Theatrical film writer-producer-director M. Night Shyamalan is trying a new tack with his forthcoming production: he's letting someone else direct. That's probably a good idea.
After several films that have done poorly at the box office and among critics, the intellectual horror-suspense filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan is teaming up with John Eric Dowdle and Drew Dowdle, directors of Quarantine, on an independent film tentatively called "Devil."
This may be a good move on his part, to bring some new energy to his work.
Shyamalan is certainly a thoughtful filmmaker whose movies typically have good ideas at the core, and his films always feature characters with whom audiences can sympathize—an uncommon trait in today's American cinema. Unfortunately, unlike his great predecessor Alfred Hitchcock, Shyamalan tends to neglect the spectacle side of filmmaking, the manipulation of audience expectations to bring real surprises and satisfy the viewer's intellectual curiosity by always keeping them guessing what is coming next.
Shyamalan is known, of course, for the classic film The Sixth Sense and its brilliant final plot twist, but since that film he has been much less effective at drawing audiences into the stories even though the characters and situations he creates are interesting.
Hence since doing The Sixth Sense he has made one very good genre film, Signs; written a successful screenplay, Stuart Little; made an interesting and thoughtful personal film, Unbreakable; and written, produced, and directed three misfires: The Village, The Lady in the Water, and The Happening.
Since then he has signed on to write, produce, and direct The Last Airbender, which will undoubtedly benefit from having a pre-tested concept in the form of an internationally successful children's TV series. The concept of the series, however, is every bit as bizarre as anything else Shyamalan has written, so it will be important for him to employ to the utmost his ability to create sympathetic characters.
Based solely on its title, Devil sounds as if it has a good chance of connecting with audiences, although no plot details have been released yet. The film goes into production next year, and the producers say that they are aiming for a PG-13 rating.
Facing a serious beating in the upcoming elections, the American right is riven by recriminations and despair. But its poor performance is not because the movement's basic ideas are unappealing. It's because the right has ceded to the left the place where ideas are actually formed: the culture.
And that can change, Mike d'Virgilio writes.
It's the Culture, Stupid!
By Mike d'Virgilio
Whatever the outcome of next week’s presidential election, the conservative movement is in for a lively debate about its future. Even if John McCain succeeds in snatching the presidency from the jaws of defeat, the majorities for the Democrats will increase in both houses of Congress.
Whether you see this as indicating a significant movement of the country to the left will in large part determine what you believe to be the best direction for the conservative movement to take.
I speak of the movement that encompasses conservatives, libertarians, and classical liberals, broadly defined as “The Right.”
A short outline of this debate can be found in David Frum’s recent NRO column, where the columnist has a little one-sided debate with Rush Limbaugh and columnist/commentator Tony Blankley.
No one familiar with the conservative movement will see anything unusual in this. Ever since the days when William F. Buckley was rounding up a group of malcontents and intellectuals to found National Review, the right has never been a monolith.
If you want a monolith, take a journey to the left and join the Democrats. The only “moderates” they tolerate are those in certain congressional districts that help them build up their numbers in Congress.
What Frum and numerous others among the rightward commentariat believe is that the conservatism of Reagan, with its supply-side, limited government views, is passé. The American public has clearly moved left, they believe, and we need a modified conservatism to appeal to them.
To treat big government as the enemy is to alienate the vast majority of voters who are addicted to it, they say.
The course for the right, then, is to use government more efficiently and more effectively for conservative ends, these writers believe. The “government that governs least governs best” just doesn’t sell anymore, they fear.
Thus Frum argues that conservatism should lean back and move left and not be so hung up on ideas from the past that simply don’t apply to the present.
Rush and Blankley, on the other hand, believe that most Americans are conservative at heart and can be convinced of the rightness of conservatism as long as conservatives stick to their principles.
Rush often notes, correctly, that whereas some (indeed, many) self-proclaimed conservatives say the era of Reagan is over, but that liberals never say the era of FDR is over. In that they are united.
Why, then, do liberals not run campaigns that fully embrace their inner leftist? A recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Holman Jenkins argues that Democrats, including Senator Obama, are simply less than forthcoming about their true beliefs and plans when they’re out buying—er, stumping for—votes.
I’m sympathetic to the position held by Rush and Blankley, but it’s important to recognize that Ronald Reagan was at the right place at the right time. Reagan's conservatism won in 1980 because the Nixon and Carter presidencies had left America in such dire straights. Reagan's was a relatively easy sale, given the circumstances.
If Carter had been competent and there had been general prosperity and peace, Reagan wouldn't have won. Both Rush and Blankley seem to discount that. (And current circumstances are certainly far from hospitable to Republicans.)
In addition, Rush and Blankley both seem to forget the overriding influence of culture on Americans’ attitudes and beliefs. Given the reality of cultural sources of political attitudes, any approach the Right takes will end up failing absent this critical consideration.
While the culture dominated by the left continues to indoctrinate Americans to accept statist assumptions, Frum and his faction seem to accept that this acceptance is some great, immutable force of history, and thus political success depends on riding that wave, presenting a cheaper, more sensible statism.
The Rush and Blankley faction likewise doesn’t offer an action plan to counter the powerful, pervasive, and persistent messages pounding Americans every day with a view of the world based on the left’s assumptions. Speaking conservatism into an electorate indoctrinated daily with the nostrums of the left isn't going to be terribly effective, even if such a plan worked well for Ronald Reagan and the Republicans intermittently over the years.
Nonetheless, at least Rush and Blankley understand that it's the principles that count.
Given that the left dominates Hollywood and other avenues of entertainment, education from K through higher ed, journalism, and most of the media, it’s a wonder the right’s ideas ever gain any traction at all.
Thus the situation calls for a different approach, one that is admittedly a long-term solution and won’t necessarily have great immediate effect (although it could). Instead of ignoring culture or continuing in its antagonistic and critical attitude toward it, the right should boldly and warmly embrace culture.
In particular this reclamation and reform campaign should start with a focused recruitment effort to get right of center individuals into the cultural influence professions.
Imagine the possibilities: Hollywood studio heads that are solid classical liberals; the presidents of Harvard and Yale committed libertarians; verified conservative right-wingers as president of ABC News and editor in chief of the Washington Post.
Imagine right of center individuals entering countless positions of leadership in these professions in the next twenty years, and in other positions from top to bottom as well.
It can happen.
This would truly turn the tide in American society, and for the long term. (That is why the left made such a concerted and successful effort to take over American cultural institutions in the past half-century.)
The alternative is to continue to abdicate the power of culture and snipe at these professions and their output while hoping the people pounded by leftist messages all day and every day will somehow elect the right people who will somehow transform American society. Well, good luck with that, as Spongebob Squarepants says.
California's Proposition 8 Is Indeed a Civil Rights Issue
Unsurprisingly, Hollywood is coming on strong in the final days before the elections, in opposition to citizens' rights to freedom of speech, assembly, commerce, and opinion, in an effort to deny every person in the state their inherent right to decide whether to support same-sex marriage.
Hollywood celebrities and other entertainment industry people are making a strong push against California ballot initiative Proposition 8, which would prevent the state government from encoding same-sex marriage into the law and forcing all California citizens to recognize such marriages regardless of their personal opinions on the matter.
Falsely portraying the legality of same-sex marriage as a matter of civil rights for homosexuals, instead of its real foundation as a denial of everyone else's rights, the fundamental and essential freedoms of speech, assembly, commerce, and opinion, many in the industry have contributed significant amounts of money in opposition to Prop 8 in recent days.
Actress Pauley Perrette (mentioned below also) called this "the biggest civil rights issue of our generation." She is correct about that, but not in the way she thinks. The civil rights in danger are those of all the citizens of society, which will be trodden under in order to make way for an entirely fictional civil right for a very small minority of people, if Prop 8 is defeated.
Proposition 8 offers the people of the state of California the opportunity to stand up for their real, fundamental rights. The alternative is forced universal obeisance to the opinions of a small minority group.
That is not an endorsing of preexisting civil rights. It is tyranny.
Most highly prominent individuals in the industry have stayed out of the fight, which is rather interesting given the strong push so many in Hollywood and in the state's highly left-oriented media-government complex have given it.
However, quite a few have signed on to the effort to deny citizens their fundamental rights in the matter. Here is a list of some of the contributors, including both Hollywood celebrities and other prominent people. Readers shall decide for themselves whether to support them and their causes by purchasing their wares.
Filmmaker Steven Spielberg
Filmmaker George Lucas
Apple Computer
Sergei Brin, President of Google, Inc.
Producer Bruce Cohen, American Beauty, Pushing Daisies
Talk show host Ellen DeGeneres
Actor Brad Pitt
Actress Pauley Perrette, NCIS (an excellent TV show which I recommend watching)
Actress Bridget Fonda
Actor Jason Tam, One Life to Live
The California Teachers Association
Actress Mary McCormack, In Plain Sight
Director Gus Van Sant, Good Will Hunting, To Die For, Finding Forrester, Milk
Two genre films—High School Musical 3: Senior Year and Saw V—brought U.S. audiences back to the movie box offices in a big way over the weekend.
The Disney pop-culture juggernaut High School Musical series of films revived the U.S. movie box office this past weekend, opening with a heady $42 million take. That was the biggest opening weekend ever for a musical, far eclipsing the $27.8 million brought in by Mamma Mia! in its first three days this past summer.
The first two installments of the wholesome but energetic Disney film series originated on television on the company's Disney Channel, and the decision to exploit that success by opening the third film in theaters proved a grand success.
The fifth installment of the Saw series of moral-dilemma horror films did quite well for their genre, bringing in about as much premiere weekend money as each of the last three films in the series.
The cop film Pride and Glory, also in its first weeked, finished fifth and brought in only $6.3 million despite a strong promotion effort and solid lead actors in Edward Norton and Colin Farrell. The grimness of yet another story about urban political corruption seems to have held its numbers down.
Opening in just a few theaters, Clint Eastwood's The Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie in another film about urban political corruption, did well by bringing in more than $33,000 on average in each of the fifteen theaters in which it opened across the country. (For comparison, High School Musical brought in a healthy $11,593 per theater.) That bodes well for Eastwood's film, which probably won't be a big hit but will do well, thanks to the story having facets other than the political corruption angle.
Last week's number one attraction, Max Payne, fell to third with an unspectacular $7.6 million.
Housing Bailout Shows Stark Choice Between Liberty and Aristocracy
Prosperity is the result of a cultural choice: whether to build and nourish a culture of personal responsibility, or one of forced submission to a willful aristocracy.
Prosperity, either personal or societal, does not just happen. It is, in fact, the result of a cultural choice.
That choice is over whether to build a culture of personal responsibility or one of forced submission to a willful aristocracy.
A child born to a wealthy family—which would seem to give them a huge advantage in life through no effort of their own—can quickly dissipate their fortune through a dissolute lifestyle caused by the assumption that their continued comfort and prosperity is not a matter of their own decisions but simply a matter of the luck of their birth. It happens all the time.
A child born to a poor family—which would seem to give them a huge disadvantage in life through no fault of their own—can quickly accumulate a fortune through adoption of a responsible lifestyle based on the assumption that their personal conditions will depend most greatly on their own efforts. It happens all the time.
That is the lesson we should and must draw from the current financial crisis, and it is the lesson that the supply-side economist Arthur Laffer draws in an excellent column in the Wall Street Journal. I recommend it highly, and provide excerpts here.
First, Laffer points out that financial panics will always happen, and that government's biggest responsibility is to allow those involved to reap the consequences of their actions, regardless of how much they may complain. To do otherwise, he notes, is for the government forcibly to reward foolishness and punish wisdom:
Financial panics, if left alone, rarely cause much damage to the real economy, output, employment or production. Asset values fall sharply and wipe out those who borrowed and lent too much, thereby redistributing wealth from the foolish to the prudent. . . .
. . . Profits and stock appreciation are not rights, but rewards for insight mixed with a willingness to take risk.
This is true of the housing crisis:
People who buy homes and the banks who give them mortgages are no different, in principle, than investors in the stock market, commodity speculators or shop owners. Good decisions should be rewarded and bad decisions should be punished. The market does just that with its profits and losses.
The key is to recognize that people who were not involved in a transaction should not be forced to bear the consequences of it. that is a matter of elementary justice:
No one likes to see people lose their homes when housing prices fall and they can't afford to pay their mortgages; nor does any one of us enjoy watching banks go belly-up for making subprime loans without enough equity. But the taxpayers had nothing to do with either side of the mortgage transaction.
The decision to intervene and "help" those under the burden of their own bad decisions may seem compassionate when we look only at the two parties involved, but the government bailout actually puts a gigantic burden on people who had no chance to from the decisions made by those being bailed out, but only get stuck with the consequences when the latter fail:
If the house's value had appreciated, believe you me the overleveraged homeowner and the overly aggressive bank would never have shared their gain with taxpayers. Housing price declines and their consequences are signals to the market to stop building so many houses, pure and simple.
In addition, the government intervention always makes conditions much worse, because economic resources do not come from the air, they are the result of hard work and hard work only:
But unfortunately in this world there is no tooth fairy. And the government doesn't create anything; it just redistributes. Whenever the government bails someone out of trouble, they always put someone into trouble, plus of course a toll for the troll. Every $100 billion in bailout requires at least $130 billion in taxes, where the $30 billion extra is the cost of getting government involved.
If you don't believe me, just watch how Congress and Barney Frank run the banks. If you thought they did a bad job running the post office, Amtrak, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the military, just wait till you see what they'll do with Wall Street.
Laffer points out that the choice of who should bear the consequences of an individual's choices will have immense consequences for the society as a whole, and that wishing things were otherwise will do nothing to change this fundamental truth of the human condition:
These issues aren't Republican or Democrat, left or right, liberal or conservative. They are simply economics, and wish as you might, bad economics will sink any economy no matter how much they believe this time things are different. They aren't.
Although we Americans are intensely loath to admit it, every society has an aristocracy. The only question is whether admission will be by merit—personal actions that benefit others—or by ambition. Our society's aristocracy is greatly populated by the latter means and as a result has become increasingly predatory and coercive.
So when a leading presidential candidate tells you he just wants to take some of the productive person's money and "distribute" it "more fairly," what he's speaking to is the culture of forced submission to an even more predatory and coercive aristocracy. That is what the American people will decide one week from today.
Entertainment industry executives are pondering how best to exploit Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin after next week's elections. That's further proof of the woman's compelling integrity.
It's clear that Sarah Palin is far more widely liked and much more interesting than the Republican Party and its presidential standard bearer.
What Palin has going for her is integrity, in its original sense: she is what she is, and entirely so. She is not a trimmer or a clever monkey or a schmoozer or a brilliant manipulator. She cannot and will not become something greatly different from what she has been, even to become Vice President of the United States.
That, at any rate, is what she has shown so far: even when it would be in her interest to play the game and bend her knee to the aristocracy by pretending to the media that she is the sort of person they like—one who makes public professions of compassion for others while basing all decisions on their own interest and therefore those of their well-heeled financial supporters—she has been constitutionally unable to do so.
If anything proves that Gov. Sarah Palin is a special person in our cowardly contemporary society, that is it.
Palin's integrity is what has enabled the press to mischaracterize her as a fool, but it is what also makes it extremely difficult for the media's false characterization to convince anyone with a good sense of judgment.
Thus it seems that regardless of the outcome of this election, Palin won't be going away soon, even though the aristocrats of both parties would dearly like to see that happen.
And that, of course, is why the plans to exploit the charisma of this extraordinary woman are already being formulated, as the Hollywood Reporter notes:
[A]gents across the entertainment world are discussing possibilities for capitalizing on her fame, ranging from an Oprah-style syndicated talk show to a Sean Hannity-like perch in cable news or on radio.
‘‘Any television person who sees the numbers when she appears on anything would say Sarah Palin would be great,’’ said veteran morning-show producer Steve Friedman, citing the double-digit ratings gains her appearances on ‘‘Saturday Night Live’’ and ‘‘CBS Evening News’’ generated. ‘‘The passion she has on each side, love and hate, makes television people say, ‘Wow, imagine the viewership.’ ’’
Although none of the execs has — at least as far as anyone is admitting — made direct overtures to the Alaska governor, they are readying their battle plans if she decides to give up her day job.
What attracts these people to Palin is her integrity, I would suggest, and the proof is that some entertainment executives who are hostile to her recognize this:
Some skeptics point out that Palin will run into a major obstacle in trying to win over the kind of widespread support one needs to become a national television figure. She is, after all, a polarizing personality. But as with such media darlings as Howard Stern or Star Jones, polarization has its advantages. ‘‘She could have a Kathie Lee Gifford kind of thing,’’ Wattenberg said. ‘‘You’re either addicted to her because you love her or you just want to tune in to see if she’ll do something stupid.’’
Whatever happens in the upcoming election, I suspect that Sarah Palin will be around for a while, and that is a good thing.
'Screwtape' Play Captures Brilliance of Lewis Book
The theatrical drama The Screwtape Letters captures the brilliance of C. S. Lewis's influential novel and even helps clarify some of the points the book makes. It's a great success as a theatrical experience as well.
TAC correspondent Mike D'Virgilio reviews The Screwtape Letters.
The Screwtape Letters, adapted for the stage by Jeffrey Fiske and Max McLean
Review by Mike D'Virgilio
The FPA Theatre Company certainly merits praise for daring to take on a dense but short book that turns upside down the biggest subject in the world, and turn it into a play, in their production of The Screwtape Letters, based on the novel by C. S. Lewis. That they have made a success of it is truly impressive, and that they have done so on a clearly quite tight budget is even more so.
For those not familiar with the C. S. Lewis book written in the early 1940s, it recounts the epistolary correspondence between Screwtape, a mid-level satanic bureaucrat, and Wormwood, a young demon that is trying to lure his first soul into his demonic leader’s house. Some critics have derided the set and production as cheap, which in my view is quite false and simply suggests a ghastly lack of imagination on their part—or perhaps a more sinister fault.
Given that the book is in the form of a series of letters, it is obvious that the play will involve much talk and not much obvious action. Yet plays have successfully employed that approach in the past, and this adaptation of Lewis’s book definitely captures the essence, and more importantly the serious layers of meaning, of the exchanges between Screwtape and his underling. The drama is played out as nearly a one-man show, which critics have found quite acceptable in other contexts. One suspects, then, that their quibbles are based not on the form but the content.
Playing at Chicago’s Mercury Theater after successful runs in Washington, D.C., and New York City, the book was adapted for the stage by Jeffrey Fiske and Max McLean, with McLean staring as Screwtape. The play is set in the underworld, in what looks like a reading room set up in a subway station tunnel. Dressed in a smoking jacket (I’m sure no pun intended), McLean stalks around the stage with his rich baritone voice enunciating Screwtape’s words to his underling Wormwood, his voice dripping with irony.
Screwtape’s secretary, Toadpipe (Yvonne Gougelet), shares the stage as a feminine seductress emitting wordless sounds (not in the book). She helps give the necessarily wordy production comic relief. Smoke and lighting complete the production effectively.
Having read the book prior to going to the play, I was surprised at how much I grasped from McLean’s characterization. His performance is truly illuminating. In the book I had to read some passages several times to get Lewis’ meaning. Given that up is down and down is up in Screwtape’s world, and that Lewis was a genius writing to an educated British audience in the early 1940s, some difficulty in reader comprehension is understandable. In the theatrical adaptation, however, McLean’s many physical gestures and gyrations and vocal inflections manage to make the meaning easier to grasp.
The wisdom of C.S. Lewis displayed in the play is just astounding. His ability to explain the human condition in ways that both surprise and ring entirely true makes one feel grateful to inhabit a universe that has objective meaning and standards.
Of course, even Lewis’s brilliant clarity of reasoning may not overcome the arguments of any nearby pagans, but it is not difficult to imagine the average bile-spewing, Christian-hating atheist actually enjoying The Screwtape Letters. It’s difficult to portray Lewis as some backward, benighted Christian ignorantly and fearfully clinging to his religion like an opiate-addicted junky. No, for Lewis, Christian faith clearly accords fully with reason and human experience, and anyone who would argue against him had better come very well prepared indeed, as Screwtape demonstrates vividly in both the book and this superb theatrical adaptation.
In fact, the transformation of Screwtape from a confident, urbane, sophisticated mentor into a desperate, haunted failure is the most striking aspect of the play. No matter what wiles and instructions Screwtape gives and whatever nefarious means Wormwood employs, the devils eventually lose their subject to the enemy. The dark, desperate, disheveled Screwtape of the drama’s climax realizes that no matter what he does, he is working in the “Enemy’s” territory (God’s creation), relying on lies and perversion to attempt to destroy a world his enemy created and which the devil does not have the power to redefine.
McLean’s bombastic portrayal of this failure is hauntingly gratifying and is superb drama and a moving theatrical experience—at least to followers of “the Enemy.”
Annotated 'Dracula' Reportedly Provides Book's Original, Very Different Ending
A new edition of Dracula, the extremely influential 1897 gothic novel written by Bram Stoker, includes a huge amount of background information about the book and its influence on the culture.
The power of the original novel Dracula lay in author Bram Stoker's ability to make Satan real to materialistic late-nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans, as was clearly the author's intention. Dracula still has the power to evoke the same thoughts today, and that accounts for its great and enduring influence in the 111 years since its original publication.
Judging by the description of the contents, the annotations will include much nonsense purveying bizarre, silly theories about the book's underlying meanings, of which a multitude have been written during the past century. However, there are a couple of things that may make it uniquely worth having.
These are, one, an introduction by sci-fi/fantasy author Neil Gaiman, and two, a detailed examination of the original typescript, which is described as having a "shockingly different" ending not previously available to scholars.
ABC's Life on Mars police drama-fantasy stumbled badly tonight in pursuit of a political agenda.
When I reported on the premiere of the new ABC TV series Life on Mars, in which a present-day police detective is mysteriously transported in time back into the 1970s, I pointed out that the pilot episode wisely followed the excellent BBC version in concentrating on the contrast between the personalities of the two central characters, Sam Tyler and his boss, Gene Hunt, instead of making self-satisfied claims that contemporary times are better than the 1970s:
[T]he show's major interest is in Sam's relationship with his new boss, Lt. Gene Hunt. . . . Sam is analytical and sometimes paralyzed by indecision, while Gene is intuitive and sometimes overly precipitous in his actions. Each, moreover, is an idealist in his own way, wanting to clean up a truly repugnant place. . . .
Thus the two characters' differing personalities make the show more than an exercise in self-satisfaction in the superiority of our present time over a benighted earlier period of history. Although Sam and Gene are definitely men of their different times, the show doesn't skew opinions entirely in Sam's favor. On the contrary, as in the original it's made clear that the best way is a proper balance between procedure and pragmatism.
Alas, it took only three episodes for the ABC Life on Mars team to go off course.
In last night's episode, the show's third, Gene Hunt is largely a peripheral character, and the focus of the episode is firmly on how ignorant and politically incorrect people were in the 1970s, and in particular on the importance of everyone being forced to endorse homosexuality lest the general public act on its overwhelming, perpetual desire to rampage through the streets in search of suspected homosexuals to beat to death.
Given that ABC is widely considered to be the "gayest" of the TV networks, this turn of events should hardly surprise us, but its effect on the show's aesthetics is a distinct disappointment. Tyler's boos, Lt. Gene Hunt (Harvey Keitel), does get in one dialogue line of oblique criticism of Sam Tyler's homosexual endorsement agenda, responding to Sam's mention of a "hate crime": "As opposed to all those 'I really, really like you' crimes?"
Unfortunately, that's the only opportunity given for a character fairly to question Sam's smug superiority, and it's only a criticism of awkward language, not the ideas behind it. Centering on the murder of a returned Vietnam veteran who has decided he no longer wants to hide his homosexuality—which the writers make sure repeatedly to describe as "courageous"—the episode continuously hammers at any discomfort with homosexuality as being tantamount to murder.
The gross didacticism of the episode greatly harms it aesthetically. Most egregious is that Gene Hunt has become a boringly ordinary character, relegated largely to the background with Sam Tyler as the only dominant character. That jettisons the healthy interplay between Sam and Gene that made the UK version of the show so effective and insightful.
In pursuit of political ends, the producers have thrown aside what was best about their show. It's possible they'll go back to the strengths of the original concept at some point, but one must wonder whether anyone will still be watching.
'National Review' Allows Diverse Opinions, Former Staffer Says
A former associate editor ofNational Review magazine says Christopher Buckley's departure from his back-page column was not a firing, and the magazine embraces diverse viewpoints within conservatism. But that's the real problem with the contemporary right: it lacks a set of coherent principles.
Recently a well-publicized conflict at National Review magazine created a stir on the right and much schadenfreude on the left. Christopher Buckley, the son of the magazine's late founder-editor and a highly respected writer himself, announced that he was supporting Sen. Barack Obama in the upcoming presidential election.
That prompted much discussion in the media, including columns by Kathleen Parker and Peggy Noonan claiming Buckley was "fired" from his column.
What clearly motivated the entire discussion was the sense that the political right in the United States is grossly fractured between three main groups: evangelicals, those who hate them and want them all dead, and those who hate them but hope to use them as catspaws to elect Republicans who are willing to spend lots of taxpayer money on a gargantuan national defense establishment. Viz, evangelicals, East Coasters, and neocons.
Cris Rapp, a former member of the National Revieweditorial staff, provides a very good perspective on what actually happened, citing NR editor in chief Rich Lowry's explanation that Buckley offered to resign from the column and Lowry accepted. Simple as that.
In fact, Buckley remains on the magazine's board of directors, and is welcome to write articles for it, Lowry said.
Rapp's column usefully points out what a wide variety of perspectives to which various members of the NR staff adhere, including people on both sides of the abortion issue, drug legalization, and even the value of religious belief (and, I would add, global warming policy). In fact, it's rather dizzying to read Rapp's account of the mad variety of thinking going on at NatRev and then consider that the magazine is just one small slice of the miasma of vastly different points of view among the contemporary American right—everything from Reason and LewRockwell.com to The American Conservative and Chronicles.
The real difference between the left and right today is that the left has a fairly strong and coherent agenda, and the right does not. The left's agenda is as well-defined as the right's was during the Reagan years, and the right's agenda is even more fractured and contradictory than the Reagan-era left's.
That's the real problem with the right today: its philosophy is simply incoherent. The American right is variously for much more government in some areas, much less in others, much more at some levels of society, and much less at others, with no real set of coherent and explainable principles guiding the choices
It used to be that the right was first and foremost for preserving the United States against the threat of international communism, to sustain the nation as a place of relative freedom in a world lurching into 1984. But with communism gone as a viable threat, the right simply fell apart. Without a vision, the people perish, as the prophet said.
As I noted more than two years ago at Tech Central Station, the Republicans and the right had lost their way because of this very lack of principles in the post-Cold War era, based on a capitulation to the left's premises that was no less damaging for being incomplete and halfhearted:
Bush and the Republican Congress have had a difficult time selling themselves to the public because their policies have not been appealing. They have adhered to a philosophy, big-government conservatism, that has finally alienated nearly everyone. . . . The economic premise of big government conservatism is that the welfare state benefits from free markets and is not in dire conflict with them. Their social premise relies on the same utilitarian calculus as that of their opponents on the Left, but the big government conservatives hold that although antinomianism is not good for people, nothing can really be done about it except to try to ease government restrictions on religion. The international affairs premise is that liberal democracy is the best thing for all nations and imposition of it on other nations is the solution when they become threats to U.S. interests.
I am going to quote extensively from this article because it remains relevant two big national elections later, alas. Instead of merely complaining about the incoherence of the modern right, I offered then, and offer again today, a viable alternative that has been tried and proven to work:
Their only real answer is to embrace classical liberalism. This includes in particular embracing its crucial components of individual rights, personal responsibility, the belief that human life in general and every human life in particular has meaning, and respect for the reality of nationality.
This vision of classical liberalism derives from Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and their contemporaries, and incorporates the insights of subsequent great thinkers such as Booker T. Washington, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Thomas Sowell. It is a vision of a true opportunity society, open to all who agree to play by the rules, and one in which the rules are sovereign.
Such a vision provides a comprehensible, consistent, and sensible view of the world and the nation. In this worldview, the nation is a society of free individuals brought together by a common heritage, living under laws that free people to achieve the best that they can and that prevent them from unfairly exploiting one another, a society that respects the need for personal morality regardless of one's religious background. Classical liberalism provides a way to find clear answers in all policy matters by asking the following question: Which policy approach will create the greatest amount of both individual liberty and social order?
Such a vision is by no means a theocracy; it is in fact based largely on utilitarian concerns. However, it also includes a respect for religion because the latter is part of mankind's perpetual search for truth and meaning and because religious faith can encourage personal morality and social charity and give great comfort and purpose to individuals in times both good and bad. In its great and abiding respect for the good things religion brings, however, classical liberalism never allows the two kingdoms (in Martin Luther's great distinction), the City of God and the City of Man, to be conflated or confused with each other.
Classical liberalism holds that the Christian religion is good for society because it encourages the intellectual foundations for an orderly society of free individuals. Whether a particular religion's claims are true or not is a matter for the Church to decide, as Luther pointed out, not the state; and whether a particular policy or political philosophy is good is a matter to be decided by an empirical calculus, as Luther likewise noted, not religious laws developed for a very different group of people six thousand years ago.
About religion, classical liberalism says: Encouragement of religion, yes; imposition of religious-based laws, no.
That's the outlines of how classical liberalism works, and how it would be applied today if we were to pursue it. As I noted at the time, this is a philosophy that the right could comfortably embrace and would have great appeal to the public at large. It could heal the great divides in the right, sending some people over to the left where they belong, while bringing in many new adherents:
This philosophy is much more likely to appeal to disaffected Republicans and others on the Right than the watered-down postmodernism now offered by the Grand Old Party. Classical liberalism is the philosophy that Ronald Reagan eloquently represented, and the party of Reagan could rely on that history to provide quick credibility to an effort to renew a commitment to his approach to government.
As I noted at the time, however, only real actions actually implementing these concepts would suffice, but the Republicans failed to make the necessary changes and the intellectuals of the right continued bickering over who was most responsible for the failures. Republicans and their backers on the right lost control of the Congress, and now they stand to lose everything.
I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.
So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.
As it happens, I have never been a member of the Republican Party (or any other), and have never called myself a conservative or accepted that description. I am a liberal, and quite satisfied to be one. The attempt to define a decent conservatism in the post-Cold War era is doomed to fail, I am convinced, because what we have in place in this nation in most areas of life is not to be conserved but instead desperately needs to be reformed.
Isn't it time we learned our lesson, and started to coalesce around a set of principles about which we can find real agreement? Classical liberalism is the answer.
Younger players may love the goofy characters and fast action but the game is also fun for older gamers who will pick up on many of the more clever jokes and can be impressed by the high variability of terrain and interesting abilities of the creatures you encounter and get to control. It might not be particularly innovative, and some play properties are downright frustrating, but overall it's a highly entertaining game that really lives up to the "all ages" category.
. . . [T]his version offers new features to add spice to the experience of those familiar with the title, but it is highly accessible to players picking it up for the first time. There are some recurring characters that older players might enjoy more, but anyone can be amused by the totally bizarre cut screens that are each done in a different fashion from infomercial to puppet show. It's here that the plot is revealed, with a pair of mad scientists creating the ultimate new mind-control device. Of course it's up to Crash to jump, climb, dig and fight his way around the game world, stopping their nefarious plan.
But the plot is much less important than the execution. There's an excellent selection of highly variable terrain in the game. You have to scale walls avoiding falling objects, time hops onto sinking icebergs, run around on funhouse-style rings, surf over water and avoid being blown off ledges by strong winds. The constantly changing obstacles the character moves through keep players on their toes, teaching you new moves along the way. Besides just fighting the terrain, you also encounter weird creatures that sound a lot like Woody Allen, girls attending "evil school," detonating robots and plenty of other villains that provide highly entertaining lines while you beat them up.
According to other reviews, the game is full of other such pop culture parodies and social satire, including a good deal of comedy about excessive consumerism. For more info, click here.
German Film Tells Story of Soviet Atrocities After WWII
The new film Anonyma: Eine Frau in Berlin depicts outrages by the Soviet military in Germany after World War II. It's another sign that mainstream media in the West are finally beginning to criticize communism—now that its partisans have far fewer threats and rewards to offer after the downfall of their imperial patron, the Soviet Union.
Here it is a mere fifteen years after the fall of communism, and Europeans are already beginning to criticize the manifestations of their former ideal. That was fast!
This week the film Anonyma: Eine Frau in Berlin opened in German theaters. It tells the story of German women raped by Soviet military personnel after World War II, an all-too-common occurrence which Germany and the rest of the West refused to acknowledge, lest the Kremlin and its lackeys strategically placed throughout the Western nations take offense.
The film is based on a book published in 1950 but "shunned" by the Germans upon its release, according to Reuters. The book was republished five decades later, however, well after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and became a bestseller.
The Reuters story reports that the film is receiving mixed reviews, and without seeing the picture it's difficult to know whether the differences are motivated by politics—those who are now willing to see communists criticized, and those who still refuse to admit that their god failed—or by honest disagreements over the film's aesthetics. Most likely the latter just happen to coincide with the former.
In any case, it's heartening to see a little honesty slowly creeping into the West's view of communism. It's long overdue.
Media Polls of Presidential Race May Be Wrong: Report
Having used skewed polls for many years in a concerted effort to demoralize right-of-center voters and energize the left, mainstream media outlets are now worried that their predictions of a big win for Obama just might not come true. Politico reports on their consternation.
Oliver Stone's W. is a good try but ultimately a miss, rather like its subject's presidency.
Oliver Stone's highly anticipated film biography of George W. Bush, W., has opened with mediocre success at the box office. Given the largely disappointing and disjointed quality of the film, it seems unlikely to turn things around and become a big hit, or to have any effect on the upcoming elections.
As had been rumored before the film's release, W. seems occasionally sympathetic to its central character, but the portrait it creates is largely negative. That is the filmmaker's prerogative, of course, but what is inexcusable—and dooms the film as either entertainment or art—is the portrait's essential incoherence.
While Josh Brolin's portrayal of Bush depicts him as physically quite ugly, with a constant barrage of unappealing smirks, grimaces, and body ticks quite unlike the real man's definite congeniality, the film's presentation of Bush's personality varies wildly.
Adding to the confusion is the director's and writer's choice to construct W. non-chronologically, jumping back and forth in time without any clear point behind the choice of which scene follows which. Evidently this is meant to encourage audiences to see the material thematically, but the themes are not drawn with any clarity, other than that Bush is alternately driven by outside events and creates additional problems by himself.
Thus the film depicts Bush variously as an irresponsible, selfish scoundrel; a religious nut; an exceedingly clever, ambitious, and unscrupulous politician; and a disturbed, adolescent adult intent on proving his worth to his father. Stone's Bush is naive, imperious, impulsive, and calculating at various times. Apparently this complex of contradictions is intended to create a deeply nuanced, psychologically complex, understanding portrait of a complicated man. Instead, the central character the film presents is simply incoherent and implausible.
Ultimately, the episodic, unfocused presentation of events makes much of the film rather dull, despite the largely strong performances Stone evokes from his actors.
Egregiously damaging to the film's effect are the behind-the-scenes cabinet meetings, which come off as ridiculously false and didactic. Especially damaging in this regard is the filmmakers' attempt to make Secretary of State Colin Powell into a lone voice of reason and conscience in the Bush White House. Instead, he comes off as every bit as smug and priggish as the rest of the group, which was clearly not the filmmakers' intention. Their problem appears to have been that their idea of a good person is a smug prig.
In addition, the film's version of Powell ultimately caves in and argues for the war in a famous speech to the United Nations, albeit reluctantly, after enduring continuous pressure from the rest of the inner circle. That makes him look cowardly for going against his conscience instead of resigning, as he should certainly have done had he disagreed so strongly. This does not resemble the Powell we know, nor does it make sense for the character as presented in the film.
On the plus side, the scene in which Bush becomes a Christian is handled very well and without irony. Stone's ability to render this scene so effectively shows what he could have accomplished had his aim been purer throughout the film.
The filmmakers obviously want to identify Bush's motives as president and beforehand, but W. never makes his thinking process clear. Stone cannot decide whether Bush has been basically a well-intentioned but irresponsible fool in a job well over his head (a strong theme of the film) or a crafty tyrant bent on an agenda of self-aggrandizement and personal vendettas (an equally strong theme). It would take a Shakespeare to make such a portrait cohere, and Stone is no Shakespeare.
Most of all, however, Stone's obsession with Iraq War weakens the effect of the film as an assessment of Bush's presidency or any kind of sensible view of the man. Certainly the Iraq War was a defining element of Bush's presidency, but it can be argued that his other mistakes were what really destroyed his popularity, sending him down from 80+ percent approval by the American public to near single-digits and a current approval rating of less than one-third of the public. After all, no one holds the Congress responsible for the Iraq War, yet their approval rating is only half of what Bush's is.
Thus it would have made sense for W. to spend at least some time on Bush's policies regarding federal government spending, the financial crisis, the Patriot Act, the disastrous botching of the Katrina response, the inability to reform health care policy and Social Security, the increasing nationalization of K-12 education, his failure to agree with the vast majority of America on immigration policy, and the like.
Indeed, I think that the rapid and unjustified increases in government spending in recent years are the main reason that the public disapproves so strongly of both Bush and the Congress. Crucially, I believe that the lack of any discernible benefits from the vast spending increases are what infuriated people the most.
Although I agree that the incursion into Iraq was not the right thing to do, at least there was some rationale behind it which made sense at the time. Even very liberal Democrats supported it. For the outrageous spending increases of the past six years (of which Iraq War spending was a relatively small part), however, there is no excuse whatever.
That, I believe, is the real reason Americans are so disappointed in the presidency of George W. Bush, and Stone's failure to understand that makes this blinkered portrayal of the man and his works much less interesting than it could have been.
Media Frenzy over Finance Sector Could Cause Dire, Prolonged Misery
More government regulation is not the answer to economic problems but instead makes the situation much worse and prolongs the trouble, a new study reports. That means the mass fear whipped up by the media in recent weeks could have dire, long-lasting consequences if we don't reverse course.
In addition, D'Virgilio notes that the pressure for further regulations could rise much farther:
This is incredibly important to know seeing as how in a couple weeks we may be seeing all three branches of our federal government controlled by Democrats of the extreme left who believe government intervention is always the answer. As Senator Obama said recently, he wants to “make government cool again.” The Democrat mantra about the financial crisis is that it’s basically free markets run amuck. In their upside down, Alice in Wonderland world that may be true, but in reality it is government intervention in the markets that precipitated the problem (see Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac).
Read Mike's article here, and read a summary of the UCLA report here.
Documentary Calls Attention to Contemporary Slavery
Musician Steve Dillon's documentary Call + Response brings attention to the vast problem of contemporary slavery, noting that there are more slaves today than at any other time in history.
The musical documentary Call + Response is Dillon’s ambitious and masterful artistic counterattack to an all-too-easy-to-overlook enemy who still sells men, women, and children like commodities to the highest bidders. The grainy, undercover film footage taken in Asian brothels is interspersed with the testimony of eloquent activists such as Gary Haugen of the International Justice Mission and actress Ashley Judd, as well as performances by the Cold War Kids and Matisyahu, the Orthodox Jewish reggae artist.
Beard describes the enormity of the problem as follows:
According to the 2008 U.S. State Department “Trafficking in Persons Report,” approximately 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders. That does not include the millions trafficked within their own countries. “Approximately 80 percent of transnational victims are women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors,” states the report. “Human traffickers prey on the vulnerable. Their targets are often children and young women, and their ploys are creative and ruthless, designed to trick, coerce, and win the confidence of potential victims. Very often these ruses involve promises of a better life through employment, educational opportunities, or marriage.”
The trailer to the film shows how ordinary Americans contribute to this horror. Dillon refers to the music in the film as "the sound of the 21st century abolitionist movement."
Dillon's film is a highly laudable effort, and Beard's article does an excellent job of introducing us to it.
The shortcomings and travails of cinematic mystery fiction could suggest that the cinema can't be contemplative and intelligent—or perhaps filmmakers tackling the genre just haven't tried hard enough.
TAC correspondent Mike Gray reports.
Writing in 1972, William K. Everson, a good authority on genre films in years gone by, famously noted that detective films have never been as good as prose detective fiction:
Despite the admitted entertainment value of literally thousands of movie mysteries, barely a handful have really matched the skill, cunning, and meticulous construction of their source novels. The British Green for Danger was one that did; so did an early Philo Vance talkie, The Kennel Murder Case, a model of its kind, and the best of the Philip Marlowe mysteries, Murder My Sweet. The rest have entertained us, excited us—but rarely fooled us.
What Everson said in 1972 remains true today. Sure, some Hollywood "mysteries" have been entertaining and exciting, no doubt about that, but as for fooling us—no.
Why is Hollywood afraid to challenge its audiences when making detective films? Do the producers in Tinsel Town think we're all so dumb that we can't figure out the mystery ourselves? Is it a classic case of projection, in which they attribute their own shortcomings to the rest of us? Or could it be a technical limitation, something in the literal nature of film a priori that precludes them from creating whodunits that really can fool us? Is it all of these, or some, or none?
Some would say that the Dream Factory has produced some genuine mysteries since 1972, such as The Usual Suspects, but Suspects isn't really a whodunit. Yes, there is a marvelous twist at the end, but a work doesn't qualify solely on that count.
The Usual Suspects actually belongs in the same category of shaggy dog story as, say, the John Wayne Western The Train Robbers. These two films are in no wise classic whodunits, with a crime, suspects, and a detective working towards a solution: the classic formula.
Historically, Everson writes, Hollywood has failed to take advantage of the cultural awareness among the masses of this classic formula that already existed in the widespread availability of written detective fiction:
Curiously, the movies have seldom exploited the public's familiarity with the cliches of the detective formula. Anticipating the audience reaction to a given set of circumstances—leading them astray—giving them credit for tumbling to the deception and carrying it a step further—this is the kind of gambit thinking that could have made the movie mystery an entertainment form quite separate from the detective story. But few directors (or writers) have ever chosen to play with their audiences like that.
I'm willing to bet that there is a large segment of the moviegoing public who wouldn't mind that kind of experience. The great mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers likened the urge to solve puzzles to self-torture. Whatever the merits of that comparison, Sayers certainly knew full-well that an exquisite pleasure can be derived from solving a mystery, as her own works attest.
The "cliches of the detective formula," it seems to me, can't miss: "[a]nticipating the audience reaction . . . leading them astray . . . giving them credit for tumbling to the deception." Such "gambit thinking" has seldom been exploited by the film industry. Why not?
Everson does offer lazy-minded Hollywood producers and writers an out when he proposes a technical limitation to adapting detective fiction to the motion picture medium:
What is surprising, however, is that so few really classic detective movies have resulted. Perhaps the two arts [the written detective story and films adapted from it] are too far apart. The detective story is essentially a contemplative and nonvisual art. The good ones are so structured that the reader can go back and restudy the case in light of later knowledge. The essential information is conveyed not by action, but by extended dialogue conversations, and by meticulous description. . . .
The film, of course, does not allow for the luxury of either extended detail or protracted examination; at best, it occasionally allows, via flashbacks or other devices, for the rescrutiny of important sequences. And the viewer has no option: he is reshown only what the writer or director chooses.
We know that successful (if often radically altered) adaptations of classic detective novels are possible; Everson cites three very good ones: Murder, My Sweet, Green for Danger, and The Kennel Murder Case, my all-time favorite. (In the last film, I think changing the sleuth from a Nietzschean superman to someone more identifiably human helps immensely, without at all vitiating the mystery elements of the original story. Philo Vance is the smartest man in the room, not because he's a more highly evolved Ubermensch but because he just happens to be the smartest man in the room.)
It has been a common complaint among readers in every genre that "the movie just wasn't like the book I remember reading." Can Everson's tenuous excuse—that "[t]he detective story is essentially a contemplative and nonvisual art" whose "essential information is conveyed not by action, but by extended dialogue conversations, and by meticulous description"—justify Hollywood's neglect of the classic detective tale? Some would say it's a necessary and sufficient reason, but how necessary and how sufficient is it?
Couldn't filmmakers tell such stories through action (including dialogue, of course), they way they tell other stories? And could not that action convey the necessary information about the critical facts—means, motive, and opportunity—that allow us to figure out who committed the crime, without showing who actually did it, plus including sufficient red herrings to mystify us?
Is cinema a relatively poor means of engaging the problem-solving, analytical side of the intellect? Or is the problem simply that too few filmmakers are willing and able to rise to that challenge?
Certainly a good many real and satisfying whodunits have been done for television. Yet few people would claim that TV is inherently a more intellectually intensive medium than the cinema. Perhaps it is, however, and scholars should look into that possibility.
Or could it be that filmmakers simply regard their customers as the Great Unwashed, the "boobsoisie", unlettered and unfettered knuckledraggers who will tolerate almost any nonsense Hollywood designates as "culture," as memorably formulated by the journalist H. L. Mencken when he wrote, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public"?
In the final analysis, one thing seems clear: Hollywood can't or won't make thought-provoking detective films in the classic mold. What that says about Tinsel Town culture and American culture at large I will leave for the reader to determine.
U.S. audiences just wish the Hollywood left would move on.
The videogame-based action fantasy Max Payne won the weekend's U.S. movie box office competition, easily besting the highly anticipated and widely promoted W, Oliver Stone's satirical film biography of President George W. Bush.
In fact, Stone's biopic came in fourth in U.S. ticket sales, bringing in just $10.6 million, behind Beverly Hills Chihuahua ($11.2 million) and the opening weekend of The Secret Life of Bees, a chick-flick starring Dakota Fanning learning life lessons from three African-American women ($11.1 million). Max Payne brought in an OK $18 million—a good haul for a Mark Wahlberg film, but not great for an action fantasy based on a pre-sold, well-known franchise.
Stone's last movie before W,World Trade Center, actually did much better in its first weekend than his current release (and even beat Max Payne's first-weekend take), bringing in $18.7 million.
W appears to have been held back by mediocre reviews from critics clearly disappointed that the film doesn't take the kind of hard-hitting, factually irresponsible attitude toward its subject that Stone did with JFK and Nixon. Instead, they lament, Stone seems rather sympathetic to the most evil person ever to walk the face of the earth.
Of course, the terrible reviews for Max Payne probably didn't help its prospects either, but its teen and college-male audience is unlikely to be affected by newspaper and TV reviews, and Beverly Hills Chihuahua has been drawing big audiences despite less than stellar reviews of its own.
Making an even more disappointing (to its investors) showing than W was the equally political Body of Lies, another film detailing the horrors of the George W. Bushyears.
The film's box office take was down nearly 50 percent from the previous weekend, bringing only $6.9 million to finish sixth in U.S. ticket sales in its second week. For a film featuring huge-name stars Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by critically acclaimed Ridley Scott, those numbers are disastrously bad.
Clearly, audiences wish the Hollywood left would do what they've been nagging George W. Bush to do for several years: Move on.
Conservative Kimball Agrees: Obama Would 'Transform' America
Conservative columnist Roger Kimball explains just how "transformative" Barack Obama really is.
Columnist Roger Kimball (managing editor of The New Criterion and president of Encounter Books) has written an excellent essay, "Is Obama a “transformational figure”? You don’t know the half of it!" for his Pajamas Media blog. Prompted by former U.S. Army General Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama on Meet the Press yesterday, Kimball takes Powell's complimentary characterization of Obama as a "transformational figure" and explains just what that really means:
Yesterday, Gen. Colin Powell, former Republican Secretary of State, waddled forth on Meet the Press to criticize his former boss [President George W. Bush] and announce his support for [Illinois Senator Barack] Obama. The election of Obama, said Gen. Powell, would “electrify the world.”
I agree with Gen. Powell that Obama would be a “transformational figure.” But what sort of transformation are we talking about? The United States is the richest, freest, most powerful nation in history. What would it look like after Obama, abetted by a Pelosi-Reid Congress, got done with their transformation?
Yes, that’s right, Virginia, it would be poorer, markedly less free, and less powerful.
Kimball cites an excellent Wall Street Journal article from last Friday that explained in great detail exactly what a President Obama and congressional majorities with a filibuster-proof Senate would do. The picture is truly frightening, and I refer you to the original article for the bloody details. Here's Kimball's sense of its central meaning:
He, together with a large left-wing majority in Congress, would transform America from the land of the free and the home of the brave into another socialist swamp: the land of the taxed and the home of regulated.
That is a perfectly accurate description not only of the inevitable consequences of Obama's and the congressional Democrats' proposed policies but also their intentions. Change the words "socialist swamp" to "haven of social justice" and it's obvious that this is a highly accurate description of their intent.
The question, then, is whether the voters will actually go through with their alleged intent to elect Obama president, as the polls seem to indicate. The vivid differences between the two candidates—which Kimball accurately describes as "a choice between a liberal, idiosyncratic Republican and an activist left-wing crusader"—definitely provides Americans a choice between two enormously different futures. :
Will it sell? In an earlier post, I said that “Whatever else it is, this election is a referendum on two very different visions of America. Obama’s vision is of country crippled by sin; McCain and Palin’s vision is of a country fired by high ideals and expansive opportunity.”
What the election results will tell us is whether America has already been transformed from a place where people want to be free to pursue happiness or one where they will gladly give up that freedom in exchange for the promise of increasingly meager handouts from an overweening and imperial government. Kimball believes that Obama ultimately won't make it:
The question is how far outside the precincts of elite opinion that fog has penetrated. I suspect most Americans side with John McCain and Sarah Palin and Joe the plumber against the socialist mandarins who have plotted out a socialist future for America, and one that is inflected, moreover, by the antinomianism of class warriors like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright. If I am right, you should not be surprised to wake up on November 5 and find that John McCain has been elected the forty-fourth president of the United States.
And if Kimball is wrong, the results of this election will reflect a profound cultural and social change—indeed, a change of civilizations—that has already taken place, and it will indeed have a transformative effect on America and the world.
Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin achieved the highest ratings in several years for two major TV network comedy shows in the past few days.
Thanks in large part to the talk show host's petulant, one-sided, highly publicized feud with presidential candidate John McCain, Late Night with David Letterman enjoyed a gigantic ratings boost Thursday night when McCain appeared on the show to mend fences with the host.
The episode achieved the show's highest rating since 2005, drawing 6.53 million viewers, more than two million more than timeslot rival The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, which usually beats the snot out of Letterman's show in the ratings.
Letterman had initiated a widely reported series of on-air attacks against the Republican presidential candidate after McCain canceled an appearance on the show a few weeks ago. McCain's appearance on Thursday's show impressed observers with his affability and charm while enduring pressure from the host's barrage of hostile questions. McCain frankly admitted, "I screwed up," in response to Letterman's inquriy regarding why he skipped the show earlier.
Letterman had pointed out repeatedly that McCain did a couple of on-air interviews during the very time Letterman's show was taping, instead of going immediately to the nation's capitol to aid in resolving the financial crisis as he had told Letterman's staff he was planning to do. Letterman still seemed angry Thursday, and McCain's calmness under fire showed his personal character to great advantage.
Palin's appearance on Saturday Night Live drew the highest ratings the show has managed in fourteen years. Approximately 14 million people watched the show. Even more tellingly, in the show's first half-hour, when Palin made her first appearance, the audience was 17 million. Saturday Night Live starts at 11:30 EDT, when audiences are much smaller than in the evening, but the first half-hour's audience was bigger than those for all but two primetime shows in the previous week.
Palin did not have to do much but seem pleasant, normal, and poised, and she accomplished that fully.
Undoubtedly the audiences tuned in out of pure curiosity, to see how the candidates would react, and both McCain and Palin showed coolness under fire. It's unlikely that the appearances would change many votes of real partisans, but the performances and the positive press reaction to them could help the ticket's standing among the still numerous group of undecided voters.
Despite the relentless beating the Republican ticket has been getting from both "the liberal elite media as well as the liberal regular media," as Fay's impersonation of Palin put it during the SNL sketch, the two shows did give the candidates some on-air time, albeit far from equal time, and allowed them to show audiences that they can take a joke and have a good deal of class.
Perhaps the people behind the two shows learned a valuable lesson about doing well by doing the right thing.
Trailing in the polls, Republican presidential ticket Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin have turned their attention to a crucial battleground: TV comedy shows.
After a good deal of trouble from Obama-Biden supporters in the media and a couple of highly publicized dust-ups, Republicans Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin have decided that they woudl join them after it became evident that they were going to continue to take a beating from them and might as well try to get some small benefit out of the situation by showing themselves as good sports.
They succeeded in that. McCain appeared on the David Letterman show Thursday night, after the erstwhile comedian spent several weeks in a one-sided feud with the Arizona senator and Republican presidential candidate for canceling an appearance on Letterman's weak late-night comedy show. Earlier that night, he had given a well-received comic address at the annual Al Smith dinner for Catholic charities in New York City.
McCain's performance at the Waldorf-Astoria--a roast, essentially--was crisp, smooth and confident; he easily earned more laughs than Barack Obama, who followed him to the podium.
It was a scripted performance, of course, and McCain knocked the ball out of the park, witnesses agree.
Letterman's show was a much more difficult and impressive achievement. The vain, over-the-hill comic went after the senator good and hard, predictably, asking lots of tough questions with undisguised hostility. In fact, he rather disgraced himself, as if it were still possible to reduce himself further in the estimation of any sensible person.
Newsweek's Romano, no fan of McCain's presidential campaign, lauded the senator's Letterman-show performance as follows:
When McCain tried to be funny, he was funny. "I haven’t had so much fun since my last interrogation," he said at one point. Later, he joked that Ayers and Obama—in a line that seemed to mock his own campaign's relentless harping on their "relationship"—"may be going to Denny's together." "Who knows?" he added, citing "the Grand Slam" as an important factor to consider. When the moment called for candor, McCain was candid. "I know Gordon Liddy," he admitted (Letterman had asked whether voters should see Liddy as McCain's Ayers). "He paid his debt. He went to prison, he paid his debt, as people do." And McCain even managed some self-deprecation—again, a quality sorely lacking in his debate performances. "I screwed up," he said of his decision to skip the show. "'It’s only Dave. There’s only a few million who’ll be watching. What the hell? Who cares?'" You may not have agreed with him on everything—I still think, for example, that he's wrong to harp on ACORN and Ayers—but you couldn't help respecting him. There was none of the nastiness or defensiveness that marred his debate performances. He seemed like a human being again—as opposed to a politician.
Two days after McCain's apperances at the Al Smith dinner and Letterman's show, Gov. Sarah Palin appeared on Saturday Night Live, likewise proving herself a very good sport.
The opening sketch was somewhat amusing, with Tina Fay portraying Palin as speaking at a news conference while the real Palin watched offstage with the show's creator and producer, Lorne Michaels. The best moment was when Fay, as Palin, addressed the media at the beginning of the conference:
First off, I just want to say how excited I am to be in front of both the liberal elite media as well as the liberal regular media. I am looking forward to a portion of your questions.
The rest of Fay's performance hit the usual notes, depicting her as an attractive nobrain. Instead of dwelling on that tired material, the scene concentrated on Palin, as actor and Democrat partisan Alec Baldwin stopped by to talk with Michaels and Palin, thinking the latter was actually Tina Fay and it was Palin who was onstage in the press conference scene:
"This is the most important election in our nation's history and you want her, our Tina, to go out there and stand with that horrible woman?" he said.
Palin took it all in stride, getting in a good shot at Baldwin: after the actor said, "I must say this: you are way hotter in person," Palin graciously replied, "Thank you, and I must say, your brother Stephen is my favorite Baldwin brother."
Palin also appeared onstage during the "Weekend Update" segment, bobbing her head while Amy Pohler sang a silly rap song originally written for Palin to perform but which the governer decided was not a good idea for her to do. It included lines such as, "I'm Jeremiah Wright 'cuz I'm the preacher; I got a bookish look and you're all hot for teacher,"
It's extremely unlikely that these successful performances on two comedy shows will turn an election around, of course, but McCain and Palin certainly didn't harm their prospects by reminding audiences of what is likeable about them. After several weeks spent grimly taking a pounding from the entire mainstream media, the Republican candidates' ability to show themselves unbowed by the relentless hostility directed against them displays more fitness to govern than any number of position papers ever could.
In light of the innumerable endorsements of presidential candidate Barack Obama by Hollywood celebrities and other media people, here's a lonely contrary opinion: a clip of actress Janine Turner (Northern Exposure, Friday Night Lights) endorsing the McCain-Palin ticket and lauding Gov. Palin:
Lifetime Network Movie Shows Deaths, Pain Caused by Government Health Care Intrusion
A new Lifetime Network docudrama reveals the deaths and pain caused by the federal government's intrusion into doctor-patient treatment decisions.
The Lifetime Network TV movie Living Proof, premiering tomorrow at 9 p.m. EDT, tells the true story of UCLA genetics researcher Dr. Dennis Slamon, whose work led to development of the cancer treatment Herceptin, which has shown great success in recent years in killing cancers without causing the damaging side effects common in chemotherapy.
Herceptin works differently from chemo, which is a poison that kills human cells, with the treatment based on the hope that the drugs will destroy cancer cells without doing excessive harm to the rest of the body. It's a hope for people with cancer, but a less damaging alternative would be greatly welcome.
That's what Herceptin is: a "superprotein" that can "target the bad cells and turn them off like a light switch. It won't cure the cancer, but it'll shut it off, which is almost as good," as Sloman states it in the film. The superprotein does no harm to normal cells, thus avoiding side effects.
The film shows Sloman, played by Harry Connick Jr., going through a decade of clinical trials and losing patience as thousands of women die of breast cancer while the treatment awaits approval by the federal government's Food and Drug Administration, as the makers of the drug negotiate their way through an elaborate bureaucratic process intended to make sure the drug will not harm anyone.
The happy ending comes in 1998, when the drug finally receives FDA approval, which the film notes, means "hundreds of thousands of women are alive today" who would have been killed by cancer otherwise.
Despite the final triumph, however, there is a tragic lesson to be learned: because of the entirely unnecessary intervention of government into doctor-patient relationships—which is what the "drug approval" process is—thousands of women endured awful pain and discomfort which was absolutely unnecessary, because they were denied a drug that could have saved their lives painlessly.
That's the real lesson to be found in Living Proof.
TV producer and filmmaker J. J. Abrams is directing and producing the forthcoming Star Trek film with the goal of bringing a more optimistic point of view to the culture.
Film and TV producer J. J. Abrams (Alias, Lost, Fringe, Felicity, Cloverfield, Mission: Impossible III), who will produce and direct the forthcoming Star Trek film arriving in 2009, says that he was a Star Wars fan as a child, not an aficionado of Star Trek.
He says he took on the Star Trek film project, however, because he was drawn to the idealism behind the franchise. He hopes to make a more optimistic point of view as popular as the somewhat bleak vision of The Dark Knight was.
AP reports Abrams as saying, "In a world where a movie as incredibly produced as 'The Dark Knight' is raking in gazillions of dollars, 'Star Trek' stands in stark contrast. It was important to me that optimism be cool again."
ABC TV's American version of the much-lauded BBC police drama Life on Mars is off to a good start, but sustaining the show's quality will be difficult.
When ABC TV first announced plans to produce a series based on the excellent BBC show Life on Mars,it seemed unlikely that the American version could approach the quality of the original. And when ABC announced that Harvey Keitel would play the American version of DI Gene Hunt, it seemed very unlikely that, talented as he is, he could be nearly as interesting and formidable a character as Philip Glenister's original characterization.
With the first episode of the ABC version having run last Thursday and episode 2 coming tonight, it's clear that the American version of Life on Mars is no carbon copy of the English version but is very good television in its own right.
The concept of the show is the same as the original: police detective Sam Tyler is suddenly and inexplicably transported into the 1970s after being hit by a car while on a case. As in the BBC version, he finds that he has been newly assigned to a different precinct, one rife with corruption and cigarette smoking (although not nearly as much of the latter as was the norm during the time period; apparently anti-tobacco attitudes in Hollywood prevent commonsense realism).
While Sam tries to figure out how he got bounced into a time when he was just a child (and the viewer is encouraged to do likewise), he is plunged into a puzzling homicide investigation and must try to find a serial killer (of course).
The critical difference between the UK and U.S. versions is that whereas the former was done in two series of about a half-dozen episodes apiece, the latter is open-ended, and the premise would have to hold up over many more episodes if the show succeeds.
The mystery investigation aspect of the premiere episode is handled quite well and provides some little insights into human life, but the show's major interest is in Sam's relationship with his new boss, Lt. Gene Hunt. Hunt is entirely a results guy, flouting the rules continuously in order to capture the villains and put them away, and is the type who is always certain he know exactly who the bad guys are. In short, a 1970s TV cop.
Sam, by contrast, is a rather more contemplative and process-oriented type, and he is appalled by Hunt's predilection for procedural shortcuts. In short, a contemporary TV cop.
This contrast is embedded thoroughly in the two characters' personalities: Sam is analytical and sometimes paralyzed by indecision, while Gene is intuitive and sometimes overly precipitous in his actions. Each, moreover, is an idealist in his own way, wanting to clean up a truly repugnant place. Jason O'Mara (as Sam) and Harvey Keitel (Hunt) do an excellent job of bringing these characters to life as powerful personalities with interesting nuances and complex motives and combinations of ideas.
Thus the two characters' differing personalities make the show more than an exercise in self-satisfiaction in the superiority of our present time over a benighted earlier period of history. Although Sam and Gene are definitely men of their different times, the show doesn't skew opinions entirely in Sam's favor. On the contrary, as in the original it's made clear that the best way is a proper balance between procedure and pragmatism.
The setting—New York City in the 1970s—is an excellent place to explore these ideas, and it's recreated vividly in the characterizations, fashions, and settings (many of which appear to be computer-generated). The two women in Sam's life—present-day girlfriend Maya Daniels (Lisa Bonet) and 1970s colleague Annie Norris (Gretchen Mol)—add poignance to the show. Sam longs to return to the present day to save Maya from a serial killer, while finding himself attracted to Annie as a friend and something of a project (to turn her into a superachiever by overcoming her acceptance of the imperfections of society).
In all, Life on Mars does a fine job of taking a limited-run English TV series and setting the plate for a possibly longer run on U.S. television. The real test will be whether it can keep the story line going without undermining the interest in the original premise by spending too much or too little time on Sam's quest to return to the present day and explaining exactly what happened.
That will be a difficult thing to accomplish, but the team is off to a good start.
The Idealism Behind Hollywood Stars' Support for Obama
The real reason Hollywood stars and other idealistic celebrities hate George W. Bush so passionately and support Barack Obama so enthusiastically is very simple: Admitting that sometimes things just go wrong despite good intentions would prove the achievement of their desired utopia impossible.
To an idealist, that is intolerable, and any means of preventing the admission of that truth are acceptable and in fact necessary.
Appearing at the London (UK) Film Festival to promote the world premiere of their new film, Frost/Nixon, actor Kevin Bacon and director Ron Howard expressed strong support for presidential candidate Barack Obama. Their film recreates a widely watched series of interviews between former president Richard Nixon and smarmy UK talk-show host David Frost that took place in the 1970s.
The film must be a labor of love of some bizarre sort, given that no one with any sense could possibly care less about Richard Nixon three and a half decades after his resignation from office. Lynyrd Skynyrd got it right at the time:
Watergate does not bother me.
Does your conscience bother you?
Evidently in the case of the people behind this film, it still does, and the answer for them is Obama.
One can see why Hollywood and the rest of the American culture keep revisiting Nixon and this particular series of interviews, however (the film is based on a stage play). It's one of the great triumphs of the Left and the media in the past half-century: the taking down of a sitting president. It's the only one, actually, and it's an entirely negative achievement, of course. Moreover, its one real consequence, the election and presidency of Jimmy Carter, is certainly one of the low points of American history.
Nonetheless, for the American Left the downfall of Richard Nixon represents a bright, shining moment of unalloyed triumph.
Reuters reports that Howard said America had lost lustre in the world (there's an insight), and that grotesque tax increases and negotiating with terrorists would be just the thing to restore us to our former glory during the Carter and Clinton eras:
"We've been through a very troubling eight years and times are complicated, the United States' standing has fallen," Howard told Reuters on the red carpet.
"I think we're a great country ... and I'm not being idealistic. I feel that we stand for something very positive and I think Obama would put that foot forward."
Counting political chickens that appear to be almost hatched, Bacon looked forward to the wonderful utopia to come:
Bacon, who described himself as a life-long Democrat, added that he thought Obama was going to be a "fantastic president."
"I think throughout this campaign we've seen the steady hand, the even hand, and I would be thrilled if he was our next president."
Meanwhile, music nightmare Madonna, performing in concert in Boston, urged the audience to vote for Obama.
And in an interview for a different Reuters story, W director Oliver Stone likened the immediate post-9/11 years of the Bush presidency as resembling the conditions in George Orwell's 1984, perhaps setting a new record for hyperbole, a stunning accomplishment given the masterpieces of rhetorical exaggeration created by representatives of both political parties:
The 2000-2003 period (of the Bush presidency) was a veiled Orwellian masterpiece, where they closed off all documents and fired anyone in the inner circle who talked to the press. This guy was infallible for three years. It was only in about 2004-2005 that this was starting to come out. Without all the investigative reporters, where would we be?
Where indeed? Nobody knew what was going on during the runup to the Iraq War, because the White House had perfect information but kept it all secret because they just wanted to have a war. We were fooled. That's what happened.
Or perhaps we all made a bad judgment based on the best information available at the time. Perhaps people had good intentions and guessed wrong. Perhaps that's just the way things go in this inevitably imperfect world.
No, no, a thousand times no!, say the Oliver Stones of the world. If that were true, there would be no answer to such worldly imperfections, and it would be simply impossible for us ever to finish building the glorious, perfect utopia of peace, plenty, and equality the Oliver Stones of the world see in their beautiful dreams.
But pursue it they must. The alternative—a realistic view of the world and an acceptance of the limitations of human nature and the human condition—is too horrible to contemplate.
Thus the real answer must lie in some psychological disease within President Bush exacerbated by the watching of too many John Wayne movies, as Stone theorizes in the Reuters interview:
Bush grew up under the curse of being the first son and the black sheep of the family and he had to prove himself stronger (than his father). So for him, winning a second term was crucial and above all finishing the job in Iraq. I think Bush personalizes a very complex series of world situations and makes them into issues of his own ego, which I call cowboy or John Wayne-like.
It's most interesting indeed that Stone would accuse Bush of "personalizing a complex series of world situations." If anybody seems to have taken the events of the past eight years personally, it's Bush's opponents on the Left. Opposition to Bush's policies is richly justified, but the intense personal hatred directed his way has been utterly irrational. Something more has been at work.
It is this: the utopians' hatred of Bush is rather like a dog barking at its image in a mirror—it was Bush's idealistic pursuit of the utopian dream of imposing modern Western values on societies not at all ready for them (the Arab, Muslim Middle East) that led to the deaths and expense in Iraq that they have so furiously denounced.
As a classical liberal, I personally disagree (in the strongest possible terms) with Bush's decision to engage in nation-building in Iraq, but I won't pretend that the administration had no reasonable arguments for it or that the American people were duped into undertaking it. (How could such a monumental thing be achieved by an administration so thoroughly incompetent as its opponents correctly characterize this one as having been?)
No, the reality is that life is messy, and even good people and good nations make mistakes. The very idealism that motivates Bush's enemies on the Left is what motivated him to undertake the Iraq War and domestic government overspending that have diminished America's economic productivity and stature on the world stage.
Having ideals is a good thing, but they must always be tempered by realism, especially when government coercion of others is involved. That's where classical liberal principles are essential: they limit what people can be allowed to force on one another in the pursuit of worldly perfection or any other desire.
Hollywood has a reputation for being anti-Bush, but industry experts point out that with his re-election in 2004, and a series of Iraq war movies that turned out to be box office flops, its impact on what happens next month may be limited.
To say the least. However, the utopianism these extaordinarily privileged people represent is a huge force in the American culture and society, and the relentless pursuit of this fevered dream is the real danger to our safety, prosperity, and peace of mind.
NBC's new sitcom Kath and Kim is funny but unduly trivial.
After the writers' strike made it difficult for producers to create viable pilot episodes for proposed new network TV series (because screenplays were not available), the networks turned to concepts borrowed from successful shows in other countries for much of this fall's new programming. Among the new shows for this season that are based on programs from other countries, are Life on Mars, Eleventh Hour, The Ex List, and Worst Week, with Knight Rider being based by a past U.S. TV series.
Kath and Kim is another of the series based on an overseas predecessor, from a sitcom that originally aired in Australia. The U.S. version stars Molly Shannon (Saturday Night Live) and Selma Blair (Hellboy) as mother and daughter.
In the premiere episode last Thursday, we find that Kim (Blair) is getting a divorce just after her mother (Kath) announces that she is getting remarried. Kim who just got married herself, is calling it quits because her husband has been asking her to "do stuff"—such as "microwaving dinner once in a while." She didn't sign on for that sort of thing, she notes.
Both Kath and Kim are stunningly superficial and self-centered (although mother Teresa compared to Kim and does have a sense of morality, however, fitfully she displays it) American women, and the highly talented comic actresses Shannon and Blair portray them superbly. The actors who play their boyfriends also each do an excellent job.
The writing in the premiere episode included numerous funny dialogue lines and situations. What makes the show less than satisfying, however, is that Kath and Kim are in reasonably good financial shape and don't face any important crises they couldn't solve by being more reasonable and having a sensible perspective on life. Their goals are so narrow and self-centered that the show comes off as excessively trivial.
That hasn't harmed shows such as Seinfeld and Friends in prior years, so it might do for Kath and Kim. Nonetheless, although the show is amusing, it seems it will be exceedingly easy to do without.
That will sound a bit odd to those familiar with the stories. Doyle portrays Gerard as brave, handsome, charming, resourceful—and terribly full of himself. The stories are full of action, adventure, romance, and droll, deadpan humor.
Production is expected to begin next spring, with a screenplay by the writers of Blades of Glory.According to the showbiz newspaper Variety, Carell is also considering other films for his hiatus after finishing filming season five of The Office.
The Variety article suggests that Carell's Gerard may well owe more to Inspector Clousseau than to Doyle's Gerard:
Carell will play the title character, the bravest soldier in Napoleon’s army and also the dumbest.
It will be unfortunate if the character is introduced to modern audiences through such a bastardized version, but perhaps it will drive one or two hardy souls to the original stories.
Which they will no doubt find disappointingly intelligent and charming.
Revelations: Extraterrestrial Societies, How to Make Oil
What extraterrestrial societies could tell us about ourselves if they existed; bad news for Saudi Arabia
A regular feature of The American Culture, highlighting items revealing trends in American society and culture, compiled by TAC correspondent Mike Gray.
Big, Bigger, Biggest!
A few years back, a Soviet scientist got to thinking on the large scale: suppose we were to detect intelligent aliens out there in deep space. What would their civilization be like? If they can travel through space, he reasoned, they must have a lot more energy and power at their disposal than we do; and if that's so, then their capabilities would put our conception of bright lights, big city in the shade.
Type 0: This is where we of Planet Earth are now. (Discouraging, ain't it?) This civilization can barely keep the lights on; there's no coordinated effort to distribute energy to the remotest parts of the planet for the benefit of everyone. (Some scientists generously rate us as Type 0.7. Feeling any better?)
Type I: This civilization can make use of all the power, from many sources, available on its home planet. This would require the concerted efforts of all the nations of the earth working toward a common goal—in other words, world government up the wazoo. (Hey, let's give that Babel thing one more try.) Example: Star Trek.
Type II: This civilization can make use of all the power generated by a single star—although that would require disassembling the sun itself. Let's take the sun apart! (Florida beachfront property prices plummet; farewell, Swedish Bikini Team.) Example: StarWars.
Type III: This civilization can make use of all the power generated by all the stars in a single galaxy. Type II on galactic steroids.
Type IV: This civilization can make use of all the power generated by a supercluster of galaxies; some galactic clusters have thousands of members.
Type V: The ultimate civilization, one that lives in even the remotest parts of the universe and utilizes all the power the cosmos generates. (Nota bene: as much as these critters might want to think of themselves as gods, and as godlike as such powers might seem to the likes of us, there's always God himself beyond them, who by definition is greater than His creation.) Examples: Doctor Who, Stargate Atlantis.
So, what do you think? We're a Type 0.7 now. Couldn't we make it to Type I if we all got together and wished really hard?. . . .
We've all been taught that millions of years ago dinosaurs roamed the earth until one day they got so big and fat and prosperous that they all died of myocardial infarctions. Since the mammals were severely underfunded by the Department of the Interior, they were forced to leave the dinosaurs unburied. Eventually the decomposed bodies of all these creatures sort of oozed together to form what we nowadays call "fossil fuels." And it's from these trillions of dead organisms that we get oil—well, mostly the Arabs get it and let us have it at reasonable rates (wink-wink).
This biogenic (originating from life) theory is the one that almost all scientists, theologians, politicians, school children, and people named Matt Damon hold to be true and unquestionable.
But then along comes something called the abiogenic (originating without life) theory. This is an idea that could have Saudi Arabia's chief export shift from oil to sand. The theory maintains that oil (hydrocarbons) is a natural consequence of movements inside the earth and the work of tiny bacteria doing what bacteria do for a living. In other words, the earth produces oil from its own components without any need for dead animals, and is doing it all the time. No dinosaurs need apply.
As Thomas Gold put it:
Hydrocarbons are not biology reworked by geology (as the traditional view would hold) but rather geology reworked by biology.
It's an attractive idea, but it has met strong opposition—understandable because there are some people who stand to lose trillions of dollars if they don't keep an energy crisis going. And if there's one thing those who are greedy and covet power need most, it's a crisis of some kind.
Melville Davisson Post's "Uncle Abner" is one of the great fictional detectives and an exemplary American character, TAC correspondent Mike Gray observes.
One of G. K. Chesterton's most popular contemporaries in the mystery fiction field was Melville Davisson Post, whose main character, Uncle Abner, is as well-drawn and -rounded as Chesterton's Father Brown (which is saying a lot).
In his article designating Post as "America's Greatest Mystery Writer", First Things editor Joseph Bottum says that Post and Uncle Abner have suffered undue neglect. This neglect is particularly unjust, Bottum says, because not only are the mysteries of high quality but also the author's prose is comparable to the best in the field of the clerical mystery:
And yet, high as Post's tales rank in general mystery fiction, they stand at the very top of the subgenre of religious mysteries. In the deliberate tone of the stories and the matching of the writing's pitch to its subject, in the uniting of the religious element with the detective's action and the sense of good's battle against evil in the solution of a crime, only G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown belongs beside Melville Davisson Post's Uncle Abner.
Post wrote twenty-two stories between 1911 and 1928 featuring Uncle Abner, a man for whom the word Justice should always be capitalized simply because he could envision no higher good in this world. In one story, Post describes Abner as follows:
He was one of those austere, deeply religious men who might have followed Cromwell, with a big iron frame, a grizzled beard and features forged out by a smith. His god was the god of the Tishbite, who numbered his followers by the companies who drew the sword. . . . The land had need of men like Abner. The government of Virginia was over the Alleghenies, and this great, fertile cattle country, hemmed in by the far-off mountains like a wall of the world, had its own peace to keep. And it was these iron men who kept it. The fathers had got this land in grants from the King of England; they had held it against the savage and finally against the King himself. . . . And the sons were like them.
About this passage, Bottum says, "Notice how religious history has merged with political history to flesh out Uncle Abner from American caricature to American archetype, and how the language itself has thickened into an unforced King Jamesian diction that immediately sets an atmosphere for the story that follows."
Bottum expresses dismay that the Uncle Abner stories aren't currently in print, and wonders why:
Where are America's publishers? Where, in particular, are America's religious publishers—especially the evangelical presses that keep so much else in print? You can't imagine Catholic publishing houses allowing Chesterton's 'The Innocence of Father Brown' to fall out of print, but why the evangelical houses have so far failed to promote Uncle Abner, the stern American Calvinist who is our greatest religious detective, is itself a mystery.
(It's ironic, by the way, that Post, before he created Uncle Abner, penned stories about a scurrilous lawyer named—wait for it—Mason.)
Like some of the best mystery authors, Post could juxtapose the terrible with the beautiful:
[He] was a hunchback, who sat his great roan as though he were a spider in the saddle. He had been married more than once; but one wife had gone mad, and my Uncle Abner's drovers had found the other on a summer morning swinging to the limb of a great elm that stood before the door, a bridle-rein knotted around her throat and her bare feet scattering the yellow pollen of the ragweed.
The clerical detective subgenre is still very much with us. A very skilled and thoughtful writer named Hal White has recently produced a book of short stories about Reverend Dean who, while not quite as stern as Uncle Abner, is nevertheless wise to the workings of divine justice. White's Reverend Dean stories are all of the impossible crime variety, and it's great fun to try to figure out how the crimes were done, while there are interesting social and moral insights to be found in the tales.
You can find a review of Hal's book here. [Note from SK: I heartily recommend all three of the Post series mentioned here, and the Hal White volume as well. I will write a review of the latter just as soon as time allows.]
Irreconcilable Differences Between Left and Right?
Looking at arguments regarding the political and cultural polarization of America, TAC correspondent Mike Gray wonders whether there is a chance for unity in the nation without a full-blown culture war, or even a civil one.
Right and the left do not want the same America. . . .
The left wants America to look as much like Western European countries as possible. The left wants Europe's quasi-pacifism, cradle-to-grave socialism, egalitarianism and secularism in America. The right wants none of those values to dominate America. . . .
The left subscribes to the French Revolution, whose guiding principles were "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." The right subscribes to the American formula, "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." The French/European notion of equality is not mentioned. The right rejects the French Revolution and does not hold Western Europe as a model. The left does. That alone makes right and left irreconcilable. . . .
It is difficult to disagree with Prager's observations about the immense division between left and right, for it is in evidence almost daily. One thing he overlooks, however, is those people in the middle who don't wholeheartedly subscribe to the ideology of the left or the right.
That group, it appears, never enters into the calculus. Perhaps unintentionally, Prager falls into the error of the false dilemma in thinking that there are only two directions to go in this cultural quagmire. Unfortunately, the vast crowd in the middle don't seem to have any answers either. The West appears to have lost its ability to pursue the path of true liberty, and in fact dismisses it out of hand. What, then, is left for us?
Prager concludes his grim survey with a dose of truly spectacular pessimism:
. . . calls for a unity among Americans that transcends left and right are either naive or disingenuous. America will be united only when one of them prevails over the other.
Although being "green" has been a hot cultural posture for the past decade in the United States, it hasn't translated into political success. And it may just be about to cool further, as people recognize the very real costs aren't worth the often imaginary benefits.
Yesterday the Canadian Green Party established a new record of futility in that nation by breaking their previous record for accumulating the highest percentage of the popular vote without electing a single representative to the nation's parliament.
The Greens got 6 percent of the total vote but didn't win a single seat.
What that means is that the party and the movement behind it have a small core of people spread across the nation but couldn't get a plurality anywhere.
The Greens are never going to have an easy time turning votes into seats. . . . [B]ecause the Greens lack any kind of regional base, they simply cannot thrive in a first-past-the-post electoral system.
Even the party leader could not truly challenge the incumbent in the riding of her choice, under ideal circumstances, with no Liberal to split the vote, and amid adoring national media coverage.
To make the decision to devote all resources to breaking through in a small band of seats—say in central Ontario—wouldn't work because the Greens' fundraising and volunteer base is spread too thin to artificially concentrate like that. And they're further hampered by an overly narrow ideological base that makes it difficult to attract a broad array of new Canadians, green Tories and progressives. Their national platform in this campaign was resolutely left-wing, and focused on comprehension instead of attracting a diverse coalition.
As a result of these and other problems, Steele writes, the party's political prospects are quite grim:
Frankly, it's time to call into question the mission of the Green Party in the long term.
Despite its failure to create a strong political party, the environmental movement has done an excellent job of persuading Americans and Canadians alike to be more conscious of their impact on the planet. However, opinions are cheap, and telling a pollster you care about the environment and will vote your concerns costs nothing, whereas actually pulling the lever starts the money ticker counting.
Once the estimates of what stopping global warming would really cost began to come in, the U.S. public quite predictably and sensibly began to report to pollsters in very strong terms that they'd rather not pay the allegedly necessary costs of reducing carbon output. As a direct result, global warming moved to the very bottom of the list of issues as ranked for level of perceived importance.
The public's answers to pollsters also began expressing increased skepticism toward the propositions that global warming is largely manmade and constitutes a worldwide crisis. Money talks, and environmentalism walks.
And with a rapidly cooling economy, environmental worries are going to move even farther down the list of priorities, insofar as that is still possible. The housing crisis and apparently imminent recession are sure to divert concerns toward more pressing matters, as they should and already have begun to do.
Thus American attitudes toward greenness and in particular regarding global warming will even more rapidly move toward what the United Kingdom has been experiencing: "Suddenly, being green is not cool any more," as Alice Thomson notes in the Times of London:
Where only a year ago the smart new eco-warriors were revered, wormeries and unbleached cashmere jeans are now seen as a middle-class indulgence.
But the problem for the green lobby isn't that it has been overrun by “toffs”: it's the chilly economic climate that has frozen the shoots of environmentalism. Espousing the green life, with its misshapen vegetables and non-disposable nappies, is increasingly being seen as a luxury by everyone.
Whereas the decline of interest in global warming and other green crusades in the United States has been largely a reaction to increasing information about exactly what kind of numbers are involved (meaning: enormous), in the UK a financial crunch was what brought people up short:
According to Andrew Cooper, director of the research company, Populus: “There is a direct correlation between how people perceive the economy and the importance they place on the environment. When times are tough people resent paying more to salve their conscience."
Really, however, the downturn was simply the factor that caused the people of the UN to take a close look at the entire Green agenda. It's all well and good, after all, to pay out a relatively little something to feel good about one's efforts to save the environment when the coffers are overflowing, but it's quite another when it's a big, current, personal sacrifice being made for an anticipated general good sometime in the future. Thomson notes that as the real costs and benefits of green policies become clear, people don't like what they're being forced to do:
It's not just the economic downturn that has harmed the green order. People have become wary of environmental causes that can turn out to do more harm than good. They don't want wind turbines marching across Britain's moors when nuclear power stations can do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They worry that washing and bleaching all those non-disposable nappies may be damaging the ozone layer, that the massive incentives for biofuels have distorted the world food market, and that green taxes are actually stealth taxes.
In addition, as Thomson notes and as has been made clear by common-sense environmentalists in the United States, the developed countries have been cleaning up the environment successfully for four decades now, and the air, water, and land are the cleanest they've been since the dawn of industrialization. Yes, we want to do still better, but there's no need whatever to shut down the economy and go back to the Stone Age in order to save the earth. Economic growth will make it cleaner, not dirtier.
As Thomson points out, the Britons have discovered the joys of such cost-benefit analysis and the sorrows of unintended consequences, now that their pocketbooks have become tight. Americans have understood these things for some time now, and one can see the prospects for a truly draconian green agenda receding further in the rearview mirror as the economy tightens.
Hollywood biopics have commonly fictionalized their subjects' exploits and had deliberate political messages. We might have avoided some disasters if the films had been more honest, TAC correspondent Mike Gray notes.
Biopics and Politics
By Mike Gray
Unlike today, when filmmakers and studios seem immune to market forces, judging by the number of apparently deliberately displeasing movies they make, Hollywood in the '40s could always be relied on to produce an entertaining product. A prime example would be Rhapsody in Blue (1945), one of many biopics Tinsel Town manufactured during that era.
The film certainly veers away from the truth about George Gershwin's life, in typical Hollywood fashion, adding dramatic conflicts where none ever existed. (One of the film's stars, acerbic Oscar Levant and friend of Gershwin, remarked afterward, "Even the lies about Gershwin were being distorted.") Whenever I watch Rhapsody in Blue, it's always for the wonderful music, not the drama.
Occasionally the Dream Factory wants to send a message, and a biopic is the conveyance. Take Patton (1970), for instance. The United States was involved in a shooting war in Southeast Asia at the time, and as with the other major war film of the era, M*A*S*H, the audience was expected to extrapolate from World War II and the Korean War to the Vietnamese conflict, connect the dots, and conclude that not only is war hell but it's always conducted by gung ho lunatics who don't really know what they're doing.
Patton, the film tries to tell us, was a fascinating personality, but like everybody in the military above the rank of buck private, he was one dangerous wingnut. That's what we're evidently intended to take away from Patton.
But returning to Hollywood in the '40s, let's consider another biopic, a prestige picture instigated, birthed, and nurtured by Darryl F. Zanuck, a fascinating personality himself. Wilson (1944) was a labor of love for Zanuck. For some reason, he believed a film about the life and travails of President Woodrow Wilson would not only make for good drama but also good politics. (It was artfully premiered in New York and L. A. in August 1944, just in time for the political conventions. Sound familiar?)
The viewing public had other ideas: the film flopped at the box office. Whether this was due to its content or length (two-and-a-half hours), or both, is problematic.
Unlike many biopics, Wilson doesn't deal with its subject's childhood. Instead, it starts in 1909, with Wilson a professor at Princeton, and ends around 1921. It's what happens in between, as depicted in the film, that might draw more than a few revisionist historians up short.
Now, there's no disputing the fact that Hollywood, since its inception, has been overwhelmingly liberal in its politics and unafraid and unapologetic about it. (Near the end of one musical number in a '30s film the FDR New Deal symbol, an eagle, suddenly appears out of nowhere. A Nazi or Soviet film wouldn't have been less subtle.)
Nationalistic patriotism is always a good box office draw, but how about propaganda promoting world governance?
How well does that play in Des Moines? If Wilson is any example, not too well.
It's made perfectly clear that Wilson is a plea for acceptance of the then-nascent United Nations. Even though the movie ends with Wilson's heroic efforts at establishing a League of Nations going down in defeat, the audience is clearly expected to extrapolate from the League to the UN, connect the dots, and conclude that, hey, the guy was right all along.
Looking at the current world situation at the time, with the concerted efforts of freedom-loving nations united together to lick those sneaky so-and-so's who bombed Pearl Harbor and overran Europe, audiences were surely expected to draw the conclusion that Wilson was right about the wisdom of pursuing international crusades. And that, I contend, is exactly what Zanuck had in mind.
As for Wilson himself, who could cavil about the man? Wasn't he one of our greatest presidents, reluctant at first to get involved in Europe's squabbles but decisive about defeating the Hun once we were forced to commit our forces in battle?
According to Jonah Goldberg, in his book 'Liberal Fascism,' Wilson wasn't all that great:
Historically, fascism is the product of democracy gone mad. In America we've chosen not to discuss the madness our Republic endured at Wilson's hands—even though we live with the consequences to this day. Like a family that pretends the father never drank too much and the mother never had a nervous breakdown, we've moved on as if it were all a bad dream we don't really remember, even as we carry around the baggage of that dysfunction to this day. The motivation for this selective amnesia is equal parts shame, laziness, and ideology. In a society where Joe McCarthy must be the greatest devil of American history, it would not be convenient to mention that the George Washington of modern liberalism was the far greater inquisitor and that the other founding fathers of American liberalism were far crueler jingoists and warmongers than modern conservatives have ever been. . . .
Wilson would later argue when president that he was the right hand of God and that to stand against him was to thwart divine will. Some thought this was simply proof of power corrupting Wilson, but this was his view from the outset. He always took the side of power, believing that power accrued to whoever was truly on God's side. . . .
War socialism under Wilson was an entirely progressive project, and long after the war it remained the liberal ideal. To this day liberals instinctively and automatically see war as an excuse to expand government control of vast swaths of the economy. If we are to believe that "classic" fascism is first and foremost the elevation of martial values and the militarization of government and society under the banner of nationalism, it is very difficult to understand why the Progressive Era was not also the Fascist Era. . . .
(Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, pp. 81-82, 85, and 119.)
Hollywood is still trying to send messages through biopics. The latest attempt is Oliver Stone's politically motivated W. Can you imagine the furor that would have resulted if some Tinsel Town maverick in the '40s had attempted to humiliate then-sitting President Franklin D. Roosevelt while he was engaged in trying to win a shooting war overseas?
Truth to tell, it couldn't have happened then, because liberal Hollywood was in the tank for a liberal president. But because Tinsel Town collectively suffers from a recent psychological malady known as Bush Derangement Syndrome, it's the overwhelmingly preferred approach in today's Hollywood.
The supreme irony of all this is that George Bush apparently sees himself as another Woodrow Wilson, the next right hand of God destined to set the world aright.
Perhaps if Zanuck had gotten Wilson's story right, we'd have been spared a good deal of horror in the years since.
'Fringe' Updates 'X-Files' with '60s-Style Optimism
Fox's well-received new series Fringe is something of a throwback to 1960s escapist TV dramas. That's a good thing.
This past summer when the second X-Files movie tanked at the box office, I observed that its fanciful horrors and conspiracies paled in comparison with the real-life terror of the 9/11 attacks and the instability our nation has endured in the years since.
Yet the new Fox drama series Fringe, which tackles the same kind of weird subject matter The X-Files dealt with, has done well with both critics and audiences. It's now the highest rated new show among the much sought-after 18-49-year-old demographic.
Produced by J. J. Abrams (Alias, Lost), Fringe follows a team investigating strange phenomena involving "fringe science"—oddities such as telepathy, invisibility, levitation, etc., which aren't really science at all—which appear to be happening with greater frequency around the world.
However, in line with the greater suspicion directed toward business in the United States in recent months, the evils seem not to be directed by governments but instead by private individuals, weirdo groups, and businesses. However, of the three people composing the center of the team fighting the problems, one is a former research scientist and the other an independent businessman (father and son, and both geniuses), neither of whom is a government employee. Hence the show avoids making a heroes/villains judgment regarding business and government.
In the conspiracies and paranormal aspects, the show is rather like The X-Files, of course, but Fringe benefits from having a less gloomy tone than its predecessor. Although the first couple of episodes were rather full of personal conflicts, and each of the central characters is carrying around personal problems of some sort, they nonetheless smile on occasion, jest with each other, and even laugh sometimes. In this respect one can see the influence of another Fox series, Bones.
The central character, Olivia Dunham, is a young FBI agent whose partner died after apparently betraying the country by assisting in the creating of a flesh-eating disease. She has unresolved emotional problems because of this, understandably, especially since they were also lovers, but she gamely presses on with her work.
An interesting aspect of the show is that each of the three central characters has been held back from fulfilling their full potential in the past, but their work in investigating The Pattern now allows all of their talents to come to the fore. That's one of the many things that makes the show a little different from the general run of contemporary TV dramas by putting an optimistic and positive element behind the main conflicts.
In all, in fact, Fringe seems much more like mid- to late-'60s escapist, adventure dramas such as The Man from UNCLE, Mission: Impossible, and The Wild Wild West than the grim police procedurals the networks have tended to offer in recent years. If that's the start of a trend, it will be a welcome change.
Oliver Stone's forthcoming biographical film about George W. Bush is being characterized as surprisingly sympathetic, but the director's need to see policy errors as deriving from psychological pathologies is dubious at best.
Although most film industry analysts expected Oliver Stone's film biography of George W. Bush, W, to be in the vein of his other heavily fictionalized and tendentious accounts of U.S. history (such as JFK and Nixon), Stone says the film is sympathetic and fair to Bush the person while being critical of his policies as president.
Reuters quotes Stone as saying he intends no malice or even judgment in the film:
"It was not our intention to bring malice or judgment on George W. Bush and his administration. He and his administration clearly speak for themselves," Stone said.
Stone's intention, he suggests, was to find the source of Bush's politics in his personal life and the ideas he holds. The Reuters story identifies his strong interest in Bush's psychological makeup:
"The movie tries to understand Bush and make him a human being," Stone said. "I have tried to be fair and balanced. I have tried not to take sides."
Stone makes Bush's relationship with his father, former President George H. W Bush, the dramatic centerpiece of "W."
Critics are beginning to weigh in, and tend to agree with Stone. Whether they are being truthful or disingenuous we will find out when the film is released this weekend.
The AP critic, for example, writes that the film shows Bush as a bad president but apparently not intentionally so (as if that were really in doubt by any reasonable person):
"W." does present Bush as a man unfit to lead. And while Stone cannot resist injecting that theme with moments of sharp satire, he generally casts the president as a deeply tragic figure in far over his head, whose personal demons hold consequences for everyone else on the planet.
The film makes much of Bush's drinking problem and his often troubled relationships with his father, mother, and brother Jeb, suggesting these personal "demons" were what caused him to make mistakes as president, according to reports. The AP critic quotes actor Josh Brolin, who portrays Bush in the film, as taking that point of view:
"I strangely found a lot of respect for the guy in his ability to tackle his demons. The opposite side of that is him feeling maybe that his demons were exorcised, when indeed they just came out in a different form through his presidency. The opportunities he saw that may have manifested through those, war being one of them."
This search for reasons to believe "the personal is the political," as is the common cry among left-wingers, is manifested in the dramatic action of the film:
Stone doesn't hold back on unflattering dramatic moments, showing a drunken Bush dancing on a bar or crashing a car into his parents' trash cans and nearly coming to blows with his father in the living room.
Such scenes are balanced with tender private times between Bush and his wife and moments of humility early in Bush's born-again conversion.
I take an entirely different point of view on Bush and his presidency. I agree that he was on balance a bad president, but I don't think he is either a bad man nor an unusually troubled one. On the contrary, the major fault most people have seen in him over the years is a certain breezy excess of confidence and concomitant lack of circumspection before plunging into major actions.
That is an explanation that fits the facts far better than the apparent psychological pathology Stone is seeking. After all, sometimes very good and thoughtful people are just wrong.
Revelations: Von Mises, Mortgage Meltdown, 'The View'
Why your property is never safe from do-gooders, the mortgage meltdown, The View
A regular feature of The American Culture, highlighting items revealing trends in American society and culture, compiled by TAC correspondent Mike Gray.
1. The pre-capitalistic system of product was restrictive. Its historical basis was military conquest. . . .
2. What vitiates entirely the socialists' economic critique of capitalism is their failure to grasp the sovereignty of the consumers in the market economy. . . .
3. Romantic philosophy labored under the illusion that in the early ages of history the individual was free and that the course of historical evolution deprived him of his primordial liberty. . . .
4. The distinctive principle of Western social philosophy is individualism. It aims at the creation of a sphere in which the individual is free to think, to choose, and to act without being restrained by the interference of the social apparatus of coercion and oppression, the State. . . .
5. The shortcoming of nineteenth-century historians and politicians was that they failed to realize that the workers were the main consumers of the products of industry. In their view, the wage earner was a man toiling for the sole benefit of a parasitic leisure class. They labored under the delusion that the factories had impaired the lot of the manual workers. . . .
6. The admirers of the Soviet system tell us again and again that freedom is not the supreme good. It is "not worth having," if it implies poverty. To sacrifice it in order to attain wealth for the masses, is in their eyes fully justified. But for a few unruly individualists who cannot adjust themselves to the ways of regular fellows, all people in Russia are perfectly happy. We may leave it undecided whether this happiness was also shared by the millions of Ukrainian peasants who died from starvation, by the inmates of the forced labor camps, and by the Marxian leaders who were purged.
Sometimes it seems that "the admirers of the Soviet system" haven't really gone away but have managed to ingratiate (some would say infiltrate) themselves into the commentariat and the halls of power in America. Or does item 6 above sound unfamiliar to you?
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Another Angle on the Mortgage Meltdown
In case you're entertaining the beguiling notion that attempts of special interest groups to prod Congress into granting amnesty to the 12 to 20 million (some would double those figures) illegal aliens are history never to be repeated, you need to think again. Just wait until after the elections.
There's one man, however, who has so far escaped any blame. Few have realized something that turns out to have been staring us in the face all along: that the mortgage mess was, in sizable measure, an outgrowth of the primary political goal of the Bush Administration.
Citing Bush's speech at an October 15, 2002 White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership, Sailer notes, Bush called for a forced increase of homeownership among African-Americans and Hispanics, specifically singling out those two groups:
The five and a half million marginal minority homeowners that Bush bunglingly called for is a big number. At a mortgage of, say, $127,000 each, that would add up to, let me check my calculator, oh…
$700 billion—the size of the current bailout. Well, whaddaya know. . . .
Sailer says this "minority mortgage meltdown" may trigger a "diversity recession."
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Foot-in-Head* Better Than Foot-in-Mouth
A popular TV talk show is angling for more viewers with yet another cast change. We certainly hope this item is true. Many probably agree that just about anything would be better than the previous co-hostess.
New AC/DC Album to Be Sold Only at Wal-Mart and Band's Website
AC/DC's forthcoming album, Black Ice, won't be available as a legal music download—or from any source other than retail giant Wal-Mart and the band's own website.
A common idea about American society is that there is an inherent hostility between business people and culture types. The former are thought of as being socially conservative, the latter socially liberal; and the former are thought of as economically liberal (wanting freedom of opportunity) and the latter as indifferent or hostile to economic freedom.
But as I noted last week, this division is a fiction. The big difference is between the elites and the masses. Further confirmation of that observation is evident in the rock band AC/DC's decision to prevent their forthcoming album Black Ice from being sold as downloads, instead allowing it to be sold only at Wal-Mart and the band's proprietary website in CD form upon its release on October 20.
Known for three decades as fun-loving hellraisers, AC/DC has been seen by right-conservatives as a bad influence and by left-liberals as an ally in tearing down outmoded, traditional social conventions. The reality, however, is that the elites among both these groups are unabashed hedonists, and they work hand in hand to help themselves to the mass of productive people's money.
Thus Reuters quotes AC/DC lead singer Brian Johnson as saying the decision to limit sales to CDs is being done for artistic reasons, to ensure that people hear the whole album and not just individual songs:
"Maybe I'm just being old-fashioned, but this iTunes, God bless 'em, it's going to kill music if they're not careful,"
Although that argument has a surface plausibility and is certainly true for some artists, AC/DC's songs have never been weakened by being taken out of the context of the albums in which they've been included. In fact the better songs are usually strengthened by being heard without the much-weaker filler songs included in nearly all the band's album releases.
Also contradicting Johnson's claim is the fact that the band has always released its best songs as singles, as they are doing with the song "Rock'n Roll Train" from Black Ice, the album they allegedly want people to listen to in its entirety.
What is really going on here is that the band wants to continue to force customers to pay for the crummy filler songs they don't want to hear. It has nothing to do with art.
Thus the seemingly odd pairing with Wal-Mart:
"A lot of people were saying 'Ah man, you're going to the big Wal-Mart, you're selling out,' Johnson said.
"Wal-Mart were the only big store to stock all of our albums, every single one of them, and they've never deviated. And they sold AC/DC shirts and pajamas for kids, which we thought was really cool," he said.
The reality is that Wal-Mart and AC/DC are not strange bedfellows at all. They're both selling hedonism, with great skill and success—and making sure people pay the highest possible price for it.
With a seemingly dire financial crisis raging on the TV news, movie audiences chose cute chihuahuas over and a horror flick over big stars in a timely political drama.
For the second weekend in a row, the talking dogs of Beverly Hills Chihuahua were the top box office attraction in U.S. theaters, raking in $17.5 million this time, for a ten-day total of $52.5 million so far.
According to Disney distribution head Chuck Vlane, much of the audience consists of adults looking for an escape from bad economic news, as quoted by AP:
"This is only word-of-mouth coming back to us from theaters. I don't have any statistical proof. But they're telling us we're getting more unaccompanied-by-children adults coming on their own. They're looking for a little entertainment," Viane said. "The axiom we've always lived by is funny is money. People come out for comedy. They love to sit back and let someone give them a couple of hours of escapism."
It seems likely that a youth-to-twenties crowd flocked to number two film Quarantine, which brought in a respectable $14.2 million in its opening weekend. The trailers for the film looked interesting and stylish—albeit a bit too reminiscent of the visual style of Cloverfield—and the film seems to be attracting audiences looking for that form of escapism.
Although boasting artistically respected, big star attractions in Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio, and director Ridley Scott, Body of Lies made it only to third place with a mediocre $12.8 million. Audiences weary from the economic crisis and several years of war apparently just weren't that enthused about a movie dealing with terrorism, espionage, and possible U.S. perfidy as the producers had undoubtedly hoped.
Two other serious films, the football and race issues drama The Express and the post-apocalyptic sci-fi drama City of Ember, had poor opening weekends, coming in sixth and tenth, respectively.
Dropping out of the top ten in only its second week was the political comedy An American Carol, taking in just under $1.4 million to finish fifteenth, behind the anti-religion satire Religulous, which brought in $2.2 million and finished thirteenth.
British TV host and journalist Jeremy Clarkson says cover bands could be a great solution to the dire and increasing problem of our favorite rock stars aging and leaving the scene. Is it time for classic rock to go the way of classical music?
Top Gear TV host and all-round curmudgeon Jeremy Clarkson asks an important question in his most recent Times of London column: How will we be able to enjoy live music when all the great rock stars die off or are incapacitated. The Who without Entwhistle and Moon are just not the Who, Clarkson notes, and now we know the real Pink Floyd will never be able to reunite, after the death of keyboardist Rick Wright.
That's about as depressing as can be for fusty, aging rock and roll addicts such as Clarkson, especially those who heroically refuse to enjoy anything released after 1980. Clarkson notes:
My wife insists that there is plenty of fresh talent coming along to replace the dinosaurs. She is wrong. The Franz Flighters, Car-sick Steve and the Frascatis are derivative and hopeless and I do not wish to listen to any of the noises they make.
I certainly wouldn’t pay even so much as one penny to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who, so far as I’m concerned, could not make a worse sound if they spent an hour attacking giant sheets of polystyrene with a flock of electrocuted cats. I hate them.
Instead, Clarkson wants to keep listening to his old favorites, as a great many people are quite content to do, but worries that he may well have seen his most revered bands in concert for the last time. No more, he fears, will he be able to see Genesis, Yes, Pink Floyd, Stevie Winwood, Eric Clapton, Supertramp, and Bad Company performing all their greatest hits live—pot bellies, balding pates, ragged voices, and all.
But there is a possible solution, Clarkson notes: tribute bands. Sure, he acknowledges, they have a bad reputation as inauthentic, poor substitutes for the real, now-doddering original band members, but we should give them a chance.
Actually, in the area of progressive rock—which Clarkson justly admires and enjoys—tribute bands have had a fairly good reputation in the past decade or so, with some achieving real audience success and going on to record original material.
In fact, in Yes's upcoming tour of the United States, longtime members Chris Squire, Steve Howe, and Alan White will be performing with keyboardist Oliver Wakeman—longtime Yes-man Rick Wakeman's son—and vocalist Benoit David, who is from a Yes tribute band, now temporarily replacing Jon Anderson in the actual Yes band as the latter recovers from a respiratory illness.
As always, the proggers lead the way into the realms of reason and beauty. Clarkson points out that there is in fact a long tradition of listening to tribute bands—classical music:
When elderly people go to see Rachmaninov’s Third, no one is ever disappointed to find that it isn’t actually the man himself on the ivories. Indeed, many derive a great deal of pleasure in hearing how other musicians interpret the great man’s work.
In fact, when you stop and think about it, the London Symphony Orchestra is a tribute band. It simply turns up and plays music written by someone else.
So why can’t we encourage this sort of thing among today’s youngsters who wish to forge a career in the world of rock’n’roll? Instead of asking them to write their own material, which will be rubbish, we should ask them to interpret work by the masters: Camel, Gong and so on.
That's a pretty reasonable argument, in my view. In fact, Clarkson notes, support for tribute bands could help create real music traditions from the works of popular artists:
At present, tribute bands try to reproduce exactly what their heroes did. Some are astonishingly good. I once saw a Floyd tribute band in Alaska who were semitone-perfect.
But why can’t they experiment? Try to improve on the original? As we saw when Gary Jules rejigged the Tears for Fears song Mad World, a modern twist can be extremely enjoyable and successful.
We see this with every performance of the Royal Shakespeare Company. We see it with every orchestra. And soon we will see it with rock music too.
Clarkson's right; this not only will happen, it already is happening, as I noted earlier. And I believe it is a very good thing indeed. Let us let a thousand musical flowers bloom.
What's your opinion? Would you like to see an excellent tribute band, see only contemporary acts, or just stay the heck away from concerts altogether? Comments welcome.
Revelations: Great Depressions, McCain and National Security, Thug Scientists
The real roots of the Great Depression, John McCain's record on national security, and scientists who hate dissent.
A regular feature of The American Culture, highlighting items that reveal trends in American society and culture, compiled by TAC correspondent Mike Gray.
What Made the Great Depression So Great?
The current economic crisis ("Crisis is the friend of government"—John Stossel) has everybody thinking about the Big One of 1929. Back then the social engineers (community organizers on the grand scale) went ape—and, as is the way of the world, made things much worse.
Forty-five years ago the great economist Milton Friedman published a book that explained just What Went Wrong. Not surprisingly, the Great Depression was found to have the fingerprints of many power-hungry yet paradoxically well-meaning social planners and big government acolytes all over it.
"Why should Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?" asked Stuart Chase in his book, A New Deal, published in 1932. Like other progressives, Chase was convinced by Soviet propaganda of the efficacy of government planning. During the 1920s Chase and Lewis Mumford led the Regional Planning Association, a group of economists and engineers enamored of social management of unified geographic areas.
Planning quickly became the intellectuals' solution to unemployment and idle factories. Indeed, there was such a predilection for planning that the intellectual class, whose job it was to analyze the situation, remained willfully blind to the drastic monetary contraction before their eyes. On the eve of the new regulatory era and birth of the administrative state, no progressive was going to admit or acknowledge that the first foray into control by experts—monetary management by the Federal Reserve—had quickly produced the worst depression in history.
With a planning and regulatory agenda waiting in the wings, it was convenient to blame the Depression on the breakdown of the unregulated market, on private property and private profit, on "cutthroat competition," on an unequal distribution of income, and on distrust of government.
Progressives were quick to invoke science in behalf of their planning and coordination schemes. The few skeptics were promptly branded "stupid men." Rule by wise elites, Chase thought, "may entail a temporary dictatorship." Chase dressed it up as "the Third Road" between dictatorship of the red (Communists) and the black (Big Business). In his inaugural speech, [Franklin] Roosevelt actually threatened Congress with a dictatorship if all else failed in the "war against the emergency."
Yet the New Deal achieved a diminution in rights, not in unemployment. This became apparent by 1942, when Ohio dairy farmer Roscoe Filburn was prosecuted successfully by the compassionate federal government for violating the Agricultural Adjustment Act by growing grain for his family's direct use. In a unanimous decision, the now-tamed Supreme Court ruled that Filburn had engaged in interstate commerce by not engaging in it. Filburn, the Court ruled, should have purchased the grain with which he fed his cows, chickens, and family, not raised it himself. . . . In order to permit the federal government a wide range of action, New Dealers destroyed the doctrine of enumerated powers.
This constraint on federal power had to be removed if New Dealers were to deal with the "national emergency" by expanding Washington's reach. The removal of this constraint meant that federal power came to occupy territory formerly inhabited by individual rights. Principal among these lost rights are the protections the Constitution gives to property and to contracts. The result has been an explosion in economic regulation and uncompensated takings of various uses of private property. With the onset of the New Deal, government abandoned its function of securing property and began violating it in the interest of redistribution and "worthy goals." Today property rights are tenuous. They are gradually diminishing as government regulation increasingly dictates an owner's use of property.
The New Dealers put their trust in government, not in the Founders' Constitution.
Perhaps you'll agree with me that the framers of said Constitution made a huge mistake when they changed "life, liberty, and property" to the vaguer, weaker, and highly frangible "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" in composing our Declaration of Independence.
The current situation, a five-trillion-dollar crater in what was a fairly healthy economy, is a perfect pretense for liberal fascism—totalitarianism with a smiley face—to reassert itself. Social planners, like all ambitious understudies, are always waiting just offstage for their chance.
We have nothing to fear but the eagerness of governments to fix what their previous intrusions broke in the first place.
One nagging question still remains: Was the Great Depression deliberately engineered for political ends, and could the current crisis have been precipitated for the same reason—or did all this "just happen"? How you answer that will probably depend on how much trust you repose in your fellow man.
The major political parties again have failed us. They have thrown up two presidential candidates unfit for the office.
Concerning the Democrat Party's selection:
In saner times, every fact of this man's political life would by itself be sufficient to render him unfit for any responsible position.
So what about the Republicans' choice? Surely he is the better candidate because he
claims America can rely on him to ensure national security. This is a lie. McCain's record shows that he willingly increased America's vulnerability to future 9/11s because he placed a higher priority on protecting illegal aliens. And to gain this perceived political advantage, he actually used the September 11 terrorist attacks as cover.
According to this author, when offering legislation that ostensibly would make America safer from the terrorists, the senator from Arizona weasel-worded his proposal in such a way as to nullify its intent:
Can it be that the Republicans, John McCain chief among them, still entertain the dubious notion (truly an instance of unrequited love) that by giving 12 to 20 million illegal aliens amnesty they can overcome the erosion of their conservative base and deliver 12 to 20 million freshly-minted Republicans to the voting booths?
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The Obama-Darwin Connection
Among the elite intelligentsia, who do you think is more likely to vote for the Democrat candidate and against his opposition? An author puts forth the thesis (scroll down to the headline, "Darwinists Root for Obama: 09/28/2008") that the ones most likely to benefit by electing the senator from Illinois would be
scientists who are largely supported by grants, and thus . . . stand to profit directly from the level of funding a President supports.
Since the preponderance of such scientists believe in Darwinian evolution as Holy Writ and insist that it be taught that way to all children educated in schools financed by taxpayer dollars, it should be obvious that among these scientists a bias automatically exists against any candidate who would gainsay their philosophy.
As a result, whenever these scientists deliver political pronouncements in writing to the public,
[t]heir views tend to be overtly pro-liberal, pro-Democrat, anti-conservative, and anti-Republican. It's noteworthy that they do not hesitate to apply the label 'far right' to Republicans, but never apply the opposite phrase 'far left' to Democrats."
Of course, people have a right to their opinions, but when those people are dependent on taxpayers' money and their claims are conducive to continuing and increasing the flow of that money, a healthy dose of skepticism is in order. And when the intention and effect of their proposed policies is to shut down investigation into and legitimate debate of scientific theories, they are not acting as scientists at all, but instead as thugs—and should be treated as such.
Thus the article concludes:
We hope several things are evident from this story: the lack of objectivity among scientific institutions; their far-leftist leanings (they adore Obama, who is the most liberal member of the Senate); their obstinate refusal to distinguish between intelligent design and creationism despite years of clarification by ID advocates; their illogical conflation of scientific literacy with acceptance of Darwinism; their identification of Darwinism and atheism with their political persuasion; their ability to lie with impunity in print about what ID leaders advocate in education; and the level of vitriol they can display toward religion. They might barely tolerate a theistic evolutionist who prostrates himself before the Shrine of Darwin, but will explode in wrath against any member of the meaningless class labeled 'People of Faith' who dares to suggest that a Designer (no matter how vaguely characterized) might interact with the world in any way."
For a taste of just how brutally coercive these people can be, the article includes an interesting side trip to President Lyndon Johnson's supremely un-American "gag order" issued against pastors in their pulpits.
Based on an Israeli TV series and employing a gimmicky premise in the manner of its popular lead-in series, The Ghost Whisperer, the new CBS TV series The Ex List (Fridays at 9 PM EDT) follows an increasingly popular trend of using sexually charged or grim subject matter to make morally conservative points.
The major subplot of the premiere episode exemplified this quite vividly. A girlfriend of the protagonist has a certain portion of her body hair shaved off in order to bring some new excitement to her marriage, but her husband is appalled. He points out that she should in fact be very disturbed if he found it a turn-on for her to resemble a preadolescent girl in that way.
The episode spends a significant amount of time on this hairy issue, yet despite the rather startiling vulgarity, the point of it is rather conservative: the husband says that he'd love his wife no matter how she looked, and what he hated about it was to see her defacing herself.
The main story has a similar effect, without the excessive vulgarity, although it is heavy on nonmarital sexual activity. The protagonist, a nice but rather intense thirty-one-year-old female, wants to get married because a psychic told her if she doesn't do so within a year it will never happen, and the further twist is that she has already met and dated the man she's "supposed" to marry, but doesn't know which one it is.
So, each week she will try on another "ex" until the show is canceled. In the premiere episode, she gets back together with a small-time rock singer with whom she previously broke up on his birthday. He forgives her and responds positively to her overtures, and in fact is annoyingly needy toward her. The final twist, which I won't reveal here, is both plausible and poetically just.
Overall, the show's gimmick seems serviceable, especially since its successful lead-in program is equally gimmicky. Whether The Ex List will succeed with audiences will depend greatly on whether the writers can come up with sufficiently interesting situations week after week—and whether they have the good sense to retain the sensible morality behind the show's thick surface of vulgarity.
TAC correspondent Mike D'Virgilio recounts an unexpected and exhilarating progressive rock reunion.
If you like progressive rock music you would have been in heaven at the Three Rivers Progressive Rock Festival. Woodstock this wasn’t, but in the small world of “prog” this was as good as it gets. From Spock’s Beard to Neal Morse, to The Flower Kings, fans got their fill of great contemporary progressive rock music.
A little history might be in order for those not familiar with this slice of popular music. Back in the late 1960s primordial soup era of rock music, bands who were not happy playing formulaic, three chord, blues-based music and three-minute songs started to experiment with odd time signatures, elaborate song structures, and music that was not particularly radio friendly. Some of these bands, such as Genesis (back before they simplified in the 1980s and Phil Collins became a superstar), Gentle Giant, King Crimson, and Yes, had good followings and are still well-known today.
But as the '70s wore on into the '80s, progressive rock became museum music, a sign of past times when experimentation reigned and corporate behemoths didn’t control every aspect of music production and marketing. When grunge exploded on the scene in the early '90s, a small band of musicians decided that minimalism wasn’t the way to go, and thought that they might be able recapture the glory years of more sophisticated and artistic rock music. Thus what you might call neo-prog was born.
One of those bands there at the new beginning was Spock’s Beard, with lead singer and songwriter Neal Morse. Their first album, The Light, released in 1995, had four songs. Can’t get much more prog than that. After six albums, Morse left the band to concentrate on more overtly Christian music, and drummer Nick D’Virgilio took over lead singing duties, a la Phil Collins and Genesis when Peter Gabriel left the band. The two went their separate ways for the last six years until one Saturday evening this past August in far western Pennsylvania at the Three Rivers Progressive Rock Festival.
After a full day of music, the prog fans were eagerly anticipating the final two acts. The Beard performed first, with an energetic set of some old Morse-era tunes and some newer, post-Morse numbers.
The highlight of the evening came with an encore rendition of “The Light” that included Morse out front singing, and playing keyboard and guitar, with D’Virgilio back on the drums like the old days. The crowd, buzzing with excitement, didn’t sit down for the fifteen-plus-minute song. The band members were clearly effected, too. Backstage after the song, emotions and tears welled up for old times gone by, captured in the moment of reunion.
I enjoyed one participant’s response to the event I found at the band’s website:
I've gotta say it was a moving experience to see the incarnation of the band that made me believe prog had been reborn. Spock's Beard with Neal represents all that I love about music; great musicianship, exciting live performances, and a contagious love and immersion in music that has the power to lift your soul to a higher place. I saw more than a handful of grown men wiping tears back (myself included) when Neal got on stage with his old band mates. Neal himself was visibly moved as he went from member to member with big hugs all around. For 15 minutes all was right with the world and we were back in that reality where Spock had a beard.
Finally after much set-up and late into the evening, it was Morse’s turn to perform with his own band. Morse is something of an anomaly, not only in the world of prog but in all of pop and rock music: an outspoken Christian whose music is openly Christian who has a primarily non-Christian fan base. Before going on stage he called together his bandmates and any others who cared to join for a short but raucous pre-set prayer session. Then it was off to a performance of epic mania. Epics, for the uninitiated are long, multipart songs that tell a story—and Morse does epics.
Being a Christian myself I can relate to much of Morse's message, but I was suffering cognitive dissonance over such in-your-face Christian lyrics in such a secular setting. The audience didn’t seem to mind at all, however. They just love the music, and they let Neal be Neal.
That’s a refreshing attitude in a culture so greatly rent by clashes between traditional-minded religious folk and militant secularists. Morse’s approach is certainly not indicative of how all Christians approach their art, but it is clear that high quality, substantive art doesn’t have to suffer from inclusion of a Christian message.
Evolve This!—BBC's 'Primeval' Series Pushes Radical Darwinism
TAC correspondent Mike Gray likes the characters and sense of adventure in the new BBC series Primeval, but wonders why it propagandizes for a radical notion of Darwinism that evolutionary biologists have rejected.
Primeval, a new dramatic TV series from the British Broadcasting Corporation, is currently airing on a weekly basis on BBC America. I wish I could get wildly enthusiastic about it, because it does have enjoyable moments of high adventure.
The producers have decided to let the story unfold in fits and starts, an approach that some would find tedious but which others would regard as naturalistic (no pun intended). Consequently, the personal lives of the central (and even peripheral) characters come to the fore.
Since the main characters are all adults, the producers choose to give us plenty of information about their sex lives, not shown explicitly on-screen in flagrante but implicitly, through dialogue. This is definitely not a children's program, although its fanciful subject matter and nonserious treatment of personal relationships indicate that it is indeed aimed at that demographic group. (Unfortunately, the assumption of immaturity among adults is par for the course in post-Christian Europe and America, which makes it difficult to ascertain exactly whom Primeval is intended for.)
The visuals on the show are state-of-the-art, however. Thanks to CGI and some good pretending by the actors, the most impossible creatures and situations are realized with a certain amount of believability. Certainly that appeals to the kid in me.
Although all the actors are handsome/beautiful and convincing in their performances, I must admit that my favorite has to be Rex, a green flying lizard. He steals every scene he's in—when he's not chewing it.
The ideas behind the series are less pleasing to this skeptic toward the dogmas of philosophical naturalism. The show openly propagandizes for a hardcore idea of Darwinism that the author of The Origin of Species never intended and which evolutionary biologists have concluded does not fit the facts. Yet this dubious line of thought is the show's unquestioned underlying assumption, which may be why it's intended to appeal to kids.
Of course, we have all been taught in school that all the dinosaurs died out millions of years ago, and doubtless the producers of Primeval absorbed that lesson well. Now they're giving their childhood beliefs back to us in the most concrete way possible given their resources. (The series posits that the fabric of time has been ripped, allowing the extinct creatures to thunder into the modern world.)
But there are many quite reasonable scientists and other analysts who strongly disagree that what we learned in school about this subject actually fits the facts. You can find some very good critiques here and here, for example.
Which theory is true and which is the fantasy is an interesting and important question, but unfortunately one that the producers of Primeval are too unsophisticated to consider.
Government efforts to mandate "smart guns," blame directed toward Reaganomics, and who's responsible for the mortgage crisis.
A regular feature of The American Culture, highlighting items that reveal trends in American society and culture, compiled by TAC correspondent Mike Gray.
How Smart Is Your Gun?
I remember reading a story when I was a kid, called "With Folded Hands," the theme of which was, in the author's words, that "the perfect machine would prove to be perfectly destructive." Machines with humanity's best interests at "heart" become an obstacle to mankind's yearnings to strive and, unfortunately sometimes, fail. Their Prime Directive: ''To serve and obey and guard men from harm."
"With Folded Hands," published in 1947, may have been sixty years ahead of its time. Today's nanny state is tirelessly striving to make that story a reality. Herewith Exhibit A:
A recurring socio-political problem that plagues our advanced industrial society is that of technology as panacea—the idea that technology in and of itself, invoked in some vague, unspecified manner, will magically solve problems. Believers in this latter day deus ex machina somehow think that waving their hands and invoking "technology" or even "science" will address some issue regardless of context and without regard to the very nature of the problem to be solved. More importantly, whether the state of developed or even developing technology is actually up to the task is never considered. This type of ignorance, when coupled with governmental, bureaucratic fiat, results in mandates that are effectively impossible to fulfill. Never has this been more obvious than in the push to make deadly weapons less deadly. . . .
Because the technology of "smart" guns simply does not work, or does not work reliably, it would be inadvisable to attempt it on any sort of widespread scale (such as in police forces). The civilian firearms market surely would reject such gadgetry were it offered for sale. More insidiously, however, were government to mandate the use of such unproven, unreliable technology, the result would be a de facto gun ban. If the government can mandate the use of a technology that doesn't work, after all, they have effectively infringed on your Second Amendment rights while maintaining plausible legal deniability. They didn't ban gun ownership, after all; they merely told you that you would have to make your gun 'safe.'
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Reaganomics, R.I.P.?
I'm not an economist (for which I am perennially grateful), but occasionally economists do get it right. (Remember the old saying about stopped clocks?) Ronald Reagan managed to meld sensible economic theory with sound political principles in a way that is still benefiting us two decades later.
So, can the current economic "crisis" really be laid at the foot of his grave, as many with axes to grind (including one presidential candidate) are inclined to do? At least one person thinks otherwise:
America's liberals are gleefully pounding nails into Ronald Reagan's coffin. His life is beyond their reach, but his legacy is not. Their goal is to destroy that legacy by convincing America that free markets and conservative principles created the economic crisis.
To them, Reagan's vision belongs on the dustbin of history.
The liberal narrative is as simple as it is wrongheaded: The financial meltdown, they say, was brought on by deregulatory policies championed by Reagan, which allowed capitalism to run amok and, ultimately, destroy our economy. Nonsense!
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Paying the Piper
Is the current financial crisis an engineered event? Just how does it benefit people who owe allegiance to no particular nation but instead to the anti-individualist socialist ideal?
The meltdown in the financial markets has caused the finger of blame to spin like a weathervane in a hurricane. The underlying cause of the debacle, however, has been largely ignored. Driven by "progressive" Democrats and Republicans, the cause is the relentless shift from a free market economy to a socialist economy. . . .
Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were institutions that were neither purely socialist, nor purely free market – a blend that is best described as communitarian, in that they allowed private investors to buy and hold shares in the corporations, but were also guaranteed by the federal government. That is, until recently, when the federal government took over both institutions. Now, the federal government essentially owns all those properties—a result that is as socialist as had the government nationalized those properties by force.
TV talk host David Letterman has gone off on Sen. John McCain again. The aging, unfunny comedian's arrogance clearly knows no bounds.
David Letterman has continued his on-air attacks on Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain on his Late Night with David Letterman show, as the Los Angeles Times reports:
[I]n tonight's "Late Show," Letterman once again spouted off about the feud. And in the process of scornfully recounting it—"war hero," "economy," "rush back to Washington," "spent the night in New York," "Katie Couric," yadda, yadda—he revealed details about the negotiations to bring McCain back that ... well, it's hard to imagine that the McCain campaign will like this.
The story quotes Letterman as follows:
Now here’s this thing with John McCain…you know a couple of weeks ago, John McCain was supposed to be on the show. And at the last minute he calls me up –- and I’ve got a lot of respect…you get a call from a senator –- you get a call from a guy who is a bona fide war hero –- all of a sudden, you know, your lips start to vibrate. So I said “Sure, whatever you want.” And he says, “Look, Dave, the economy is about to crater.” It’s about to “crater,” his word. “And I have to rush back to Washington to save the economy.” And so it made me feel puny. So I said, “OK, Senator, do what you have to do. Rush right back to Washington.” And then I hung up and I felt like a patriot. I felt like I had done my part. And he was supposed to be on the show like an hour later. So now, we’re in a hole but everybody has to pull together in economic hardship times. So we all pull together and we get that guy with the big head from MSNBC. What’s his name? Keith Olbermann, yeah. Giant head. So he comes over. He’s good. He’s very good. So now it turns out, not only did he not rush back to Washington, he spent the night here in New York City. He went on Katie Couric…he was on Conan…he was on Regis…he was everywhere. So now, in an attempt to save his campaign, they’re talking about coming back. You see what I’m saying? So we said, “Sure, we would love you to come back.” And even on the phone, he said, “I’ll bring….Sarah.” But they’re being squirrely. Politicians can be squirrely. Because we have a date picked. We do this show every afternoon at 5:30. He wants to do the show at 5. So one –- we have no guarantee he’s going to show up, period. And we’ve kind of already rearranged our schedule on his behalf to save the economy, right? By getting that big-headed kid in here to talk about the politics. You know what I’m driving at? I just don’t know if we can trust him. And by the way, I don’t need to remind you that the road to the White House runs right through here."
Interestingly, the initial reader comments on the L.A. Times report were highly critical of Letterman, characterizing him as an arrogant, spoiled, partisan jerk. Soon, however, Democrat partisans heard about the item and flooded it with comments supporting Letterman.
The initial commenters were right, in my view, and I believe that they probably more accurately reflect the general public's opinion on the matter.
Update, Sunday, October 12: CBS is now showing promotional spots indicating that Sen. McCain will appear on Late Night with David Letterman on Thursday, October 16.
Epic Russian Film Reflects Push for New National Identity
The newly released epic Russian film Admiral exemplifies the nation's effort to build a post-Communist culture with new heroes embodying traditional ideals. Unfortunately, dislike of foreigners seems to be a big part of the process.
Admiral tells the story of Alexander Kolchak, whom Reuters describes as "a former naval hero who led White Russian forces into battle against the Bolsheviks in Siberia and briefly became Supreme Governor of Russia before meeting an untimely end at the hands of a communist firing squad."
During the Soviet era, the Communist powers taught hatred of Kolchak, but he is an apt hero in post-communist Russia as the society seeks to reconnect with its previous history, which was thoroughly suppressed by the Kremlin under Communism.
Heroes from the Tsarist past allow contemporary Russians to feel a sense of patriotism and restore faith in their characteristic belief in Russia as a great nation with a speical place in history while it struggles through the growing pains of establishing a viable economy and functioning society after the rootlessness and disorder of the first years of transition out from under Communist domination.
"It's very important we talk about our history, our country, our officers," director Andrei Kravchuk said, according to Reuters. "If we understand that we had such a history, such people... we can fill ourselves with dignity, and the notion of motherland and patriotism, which can seem worn and tarnished, gains new, concrete, visible meaning."
The film opened in over a thousand theaters across Russia today, and cost $20 million to make, a huge budget for a Russian film. It "portrays Kolchak as a fearless naval commander, loving father, dashing lover and principled leader of the doomed White Russians as they make a final stand in the winter snow," Reuters notes.
Hostility toward foreigners and a sense that other people are the root cause of Russia's problems is an attitude that the Soviet Union shared with pre-Revolutionary Russia, and it is proving to be an important element of the effort to build a post-Soviet Russian culture as well. That's manifest in Admiral and other films in what Reuters describes as "a series of historical epics which resurrect pre-revolutionary Russian heroes who battle bravely against impossible odds, dogged by foreign villains."
The Reuters story outlines some of them:
Audiences have already been treated to "1612" showing Polish troops thrown back from Moscow and "Alexander: The Battle on the Neva" where the hero fights off marauding Swedes; a new look at Ivan the Terrible is promised.
Echoing the anti-foreigner theme, "Admiral" opens with Kolchak commanding an imperial Russian warship in the Baltic as it lures a German enemy vessel to destruction in a minefield. It closes with Kolchak betrayed to the Reds by a French general who was supposed to be his ally.
As the Russians correctly seek to develop a culture expressing and strengthening a more positive view of the Russian people and their history, it's perhaps inevitable that it would involve a tendency to blame others for the nation's problems.
That may be good for their self-esteem, but it can't be more than a temporary fix. Worse, it may greatly impede the development of a liberal culture that can equip Russians to embrace the political and social conditions necessary for real prosperity and a nation's ability to control its own destiny. That would be a real tragedy.
Revelations: Communitarianism, the NEA, Detective Fiction
Anti-communitarianism, the National Education Association, and what fictional detectives tell us about ourselves.
A regular feature of The American Culture, highlighting items that reveal trends in American society and culture, compiled by TAC correspondent Mike Gray.
Third Way
Until last September, I must confess, I had never heard the word "communitarianism"—so imagine my surprise when I discovered that there is already an "Anti-Communitarian League." Is it really necessary? Read about it and decide for yourself:
Communitarianism is the foundation for the emerging supranational government. This is not a conspiracy theory. Anyone who says it is shouldn't be trusted as a source.
The modern version of this ancient religious and legal theory was introduced in upper academia in the late 1980s. It had brief international attention as the Clinton-Blair Third Way. (Barak Obama is the leading Third Way candidate;
Senator Evan Bayh leads the Third Way group in the U.S. Senate. John McCain, like President Bush, supports all communitarian programs and policies.)
Global community governance and sustainablity are based in the theory of communitarianism. Communitarians believe that communities should hold the same rights as are held by individuals in the USA. It's billed as a spiritual, earth friendly solution to every conflict between polar opposites. It officially solves the traditional right v left divide. Capitalism, communism and socialism can now merge into the next level of planned human social evolution.
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The All-Knowing NEA
Last July, the National Education Association met in Washington to, as family values activist Phyllis Schlafly notes with steep disapproval, agree on a few wonderfully high-minded-sounding things:
resolutions [that would] cover the waterfront of all sorts of political issues that have nothing to do with improving education for schoolchildren, such as supporting statehood for the District of Columbia, a "single-payer health care plan" (i.e., government-run), gun control, ratification of the International Criminal Court Treaty, and taking steps "to change activities that contribute to global climate change." . . .
NEA resolutions include all the major feminist goals such as "the right to reproductive freedom" (i.e., abortion on demand); "comparable worth" (i.e., government control of wages according to feminist ideology rather than the free market); full funding for the feminist boondoggle called the Women's Educational Equity Act; and "the use of non-sexist language" (i.e., censoring out all masculine words such as husband and father).
Clearly, change is in the air. Find additional gory details here.
"The tragic irony of the NEA's endorsement of Barack Obama is not lost on millions of pro-lifers across the country," Karen Cross, the National Right to Life political director, told LifeNews.com.
'The NEA has chosen to back a presidential candidate who wants to continue a policy of abortion on demand, which has resulted in nearly 50 million missing students in classrooms from coast to coast since 1973," she said.
Senator Obama has said that, if elected president, the first thing he would do is sign the so-called "Freedom of Choice Act"—a bill that would make partial-birth abortion legal again, require taxpayer funding of abortion and nullify virtually all federal and state limitations on abortion, such as parental notification laws.
We are often told that detective fiction is about restoring order, but it hasn't always been so. Belle-Epoque sleuths' motivations were remarkably mundane: money, getting oneself or a loved one out of trouble, or the plain thrill of the game; also, they weren't above letting the criminal go free if they sympathized with his motives. But at least they remained on the right side. Well, most of them. Think of Romney Pringle or, more sinisterly, Horace Dorrington. But the most chillingly effective portrayal of the dark side of the Great Detective figure is to be found in Baroness Orczy's stories featuring Bill Owen, better—known as The Old Man in the Corner.
McCain-Obama Choice Manifests Public's Acceptance of Government Paternalism
America's elites are out of touch with the people and govern arrogantly and coercively, but the public is responsible for having traded in our freedoms for the false promises of government paternalism, writes TAC correspondent Carl Groves.
I watched as much of the second presidential debate of the season as I could stomach, but it was a frightful experience. After a while, hearing both candidates preach on how stunningly necessary they are to us, how government is our savior, and how stupid, misguided, and devoted to counterproductive measures their opponent is, I couldn't watch any more.
However bad I had thought things were before the debate, however close to the brink of collapse I worried we were, I now realize, from this election season and as exemplified by the debates, that things are actually worse.
With very few exceptions—and I'm talking probably a single digit number out of 535—Congress will continue to fail the American people by throwing our money at a wide variety problems (most of which they have caused in the first place), all in the name of "progress", "civility," and "compassion." And if anyone makes an objective criticism regarding how well that's worked so far (funding for public education, the arts, defense, transportation, civil rights—one could list pretty much every government department and document in great detail how they impede us, not help us, but nearly all reasonably intelligent people already know this), they're labeled as a fascist, heartless, or un-American.
So now, thanks to the assclowns you and I and our immediate ancestors have elected during the past several decades, our government is now in the mortgage business. Forever. Listen closely, and you'll hear the sound of giddy applause coming from Karl Marx's grave.
Today the U.S. government is doing more to damage you than your business competitors, your personal enemies, al Qaeda, and your mother-in-law combined.
In offering their alleged solutions to the problems government has created, the current Republican and Democrat candidates for president have guaranteed us policies that are certain to make things worse. The Left wants the government out of our bedrooms but in our banks. The Right wants the government out of our banks but in on our phone calls.
Anyone who trusts the the U.S. government today—regardless of their political leanings—is tragically naive. Unfettered freedom is the foundation on which anything good, anything just, anything worthwhile in this nation is built. Yet the fact that I have to qualify the word "freedom" with "unfettered" demonstrates the ugly truth that Americans today don't really mind the pen, as long as it's our kinda pen.
Republicans want their pen red, and the Democrats want theirs blue, but they both want a pen, with the government taking care of all the difficult personal decisions that life is supposed to be all about. The greatness of America has always been that we don't want a pen, even if it's for our own presumed good. In recent weeks, however, the U.S. government has sent a clear, $700 billion (that's $700,000,000,000!) message that one of our most basic freedoms has now been eroded and is destined for abolition: our freedom to fail.
Yet the public's skepticism toward this supposed solution was easily overcome by a Congress and president who clearly don't take seriously any threat of consequences from the voters. Alas, they are probably right. Public dismay toward our national elected officials—currently at historic lows—does not result in their ejection and replacement.
I wrote a pair of songs in 1992 lamenting how far the United States had drifted from the lofty ideals and precepts that had made us the envy of the world ("Brave New World" and "There's Always Canada"). In 1992 I was a silly twenty-seven-year-old, whining about the woeful condition of a nation that had turned its back on all of its most important principles. But I was right then, only the absolute shambles of the United States in 2008 makes 1992 look like a utopian "good 'ole day" by comparison.
Biased Coverage of Financial Crisis Reveals Arrogance, Solidarity of U.S. Elites
The mainstream media have utterly failed to report the full story on the mortgage and financial industry crisis and the government bailout of big investors and takeover of much of the nation's financial sector.
The reason for this failure lies in the dirty little secret of America's elites: although they often seem to differ greatly on political policies, their real loyalty is to their privileged caste above all. Hence, they consistently agree that social and economic conditions should be constituted such as to allow them to pursue whatever power and pleasures they wish, with the great unwashed general public paying the bills.
That is one thing on which both the editors of the New York Times and their presumed adversaries on Wall Street agree wholeheartedly.
If you've spent much time listening to cable news lately, you would think there is universal agreement among economists that an immediate, enormous government intervention in the markets is the only way to stave off a recession, and perhaps even a depression. This is simply false. Many economists reject the notion that something must be done immediately and have called for more careful consideration of a wider range of options. Some even reject the premise that any bailout action will make much of a difference. . . .
The disconnect appears to stem from the fact that in many cases, financial journalists have simply gotten too cozy with the Wall Street crowd. These journalists have failed to cast a critical eye on what their small circle of East Coast experts in the financial world tell them, and they have ignored other sources in most cases.
Echoing the point I've made above and written previously in this publication, Parks writes, "this isn't a divide between smart and dumb people; it's a divide between Wall Street and its allies in Washington, and the rest of the country."
The mainstream media have been relentless in their alliance with their fellow elites residing on Wall Street, and their behavior has been arrogant and elitist in the extreme, Parks notes:
In my 18 years as a journalist—nine of them in Washington—I've rarely seen my profession behaving as badly on a hard news story as it has during coverage of the financial bailout bill.
The level of condescension has been breathtaking.
Particularly on network and cable television, journalists and supposed financial experts have been wagging their fingers at the voting public for pressuring Congress to vote against the bill. To hear them tell it, you would think there was universal agreement—at least among smart people—that something needs to be done now.
The coverage of the financial crisis is in fact emblematic of the U.S. elites' attitude toward the general public. It is something not at all distinguishable from contempt. Here's an example of how Parks sees it as manifested in the current instance:
Ali Velshi on CNN is among the worst. The bald, bespectacled financial analyst practically wags his finger at America as he exhorts over and over again tha t everyone is at risk, and that the good people of America just need to listen to the experts.
Similarly, he notes,
The Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein, whose expertise and analysis I respect on most issues, joined the "They just don't get it" bandwagon with a column in Wednesday's edition titled, "They just don't get it." Pearlstein showed remarkable arrogance in declaring "too many people don't understand the seriousness of the situation."
That's hooey, Parks observes:
The fact is, most people do understand. They just aren't convinced that this particular approach—or any government approach—is the best answer. And there are plenty of smart, highly educated people on their side. Just because you won't find many of them on Wall Street, or in Washington, doesn't mean they don't exist or their analysis is any less sound.
Although they often disagree strongly on the specifics of who should run the country and what the guiding policies should be, the reality is that America's elites are consistent in their agreement that they'd very much like to dissolve the American people and elect a new one.
Clearly, we the people should strengthen our efforts to do unto them as they would do unto us.
Thanks to Steve Stanek for referring us to this story.
Homosexuality Caused by Environmental Factors, Not Genetics, Studies Show
An important new study shows that efforts to force all of society to endorse same-sex marriages will increase the amount of homosexuality in a society. This should not surprise anyone, as that is quite obviously their intent.
Although the orthodox opinion in the United States for the past couple of decades has been that homosexual behavior is genetically determined and therefore simply immutable for those who are involved in such activities, numerous skeptical scientists have pointedly questioned this notion, noting that the evidence strongly argues for environmental factors as being the vastly preponderant element in the choice of a sexual identity. Hansen summarizes this research as follows:
Extensive research from Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and the United States reveals that homosexuality is primarily environmentally induced. Specifically, social and/or family factors, as well as permissive environments which affirm homosexuality, play major environmental roles in the development of homosexual behavior.
Outlining some of the evidence against the theory that homosexual behavior is determined genetically, Hansen notes the following:
Twin study investigations of homosexuality were recently conducted in both Sweden and Finland. Such twin studies compare rates of homosexual behavior between different sibling groups who share varying degrees of genetic similarity (i.e., identical twins versus non-identical twins). By comparing such rates, twin studies help sort out the extent to which homosexual behavior is genetic and/or environmental. For instance, if homosexuality is genetic, then in cases where one identical twin is homosexual the co-twin should be homosexual nearly 100% of the time because identical twins share 100% of their genes.
But that is not what these two large-scale Scandinavian studies found. Both studies revealed that when one identical twin was homosexual the other twin was homosexual only 10% or 11% of the time. Such findings indicate that homosexuality is not genetically determined.
Instead of genetic factors, these Scandinavian studies concluded that unique environmental factors play the largest role in the development of homosexual behavior. The question as to which specific environmental factors contribute to homosexuality was not answered by these studies although some conclusions are offered by Danish and American research data to be discussed later in this article.
The genetic influence may be even less than this, Hansen notes:
[A]lthough the Swedish and Finnish twin studies are among the best to date, they still have wide margins of error. In fact, the margins of error are so wide it remains entirely possible that genetic factors play no role in the development of homosexuality. That remains to be determined, but what has been resolved is that the primary factor in the development of homosexuality is environmental.
In addition to family elements, which appear to be crucial in forming the choice of homosexual behavior, Hansen notes that the scientific evidence shows that whereas genetics has little and perhaps no influence on homosexual behavior, various factors in the social environment have a proven effect:
A Danish research investigation studied two million adults living in Denmark, a country where same-sex marriage has been legal since 1989. This study uncovered a number of specific environmental factors that increase the probability an individual will seek a same-sex rather than an opposite-sex partner for marriage.
For Danish men, the environmental factors associated with higher rates of homosexual marriage include an urban birthplace and an absent or unknown father. Significantly, there was a linear relationship between degree of urbanization of birthplace and whether a man chose homosexual or heterosexual marriage as an adult. In other words, the more urban a man's birthplace, the more likely he was to marry a man, while the more rural a man's birthplace, the more likely he was to marry a woman.
For Danish women, the environmental factors related to increased likelihood of homosexual marriage include an urban birthplace, maternal death during adolescence, and mother-absence.
Interestingly, this Danish research finds that urban birthplace and separation from the same-sex parent both were associated with same-sex marriage for men as well as women. (The latter finding supports psychological theories that have long asserted homosexuality is related to childhood problems—real or perceived—with the same-sex parent). In summary, this study finds that environmental factors that contribute to the development of homosexuality can be social and/or familial.
As Hansen notes, this evidence accords with what psychologists and physicians have known for many years (and which people have known for millennia) but was suppressed in recent years in the well-meaning but wrongheaded attempt to coerce people into accepting homosexuality instead of simply tolerating it, so as to ensure that homosexuals were not unduly harassed by people uncomfortable with their increasing prominence in society and open recruitment of people into that form of behavior.
The long record of human history shows conclusively that "rates of homosexual behavior fluctuate greatly," Hansen notes, varying over time and across regions and societies. There is nothing immutable about it, and there never has been.
Hansen then cites evidence identifying factors in the United States that have affected the choice of homosexual behavior:
For American men, the environmental factor most related to homosexual behavior was the degree of urbanization during the teenage years. Specifically, boys who lived in large urban centers between the ages of 14 and 16 were three to six times more likely to engage in homosexual behavior than were boys who lived in rural communities during those same ages. The authors offer the following possibility: "an environment that provides increased opportunities for and fewer negative sanctions against same-gender sexuality may both allow and even elicit expression of same-gender interest and sexual behavior (p.308)."
For American women, the environmental factor most associated with a homosexual or bisexual identity was a higher level of education. . . . [A] woman with a college degree was nine times more likely to identify herself as non-heterosexual than a woman with only a high school diploma. The specific elements that create this marked difference are unclear, but the researchers don't believe it's simply due to higher reporting of non-heterosexuality by more educated individuals. They believe one explanation is the fact that with more acceptance, even encouragement, of homosexuality at universities, more university women embrace a non-heterosexual lifestyle.
Hansen notes that the amount of homosexuality in a society is a choice by the members of that society, manifested in the norms and laws they adopt:
Social and cultural norms, as well as legal regulations, influence human behavior including sexual behavior. So not surprisingly, as the United States and other Western Countries have become increasingly pro-homosexual—socially, politically, and legally—they have experienced an upward trend in the number of individuals engaging in homosexual behavior. That trend will continue if we move beyond mere tolerance of homosexual behavior (which is appropriate) to formally honoring it by legalizing same-sex marriage.
Her conclusion constitutes a serious warning:
The legalization of same-sex marriage—which is being considered by voters in several U.S. states—is the ultimate in societal endorsement and will result in more individuals living a homosexual lifestyle.
One could certainly argue that having more homosexuals in a particular society is a jolly good thing indeed, but it's an argument that we should have openly, instead of having it imposed by government and through indoctrination in the schools and by the mass media. That argument, moreover, should be engaged without prejudice toward a predetermined conclusion, and with our decisions based on what we know, not on what some of us may wish were true. That is how we are supposed to decide things in places not gripped in the vise of tyranny.
If we truly want our society to have a greater proportion of homosexuals, we can decide explicitly to adopt policies, such as forced endorsement of same-sex marriages, that will bring about that end.
If not, such decisions should not be imposed on us.
Saturday Night Live's political humor has become more evenhanded, but right-wingers are still complaining.
As noted earlier in this publication, the political satire on NBC's Saturday Night Live started out rather skewed toward the Democrats in the season's premiere episode, but was much more evenhanded in the second week's show. That trend has continued, and the two subsequent episodes have taken fairly equal shots at both the Democrats and the Republicans.
Tina Fey's impersonation of Sarah Palin has justly won admiration all around for its visual and vocal accuracy and the humor of her portrayal, and the performers playing Obama, McCain, and Biden are doing equally well. The most recent episode opened with a satirical replay of the recent Vice Presidential debate, which took some cheap shots at Palin but also fired a good many volleys at Biden.
All in all, it was both funny and pointed. But mostly funny—and that's the way it should be, in my view. If I want political coverage (which I don't), I'll go elsewhere for it, thank you very much.
The nonpolitical portions of the show have been quite funny as well, such as this engagingly silly sketch depicting Mark Wahlberg talking to animals, for some unknown reason:
Such skits emphasize what the show is really about—making people laugh. (And as filmmaker John L. Sullivan said in Preston Sturges's brilliant Sullivan's Travels there's a lot to be said for that.)
Given the overheated politics of the present day, however, the show's political evenhandedness naturally cannot go unpunished, and the SNL crew have gotten slammed by both the left and the right in the past couple of weeks. It all revolved around the following skit:
Bush warned about Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae long before the Democrats, even though Pelosi has said the opposite and lauded the President’s economic policies
Many home buyers who were affected were horribly under qualified for mortgages
Other home buyers were wealth opportunists who will be OK in the long run
Those benefiting from the bailout are wealthy investors who don’t need a bailout
George Soros is a jerk
Republicans and right of center people should have been elated. I certainly was. The euphoria never happened, however, and instead the right began to complain, exemplified by political columnist Michelle Malkin's blog item:
Over the weekend, I watched a hilarious, dead-on, and surprisingly honest skit on Saturday Night Live about the craptastic bailout and its Democrat roots. The skit called out Fannie/Freddie and featured Nancy Pelosi dragging out various sob-story “victims”—who turned out to be a parade of deadbeats and schemers. I was going to post the video for you tonight, but I can’t.
One of the rapacious couples featured in the skit was Herbert and Marion Sandler (portrayed by Darrell Hammond and Casey Wilson). Unlike the other composite figures, the Sandlers are a real-life couple.
Also lampooned: Left-wing billionaire George Soros.
The Sandlers are seething over the skit. And George Soros must be livid as well. Anyone else smell a legal threat behind the disappearance of the vid? . . .
If you suspect a few high-placed phone calls to NBC led to the bailout skit slipping down the memory hole, you’re not alone.
I'm sure Malkin was correct in her theory of why the video disappeared. She also noted that NBC's website was "deleting questions about the skit from message boards."
Clearly NBC was skittish, but there's a happy ending. NBC has reposted the skit, as you will have noted above, after editing out the words "People who should be shot" below the actors depicting the Sandlers. Given that the admonition, while clearly meant to be satirical, clearly goes over the line into advocacy of violence against two real-life individuals, that's a compromise I think is perfectly acceptable.
Michelle does not agree, but I think she's wrong on this. The fact that the skit appeared at all on the live show is a very happy thing, and the fact that it's available online once again is an even happier event.
Post script: If NBC should decide to pull the video off the internet again, you may view it here.
The show's new energy and evenhandedness have brought rewards in very high ratings. Reuters reports:
"SNL" is up 49 percent in the metered markets compared with the first four weeks of last season, as well as up 42 percent this past Saturday compared to episode No. 4 last season.
That should give the show's producers and NBC a strong incentive to stay the course.
'An American Carol' Off to Slow Start at Box Office, Deserves Better
David Zucker's An American Carol is a superb satire on Euro-loving America-haters. It has started slow at the box office, but deserves real audience support.
Given very little paid advertising and promoted largely by its writer-director, David Zucker's An American Carol performed rather mundanely at the box office during its first weekend of release. The film finished ninth among all releases in U.S. box office receipts, taking in $3.8 million and finishing just ahead of another new release, Religulous, which took in $3.5 million.
Two other newly released films did much better, finishing first and third, respectively: the heavily promoted Beverly Hills Chihuahua ($29.0 million) and Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist (S12.0 million), with Eagle Eye in the number two slot in its second week, at $17.7 million.
Thus An American Carol. Zucker, who was a lifelong Democrat awakened by the 9/11 attacks into a concern for the nation's safety, became a supporter of the Bush administration and its War on Terror, including the War in Iraq. While the Hollywood orthodoxy has insisted on a monolithic opposition to the Iraq War and the Bush administration in general, Zucker has swum against that tide, speaking out publicly in support of a national right and responsibility to defend ourselves from foreign aggression.
Although we may disagree with Zucker regarding whether a war in Iraq was the right means of pursuing that goal (I tend to disagree with him, though like most people I found the arguments plausible in the runup to the war, and have argued that the expansion into nation-building there was unjustified), there can be no doubt that he has shown great courage in standing up for his principles.
In addition, we can laud Zucker for both courage and insight in his recognition that the opposition to the war in Iraq has brought on a thoroughly disturbing increase in elitist, hate-America attitudes among the various strands of the nation's pseudointelligentsia—Hollywood, academia, journalists, powerful business interests, and other such frightful myrmidons of the contemporary orthodoxy of coercive elitism.
Prominent among these hate-America types (all of whom claim to love America but aggressively express their hatred of everything about the nation they allegedly love so much) is documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, and he is the main target of Zucker's film and its symbol of the fashionable contempt for the real America and the overweening desire to transform it into a facsimile of modern-day Europe.
That's the crux of the real war in the United States today: whether the Anglo-American, Christian values that founded this nation will prevail over the Rousseau-De Sade foundations of contemporary Europe.
That conflict is the essence of all the political, social, and cultural divides in the United States today, and An American Carol makes a powerful case for the Anglo-American tradition. Through the same kind of zany humor and ridiculous situations that have driven Zucker's other popular films, Zucker takes Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol as a way of showing the political and cultural redemption of hate-America documentarian Michael Malone.
With its necessary fealty to a relatively strong story line, albeit a fanciful one, An American Carol is not quite as zany and unpredictable as Zucker's other popular comedies, but what it may lack in screwball humor is more than compensated for by the gains in thoughtfulness and emotional resonance the story and characters allow.
In addition, An American Carol really is quite funny throughout, with quite a few audible-laughter moments. It's a good deal of fun, and it's a great pleasure to see a Hollywood satire that mocks the people who pose the most serious dangers to our ways of life instead of jabbing at safe, politically correct targets that are too socially weak to pose much of a threat (such as televangelists, Southerners, and gun owners).
College professors, the ACLU, arrogant judges, Hollywood leftists, anti-handgun activists, and God-haters, by contrast, do have serious influence in our society, and global Islam seeks to neutralize or destroy us altogether. It took quite a bit of courage for Zucker to give these groups and others a satirical spanking. He'll pay, of course, in bad reviews and social ostracism, but he clearly doesn't care as much for those things as for following what he sees as the right and honorable path. Good for him.
In light of all of this, it's important to note that the film ultimately projects a strongly positive tone. The presence of characters depicting real American heroes such as George Washington, George S. Patton, and John F. Kennedy shows what is great about the nation: it's people and the values they stand on and for. In addition, the redemption of the central character is the center of the film's drive and is both plausible and rather moving. The film fully accomplishes Zucker's goal of comparing the values of the two major contemporary American points of view and establishing the superiority of his own and the greatness of America in allowing us the freedom to make our own choices.
Zucker has strong opinions about what those choices should be, and even if we may not agree with him on all issues, he is certainly right about the main one. An American Carol is a fine, honorable, and funny defense of America's basic values against attacks by those who would well-meaningly transform the nation into something they themselves would soon enough find intolerable.
Guy Ritchie Talks About His Upcoming Sherlock Holmes Film
Guy Ritchie's upcoming Sherlock Holmes film has been in the news lately. It was recently announced that Rachel McAdams has been cast as leading lady in the film:
Here's a good video news story with Guy Ritchie providing some details about his vision for the film:
Finally, for an interesting news story on the film, click here.
Cage, Sena Reunite for Medieval Supernatural Thriller
Nicolas Cage is reteaming with his Gone in Sixty Seconds director on a supernatural thriller set in the fourteenth century. It may turn out to be interesting.
In their effort to rebound from the box office failures of their most recent films, actor Nicolas Cage and director Dominic Sena are teaming up on the upcoming supernatural thriller Season of the Witch.
In 2000, Cage and Sena teamed on the successful Gone in Sixty Seconds, which starred Cage as a master car thief.
Cage's latest film, Bangkok Dangerous, failed badly in its theatrical release last month, and Sena's last film came out in 2001, the unexpectedly poor-performing John Travolta heist film Swordfish.
Sena has also directed the Antarctica-based mystery-thriller Whiteout, which is scheduled for release next April 24. It stars Kate Beckinsale and sounds rather interesting. (And I, for one, will not miss the suggestions of lesbianism that were in the graphic novel on which the film's story and characters are based.)
Here's what the Hollywood Reporter has to say about Season of the Witch:
Cage will play a 14th century knight transporting a girl suspected of being the witch behind the Black Plague. His compatriots help him bring the girl to an abbey of monks trained in exorcising demons.
Production is set to begin in early November in Austria and Hungary. Relativity Media and Atlas Entertainment are backing the project.
The Jonas Brothers band members showed the tediously vulgar English comedian Russell Brand how to behave, after his embarrassing performance at the MTV Video Music Awards ceremony.
The season premiere of Friday Night Lights on the DirecTV channel The 101 represents a new step in the satellite company's efforts to bring first-run programming to its subscribers, and is another step in NBC's attempts to find cheaper programming options.
In the past year NBC deferred to cable/sat's USA Network in allowing the latter to have first runs of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, which previously appeared on NBC first and then on several cable outlets (most of which were owned by the same people who own NBC), and also ran episodes of the USA Network original series Monk and Psych after they had appeared on the cable channel numerous times.
Taking the programs after other networks have shown them reduces NBC's costs in buying the shows, of course. The network has now done the same thing with its critically acclaimed but low-rated Friday Night Lights. DirecTV will show a half-season run of thirteen episodes this fall, and then NBC will broadcast them beginning in January.
The showings on DirecTV will be without commercial interruptions. NBC's showings will have commercials.
DirecTV is willing to help bankroll further episodes after the thirteen that have been scheduled so far, according to DirecTV President of Entertainment Eric Shanks as quoted in Forbes, but the decision will have to wait until financing partner NBC decides whether the show's ratings on the broadcast network warrant continuation.
That suggests that there will be a long wait between the two halves of the season if the show does continue, but the arrangement, however unwieldy at this point, has saved an excellent TV series for at least three more months.
British TV host and journalist Jeremy Clarkson says cover bands could be a great solution to the dire and increasing problem of our favorite rock stars aging and leaving the scene. Is it time for classic rock to go the way of classical music?
For a film without any real promotion, An American Carol did all right and will probably turn a profit thanks to its low budget. Well known and respected in Hollywood circles for zany comedies such as 
