's the way it should be for Smith and Dungy. They are people, not symbols.
We should hope that the day arrives soon when black Americans don't have to bear an additional responsibility to other blacks or to society as a whole (having to exemplify our national ideal of equal opportunity) because of an accident of skin color, but instead are judged solely by their own accomplishments. To add to people's burdens by making them symbols only makes their lives that much more difficult.
Most important of all, judging people as individuals gives each person the greatest incentive to use their time and talents—and that is the surest way to open the road to success for everyone.
The Only Kind of Conservatism These TV Writers Could Imagine As Not Entirely Repulsive
On the Acton Institute's Power Blog, Jordan Ballor analyzes a scene in the most recent episode of the ABC-TV series Brothers and Sisters which he shows to be indicative of the mentality of big-government conservatism. Ballor writes:
Here’s a speech [a conservative U.S. Senator played by Rob Lowe] gives to a group of ladies and donors (My comments are in brackets. The full episode is available for viewing at ABC.com here by clicking on the Brothers & Sisters graphic and selecting the episode marked 1/14/07. McCallister’s speech begins at approximately the 01:22 mark of the show):
I barely left the house most Sundays [not even to go to church?!]. My mom would cook elaborate dinners for neighbors, friends, and sometimes people we barely knew. By ten I could whip up a perfect meringue, to glaze a pan, dress chicken [these last two may be terms for particular dishes and I probably have not gotten them right].
But by the time puberty rolled around I’d had enough. Football, friends seemed more important. So I told her I was done. I was a guy, I didn’t want to spend Sundays in the kitchen with my mom. And you know what she said? She told me that someday I would realize that taking care of people is not masculine or feminine. It’s a privilege and it’s an honor. And she was right.
And one day I realized that politics is about the privilege and the honor of taking care of people, of making certain that the weak are protected, the poor are sheltered, and the hungry fed. My mother passed away six years ago, but I work every day to honor her memory in politics and in my kitchen. Thank you very much.
This captures pretty well the spirit of big government conservatism, as represented in real life by some other California Republicans. In such a view, it is the task of government to “take care of people,” periphrasis for a nanny State if I ever heard one. Indeed, politics are about sheltering the poor and feeding the hungry, taking care of people who obviously can’t take care of themselves. It’s not about empowerment but about infantilization.
Ballor is right in his observation that the speech characterizes big-government conservatism, and his assessment that it is greatly sick-making.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association gave out its annual Golden Globe awards last night. and the big winner was the English school of acting.
British performers were prominent among the winners, and the more eccentric the character, the more likely was recognition. Helen Mirren won for her portrayal of the enigmatic British queen Elizabeth II in The Queen and for portraying Queen Elizabeth I in the TV miniseries Elizabeth I, Forrest Whitaker won for his oddly winsome portrayal of mass-murdering former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, Sacha Baron Cohen grabbed the Best Actor (Musical or Comedy) award for Borat (a fairly ridiculous choice, even though Cohen is smart and funny; he's hardly a great actor at this point, but he is British, so fork it over, foreign writers), and Hugh Laurie, Bill Nighy (who is always good), Jeremy Irons, and Emily Blunt snagged awards in TV categories.
The British actors all gave vivid performances, usually presenting decidedly eccentric characters but employing a rather straightforward acting approach without too many histrionics. Laurie, of course, is an exception in his portrayal of the preternaturally irascible Dr. Gregory House in the U.S. TV program known by the character's surname, but he's playing an American, so the perfoming style choice makes sense.
Other than the English performances, the awards tended to go to ethnically "diverse" persons and productions. American actress America Ferrera won a GG for her performance in the TV series Ugly Betty, and deserved it. She's very good. Other prominent winners of GGs last night were the films Dreamgirls (lots of flash) and Babel (sporting a different kind of flashiness) and director Martin Scorcese for The Departed, whose best film in quite a few years was chock full of scenery-chewing acting performances (and a more nuanced and perfectly briliant one by Leonardo DiCaprio). Jennifer Hudson and Eddie Murphy won for performances in Dreamgirls.
Speaking of The Departed, is anyone else as tired of Jack Nicholson as I am? His acting never was particularly subtle, but he now appears entirely devoted to a limited bag of obvious, overly familiar acting tricks he has employed without variation for a couple of decades. He always was as much of a personality as he was an actor, but now the persona has all but entirely overridden the characters he plays.
The Fox TV series has progressed from a cult hit to an award-winning cultural bellwether, so it's an interesting thing to see what each season's central story line consists of. Last night was the first half of Fox's four-hour, two-night season premiere (an excellent way to get viewers deep into the season's story line very quickly).
The story starts off with a bang, with Jack Bauer, just released from a Chinese prison (having been traded by the Chinese for undisclosed U.S. assets), where he had undergone unspeakable tortures but not spoken a single word for two years (of course!), only to find out that he is being traded to a U.S. sympathizer in an Islamic terrorist organization (who hates Jack because the agent killed the terrorist's terrorist brother) so that the Muslim will turn over his brother to the United States, which is urgent because the brother is about to launch a series of bombings in the Uinted States.
The U.S. government and Jack both know that he will be killed by the Muslim, but Jack is willing to accept his destiny because in doing so he will be dying for something, as opposed to dying for nothing, as would have been the case had he died in the Chinese prison.
That is a beautiful and morally charged moment. It's truly great drama. Well done.
I hardly need tell you that Jack spectualarly and violently escapes from his Muslim captors, and then the double-crosses, shocking revelations, and violence rush forth in quick succession. The first two hours are the best start for a 24 season since season 2. Last year's episode struck me as rather disjointed in too many ways, and last night's installments showed a much tighter and stronger plot.
An interesting note: in the opening sequences of episode 1, various characters make several statements to the effect that mearl all American Muslims are loyal to the United States and don't support terrorism at all, here or elsewhere. Then, the villains turn out to be Muslims, and one of them is one of the people whom we are set up to think is an innocent Musliim American being unfairly targeted for abuse.
Mercer's argument is that Winfrey's reasons for building the school are highly laudable because they have not only the emotions (true sympathy) but also the logic just right:
Her politics may be populist; but her deeds are patrician. Dare I suggest that there was something both Randian and Jeffersonian about this particular project?
As to the Randian grandness: The petty-minded at home and abroad carped about Oprah’s opulence. They wanted to know why she needed “this kind of environment for African girls, who were coming from huts.” Indeed, the project cost over $40 million and was intended, in Oprah’s words, to create “a beautiful environment that would inspire [the students].” She fussed over the architecture, she installed an amphitheater, fabulous library with fireplace, modern marble kitchen, an audio-video center, gym, tennis courts, and spa—the scale and the splendor scream “made in America.”
This is an excellent point. The critics' assumption seems to be either that the girls will be distracted by the beauty of the place, which seems a rather silly argument, or, what they are most likely thinking, that the girls will be spoiled by the gorgeous environment and be unhappy going back to their scummy home environments.
Well, I say, let them be unhappy about that. As Oprah knows very well from her own experience, being unhappy with one's present situation is the strongest motivator for hard work and the success that comes from it. The experience of beauty and niceness gives these girls something fine to which to aspire.
The other argument made against the school by Americans has been that the effort is elitist, benefitting the best students and leaving others behind. Mercer points out what should be obvious to anyone but a fool, that people cannot reach their potential unless they are given the tools to do so, and that goes for the gifted as well as the rest:
As for the Jeffersonian judiciousness: Thomas Jefferson insisted that all children, even the simple ones, must know “reading, writing, common arithmetic,” and history (not “social science” or “self esteem”). He would have abhorred America’s sclerotic public schools for teaching none of the above. Still more would he have condemned our schools for the contempt they show the gifted. Jefferson believed that geniuses ought to be "raked from the rubbish." American schools allot the gifted two pennies out of every 100 educational dollars and work hard to integrate them with the gimps.
Mercer points out that there is something powerfully and laudably elitist about what Oprah has done:
Oprah can protest all she wants, but, like Jefferson, her actions bespeak a belief in “a natural aristocracy among men,” which Jefferson considered “the most precious gift of nature.” In an 1813 letter to John Adams, he described this natural aristocracy as distinguished by “virtue and talents,” and disavowed “an artificial aristocracy… without either virtue or talents.” Jefferson would have thus approved of the way Oprah separated the wheat from the chaff for her school, selecting each girl for her grades and grit. The 152 girls were chosen for qualities rare everywhere (and certainly among American school kids).
Oprah also made an interesting point in discussing why she felt these South African children were indeed ready for the challenges such a school would provide. Mercer writes:
By now everyone has heard what Oprah had to say about kids in American inner-city schools: “The sense that you need to learn just isn't there. If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don't ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms, so they can go to school.”
And it’s not just the inner-city children. Despite being the best funded school system in the world, American public schools graduate the thickest kids in the developed world. Paradoxically, while our high-school students score near the bottom in international competitions, when asked to rate themselves, they consistently give themselves top marks. But then so do their parents and teachers. Thanks to constant, unwarranted worship, and no moral or rigorous intellectual instruction, American schools are full of lame and lazy megalomaniacs.
These South African girls couldn't be more different from their American counterparts of both sexes, as Mercer notes:
By contrast, the lasses Oprah chose for her Academy come from poverty unimaginable in the US. Before Oprah, Mbali Meyers, for example, lived in a one-room shack with no running water or electricity and shared a water tap and outhouse with 30 neighbors. The family (which is typically matriarchal or fatherless) would often go to bed hungry. “At night,” reports CNN’s Jeff Koinange, “Mbali burns the midnight oil by candlelight, doing her homework on her knees. There's no room here for luxuries like chairs.” Yet Mbali has consistently been at the top of her class.
Many of Oprah’s girls were also raped. South Africa has the most rapes per capita (as well as murders and assaults). African young men there consider rape a form of recreation. They even have a name for gang rape: "jackrolling." Some of the girls are AIDS orphans. Yet despite the trammels of despair, they’ve retained a child-like innocence and sweetness, qualities unusual among America’s jaded girls. One young girl said she felt like crying—but crying of happiness. The other said this was “more than a dream come true. It's like a fairy tale.”
In conclusion, Mercer notes that Winfrey doesn't just preach about helping people, she has done something real and powerful and immensely good for these young girls from a tragically disheveled nation across the globe:
And the fairy godmother herself looked grand in pink taffeta. Never once did Oprah preach about how the West could cure poverty if governments gave more (one of Jolie’s idiot utterances). She simply “gave more.”
On that day, Oprah exemplified the qualities of a great American philanthropist and entrepreneur.
Surface realism is a perfectly nice thing for a movie to have, but it's a mistake to elevate it beyond its real importance — and that is true for audiences, critics, and filmmakers alike.
In the case of films based on Biblical events, the temptation in recent years has been to deride movies of the past as unsophisticated and kitschy, and to elevate current-day religious films as superior. This is a mistake, as there are many excellent films with Biblical themes that viewers obsessed with surface realism would miss, as I noted in my National Review Online review of the excellent 2004 film The Gospel of John.
In the case of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, the passion for realism manifests itself in a shocking luridness that happens to serve the film very well. (For a full analysis of Gibson's film, see my National Review Online article on it.)
In The Nativity Story, now in theaters, a similar sense of the violence, corruption, and dirtiness of the Israel of that time prevails, but here too, the filmmakers make sure that it serves the story.
The film depicts the Israel into which Jesus Christ is born as a rather dirty, poor place under Roman occupation. The focus of the film is nonetheless strongly on the widespread belief that the Messiah is about to arrive. Following the Biblical account accurately, Mary's cousin Elizabeth conceives a child late in life, which God sends as a sign of the One to come. The child, of course, will grow up to be John the Baptist.
Upon realizing that his fiancee, Mary, is with child, Joseph is understandably appalled by what he can only assume is an act of unfaithfulness on the part of his betrothed, and the actors do a fine job of playing these scenes. By introducing the specter of the Jewish punishment for adultery at the time—stoning to death—the film gives a strong motivation for Joseph's decision to accept the child as his own; it will save the lives of both Mary and the as yet unborn child. Afterwards, as in the Biblical accounts, Joseph is visited by an angel who confirms Mary's story. This entire story line is presented very well indeed.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the distant East, three wise men interpret the stars and some old texts and conclude that a savior for the entire world will soon be born. Guided by a unique star formation, they set off to greet this individual. Debating amusingly among themselves, the magi provide a welcome lightening of tone in their scenes.
Of course wicked Herod, King of Israel, fears the coming Messiah and plots to avert his arrival (and Herod's presumed downfall as the new king comes) by killing everyone who fits the varying interpretations of the descriptions of the Messiah in the Tanakh, what Christians call the Old Testament. This leads, of course, to some violent movie action, suspense, hairsbreadth escapes, and the like.
It's all, however, in great accord with the Biblical accounts and illustrates the story quite well. (The biggest factual quibble I noticed is that the magi seem to arrive on the night of Jesus's birth, whereas the Gospel of Matthew makes it clear that they must have come at least a few days later, and even that's a pretty minor complaint.)
I wouldn't throw away De Mille's King of Kings,William Wyler's Ben-Hur, or any of my other old favorites, but The Nativitiy Story is a fine addition to one's collection of films based on the Bible.
On December 28, 2006, the North Carolina State Bar filed ethics charges against Durham, North Carolina District Attorney Michael B. Nifong for public statements made related to the so-called Duke University rape case.
As noted earlier on this site (see articles here, here, and here) and elsewhere, the case was a blatant instance of false prosecution from the beginning. The Freedom Line article nicely summarizes Nifong's motives in pressing the entirely groundless case forward:
As most everyone now knows, Nifong was a career prosecutor until he got appointed District Attorney to fill out an uncompleted term. He liked the top job. He decided to run for election to keep it. At the time, he had some competition. He needed a political edge.
Nifong got that edge when, in March 2006, a stripper hired to perform at a party for the Duke lacrosse team claimed she had been gang raped there.
Talk about a prosecutor's political dream. The stripper was black, poor, a single mother working her way through college. The lacrosse players were mostly rich, mostly white, going to that school of privilege and prestige. In the . . . South! (Harper Lee, call your agent.)
Nifong went public, talking, talking, talking. The media, scandal-starved after months of not discovering the dastardly deed or doers thereof to little Natalee in Aruba, took the story global. The Duke University administration, after years of carefully cultivating its reputation to match its ivy-covered facades, looked ever so presumptuously at the prosecutor's edge and decided to jump over it with him. (Now, Duke is clumsily trying to jump back.)
The ethics charges filed against Nifong thus far cover only violations resulting from his public statements. Based on subsequent developments, including collusion with a DNA lab to obfuscate exculpatory evidence, amended complaints and other actions should soon follow. . . .
For those who pay attention to such arcane proceedings, several aspects of the North Carolina State Bar complaint against Mr. Nifong are noteworthy.
First, the State Bar said that it opened a case against Nifong only weeks after the original rape charges were made. Second, the State Bar seems to have initiated the ethics action itself. Third, the complaint is about as public as any could get, while most such actions by state bars are secret.
All three of those initiatives – speed, responsibility, transparency -- are to be commended, because all are so rare.
Your intrepid correspondent, as you will remember, called for Nifong's impeachment and removal from office last May, and for the prosecution of the unnamed accuser and the firing of Duke University President Richard Brodhead at the same time. I branded this "the North Carolina false prosecution scandal" from the start.
It is good to see that the state's bar has finally gone on record as agreeing with that assessment. Now it is up to other state authorities to follow suit.
Analyzing the disagreement between libertarians and liberals as to whether the two sides have much in common and might make good political bedfellows, and concentrating on leftist Jonathan Chait's furious rejection of libertarian Brink Lindsey's overture suggesting an alliance, Wood uses the exchange to exemplify the absurd amount of anger in political discourse today, and the amount of it that seems so thorougly unjustified by the intellectual or political differences at hand.
We know all of that already, of course, but Wood adds something of value to the discussion. He succinctly and correctly identifies the sociological and cultural origins of the great unleashing of anger in contemporary political discourse:
The Newly Angry are moved by a sense that they are most authentic, most transcendently themselves, when they are unleashing their anger. New Anger is the narcissistic self in high dudgeon.
Wood points out that modern-day, extreme expressions of anger in political discourse are actually attempts to characterize oneself as authentic and one's cause as just. This, he astutely observes, is an outgrowth of our transition "from a culture that prized self-control to a culture that prizes self-expression" (a phenomenon which I identified in NRO in 2003). Wood notes that although polictical anger has existed for a long time (ever since people have had any influence over their governments, I would note) the big change is the movement away from an ideal of self-control to one of self-expression:
Anger at political adversaries, of course, is nothing new. Reflecting on the intensification of political anger in the last few years, some commentators have pointed to the extraordinary acrimony between partisans of Jefferson and Adams in the 1800 election as proof that the nation has seen worse. But that comparison misses something. Go back and read the vitriolic diatribes of 1800 and you will find numerous attacks on Jefferson as a would-be tyrant and a man of low morals; and numerous attacks on Adams as a scoundrel who would sell the nation back to the British. But you will nothing remotely like, “I hate Thomas Jefferson,” or “I hate John Adams.”
Why not? Americans in 1800 certainly knew what political anger was but they faced powerful restraints. George Washington, who was completing his second term, was a living reproof to those who couldn’t control their anger. He was known to be a man of quick temper who, by dint of hard effort, smothered it. That was the ideal. Children were taught from a young age that they had to master their anger, and that to fail at this was to own a morally serious flaw. Politics, being inherently oppositional, is bound to test such a principle. The newspapers and pamphlets of 1800 are full of Jeremiads, hard-hitting satire, and libelous personal attacks, and the writers give the impression (usually behind the mask of a pseudonym) of enjoying the rollicking pleasure of their verbal extravagance.
I should observe that the period leading up to the War Between the States included expressions of anger similar to those we see today, in which people routinely characterized one another as demons and in which reason was regularly tossed out the window. I think that this observation actually brings up a point that should be crucial in understanding the current situation:
Slavery was important.
It was a central moral issue. It went to our very definition of ourselves and what is human.
And there could be no compromise on it.
Today, by contrast, political discourse has become absurdly impassioned over issues such as when to turn Iraq over to its elected government, what if anything to do about climate variation, how much more money to waste on propping up the welfare state, and other such issues which, however important they may be in making our comfortable lives even cushier, have not one one-hundredth of the importance of the issue of whether people should be viewed as property.
Antebellum Americans had a demmed good reason to be angry at one another. There is nothing like that in play today, with the possible exception of stem cell research and related issues—and on that issue there hasn't been much discussion at all in comparison with the issues mentioned above.
As life has become easier for Americans, the arguments have become more ferocious.
The biggest difference between America then and now, and between today and all other times in the history of the United States, is this: We were vulnerable to attack.
When Jefferson and Adams were arguing and their followers fuming, the British were a severe, present danger, and in fact would attack the United States just a few years later. In that regard, both Jefferson and Adams were on the same side. There could be no doubt that they were allies of the heart on the fundamental level.
Today it is our very sense of post-Cold War, sole superpower invincibility that allows us to fight each other so furiously.
The hostilities, so evident during the Clinton administration and after the 2000 elections, died down temporarily when we perceived ourselves as threatened after the 9/11 attacks. But as the threat receded, there being no terror attacks on American soil after our intitiation of the War on Iraq, the furor over every little thing arose again, even greater than before.
Everything happens in the Omniculture, and without a central set of accepted premises to guide us in our search for solutions to our social problems (which are endemic to mankind and will always exist), our political discourse becomes increasingly disturbed and pornographically violent.
That is unlikely to change until we are either confronted by a real, undeniable, and imminent danger to our very existence, or we come once again to share a set of general values widely across society.
The first is, of course, a consummation for which no sensible person would wish, and the second is something that, alas, appears to have become very unlikely indeed.
Nifong Drops Rape Charges Against Falsely Accused Duke Students
As you may have heard in the news, District Attorney Michael Nifong has dropped the rape charges against the Duke University lacrosse players falsely charged last March. As Thomas Sowell notes in National Review Online, Nifong decided to drop the charges when the head of the lab that looked at the DNA evidence in the case testified under oath that the accuser had DNA from other men on her, but none from any Duke player.
However, as Sowell astutely notes, Nifong has left some relatively minor charges hanging over the three young men identified by the stripper in a rigged photo lineup. Nifong's blatant misconduct led to this author's call for his impeachment last May, along with prosecution of the accuser and the firing of Duke University President Richard Brodhead, who sided with the accuser and castigated the Duke lacrosse team, the Duke student body, all non-poor caucasians, and all males. The man is an utter disgrace.
From the start of this sordid affair, I have consistently referred to the players as falsely accused, the accuser as phony, Nifong as guilty of gross prosecutorial misconduct, and Brodhead as a race panderer and a disloyal, smarmy class warrior. Nifong's latest action confirms all of those characterizations.
Sowell notes that Nofong's strategy in leaving some charges remaining against the falsely accused men is designed to save not only his political life but indeed to keep himself out of prison. His blatant misconduct in this case merits disbarment and criminal prosecution for obstruction of justice, as I have argued before on this site. Sowell points out that the remaining charges are Nifong's only hope of evading disbarment and possible criminal prosecution against himself:
It is an old ploy to keep some charges hanging over the heads of accused individuals, even if you don't have enough of a case to convict them, just so that they can be persuaded to plea bargain down to something with minor penalties, in order to get the hassle over with.
That would also get the heat off Nifong, who could then claim that in fact he had some basis to prosecute in this case, when in fact he had nothing from day one.
If bad gets to worse, Nifong can take the case to a jury, hoping to find at least one juror so biased by racial resentments as to refuse to declare the Duke students not guilty. A hung jury can save Nifong from being hung for a groundless prosecution.
As I argued months ago and regularly since, this case is not just about three college boys, a stripper, and a prosecutor. It is about whether ambitious prosecutors are to be allowed to use the power of the law as a tool of their own political ambitions. Sowell agrees, noting that if Nifong gets away with this outrageous misconduct,
. . . it would allow a nationally publicized gross misuse of prosecutorial powers to go unpunished, emboldening other prosecutors across the country to think that they can get away with anything.
What happens to Nifong matters far beyond Nifong, just as what happens to these Duke University students matters far beyond these students.
That is why we should care about this case, and why Nifong should be impeached forthwith. Once he's impeached, his replacement can drop the charges against the falsely accused Duke students, and the prosecutions of Nifong and the accuser can begin.
A clearly well-intentioned movie is rather more of a rarity in Hollywood these days than we should like, and as a consequence I am favorably toward such pictures even when the results don't quite measure up. Night at the Museum is one such, a big-budget comedy loaded with special effects for Christmas vacation audiences, aimed at pre-adolescents whose sense of wonder is stronger than their sense of logic. It's got nice visual effects, nice performances, nice ideas, and nice intentions.
Yet it sells its young audience short, as the filmmakers seem never to have recognized that just as the protagonist's young son can figure out the meaning of things without the answers being written in hundred-foot-tall letters, so can ordinary children who attend movies. Nor do the filmmakers seem to understand that children who are not ready to figure out a message won't get it just because you shout it. As are most contemporary films aimed at kids, Night at the Museum is mostly rather silly and implausible even as we grant its premise that a magical Egyptian tablet allows the exhibits in a museum to come to life every night.
The messages, as I say, are laid on with laborious explicitness. One is that everyone in the world would be happy if we all just tried to understand each other and love one another. Not exactly going out on a limb with that one, they aren't. The movie makes this point thoroughy explicit in an extremely cringemaking scene in which the protagonist gives Atilla the Hun an impromptu session in psychotherapy (psycobabble, actually), which ends with the historical marauder in tears. I kid you not. To be fair to the filmmakers, the scene is meant to be funny, but to be fair to the audience, it is only right to note that it isn't.
This insanely pie-in-the-sky idea is balanced by a couple rather more attainable messages for the wee ones. The more predictable one is that history is a good thing and that it's important to know the past so that—well, you know why. The film portrays knowledge, imagination, and the pursuit of wisdom as immensely positive things, and it is good indeed to see a film that does so.
The other message, which is given mostly by implication rather than explicit smarmy Hollywood jibber-jabber, is that it's important for each person to take responsibility for their actions, with the corollary point that being willing to accept the task of looking after the welfare of one's neighbors and make hard choices is what makes for a good person and a real hero. OK, bravo for that, and I hope the kids take note.
All very nice and Christian messages they are, but it would be nice if they weren't written in such gigantic letters. Still, at least the filmmakers mean well, and that counts for something.
What is not forgiveable is that the film entirely wastes the talents of Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney, using them as decidedly uninteresting foils in the protagonist's getting of wisdom. While it is good to see Ben Stiller play the protagonist correctly as the straight-man character he is, resisting the tendency to overact and telegraph comic effects, it would have been wonderful to see these two brilliant comic actors stretch their legs a bit. Indeed, one might greatly hope that a film that celebrates the imagination would be a bit more imaginative in this regard—and in most other ways. But I guess we can't have everything, can we?
Hey, maybe that's the real message of Night at the Museum !
The Curse of the Golden Flower, Zhang Yimou's latest film to be released in America, is a brilliant motion picture that interestingly exemplifies important differences between East and West.
Another item in our Everything Happens in the Omniculture series: professional pillow fights. Reuters reports:
As if the pressure on National Football League coaches weren't enough, especially during the playoffs, Chicago Bears coach Lovie Smith and Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy are forced to labor under the additional condition that 
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association gave out its annual Golden Globe awards last night. and the big winner was the English school of acting.
The Fox TV series has progressed from a cult hit to an award-winning cultural bellwether, so it's an interesting thing to see what each season's central story line consists of. Last night was the first half of Fox's four-hour, two-night season premiere (an excellent way to get viewers deep into the season's story line very quickly).
Surface realism is a perfectly nice thing for a movie to have, but it's a mistake to elevate it beyond its real importance — and that is true for audiences, critics, and filmmakers alike.
Upon realizing that his fiancee, Mary, is with child, Joseph is understandably appalled by what he can only assume is an act of unfaithfulness on the part of his betrothed, and the actors do a fine job of playing these scenes. By introducing the specter of the Jewish punishment for adultery at the time—stoning to death—the film gives a strong motivation for Joseph's decision to accept the child as his own; it will save the lives of both Mary and the as yet unborn child. Afterwards, as in the Biblical accounts, Joseph is visited by an angel who confirms Mary's story. This entire story line is presented very well indeed.
