Dear Ms. Fundis:
You are under arrest for giving aid and comfort (i.e. practical advice on how to avoid detection of unauthorized almanac use) to terrorists. Pending the determination of whether you count as an enemy combatant -- which could take a while, there is no deadline, and no one can make us make a determination any faster than we feel like making it -- you may or may not have a bunch of rights we may tell you about later, but until we decide whether you might have them, you don't.
Sincerely,
John D. Ashcroft
Attorney General
I was in B.C. shortly after the Liberals came to power and during a bus strike. The NDP had been the governing party, in what amounts to a 2-1/2 party system (a third party that draws significant votes but has little chance of winning) but the Liberals rode a lot of close wins in 3-way races to take 77 of 79 seats. They won fair and square, as far as an outsider can tell, but the overwhelming 77 of 79 margin is an artifact of all the close calls in the individual districts going their way rather than a large shift in voter sentiment. The province-wide vote was actually rather close. I'd be interested in hearing from B.C.-ers (or others more familiar with the parliamentary system of government in a multi-party system) whether a party that wins a huge majority of seats in those circumstances can get away with ramming through its agenda, whether the Liberals are doing it now, and whether they stand to suffer in the next election by exceeding their mandate.
At least they provoke something. They rarely provoke interest or controversy, and never promote insight. They rarely have anything to say and almost never say it well. The revelations and naughty bits, if there are any, get excerpted somewhere, and a few pages in Time or Newsweek, which would have been filled with something else anyway if the ad sales for that week supported them, contribute far less to the overuse of forest products than the vanity publications destined for a quick trip to the remainder table.
News flash. Memoir by practising politician is a snoozefest. I've never read a memoir by a politician currently holding office or looking to hold office and I don't see anything telling me that Hillary's book is an exception.
What did anyone -- pro- or anti-HRC -- expect?
Although this string is long enough, I can't help commenting on the unearned moral fervor of so many participants. We all agree that slavery was a monstrous evil, but who among us actually opposed it? Did any of us ever free a slave? Help one escape to freedom? Risk life and limb denouncing it? Of course not. Generations before us did that, and only a small minority of the members of those generations. If slavery were now an existing fact, a living institution with deep roots in and spreading branches throughout our economy and culture, how cocksure are we that we would take a position, with its attendant risks, that damn few people took at the time? Unless human nature has changed fundamentally in a couple of centuries, isn't it more likely that we, like the real human beings who confronted the real problem, would be all over the lot? Some of us would be radical abolitionists, some non-expansionists, some popular sovereignty advocates, some expansionists. Some us of would think slavery a monstrous evil, some a sad necessity, some a positive good, better than the cruel "free" labor system of the heartless industrial North. Many of us wouldn't think about it at all.
Let's not pat ourselves on the back too hard for the moral achievement of having been born in the late 20th century.
Doug:
I think we can reach agreement here. I want people to be able to get whatever kinds of movies they want (snuff films and kiddie porn excepted). I myself like sleazy movies so bad they're good, but I don't find many. If you want a conservative Costa-Gavras, I hope you get a bunch of them. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
Why we don't have that many of them is an interesting question. It seems to me that the possibilities are:
1. Hollywood lefties prevent them from being made;
2. Not enough people want them;
3. It's hard to write good scripts from that viewpoint.
I would agree with anyone who says (1) is deplorable. Whether it's true would be an interesting study, but there are enough alternative production sources these days, e.g., the PAX Network and the Murdoch interests, that if that's the problem it will not be one long. If it's either of the other two, I don't know what can be done about it.
Doug:
I grew up in rock-ribbed conservative Republican central New York. Not that that matters because they invented TV some time before I was born and, like everyone else, I saw most of my movies on television in the days of three nationwide networks. (I have fond memories of falling in love with Lauren Bacall at the tender age of 11 and behaving like a moonstruck, prepubescent schoolboy when I met her 20 years later) As for a listing of movies with "conservative 'soul,'" you've upped the ante because I don't know what "conservative 'soul'" is when applied to movies. Most movies, whatever their genre and whatever superficial political content they have, are hack work lacking anything I would dignify with the word "soul." Anyone doing soulless hack work for a commercial audience (some of which can be exquisitely well-crafted) will default to whatever conventional pieties actually sell among the viewing public in, say, rock-ribbed conservative Republican Central New York, which introduces an inherent conservative bias. Movies with "soul" of any kind are rare, and although I don't care to investigate it, there may be an inherent liberal bias in "soulful" movies and television, either because the producers of "soulful" stuff are disproportionately liberal or because that vision lends itself more to "soulful" stuff. Imagine a seriously conservative version of "The West Wing." It would likely be wretched on purely dramatic grounds. How do you write snappy dialogue, not agitprop, about tax cuts for the rich and deregulation of polluters?
Last point (promise): movies and TV shows compete in the marketplace in good conservative, laissez-faire fashion. Consumers of widely varying politics vote with their tickets and remotes. Unless you have a mechanism to account for a market failure, the tastes and prejudices of the producers (presumed to be biased lefties) should yield to the demands of the consumers (presumed to be something else). In the absence of market failure, either the consumer is more liberal or the product is more conservative than the Hollywood Left discussion presupposes.
Doug:
Of course a war/cop/cowboy/etc. movie isn't necessarily conservative simply because of its genre. But the criteria you set out for defining a movie as conservative are exactly the ones I had in mind, and fit so many movies I grew up seeing -- and see to this day -- that even to start naming names (pun wasn't initially intended, but I'll go with it) would be like having a fish identify specific water.
Again, this unaccountable obsession with the politics of Hollywood hacks and hams. I just don't get it, but what the hell, I'll join the party.
Elia Kazan richly deserved an Oscar, not for his politics, but for his distinguished cinematic career, which his political choices (to name hapless, harmless hacks and hams who had attended the wrong meetings in the 1930s) ALLOWED HIM TO HAVE. Some objected to his Oscar, which he got anyway, out of sympathy for those whose political choices kept them from having a shot at such a career. As between someone who maybe doesn't get a statue and someone who surely doesn't get a career, it's not obvious to me that the former is more persecuted than the latter.
Almost by definition, big-time Hollywood types are deplorable human beings, wherever they stand on the political spectrum. End of story.
By the way, no conservative movies? What about most cop and cowboy flicks? Most war movies? Most action shoot-em-ups? Most spy movies? Most Jesus/Moses/St. Fill-In-The-Blank movies? Most Arnold/Bruce/Clint movies? (And I don't even know what Clint's actual politics are.) Oh, maybe you're just counting the good ones.
Why does anyone care any more about the politics, whether good or bad, of Hollywood's hacks and hams than they do about the politics of plumbers or optometrists, who have much more influence on our lives? One of my relatives gets apoplectic about Martin Sheen. Why? He's just an ex-drunk who plays the President of the United States on TV.
Then again, so is George W. Bush.
Never mind.
Someone -- I think it was Joe Queenan -- described the current political situation (as long ago as the '80s) as one side gets the Pentagon, Boeing, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, etc, and the other side gets the English Department. In that vein, the whole political correctness furor was and is the winning side saying it wasn't satisfied with that deal and it wanted the English Department too.
The usual suspects in PC controversies are often annoying, but rarely dangerous. Who REALLY suffers from "politically incorrect" opinions? The Dixie Chicks were scrapped from country radio station playlists after expressing embarrassment that George Bush is from Texas. What pro-Bush entertainer has suffered any backlash at all? A woman on a nearby Division III college basketball team decided not to face the flag during the Star Spangled Banner because of the rush to war. She has been abused by fans, even physically confronted during games, while Mike Piazza and Al Lieter, rich and famous athletes, sneer at her and take the enormous political risk of publicly supporting the president of the United States. The list goes on, but I won't.
When I hear popular commentators yell "PC," as if they, not their targets, faced adverse condequences for their beliefs, I reach for a custard pie or a gun, whichever is handier.
Simple arithmetic. Anyone now under 40 first voted, nationally, no earlier than the 1984 presidential election. Most of this crew would have only dim, adolescent or pre-adolescent memories of a Carter administration widely portrayed (whether accurately or not is beside the point) as feckless and would have come to political consciousness during the triumphalism (again, whether accurately portrayed or not is beside the point) of the Reagan years. Perhaps this explains the otherwise inexplicable popularity of swaggering can-do conservatives (whether they actually "do" or not) among young voters whose interests are systematically betrayed by those same politicians. Their earliest memories of seemingly effective government (if you pay no attention to the man behind the curtain or actual results, which may vary) begin with Sunny Ron and his tough guys.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 1 |
| 2003 | 13 |
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