It ought to be perfectly normal for a person to state their support for the traditional idea of marriage, but things are topsy-turvy these days. As you will recall, I praised Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy for standing up to homosexualist activists who criticized him for accepting an award from the Indiana Family Institute. I somehow missed the subsequent report that Dungy has now openly stated his personal opposition to proposals to change Indiana state law to force individuals and businesses to acknowledge "marriages" of same-sex couples. This is good news, and I bring it to you in case you missed it. USA Today reported as follows:
Monthly Archives: March 2007
Liberalism and Statism
Here’s another installment in our continuing effort to clarify the misnamed political alignments of the post-Cold War West. Today we take up the topic of how the word "liberal" has been hijacked by people who are anything but that.
What Think Ye of HBO’s “Rome”?
Currently on National Review Online, Gerald J. Russello points out that the alternative to Christianity is not universal individual freedom but in fact despotism, violence, and widespread exploitation of people.
Orwell on Wodehouse
In a comment on my item on Wodehouse Playhouse, regular visitor Mike quotes George Orwell’s July 1945 essay "In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse." Mike astutely points out that Orwell’s defense of Wodehouse characterizes the Great PGW as the performing seal the latter pretended to be, rather than a brilliant comic writer whose works have some interesting and valid thought behind them. Now, it is important to note that in this article Orwell correctly and valiantly stepped forward to defend Wodehouse from absurd charges of collaboration with the Nazis, charges of which Wodehouse was entirely innocent. (It is a sorry saga in which the government and media of the time come off very badly indeed.) In doing so, however, Orwell makes several claims about Wodehouse that are thoroughly unjustified.
Thoughts on Wodehouse Playhouse
In a comment on the humorous piece genrerously supplied by Mike (not Linda) below, regular visitor Joe asks our opinion of P. G. Wodehouse. I shall find occasion, I am sure, to write more about PGW in future, as he is one of my favorite authors. In the meantime, here are my thoughts on the first DVD set of the excellent 1970s BBC TV series Wodehouse Playhouse, which starred the brilliant comic performers John Alderton and Pauline Collins in faithful adaptations of Wodehouse stories, primarily the author’s Mr. Mulliner tales, where PGW was really at his funniest. I strongly recommend all three DVD editions of Wodehouse Playhouse.
Reservations About Rudy
Our friend Hunter Baker has written a very insightful piece on current politics for the excellent newspaper Human Events. Baker considers the recent groundswell of support for Rudy Giuliani for the Republican presidential nomination, and remains skeptical. Baker sees what makes Guiuliani so appealing: Republicans hungry for revenge after getting blown out in the 2006 elections are thinking hard about letting the mayor carry the party’s banner in 2008. As Michael Barone has demonstrated, Giuliani has the potential to turn the electoral map substantially in the GOP’s favor. But the appeal is visceral. Here is a man who imposed order on a crime-ridden, seemingly ungovernable city. He took the hardest and best shots the New York liberal establishment had to offer and proved to his skills as a political streetfighter. Baker recognizes, however, the huge mountain of problems Giuliani will have to climb in order to obtain the support of religious conservatives and others concerned about the nation’s current moral tenor:
“300″ and “Ghost Rider”
Movies based on comic books, which are now called graphic novels, are so common as to be something of a genre of their own, with an increasingly formulaic set of common conventions and devices. These stylistic innovations have invigorated the motion picture industry to a notable extent—as in the Spider-Man and X-Men series and individual pictures such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. These innovations come with a price, however, and nobody but Sam Raimi, director of the series, seems able to solve the problem.
The Case of the Ectoplasmic Ecdysiast
A regular visitor to this site, who goes by the mysterious name of Mike (not Linda), wrote a comical pseudo-review of a nonexistent Golden Age detective novel, which I asked him for permission to post in the comments section of my recent item on mystery criticism. Mike sent it to me for posting, but it’s really too good to hide in the comments section where many visitors might miss it. So here it is for your enjoyment. Mike is clearly influenced by the twentieth century American humorist S. J. Perelman in this item, and it’s a salutary influence indeed. I hope that you’ll enjoy it.
Two Robin Hoods
The BBC’s new series Robin Hood, showing on BBC America on Saturday nights at 9 EDT, is all right, but it’s not even in the same universe of quality as the glorious 1938 Warner Bros. production The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains, Alan Hale, Eugene Pallette, Melville Cooper, Una O’Connor, Patric Knowles, Ian Hunter, Herbert Mundin, Montagu Love, and the rest of that superb cast, directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighly. In terms of sheer entertainment and the joy it brings, The Adventures of Robin Hood is one of the greatest motion pictures of all time. Few films in the years since it was made have reached this level of delight, and for a TV series to get even close is to ask far too much. But it’s not too much to ask it to get a good deal closer than the new BBC Robin Hood.
An Intellectual Intuitive TV Detective
NBC-TV premiered an interesting and innovative new detective series last night. Jeff Goldblum stars in Raines as an L.A. police dept. homicide detective who sees the "ghosts" of the victims, but they are established as being not real ghosts but just his very vivid imagination creating hallucinations with whom he discusses the cases he’s working on. Yes, that is actually the concept of the show. There will be a quiz on this, so please reread the description until you understand it or begin to have hallucinations of your own. Some thoughts— Overall: Interesting concept, OK+ execution. Two, this is definitely one intuitive detective. Or, kind of. He’s certainly intuitive in that he has conversations with his own imagination. In dramatic terms the device is interesting, in that it allows us to see his thought process operating literally. This, however, puts him in the realm of the rationalistic puzzle solvers, if we take his conversations with the imaginary characters as his means of thinking things through. My head hurts. Three, in his reliance on intuition but also ratiocination, Raines resembles both hardboiled detectives and puzzle solvers, combining the two in an extraordinarily intelligent police detective. In this way the show duplicates
Was Ellery Another Kind of Queen?
Short answer: no. A comment placed on my Tony Dungy item, below, suggests a worthy item for discussion. For introduction, note that the commenter, named Mike, and I are members of a Yahoo group that discusses Golden Age mysteries. In the past few days some members of the group have been discussing claims that various characters in Golden Age mystery novels (in particular, puzzle mysteries of the 1920s-’40s) were homosexuals, even though the authors gave no indication of them being so. It is a truly abysmal form of literary speculation, in my view, and Mike and I said exactly that. As a particularly vivid example, I note that an otherwise very good website of information on mystery fiction, Mike Grost’s "Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," is marred by a pursuit of approval for homosexuality that crops up regularly in Mr. Grost’s analyses of mystery fiction. Grost continually disapproves of characters’ expressions of what he (atrociously but conventionally) calls homophobia, and searches for clues that characters positively displayed in these fictions are in fact homosexuals even though the author has given no direct or even vague intimation whatsoever of such a thing. The great blot on Mike Grost’s otherwise excellent
Homosexuals Pursue Dungy
Homosexual activists are attacking Super Bowl-winning Indianapolis Colts head coach Tony Dungy for agreeing to attend a dinner to accept an award from an organization that promotes traditional family values. Interestingly, Dungy has not said anything against homosexuality himself, but is being attacked simply for going to dinner with people who oppose the idea of changing marriage laws to force private citizens and organizations to acknowledge "same-sex marriages." Focus on the Family reports: Jim Buzinski, co-founder of OutSports.com, a Web site aimed at the homosexual audience, claims that Indiana Family Institute (IFI) is a political organization. "He is speaking at the dinner next week in front of group that is very much a political organization," Buzinski said. IFI President Curt Smith said neither the dinner nor the award is political. "The purpose of this award is to celebrate those who live out the family ethic that we think is at the heart of a healthy and successful society," Smith said. "There was no five-point quiz where he had to agree with us on a number of public policy questions. In inviting him and then following up with a letter, we didn’t discuss public policy." Jim Daly, president of Focus on the
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