Dungy Supports Freedom Regarding Concept of Marriage
It ought to be perfectly normal for a person to state their support for the traditional idea of marriage, but things are topsy-turvy these days.
As you will recall, I praised Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy for standing up to homosexualist activists who criticized him for accepting an award from the Indiana Family Institute. I somehow missed the subsequent report that Dungy has now openly stated his personal opposition to proposals to change Indiana state law to force individuals and businesses to acknowledge "marriages" of same-sex couples.
This is good news, and I bring it to you in case you missed it.
Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy said he knows some people would rather he steered clear of Indiana's gay marriage debate, but he clearly staked out his position nonetheless.
The Super Bowl-winning coach "embraced" the stance of an Indiana organization supporting an amendment to the state constitution that would ban gay marriages, and he added Tuesday night at a gathering of the Indiana Family Institute that he's "on the Lord's side."
"We're not trying to downgrade anyone else," said Dungy, coach of the Super Bowl champion Indianapolis Colts. "But we're trying to promote the family — family values the Lord's way," Dungy said. "IFI is saying what the Lord says. You can take that and make your decision on which way you want to be."
The USA Today story said Dungy characterized his opinion on the matter as not a dislike of homosexuals but as a position arising from his religious faith:
The coach said his comments shouldn't be taken as gay bashing, but rather his views on the matter as he sees them from a perspective of faith.
It's important to bear in mind that what Dungy is doing is defending a liberal position: he wants the government to refrain from forcing people to acknowledge unions between homosexuals as marriages.
This is the essential point. Where the use of force is proposed is against those who don't want to have anything to do with homosexual marriage.
The matter at hand is whether the government should force people to accept and acknowledge "marriages" between same-sex individuals.
No one—repeat no one—is making any effort whatever to stop homosexuals from having marriages performed in any kind of ceremony they may choose. That is not at issue.
What people do object to is changes in the law that would force people to acknowledge these unions as marriages.
There is no practical need whatever for such laws. Insurance companies, for example, can allow benefits for such couples if they wish, but the government doesn't force them to do so. That is exactly as it should be.
The ones who are trying to force these "same-sex marriage" laws on a decidedly unreceptive population are the ones who are against liberty in the matter.
And they should be characterized as the tyrants they are.
Here's another installment in our continuing effort to clarify the misnamed political alignments of the post-Cold War West.
Today we take up the topic of how the word "liberal" has been hijacked by people who are anything but that.
Today the convention remains that we think in terms of "left" and "right," yet without a Cold War between freedom and communism to provide a sensible means to understand and separate the two poles of political thinking, the terms tend to sow more confusion than sens. Hence, I do not see any powerful need to sustain a left-right distinction between political positions at this time.
However:
I do believe that there are two main poles of political thought: liberalism and statism. This distinction, I believe, is fully true and highly useful.
This distinction, I think, makes much more sense of our current political divisons and alliances.
What is commonly called the Right today in the United States can be roughly associated with classical liberalism.
Central to this liberalism are the 18th century thinkers Smith and Burke.
Adam Smith remains an important figure in the liberal pantheon, in being the bridge from earlier strains of liberalism in Western history (which were very strong in the West but have been largely forgotten since the Enlightenment era).
It is important to understand, however, that Smith was nothing like a modern libertarian—his Christian moralism, open nationalism, and willingness to accept much government intervention in the economy would immediately disqualify him in most libertarians' eyes if he were writing today. Classical liberalism, moreover, starts not with just Smith but, equally important, Burke, for whom a good many modern libertarians have little use.
The Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek is another good touchstone for modern-day classical liberalism, but he too supported a very large amount of government intervention in the economy and shares much more with Smith and Burke than with modern libertarians. If doctrinaire libertarians were to read all of his writings they would quickly toss much of his practical policy advice overboard. My article in the next issue of National Review is on Hayek and how his thinking can contribute to a revival of classical liberalism . But there is one thing on which classical liberals and libertarians would agree: the nature of the state and the reason for individual freedom: the social contract.
This is a most important point. The classical liberals had a completely different idea of the social contract from that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his followers. The former (taking their conception of it directly from its English originators) believed that the social contract truly was a contract, in which people gave up some freedoms in order to avoid Hobbesian chaos. The latter believed in the General Will and that individual freedom was socially destructive and absolutely not a valid goal of society, cf. Rousseau.
Consider, for example, the issue of intervention in the economy. Classical liberals supported—and still support—the idea of freeing people from any unnecesary social strictures in order to allow their talents to flourish. Heredity titles and state-mandated racial segregation are good examples of such structures which any classical liberal would agree should be dismantled as bad for both individuals and society in general.
Smith, Burke, Hayek, and any other real liberal would take this approach. For them (and modern-day classical liberals) the issue is one of means, not the end.
For Smith, Burke, Hayek, and others, markets are the best means of freeing people to employ their talents in their own interest, which also benefits society in general.
Hence, they argue, government policies should liberate people to participate and reach their full potential in the marketplace, to the benefit of all. How best to liberate them is the question, and it involves both philosophical and practical questions.
The modern liberals' position is very different. They seek equality of results, and engage in an aggressive, egalitarian leveling of conditions for all. (In practical terms, this typically means pulling the successful down to the level of those who are not as talented or industrious.) In so doing, they enjoy a level of power and dominance which it is inconceivable for a true liberal to justify.
Modern liberals are statists, pure and simple. The source of their position is the idea of the General Will, bequeathed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and augmented by other statist writers through the ensuing centuries.
The source of their power is that they are the valid discoverers and interpreters of the General Will. The evident benevolence of their position allows them to undertake their efforts with whatever level of ruthless they find comfortable.
This matter of the General Will is essential in understanding statism, I believe.
Liberalism and statism are indeed two separate streams of thought, which have existed since Western civilization has existed (see my article on "The Two Streams of Western Civilization" in the current, Winter issue of Orbis magazine).
A certain amount of commonality can at times be found between people in both of these movements, but a basic disagreement on human nature and the function of the Social Contract is always going to be very difficult to overcome.
That is the real reason for the disagreement between those who follow classical liberalism and those who adhere to the modern variety. The former are true liberals, whereas the latter are statists.
Currently on National Review Online, Gerald J. Russello points out that the alternative to Christianity is not universal individual freedom but in fact despotism, violence, and widespread exploitation of people.
In a smart analysis of the overall impression made by the HBO series Rome, Russello, editor of The University Bookman, points out that the show makes a powerful case for Christianity (probably unintentionally) simply by accurately portraying one of the great pagan civilizations. Russello writes,
The most pro-Christian show on television doesn’t have a single Christian character in it — and it couldn’t have. Rome, the hit series now in its second season on HBO, is a surprising affirmation of the Western tradition. While it is packed with sex and violence, its (probably unintended) message is that Rome was desperate for Christianity.
Although recognized by critics as one of the best new shows on television, less frequently noted is how the show rebukes those who would reject the West’s Christian heritage and go back to “neo-pagan” life. In fact, Rome illustrates that historians like Christopher Dawson were correct in emphasizing the revolutionary effect Christianity had on the pagan Roman world.
Russello notes that the program is set in the closing days of the Roman republic, at the end of the first century BC and beginning of first century AD. Russello notes that Rome was a slave society, and that is something very difficult for modern Americans to comprehend. What dominates one's attention, however, is the stunning prevalence of cruelty and ruthlessness:
Three features stand out, amidst the thrilling story lines, well-crafted battle scenes, and first-rate acting. The first is the casual cruelty of the Roman world. . . .
The Romans did develop a legal culture that is the basis of the Western legal system, including notions of natural law and rights, but that system was harsh: Testimony from slaves in court, for example, was not admitted absent torture. It had not yet been enlightenedthrough the principles of equity that would make their appearance with the Catholic Church’s canon law and admonitions of charity. . . .
Wives and children had almost as low a status as slaves, and again the show portrays harsh realities without exaggeration or superficiality. Husbands could, and did, beat their wives with impunity, their children were only extensions of the father’s will, and the wife was clearly not the equal partner. . . . Women without husbands would become destitute, be sold into slavery, or become prostitutes.
Russello then points out that paganism is not some sort of freedom from religious strictures but is in fact much more demanding than Christianity:
Finally, there is religion. Rome is saturated with it — there are prayers and oaths, offerings made to deities known and unknown, and religious processions and priestly orders. A pagan world, in other words, is not one in which we control the gods, as trendy leftists suppose, but in which we are ever at risk of offending some god for failure to make the right offering or sacrifice. Moreover, these gods rarely provide a guide to conduct or right behavior — they are inscrutable.
Russello's conclusion is both provocative and intellectually unassailable:
[T]hose wishing to reject the West’s Christian heritage should take a hard look at what that world was like before the arrival of Christianity.
In a comment on my item on Wodehouse Playhouse, regular visitor Mike quotes George Orwell's July 1945 essay "In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse." Mike astutely points out that Orwell's defense of Wodehouse characterizes the Great PGW as the performing seal the latter pretended to be, rather than a brilliant comic writer whose works have some interesting and valid thought behind them.
Now, it is important to note that in this article Orwell correctly and valiantly stepped forward to defend Wodehouse from absurd charges of collaboration with the Nazis, charges of which Wodehouse was entirely innocent. (It is a sorry saga in which the government and media of the time come off very badly indeed.)
In doing so, however, Orwell makes several claims about Wodehouse that are thoroughly unjustified.
Orwell's critique of Wodehouse veers far away from an analysis of the particular merits of PGW's work, to indulge instead in a vigorous ride on Orwell's favorite hobbyhorse. Mike notes an example:
It should be noted, however, that Orwell un-self-consciously allows his own prejudices to surface on occasion, as here: ". . . Wodehouse's real sin has been to present the English upper classes as much nicer people than they are."
Now, for all I personally know, the English upper classes might be an irredeemable pack of bounders worthy of such censure; but how does Orwell know? First-hand experience, or the received wisdom commonly and uncritically accepted by Socialists everywhere?
Another of our commenters, Joe, points out that Orwell most certainly did have some contact with the upper classes, and that is a good point. However, Orwell's characterization of Wodehouse in the passage quoted by Mike is seriously wrong nonetheless. Wodehouse most certainly did not "present the English upper classes as much nicer than they are." His upper classes are populated by a far greater proportion of bounders, miscreants, harridans, twits, no-brains, ditzes, phonies, prigs, ignoramuses, hypocrites, obsessives, and flibbertigibbets than has ever existed anywhere in reality—and I am including the U.S. Congress in this.
Orwell is utterly fantasizing if he thinks Wodehouse presents the English upper classes as anything but wildly varied and with an inordinately strong presence of greed, venality, vanity, narcissism, ignorance, and vengefulness. Here, again, Orwell rides his hobbyhorse to an entirely absurd conclusion.
Similarly, Mike points us to Orwell's observation that Wodehouse fails to have followed in the footsteps of Upton Sinclair and other subliterary fiction-writing muckrackers:
Wodehouse's attitude towards the English social system is . . . a mild facetiousness covering an unthinking acceptance.
and
. . . a harmless old fashioned snobbishness is perceptible all through his work.
Here too, Orwell is dead wrong. As the list of character types and personal flaws noted in the previous paragraph indicates, Wodehouse has no illusions about the character of the English upper classes, and certainly proffers none.
Orwell is correct to note that Wodehouse makes in his narratives no overt statement that the English upper classes are evil and must be overthrown and put to the guillotine, but that simply shows Wodehouse's common sense: it would ruin the effect of his stories, and nobody would be reading them today. As a result, we can see in Wodehouse's writings a characterization of a senescent aristocracy at its most vain and mad, and thereby benefit from a knowledge that privileged classes of any kind at any time are carrying the seeds of their own demise.
In this way, one could argue (and I would indeed do so) that more real wisdom about social classes and the perils of privilege has been engendered by Wodehouse's writings than those of any 100 left-wing journalists of his time, excepting only Orwell himself.
And Wodehouse's writing are much more pleasing to read. Positively delightful, in fact.
Mike also quotes Orwell's opinion of the characters of Jeeves and Wooster, and finds the critic's analysis desperately wanting. Mike writes:
Orwell's assessment of Jeeves should excite controversy among both Plum-ophiles and Englishmen in general: "The most immoral, or rather un-moral, of Wodehouse's characters is Jeeves, who acts as a foil to Bertie Wooster's comparative high-mindedness and perhaps symbolises the widespread English belief that intelligence and unscrupulousness are much the same thing."
Here I have to agree with Orwell's observation, but disagree strongly with his judgment. Jeeves is clearly a guardian angel in human form. His morality is not worse than ours, but better, as he sees well beyond the immediate situation and is ruthless in protecting his charge from all danger, regardless of the cost. Remember, in the Bible angels are seen to think nothing of killing thousands of people if that's the right thing to do. That, in his quiet and much smaller but thoroughly merciless way, is Mr. Reginald Jeeves for you. A half-point for Orwell here.
Looking at the Orwell article itself, one finds many other revealing moments in which the author is very obviously seeing Wodehouse from a highly politicized point of view, as in the following:
Wodehouse is almost incapable of imagining a desirable job. The great thing is to have money of your own, or, failing that, to find a sinecure. The hero of Something Fresh (1915) escapes from low-class journalism by becoming physical-training instructor to a dyspeptic millionaire: this is regarded as a step up, morally as well as financially.
I've read Something Fresh (and most of the other Blandings Castle novels), and nowhere does Wodehouse suggest that he, as author of the work, personally considers work to be something to be avoided and morally less worthy of approbation than leisure.
On the contrary, Wodehouse himself worked almost incessantly. He wrote nearly a hundred books and five hundred stories, and he toiled hard over each one, as a look at any biography of him reveals. He seems to have done little in his life other than write and play golf, and spent only a small fraction of his time on the latter. He wrote and rewrote his works incessantly, poring over each page through several drafts.
His writings do not deny this ethic; they confirm it. What one gains from Something Fresh (and countless other Wodehouse narratives) is the insight that a lot of people simply hate to work and will do all that they can to avoid it—a notion that Orwell, the great advocate of the English working classes, would have been loath to acknowledge and to which, as a consequence, he appears to have been blinded. Indeed, in this case Orwell misses this obvious conclusion and instead blames Wodehouse for expressing an attitude which he clearly cannot have held.
Orwell assesses Wodehouse's work from too narrow a point of view, that of social class and political struggles. There is much more to life than that, however, and Wodehouse's works point us to those things if we are wise enough to look below the frothy surface of his delightful humor and shimmering prose.
True it is that PGW did not intend his works to be social commentaries. And we should all be immensely grateful for that, for there are innumerable social commentaries to be found in this world, but few writers who have consistently been able to produce prose as brilliant as Wodehouse's, much less make their readers laugh out loud on a regular basis (at least, to do so intentionally) and keep them engrossed in plots of remarkable complexity.
Surely Wodehouse's is by far the more impressive accomplishment.
In a comment on the humorous piece genrerously supplied by Mike (not Linda) below, regular visitor Joe asks our opinion of P. G. Wodehouse. I shall find occasion, I am sure, to write more about PGW in future, as he is one of my favorite authors. In the meantime, here are my thoughts on the first DVD set of the excellent 1970s BBC TV series Wodehouse Playhouse, which starred the brilliant comic performers John Alderton and Pauline Collins in faithful adaptations of Wodehouse stories, primarily the author's Mr. Mulliner tales, where PGW was really at his funniest.
You can find the entire review at National Review Online, here. Here's an excerpt, to whet your appetite:
[T]he great British humorist P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) . . . was widely acknowledged, by authors such as Orwell and Waugh, as one of the greatest prose stylists in the English language. They were correct, and the fact that this great gift was placed in the service of humor is one of the instructive ironies of life.
The first-person narration of wealthy London idler Bertie Wooster, in the numerous stories and novels Wodehouse wrote about him and his lifesaving valet Jeeves, is one of the great delights of English literature. A good prose style, however, is difficult to reproduce on the screen. (Voiceover narration, which is sometimes tried, is seldom effective and usually just a distraction.) Hence, Wodehouse's writing, though full of brightly drawn characters and dazzling dialogue, seldom transferred well to film during his lifetime. Few people particularly admire the Fred Astaire film A Damsel in Distress (I am one of that happy few), for example, and the two 1930s adaptations starring David Niven and Arthur Treacher as Wooster and Jeeves, respectively, are for addicts only. (Which means, of course, that I have seen them more than once.)
The British Broadcasting System (BBC) got it just right, however, with the production of Wodehouse Playhouse. Just before the author's death at age 93 in 1975, the BBC produced this series of adaptations of Wodehouse stories from three of his six major sagas. (Wodehouse wrote approximately seventy novels and three hundred short stories.) Series One of Wodehouse Playhouse, now available on DVD in a nicely presented two-disc set from Acorn Media, includes six Mulliner stories and one golf tale. (Wodehouse had a passion for golf, and he wrote nearly three-dozen stories set in that particular world, narrated for the most part by the Oldest Member (who has not actually played the game himself for many years.) The two forthcoming sets will present more from each of those series and three Drones Club stories.
The producers did well to concentrate on the Mulliner stories, for it is in these tales, according to no less an authority than the author himself, that Wodehouse tried to be at his funniest. "I must warn my public," he wrote in the preface to an omnibus volume of these stories, "that in The World of Mr. Mulliner I am writing as funny as I can, and I can only hope that there will be no ill results." The stories are told by Mr. Mulliner, owner and barman of the Angler's Rest, and each tells the tale of one or more of his many and varied relatives. (The stories name 43 in all.) . . .
Laughter may not be the best medicine, but it is a fine tonic for a worried soul. Wodehouse Playhouse makes an excellent introduction to this great humorist's world, which is a highly satisfying and, I should say, healthy place to be.
Read the entire article here. Buy the Wodehouse Playhouse sets here.
Republicans hungry for revenge after getting blown out in the 2006 elections are thinking hard about letting the mayor carry the party’s banner in 2008. As Michael Barone has demonstrated, Giuliani has the potential to turn the electoral map substantially in the GOP’s favor. But the appeal is visceral. Here is a man who imposed order on a crime-ridden, seemingly ungovernable city. He took the hardest and best shots the New York liberal establishment had to offer and proved to his skills as a political streetfighter.
Baker recognizes, however, the huge mountain of problems Giuliani will have to climb in order to obtain the support of religious conservatives and others concerned about the nation's current moral tenor:
. . . Giuliani has a long way to go to reassure nervous pro-lifers about his judicial intentions. Consider the following lines from a speech the mayor gave to the National Abortion Rights Action League in 2001:
This event shows that people of different political parties and different political thinking can unite in support of choice. In doing so, we are upholding a distinguished tradition that began in our city starting with the work of Margaret Sanger and the movement for reproductive freedom that began in the early decades of the 20th century.
So it is consistent with that philosophy (of political freedom) to believe that in the most personal and difficult choices that a woman has to make with regard to a pregnancy, those choices should be made based on that person's conscience and that person's way of thinking and feeling. The government shouldn't dictate that choice by making it a crime or making it illegal. (parenthetical added)
There is a great deal to make social conservatives skittish in this brief portion of a short speech. No candidate of social conservatives would welcome NARAL in the first place, much less praise Margaret Sanger, whose name is anathema to pro-lifers of all stripes. What might be more concerning is the equation of abortion with personal rights of conscience. That is the language of Supreme Court opinions, the kind that invoke penumbras of this and emanations of that as they remove issues of great controversy from the democratic process.
Baker then considers the likely scenarios for Giuliani's candidacy, as regards social conservatives:
When the primary season moves past window shopping into decision-making, Giuliani will be pressed hard about his speech to NARAL and whether he really believes in appointing judges who won’t legislate from the bench. . . .
The deal is on the table. If Giuliani says he thinks abortion should be legal, but that the Constitution—interpreted properly—leaves that decision in the hands of the democratic process, then he will be the first pro-choice candidate to carry the GOP banner in a long time. If he is unwilling to be quite so explicit, then his opponents will open up with both barrels. McCain will have the largest opening with his strong pro-life voting record. Maybe the mayor will still have the votes, but it becomes much less of a sure thing. Much less.
I think that Baker's assessment is spot-on, and it seems likely that this race is far from decided.
Movies based on comic books, which are now called graphic novels, are so common as to be something of a genre of their own, with an increasingly formulaic set of common conventions and devices. These stylistic innovations have invigorated the motion picture industry to a notable extent—as in the Spider-Man and X-Men series and individual pictures such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
These innovations come with a price, however, and nobody but Sam Raimi, director of the series, seems able to solve the problem.
Two recent films exemplify the situation.
300 is certainly watchable and interesting, though I wasn't as impressed by its historical accuracy as the historian cited by USA TOday was. 300 makes it look as though the Spartans held off the Persians by themselves, whereas they actually led an army of well over a thousand Greeks, although even that total was vastly outnumbered by the Persians. The film was based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller and strongly bears the stamp of Miller's anti-authority and anti-clerical stances so evident in his works. The story is a very strong one, however, and the film captures the narrative drive of it quite well.
But what it bears most strongly in imitation of the graphic novel is its visual style. Critics love the film because its visuals are quite stunning. They're very impressive, and some of them are reminiscent of the painterly compositions of great older films such as Adventures of Robin Hood, Gone with the Wind, and Lawrence of Arabia.
Unlike those films, however, 300 makes it difficult for viewers to identify with and hence sympathize strongly with the characters in the film. And that is not because of the narrative being set in ancient Greece, etc. We can easily comprehend and sympathize with the Spartans' situation as thorough underdogs vastly outnumbered by their enemies.
No, it is for a far simpler and more fundamental reason: we cannot see the characters' faces very well. Human beings take their cues from facial expressions and vocal inflections of amazing variety and subtlety, and both of these are relatively difficult to discern in 300. The faces are often seen in shadow or otherwise obscured, with most attention lavished on the other visual elements. The subtleties of the voices are often lost in the din of sound effects, and even when the voices are in the foreground we cannot make much of them because they are too low in the sound mix, as the filmmakers leave the volume way down during these scenes, apparently to create a greater contrast for the eardrum-splitting battle scenes.
All of these things reduce a film's human qualities, distance the audience from the story, and do so quite unnecessarily.
Robert Rodriguez's Sin City took this stylized, comic-book approach about as far as it can go, and although its visual presentation is impressive, the film is not nearly as involving as most of Rodriguez's others, even his movies intended for children.
Ghost Rider is likewise based on a graphic novel, but Nicolas Cage and the rest of the crew supply a good many scenes in which we can better see the characters' faces and hear their voices, and hence makes the characters' choices much more real to us. This is all to the good, for the film deals with the central theme of choice, specifically regarding the issue of Christian salvation.
Executive producer and lead actor Cage and his associates fill the film with Christian themes and images, and the story, while fanciful and bizarre, hews closely enough to these themes and the characters' humanity to involve viewers in the protagonist's situation and enable us to sympathize with him as he deals with the frightful consequences of a choice he never really made, to sell his soul to the Devil.
Although Cage's face in this film looks even more simian than usual, his expressions and vocal inflections are much clearer than those in 300. In this way the film takes a far less understandable situation than is depicted in 300 and makes it possible for the audience to feel some investment in it. As exemplified by Raimi's Spider-Man films, it is the human qualities that make these comic book films truly effective, and one hopes that the comic-book film style will evolve to include a greater allowance for facial expressions and vocal inflections.
These are things that the movies do better than other art forms, and it is a mistake to shove them aside.
A regular visitor to this site, who goes by the mysterious name of Mike (not Linda), wrote a comical pseudo-review of a nonexistent Golden Age detective novel, which I asked him for permission to post in the comments section of my recent item on mystery criticism. Mike sent it to me for posting, but it's really too good to hide in the comments section where many visitors might miss it. So here it is for your enjoyment.
Mike is clearly influenced by the twentieth century American humorist S. J. Perelman in this item, and it's a salutary influence indeed. I hope that you'll enjoy it.
Review of THE CASE OF THE ECTOPLASMIC ECDYSIAST by George and Ira Gershwin:
We hark back to the nostalgic years of pre-World War Two America, when men were men and women frequently noticed. As the book opens, the voluptuous but inert body--and what a body!--of TOODLES ("BOOM-BOOM") LaTOUR is discovered on the floor of her backstage dressing room at THE PALAC (they couldn't afford another E), a burlesque theater way, way, way, way, WAY off Broadway, somewhere just east of the Continental Shelf. In her left hand is a bag of golf clubs, in her right a letter from the draft board; sticking out of her chest is a six-foot-long harpoon.
When the coroner determines that Toodles died laughing, suspicion immediately falls upon TWINKLES, the sad-faced, baggy pants clown; it was well known that Twinkles had been having a torrid affair with both Toodles and his hot water heater--but the thermophilic jester is able to establish an alibi with dozens of burn marks all over his chest. Additionally, the golf clubs clearly indicate that the murderer must be a Republican, yet Twinkles had voted for Martin Van Buren and James K. Polk in the same election.
By now our SLEUTH--I haven't mentioned him, have I? He's the ruggedly handsome Hollywood leading man type, a delightful cross between Cary Grant and Margaret Rutherford and smarter than a bagful of gossip columnists--our sleuth, as I say, has his hands full, juggling squealing CHORUS LINE GIRLS (which they don't mind AT ALL), surly ANIMAL ACTS (an incensed penguin flips him a flipper), and an exasperated THEATER MANAGER who's constantly pulling his (the sleuth's) hair out and blubbering about how the show must go on.
Our sleuth stops the theater manager from hair-pulling by shooting him in the foot and turns his attention to THE LEAST LIKELY SUSPECT, a gay--maybe--carefree man about town, SIR REGINALD NASAL-SEPTUM, recently imported from England in a shipment of crumpets and red herrings. But again, frustration for our detective! Sir Reginald can confim his alibi: At the time of the murder, he was dancing cheek-to-cheek with Fay Wray on the dirigible mooring mast atop the EmpireState Building.
After six weeks in a trance (and two more in the hospital getting transfusions), he figures it out: The penguin dunnit! And so he dun-- er, did: Toodles and the dapper fashion plate had had a frigid affairwhen she was stationed at McMurdo Sound with Dr. Samuel Johnson and the Trapp Family Singers, but things turned sour when she revealed her peccadilloes to him. "Nobody shows me their peccadilloes and lives!" he ejaculated; "I shall have my re-wenge!"
And what was the give-away clue? "Elementary," declares our sleuth; "everybody knows penguins hunt peccadilloes with golf clubs."
The BBC's new series Robin Hood, showing on BBC America on Saturday nights at 9 EDT, is all right, but it's not even in the same universe of quality as the glorious 1938 Warner Bros. production The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains, Alan Hale, Eugene Pallette, Melville Cooper, Una O'Connor, Patric Knowles, Ian Hunter, Herbert Mundin, Montagu Love, and the rest of that superb cast, directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighly.
In terms of sheer entertainment and the joy it brings, The Adventures of Robin Hood is one of the greatest motion pictures of all time. Few films in the years since it was made have reached this level of delight, and for a TV series to get even close is to ask far too much.
But it's not too much to ask it to get a good deal closer than the new BBC Robin Hood.
The first two episodes are mildly entertaining but no more, are not particularly thoughtful, and are entirely uninspiring. The program is not an entire waste of time, as it does have a nice message of resistance to oppression and anger against excessive government taxation, but there's no real drama or excitement here, little entertainment, and a distinct lack of creativity.
A few comments:
The main characters of the BBC's Robin Hood are several years younger than their counterparts in the sublime Warner Bros. version (although Flynn and de Havilland were fairly young at the time, they easily held their own among the veteran cast), and that makes a big difference. The central male characters in ths version have high, squeaky voices which make them much less formidable and interesting than the deeper voiced, more masculine characters played by Flynn, Rathbone, etc. There's a sense of boys playacting throughout the episodes shown so far, instead of men confronting life-or-death dilemmas. Hence, much of the drama is drained out. This is a trend of our times, unfortunately, with male heroes sounding as if they have been wearing too-tight briefs since they got out of daipers. The thing that most ruined Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves for me was Kevin Costner's preadolescent pipsqueaky voice, and that's saying a lot, given how many things were seriously wrong with that film.
As is the custom today, instead of teaching the actors how to fence and fight or hiring actors who are already skilled at these things—such people do exist, I can assure you—the filmmakers use close-ups and cut-away shots to hide the fact that the actors can't fight worth a lick. (Contemporary filmmakers do this regularly with dance sequences also, in the rare times they show them at all.) When Curtiz shot the swordfight sequences in The Adventures of Robin Hood, you could clearly see that Flynn and Rathbone were actually cutting and thrusting away at each other. (Rathbone, was well-known as the best fencer among Hollywood actors, and Flynn was extraordinarily graceful and stylish in his fighting.) The fights in the BBC Robin Hood are clumsy and dull in comparison and really not even worth watching. Some boring old ninnies, of course, will argue that people can't really swordfight the way Flynn and Rathbone did it, and they may be right. But if I want to see a real fight I'll go down to the local tavern and watch one for free, thank you very much. When I want real art and entertainment, I want some artistry in it, if you don't mind too bleeding much.
In an apparent "diversity" element to accommodate modern-day attitudes that everything about the West is and always has been inferior, Robin uses a Saracen bow. This is absurd, given that the British longbow was a truly superb weapon that revolutionized warfare. It could shoot an arrow more than 200 yards with deadly accuracy. The notion that Robin would give that up for a Saracen bow is utterly unfounded and in fact perfectly silly.
The Middle Ages in Europe are depicted, as is the custom in contemporary media, as dirty, wretched, chaotic, dangerous, and irrational. This is a disgusting lie. The Middle Ages were a time of great human creativity and civilizational advance in the West. The contemporary attitude is a canard depoyed by atheists who hate Medieval Europe for its Christian reliogisity. Anyone who holds to the contemporary view of smug superiority over the Middle Ages is just despicably ignorant.
Robin Hood entirelyleaves out the character of Friar Tuck, one of Robin's closest assosciates in the original tellings and 1938 film. This is symptomatic of the treatment of religion in the series, consistently ignoring its centrality to life in Medieval Europe.
Robin returns from the Crusades convinced that fighting does not win arguments. Most soldiers return from war with the exact opposite idea: winning may not persuade anybody that you're right, but you're not fighting to persuade people. You're fighting to protect yourself, your comrades, and your loved ones and neighbors back home. Flynn's Robin Hood, like any real hero, understands that. The BBC's Robin Hood is still a silly, idealist boy after all that fighting in Palestine. Not likely. With an attitude like that, he'd never have made it back.
As in the 1938 film, the BBC's Robin shows immense Christian charity to the downtrodden, feeding them generously and fighting to release them from oppression. That is one matter in which the series follows the earlier stories greatly to its benefit.
I mentioned taxes earlier. Not only does Robin oppose the King's oppressive taxes, he actually takes a supply-side, Arthur Laffer approach, arguing that the Sheriff should cut taxes so that people can create a surplus and get trading again. That's a message I'd like our Congress to hear.
The Marian in this version is very non-pretty and hasn't even a minute fraction of the dignity expressed by de Havilland's character in the 1938 film, but this one does throw a dagger with impressive accuracy. That makes her rather likeable.
Robin does a "dry pull" of his bow (i.e., firing it without an arrow) to slap Gisbourne's face with the bowstring. What actually would have happened is that the force of the bowstring would have transferred to the bow and thus probably have broken Robin's arm.
The new BBC version has some effective drama in the main storyline, Robin's attempt to free his people from oppression. That makes it worth watching even though the production pales in comparison with the splendid Curtiz-Keighley version. It's a great story, and whenever Robin Hood adheres to it, it works.
With England at war, the Sheriff has taken the opportunity to suspend normal rights such as trial by jury. Those who see this as a jarringly obtrusive comment on contemporary political issues are entirely correct in doing so.
Keith Allen is the standout among the cast. He's way over the top in his performance as the Sheriff of Nottingham, but he at least seems to be having fun, and he makes the ride much more pleasant than it would otherwise be.
The overall moral position of the series is sound and laudable—outside of its occasional, ridiculously anachronistic importation of contemporary sexual latitudinarianism into the Middle Ages.
The Adventures of Robin Hood taught me some real lessons about what it takes to a man. The moral strength the main characters display showed me that I could and should expect more from myself and less from other people. It's a lesson that can make one's life a good deal easier, more comprehensible, and more meaningful.
The Adventures of Robin Hood had style, elegance, joy, passion, forceful logic, stunning beauty, humor, and a foundation of great moral probity. The BBC's Robin Hood is clumsy and sloppy but well-intentioned and good-hearted. It's worth watching, but it won't change your life.
NBC-TV premiered an interesting and innovative new detective series last night. Jeff Goldblum stars in Raines as an L.A. police dept. homicide detective who sees the "ghosts" of the victims, but they are established as being not real ghosts but just his very vivid imagination creating hallucinations with whom he discusses the cases he's working on. Yes, that is actually the concept of the show. There will be a quiz on this, so please reread the description until you understand it or begin to have hallucinations of your own.
Some thoughts—
Overall: Interesting concept, OK+ execution.
Two, this is definitely one intuitive detective. Or, kind of. He's certainly intuitive in that he has conversations with his own imagination. In dramatic terms the device is interesting, in that it allows us to see his thought process operating literally. This, however, puts him in the realm of the rationalistic puzzle solvers, if we take his conversations with the imaginary characters as his means of thinking things through. My head hurts.
Three, in his reliance on intuition but also ratiocination, Raines resembles both hardboiled detectives and puzzle solvers, combining the two in an extraordinarily intelligent police detective. In this way the show duplicates the strategy of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe tales, but combining both characters into one. Strange and interesting.
Four, the producers actually manage to make Los Angeles look interesting in a mystery context, not an easy task given how frequently filmmakers and TV producers have used that area as a location.
Five, can we retire the Hooker with a Heart of Gold character forever? I knew you'd agree. Thank you very much!
Six, Jeff Goldblum is a terrfic actor, but sometimes he underplays the character so greatly that one suspects he might be a ghost himself.
Seven, the only way not to guess the killer is not to pay attention to the clues at all, which I pretty much managed to do. But it's not as if the characters other than Raines were interesting enough to make me want to pay any attention to them. This is not an item in the show's favor, of course, especially in the bloody pilot episode which is supposed to grab the audience and never let go.
Eight, I don't imagine I'll watch Raines regularly but wouldn't warn anyone off, either. It has its virtues, but I really don't need to see any more of it.
A comment placed on my Tony Dungy item, below, suggests a worthy item for discussion.
For introduction, note that the commenter, named Mike, and I are members of a Yahoo group that discusses Golden Age mysteries. In the past few days some members of the group have been discussing claims that various characters in Golden Age mystery novels (in particular, puzzle mysteries of the 1920s-'40s) were homosexuals, even though the authors gave no indication of them being so. Itis a truly abysmal form of literary speculation, in my view, and Mike and I said exactly that.
As a particularly vivid example, I note that an otherwise very good website of information on mystery fiction, Mike Grost's "Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," is marred by a pursuit of approval for homosexuality that crops up regularly in Mr. Grost's analyses of mystery fiction. Grost continually disapproves of characters' expressions of what he (atrociously but conventionally) calls homophobia, and searches for clues that characters positively displayed in these fictions are in fact homosexuals even though the author has given no direct or even vague intimation whatsoever of such a thing.
The great blot on Mike Grost's otherwise excellent site is his tendency to find homosexuality all over the place, and in particular his habit of equating male-male or female-female friendship with homosexuality. It is a thorough absurdity.
In addition, Grost suggests, through his criticisms, that a person can be established as homosexual because of his or her taste in hobbies, etc., an entirely unjustifiable claim that is in fact simply the flip side of what some people who hate homosexuality do, seeing it where it is not (and missing it where it is).
Grost's site is also marred by a prominent, page 1 exhortation to "Stop Global Warming," an utterly irrelevant and scientifically ignorant assertion. This dreary leftism is imposed on the site in numerous places, and Mike Grost's adumbrations about the wonderfulness of homosexuality are an important symptom of this political bent.
This habit of ascribing homosexuality to fictional characters who are not so characterized by their authors is simply a subset of the postmodern scholarly game of saying "anything I can conclude about a work of fiction is true." It is abominably stupid.
In Grost's case this tendency is a particular shame because his site is a highly useful compendium of information on mystery fiction, if one can endure the annoying political clinkers.
Now, it is of course perfectly fine for Mike Grost to think whatever he wishes to on these subjects, and I find him and his site quite likeable for their strong support of the puzzle mystery form, but when a political hobbyhorse causes a critic to make unsupportable and indeed blatantly false claims about the things he is writing about, that is a great problem indeed.
I think that this is an important subject for two main reasons. One is that genre fiction does affect people's perceptions and attitudes. A steady diet of heroic fiction, for example, will inculcate those values into a person (or, more likely, reinforce attitudes that are already there and cause one to seek out such stories). The second is that critical attitudes and analyses affect what publishers will publish and what writers will write, and thereby affect what people will be allowed to read.
Mike Grost makes on his site the excellent point that U.S. publishers simply stopped accepting puzzle mysteries after World War II from any but the very most well-established authors, thereby basically killing the form for three decades.
My belief, stated elsewhere on this site on various occasions, is that this was a political-social decision (deliberate or otherwise) on the part of editors and publishers, who saw puzzles as basically conservative and viewed hard-boiled, extreme-action, and police procedural narratives as better able to accommodate leftward ideas.
Hence, it is important to know and evaluate what critics think and say.
If we want good art, popular or otherwise, we have to have good critics.
And when a political agenda causes a critic to make inaccurate statements and erroneous judgments, that's a big problem.
Homosexual activists are attacking Super Bowl-winning Indianapolis Colts head coach Tony Dungy for agreeing to attend a dinner to accept an award from an organization that promotes traditional family values.
Interestingly, Dungy has not said anything against homosexuality himself, but is being attacked simply for going to dinner with people who oppose the idea of changing marriage laws to force private citizens and organizations to acknowledge "same-sex marriages."
Jim Buzinski, co-founder of OutSports.com, a Web site aimed at the homosexual audience, claims that Indiana Family Institute (IFI) is a political organization.
"He is speaking at the dinner next week in front of group that is very much a political organization," Buzinski said.
IFI President Curt Smith said neither the dinner nor the award is political.
"The purpose of this award is to celebrate those who live out the family ethic that we think is at the heart of a healthy and successful society," Smith said. "There was no five-point quiz where he had to agree with us on a number of public policy questions. In inviting him and then following up with a letter, we didn't discuss public policy."
Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family Action, said gay groups would like to silence anyone they perceive as opposing the gay agenda -- even a celebrated athlete or coach.
Exactly. In fact, I believe that these activists are intent on going after prominent sports figures in particular, because seeing their heads on the activists' pikes sends a powerful message to the hoi polloi, especially young men.
This effort by homosexual activists is also clearly an attack on Christians, part of a concerted attempt to drive Christianity from the public square altogether after forcibly removing it from all possible support by government, to the point of even shredding any implicit endorsement that might be made. Now all public expression of Christian values is increasingly under attack. As Daly of Focus on the Family puts it:
"Unfortunately, this is becoming a pattern for those that oppose Christianity," he added. "They want to control our speech in the public square, embarrass us and try to belittle us. It really is a form of fascism."
The activists' strategy has worked thus far, as shown in the case of NBA player Tim Hardaway, whose public statement of intense disdain for homosexuality ignited a furor of attacks against him and an explicit attempt to destroy him both socially and economically.
When one side fights and the other doesn't, guess who wins?
My guess is that this attack won't succeed, because Dungy is too well-liked, too diplomatic, and too strong-willed to be taken down at this time.
You may rest assured, however, that the homosexual activists' attacks on sports figures will continue and intensify.
Country greats Ray Price, Merle Haggard, and Willie Nelson are touring in support of their new album, Last of the Breed, which will be released next Tuesday. The backing band is Asleep at the Wheel, a very talented group that has revived the Texas Swing tradition.
"Last of the Breed" could be the Rat Pack of country music: Ray Price assumes the sophisticated role of Sinatra, Merle Haggard is the playful conscience who takes a lot of pride in who he is and Willie Nelson is everyman's best buddy who knows everybody loves somebody sometime.
All three men stand tall in the Country Music Hall of Fame. . . .
Price opened up with his own 35 minute set with his own band of Cherokee Cowboys. He set the bar for vocal performance. At 81 years old Price's smooth pipes are in amazing shape, especially on ballads like "For The Good Times," "Make The World Go Away" and "Release Me." He hit his notes with clarity and integrity. Price deployed a three-piece fiddle section to set a Western Swing motif, in fact they delivered "Crazy Arms" and "Heartaches By The Number" in the same dance hall tempo.
Dressed in blue jeans, a crisp white shirt and black blazer, Price offered the evening's mission statement: "This is the music they've been trying to kill," [correctly characterizing the work of the music industry and corporate radio stations—STK] he told the crowd that included a six-month old with a red bananda (I'm not kidding). "And they're not going to get it done."
After Price's performance, there was a 15 minute intermission to reset the stage for "Last of the Breed." Ray Benson and Asleep at the Wheel opened up part two with their own set that consisted of "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66"--with a shout out to Flagstaff---and "Miles of Miles of Texas." But still no "Last of the Breed."
Finally, Haggard strolled on stage like the eternal hipster saint. He hoisted his fiddle and took authentic delight in interacting with the twin fiddles, consisting of his own fiddle player and Jason Roberts of Asleep at the Wheel. Haggard twirled his foot and shook his ass before slicing into Bob Wills' "Take Me Back to Tulsa" and hitting the classic two-beat on "I Wonder If You Feel The Way I Do." Haggard covered the latter track on the Wheel's excellent 1993 tribute to Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. Haggard followed with several of his greatest hits: "Silver Wings," "Think I'll Just Stay Here and Drink" (big crowd pleaser with this crowd), and "I Take a Lot of Pride In What I Am," a '45 that used to have regular rotation in my old loft jukebox. Dean Martin also covered "Pride." When Haggard sings about things he learned in a hobo jungle, it is clear these guys are the last of a breed. Who sings about hobo jungles today?
As Hoekstra notes, Haggard "is America's voice"—or one of them, anyway. Willie Nelson then came out, and the show really took flight:
The trio then played songs from the "Last of the Breed" two-disc, 22-song CD that is out March 20 on Lost Highway. The three giants climbed new heights on Harlan Howard's 1958 honky-tonker "Pick Me Up On Your Way Down," wiith Haggard mimicking Bob Wills yelps and "I Love You So Much It Hurts" (both on the CD, produced by the empathetic Fred Foster). They followed the downbeat on the underchampioned Floyd Tillman material from the new record, most notably "I've Gotta Have My Baby Back."
You can read the rest of Hoekstra's review here. You can learn more about the CD release here.
Season 1 of Banacek will be released on DVD on May 15, according to Hart Sharp. The 2-disc release will be the first in a series called TV Guide Presents, which will benefit from promotion in the magazine, on the TV Guide television channel, and the TVguide website.
The set will consist of the first eight Banacek episodes (although not the pilot episode, as far as I can discern) and will retail for $29.95. The show ran for two seasons and constituted 16 episodes plus the pilot film, which ran in a two-hour time slot and was originally titled Banacek and later renamed Detour to Nowhere.
In each episode, suave but tough Thomas Banacek (George Peppard) recovers stolen items that the insurance companies' detectives cannot find, identifies the thief and any accomplices, and pockets double the percentage of value that is ordinarily offered.
The neat twist is that each theft has been done in a way that seems impossible. As I wrote in my earlier post on the program, "A large, bejeweled coach would disappear from a locked cargo hold of a ship in transit, a horse and rider would vanish from a racetrack during a practice run, an experimental car would be stolen from a train while in transit and watched by multiple witnesses, a football player would disappear after being tackled on the field before tens of thousands of fans in the stadium and millions of TV viewers, and other such puzzlers would occur in each episode."
Banacek rose from humble roots to make a large fortune for himself, and he clearly enjoys the good things that money can buy. Nonetheless, he does not seem driven by any lust for wealth. What really seems to push him is a desire for justice—and a powerful wish to prove himself worthy of others' respect.
As such, Banacek has served as an inspiration to urban, working-class, ethnic youths such as I myself once was, in that he was proud of being of Polish descent and took no crud from anybody about it. Seeing Banacek dismiss people's prejudices and make his way regardless of what others thought he was worth really did make a difference in how I saw my place in the world, and I am rather grateful to both the filmmakers and George Peppard for doing that fine little thing.
I am sure that others growing up today could benefit from that lesson as well.
According to TVShowsonDVD, special features of the Season 1 release will include "a photo gallery, TV Guide Crossword puzzle and exclusive access to a Banacek microsite."
Here is the Hart Sharp Video press release:
TV Guide Presents BANACEK- The First Season (2 discs)
RELEASE DATE: MAY 15, 2007
A self-made millionaire, and living in Boston's posh Beacon Hill area, Thomas Banacek (played by George Peppard) has a taste for only the finest things. Being of Polish decent, he also loves to recite enigmatic Polish proverbs. Banacek is aided in his efforts by his limo chauffer and gofer, Jay (played by Ralph Manza). Jay usually has his own ideas on how the items were taken, and also has dreams of recovering the items himself first and get the reward. Banacek also relies heavily on his close friend and bibliophile/bookstore owner Felix Mulholland (played by Murray Matheson) to help in background research. Insurance companies are loath to call on his services for the recovery of lost or stolen insured items because of these fees. Nevertheless, they call on him when they get stuck, as no one else can solve these impossible cases.
CAST:George Peppard (TV's The A-Team, Breakfast at Tiffany's ) - Guest stars include Michael Lerner, Margot Kidder, Brenda Vaccaro, Mike Farrell and many more
Rating: Not Rated Genre: TV Drama Run Time: 576 minutes on 2 discs - (8 episodes/72 minutes each) DVD SKU#: (8) 29567 0428-2 (3) DVD SRP: $29.95
Bonus Features include Photo Gallery, TV Guide Crossword Puzzles, and more! (Special features subject to change).
Matthew Bowman of Christendom College posted a very interesting comment on my article on Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy tales, which I think adds some value to the discussion. Matthew's comment indicates some reasons why the stories are so interesting, and suggests that a renaissance of interest in them is possible. Here is Matthew's comment:
Well, I have to say you've got good taste in fiction.
I only read Lord Darcy for the first time at the tail end of last summer, as I was getting ready for the new semester at college. I'd first heard about it from my father, thouh only iin very vague terms -- basically just "alternate universe where magic is used to solve crimes." Years later, following some "you'd probably like this links" on Amazon, I came across a book that sounded good. Noticing it was a Baen book, I immediately switched over to Baen.com to read the sample chapters.
The first story blew me away. It not only sounded like the story my father had alluded to years before but couldn't remember the title of, it was also a fantasy story with a strong base in Roman Catholicsm. (I later found out that Randall Garrett was actually a member of the Old Catholic Church, but it doesn't change the way the world he created is structured.) I was surprised that my father, being a diehard and vocal atheist, liked it so much. As a strong Roman Catholic myself, I'd like the Lord Darcy stories just for that.
But, of course, that isn't the only reason I like the story. Going into the story "cold" (with no knowledge of the story except what was on the pages, both expressly stated and what I could figure out myself), I came up with almost exactly what you described in your NRO article. That is, I saw a well-organized world without the modern mess, with paralells to our world but still obviously unique. It was like Garrett had discovered, not created -- the same feel from all great stories. True "sub-creation," as Tolkein called it.
There is something objective about it that speaks to us. It is a world where life can still be seen in white and black without losing sight of humanity. It is a country where one can excell at one's task, and find happiness as a person among people, rather than a simple individual in society. It is a world that almost audibly says "this is how it should have been."
Currently, I'm writing a term paper on the Lord Darcy stories -- for a history credit, no less; and whle the class is cross-listed with English Lit, Lord Darcy is not directly connected with anything we are studying. However, my professor (Dr. Schwartz) was so intrigued by my description of the series that he suggested it as my topic on the very fi[r]st day of class, even though I pointed out to him that it didn't fit the criteria that he'd just listed for the students. (Arm-twisting? Heck no. There wasn't even finger-twisting.)
Actually, I've been talking it up so much at the college that both of my dead-tree-and-pigment copies (yes, I got two) are being lent out, while I use my ebook copy from Baen to do research. Another professor was so taken by the idea of the story that he express-ordered it from Amazon for himself -- I walked into his office and found him reading it. The library even got in its own copy last week.
Frankensteinian concerns persist in the modern age because of humanity’s inborn suspicion of the new. Happily, over the past few centuries the West has established firm linkages between scientific and economic actors — launching the industrial/technological revolution that has lifted billions of people out of humanity’s natural state of abject poverty. But such transformations of economic and social institutions remain scary. Frankenstein was essentially a reactionary response to that revolution. But there are other ways to craft narratives about humanity’s growing technological prowess — telling stories that are more hopeful and liberating.
Bailey suggests an alternative approach that could be just as entertaining and more edifying, using Crichton's Jurassic Park as an example:
I have often wanted to suggest to Crichton that he could have gotten the same narrative bang for his buck if he had instead celebrated the achievement of bringing dinosaurs back to life. In my alternative plot, a kindly old paleontologist, using the miracle of biotechnology, conjures dinosaurs back into existence to delight the world’s children. Things go wrong only when a cadre of evil anti-biotechnologists led by Jeremy Rifkin break into the peaceful island zoo to kill the dinosaurs. This revised scenario would provide Crichton with all of the gunfire, gore, chase scenes, and satisfying explosions without the Luddite baggage of the original.
This plot would actually be more true to life—because there is practically no evidence that humanity rushes headlong into misusing powerful new technologies. Instead of using computerized probes for mind control, physicians implant them to control Parkinson’s disease. Instead of carelessly bringing space viruses to Earth, NASA set up elaborate containment and decontamination systems for astronauts returning from the moon. And researchers hope to use biotech to bring back to life animals driven to extinction by humanity, including the Tasmanian tiger and the woolly mammoth.
That is indeed a more accurate vision of what science really does, particularly in the hands of Westerners.
Next, as noted, is firmly in what Bailey refers to as the Luddite category, but Bailey still considers it enjoyable:
Despite its considerable narrative flaws, Next is still a compulsively readable beach book about the dawn of the biotech revolution. If your taste runs to car and helicopter chases, gunfire, explosions, sex, and entertaining demises for villains, combined with a bit of public policy, Next delivers all that and more. So squirrel away this one in your luggage when you fly to some sandy strand for your winter vacation.
USA Today has an excellent article in which the author interviews historian Paul Cartledge, author of Thermopylae: The Battle that Changed the World, about the historical accuracy of the movie 300, which premieres this Friday nationwide. The film was based on the accouint in Herodotus's Histories, by way of a graphic novel by Frank Miller.
Cartledge saw a preview of the movie, and the news is good:
The historical record is (pretty much) Book 7 of Herodotus' Histories. What the movie leaves out is that Sparta didn't fight the Persians alone but as the head of a Greek alliance that included, most importantly, Athens. Sparta was the greatest Greek military power on land, Athens by sea. The resistance to the massive Persian invasion had to be an amphibious one, both by land and by sea, to counter the Persians' amphibious invasion. So the filmmakers missed out that Leonidas and his Spartans were attempting to hold the Thermopylae pass by land in conjunction with the allied Greek fleet led by Athens just up the coast.
However, there are two points about this Greek alliance: 1. It was tiny — only about 30 Greek cities out of 700 or so who might have joined in the resistance; 2. Far more Greeks fought on the Persian side than on the loyal Greek side!
What the movie adds in is a slew of fantasy fiction, including scary monsters. This is partly to take full advantage of the latest computer techno-wizardry (only one small scene was actually filmed out of doors — the rest in the studio against a blue screen with the background — mountains, sea, etc. — all digitally added on.)
What the movie gets dead right is the Spartans' heroic code (not least the gallows-humor one-liners) and the key role played by women in backing up, indeed reinforcing, the male martial code of heroic honor.
The previews and commercials make the film look much more enjoyable and appealing than Troy and Alexander—which, alas, is not too difficult to do. I'm looking forward to seeing it.
Turner Classic Movies is featuring mystery films this month, on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, with an emphasis on various detective series. All showings will be entirely without commercial interruptions, as is TCM's custom.
Those who have had their fill of sensationalistic, ultraviolent, ugly, modern theatrical crime thrillers would do well to take a look at these films, which are mostly lower in production values but much stronger on logic, common sense, insights into human behavior, and what makes for good character.
Tomorrow night the series begins with two of the best films featuring hardboiled detectives. The 1941 film The Maltese Falcon (8 p.m. EST) was written and directed by John Huston and features Humphrey Bogart in the definitive private eye movie performance as Sam Spade. TCM follows that at 10 p.m. with an even better film, Howard Hawks's superb adaptation of The Big Sleep (1946), by Raymond Chandler.
Those two are must-sees. At midnight, iron-fisted Mike Hammer comes on the scene in Robert Aldrich's excellent 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly, followed by a poles-apart detective, Hercule Poirot, played by Albert Finney in a star-studded 1974 production featuring Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, and Lauren Bacall. After that, at 4:15 a.m., the DVRs will still be running, to record The Scarlet Clue, a minor but amusing Charlie Chan film from 1945—it features the woefully underappreciated comic brilliance of Mantan Moreland as Chan's driver, Birmingham Brown. Watch this one if only to see how much a great comic actor can do with seemingly ordinary material.
Wednesday night TCM turns to the greatest of all fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes, as played by the actor who best inhabited the role, Basil Rathbone.
Even though nearly all of the Universal films starring Rathbone with Nigel Bruce as an amusing Watson are set during contemporary times, the World War II years, the films capture the spirit of the orignal stories, combining equal parts deduction and adventure.
The four films showing towmorrow night are good ones: Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, The Woman in Green, Sherlock Holmes in Terror by Night, and Sherlock Holmes in Dressed to Kill.
The Holmes films are followed, beginning at 1:00 a.m. EST, by four films starring Warren William as the Lone Wolf, Lewis Vance's reformed jewel thief who has turned to a life of fighting crime. I haven't seen any of the Lone Wolf films and am looking forward to doing so.
Coming later in the month: films featuring Dick Tracy, Nancy Drew, the Saint, the Falcon, Boston Blackie, and other police detectives, private eyes, and amateur sleuths.
Harvard’s Frank Moore Cross, for instance, makes several on-screen appearances, mostly to read the inscriptions on the ossuaries. The presence of Cross, a distinguished scholar at a top-notch university, is meant to provide intellectual heft to the program. Yet Jacobovici merely has him read the words on the ossuaries. As it happens, nobody denies that they carry these names. But are they actually the ossuaries of the son of God and his earthly parents? Jacobovici doesn’t get around to asking Cross, this eminent professor, for an opinion.
So I did. Here’s how Cross replied in an e-mail:
I am skeptical about Jacobovici’s claims, not because of a faulty reading of the ossuary which reads yeshua’ bar yosep [Jesus son of Joseph] I believe, but because the onomasticon [list of proper names] in his period in Jerusalem is exceedingly narrow. Patriarchal names and biblical names repeat ad nauseam. It has been reckoned that 25% of feminine names in this period were Maria/Miryam, etc., that is variants of Mary. So the cited statistics are unpersuasive. You know the saying: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
For some reason, Cross doesn’t have a chance to say this on camera.
Good on Miller for bothering to ask Cross his opinion. Miller correctly notes that the documentary is wholly phony and fatuous:
The Lost Tomb of Jesus runs perilously close to Erich von Daniken territory — no prehistoric astronauts, but definitely a flight of fancy. It runs for 90 minutes (with commercials stretching it to two hours). Views that dissent from its relentlessly uncritical presentation of a madly speculative theory — which is to say, the opinions of Cross and virtually every mainstream Biblical scholar who has examined the film’s central contentions — receive almost no air time.
The documentary is just another manifestation of the tendency of some unbelievers to subject the claims of Christians and Jews to intense scrutiny while eagerly and easily swallowing any elephant-sized chunks of nonsense that purport to question the basic premises of Christianity:
The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Tomb of Jesus approach the traditional Christian narrative in essentially the same way: They expose it to a severe, Torquemada-like scrutiny and then propose to replace Western civilization’s foundational story with a newfangled alternative that’s based on a flamboyantly credulous reading of a few cherry-picked Gnostic texts.
It doesn’t take a religious skeptic to understand what this requires: A gigantic leap of faith.
Scientists Denounce "Jesus Tomb" Documentary As Publicity Stunt
You may have heard about the forthcoming Discovery Channel documentary and accompanying book in which archaeologists purport to have discovered the tomb of Jesus Christ—and his ostensible wife and son.
From the beginning this was an obviously silly notion, given that the main evidence provided for the find's importance was that the names on some of the ossuaries found there matched some mentioned in the Gospels: Jesus, Mary, Joseph, etc. However, those names were so common at the time that the filmmakers' assertion of high odds against a tomb carrying bones of persons with those names is openly risible. Even in Mexico today one could easily find families with all of those names.
In addition it was old news, having been mentioned on the BBC more than ten years ago, and was dismissed then by the first archaeologist who examined the site.
Leading archaeologists in Israel and the United States denounced the purported discovery of the tomb of Jesus as a publicity stunt.
Scorn for the Discovery Channel's claim to have found the burial place of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and -- most explosively -- their possible son came not just from Christian scholars but also from Jewish and secular experts who said their judgments were unaffected by any desire to uphold Christian orthodoxy.
"I'm not a Christian. I'm not a believer. I don't have a dog in this fight,'' said William Dever, who has been excavating ancient sites in Israel for 50 years and is widely considered the dean of biblical archaeology among U.S. scholars. "I just think it's a shame the way this story is being hyped and manipulated," he said Tuesday.
Another story in yesterday's Washington Post points out that this is actually an old story and that the first archaeologist to examine the site considers the documentary's assertions specious and openly mercenary:
In 1996, when the British Broadcasting Corp. aired a short documentary on the subject, archaeologists challenged the link to Jesus and his family. Amos Kloner, the first archaeologist to examine the site, said the idea fails to hold up to archaeological standards but makes for profitable television.
Regarding the filmmakers' claim that it is extremely unlikely that persons other than those named in the Bible could have the names that are engraved on the ossuaries, the first-mentioned Post story reported as follows:
Dever, a retired professor of archaeology at the University of Arizona, said that some of the inscriptions on the Talpiyot ossuaries are unclear, but that all of the names are common.
"I've known about these ossuaries for many years and so have many other archaeologists, and none of us thought it was much of a story, because these are rather common Jewish names from that period," he said. "It's a publicity stunt, and it will make these guys very rich, and it will upset millions of innocent people because they don't know enough to separate fact from fiction."
Similar assessments came yesterday from two Israeli scholars, Amos Kloner, who originally excavated the tomb, and Joe Zias, former curator of archaeology at the Israeli Antiquities Authority. Kloner told the Jerusalem Post that the documentary is "nonsense." Zias described it in an e-mail to The Washington Post as a "hyped up film which is intellectually and scientifically dishonest."
The Post story quotes another archaeologist, Jodi Magness, an archaeologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, debunking the notion that the inscriptions refer to the people mentioned in the Bible:
Magness also said the names on the Talpiyot ossuaries indicate that the tomb belonged to a family from Judea, the area around Jerusalem, where people were known by their first name and father's name. As Galileans, Jesus and his family members would have used their first name and home town, she said.
Contrary to the filmmakers' hype, this story is no more plausible than The Da Vinci Code—and it lacks the latter's kitsch value.
In a comment on the humorous piece genrerously supplied by Mike (not Linda) below, regular visitor Joe asks our opinion of P. G. Wodehouse. I shall find occasion, I am sure, to write more about PGW in future, as he is one of my favorite authors. In the meantime, here are my thoughts on 
A regular visitor to this site, who goes by the mysterious name of Mike (not Linda), wrote a comical pseudo-review of a nonexistent Golden Age detective novel, which I asked him for permission to post in the comments section of my recent item on mystery criticism. Mike sent it to me for posting, but it's really too good to hide in the comments section where many visitors might miss it. So here it is for your enjoyment.
The BBC's new series Robin Hood, showing on BBC America on Saturday nights at 9 EDT, is all right, but it's not even in the same universe of quality as the 
NBC-TV premiered an interesting and innovative new detective series last night. Jeff Goldblum stars in Raines as an L.A. police dept. homicide detective who sees the "ghosts" of the victims, but they are established as being not real ghosts but just his very vivid imagination creating hallucinations with whom he discusses the cases he's working on. Yes, that is actually the concept of the show. There will be a quiz on this, so please reread the description until you understand it or begin to have hallucinations of your own.
Three, in his reliance on intuition but also ratiocination, Raines resembles both hardboiled detectives and puzzle solvers, combining the two in an extraordinarily intelligent police detective. In this way the show duplicates the strategy of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe tales, but combining both characters into one. Strange and interesting.
Short answer: no.
This habit of ascribing homosexuality to fictional characters who are not so characterized by their authors is simply a subset of the postmodern scholarly game of saying "anything I can conclude about a work of fiction is true." It is abominably stupid.
Your voice has been heard!
Science writer Ronald Bailey has put together 
Turner Classic Movies is featuring mystery films this month, on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, with an emphasis on various detective series. All showings will be entirely without commercial interruptions, as is TCM's custom.
Wednesday night TCM turns to the greatest of all fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes, as played by the actor who best inhabited the role, Basil Rathbone.
