Thursday, July 09, 2009
THE AIRING OF GRIEVANCES. If you're having trouble understanding the depth of conservative commitment to Sarah Palin's ridiculous assumption of martyrdom, John Derbyshire offers an instructive sidelight at The Corner. He starts with a typical "The Fuhrer was sweet, the Fuhrer was kind" defense of Pinochet, but gets to his bigger fish: a new film by "Chilean commie film director Pablo Larrain" called Tony Manero, which sounds like an American Psycho-style knock on the Pinochet years (I haven't seen it, and evidently neither has Derbyshire).That's bad and silly enough. What lifts Larraín's feeble bit of ComSympery to the level of outrage is the particular cultural icon he picked on as the target for his venom. It is none other than Tony Manero, the character played by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Larraín's wretched, filthy movie is in fact titled Tony Manero.
Is there no decency any more? No restraint? No respect for our cultural heritage?
Chile had a narrow escape from Marxist-Leninist tyranny. We should never cease to remind the Left of that, if only because it annoys the hell out of them. Pinochet, with all his many faults, was a patriot who saved his country. We should keep saying that, too; and Pablo Larraín's absurd movie gives us the opportunity. It might all have gone unmentioned for another year or so if not for Larraín; but, as Tony Manero says to the customer in the paint store: "You brung it up." I charitably assumed at first that Derbyshire was making a subtle joke, but as the screed wore on I realized that he was genuinely enraged that an art film few Americans will see trifles with the sacred images of Tony Manero and Augusto Pinochet. Even stranger, he found this cultural offense a suitable launching pad for new and louder defenses of the murderous dictator, to which most Americans are likely to respond, "Who are Pinoshay and Ayendi?"
It was unavoidable and understandable that, with conservatives largely out of power, they would spend more time complaining. But so much of their time these days is spent raging at irrelevancies. It's as if they believe their rage itself is incandescent and, if allowed to burn brightly enough, will attract voters like moths. The Palin eruption, in which her abandonment of the responsibilities of office is portrayed as victimhood, is only their biggest such bonfire of vanities at the moment.
This compares badly even with the conservative culture-warring of olden times, for which I find myself growing almost nostalgic. They make Pat Buchanan look like Isaiah Berlin.
12:24 AM by roy edroso
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Tuesday, July 07, 2009
CULTURE OF COMPLAINT, PART 83,992. At The Corner, Mark Hemingway is incensed that Obama joked in a speech to Moscow students, "I don’t know if anybody else will meet their future wife or husband in class like I did, but I’m sure you’ll all going to have wonderful careers." Michelle and Barack went to Harvard Law at different times, though Obama was at the time a student doing his summer internship at Sidley & Austin, where she mentored him. Newsweek calls the comment "a wee bit off," which is not good enough for Hemingway, who calls the publication Obamaweek.
"The statement is just wrong," Hemingway continues in a blind fury. "There is no 'technical' justification for it having any veracity that I can tell — 'in class' is quite specific. Next time you husbands embarass your wife publicly by not remembering a significant relationship detail. I bet you wish a major media organization would step in and spin it for you. Alas, you'll have no such luck." Because Obamaweek loves Obama and hates you ordinary people, whose casual statements Obamaweek will parse rigorously in order to embarrass your wives. And Obama clearly must hate his wife, too, to humiliate her thus.
Elsewhere at The Corner Jay Nordlinger flips out because a conductor at Lincoln Center said that he and his fellow Britons were "very pleased" at how things were going in America now, which Nordlinger took as a slur on George Bush. Despite a recent poll showing Obama much more popular with Brits than Bush, Nordlinger disputes the maestro's imputation: "There has been a new awkwardness in Anglo-American relations," he asserts. "Beginning with the return of the Churchill bust, continuing with DVD-gate, etc." Maybe the only Britons he knows are named Windsor. And, Nordlinger adds, "the administration has thrown cold water -- strange cold water -- on the idea of a 'special relationship.'" Strange cold water? Perhaps Obama imported it from Treasonstan.
Nordlinger finds this further evidence that there are no "safe zones" left where a decent, Obama-hating citizen can enjoy himself in peace. If you can't evade mildly liberal sentiments among artists at Lincoln Center, where can you evade them?
And they say liberals are touchy.
UPDATE. The Ole Perfesser catches Nordlinger's outrage. "I’m sorry," he says, "but the only way to fix this is to be an asshole, complain loudly, and make things even more unpleasant for the perpetrator than for you." This of course has been the Perfesser's modus operandi for years. He and the Missus must be a real ornament to the local arts scene. Maybe we should all pitch in and send them to a Decemberists concert.
10:43 PM by roy edroso
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Monday, July 06, 2009
THE RIGHT ARE VERY DIFFERENT FROM YOU AND ME. Legal Insurrection finds a Reuters photo captioned, "Supporters of ousted Honduras' President Manuel Zelaya, one of them with a shirt covered with blood,.." Turns out the guy wiped the blood on his shirt, which is no shock, since in the photo he is standing and gesticulating, something he would not be able to do if his chest had been blown open. Nonetheless, Legal Insurrection calls the accurately captioned photo "fauxtography," etc.
A commenter points out that the caption matches the reality of the scene, and one of LI's shills steps forward:Caged, Reuters does not deal in truth but in innuendo and slant. The slant here is that someone was injured while protesting the ousting of Zelaya. That slant is false and Reuters deserves to be called out. Try Google sometime. Many compilations available of established Reuters fauxtography.
What kind of Useless Idiot defends Reuters or any MSM entity, anyway? The Astroturf kind? It's like something out of a psych textbook. The patient, unable to completely deny obvious reality, tells you how his enemies are twisting everything to make it look bad, don't you see, and when his explanation fails to convince either his audience or himself he lashes out in rage.
I've spent six years explaining the strange folkways of American conservatives, but since their forced migration from power they've entered a phase that is new and a little spooky even to me. They've been risible before, even ridiculous, but in this new age of the Victorious Palin Resignation it's as if they've entered some kind of mass hallucination. The sad thing is, if they ever catch on to that, they'll think it's because Obama drugged them, and that I'm writing about it as a kind of double-blind to cover Obama's tracks, etc. Well, if they start screaming call the ambulance.
9:12 PM by roy edroso
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NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, following on the reaction of rightbloggers to Sarah Palin, particularly her threat to sue reporters and writers who "defame" her. Needless to say they think that's great. I remember a time when these guys were all about defending blog scribes from the attacks of the powerful. Of course, that was before Palin became their professional victim, someone who may be cast as the underdog in any encounter despite her position and privileges.
Ross Douthat's column today about Palin follows the general strategy of talking about her as a symbol rather than as a politician. He talks about what sort of person he imagines her to be, and what sort of person polls suggest she appeals to, which relieves him of the need to consider her disastrous national political career as something for which Palin might at least share some responsibility, and leaves him free to fantasize a Republican mythology in which a Palin figure who has no characteristics except a noble common touch, the love of hardcore supporters, and female genitalia is harried to destruction by the demons of the Left because of them. The actual story, of a local pol who fared badly in the national spotlight, is too painful for him to contemplate. Though she proved a turkey on the ticket, Douthat will no doubt treat her inevitable reemergence as the resurrection of a phoenix.
10:27 AM by roy edroso
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SHORTER ANDREW BREITBART: Bitches! If I say this often enough, maybe women will finally start voting Republican.
9:45 AM by roy edroso
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Sunday, July 05, 2009
PUBLIC ENEMIES. Maybe I just have a bad chemical reaction to Michael Mann movies. I can barely remember The Insider or Heat, though I recall there were things in them that I liked; they just seemed lumpy and unfocused and their ponderousness overwhelmed even the very good acting (though Christopher Plummer's Mike Wallace, a professional trimmer with good excuses, sticks in my mind. Plummer was a fine actor in his younger days, but his late performances are sublime).
Public Enemies is no improvement, though since I saw it Friday I can recall it a little better. The first bank robbery was a nice how-to, but after that I lost interest in them, and I suspect Mann did, too. Actually most of the scenes, even when competently handled (and Public Enemies, like many recent action pictures, has bang-bang episodes where you can't tell who's doing what), just sort of lie there. As has elsewhere been noted, Johnny Depp and Marion Cotillard never get much of anything going, and after a short while seeing how Dillinger is going to get out of jail or get the money or get killed is no longer a matter of pressing concern.
The major problem is that Dillinger isn't interesting -- not in this telling, anyway. (I've heard good things about the Warren Oates version.) His signal qualities are professionalism, loyalty to friends, and a refusal to admit defeat; the movie would have to have more on its mind than showing this off to carry the day. As it is, he's just an admirable thug with a girlfriend. I think Johnny Depp's decision to play Dillinger quiet and heavily internalized is probably smart star-image-wise -- filmgoers want to see him play a soulful hero once in a while, in between weirdoes -- but disastrous for the movie. Being encouraged to admire a killer and bank-robber hasn't been a fresh trick for decades, and Depp's Dillinger doesn't reward our attention with anything else.
Context doesn't add much. A lot of effort is devoted to social portraiture around the edges; this is well-done but mostly futile. The J. Edgar Hoover and Melvin Purvis characters are meant to show the corruption of the law -- self-righteous in the former case, self-tortured in the latter. But that provides no reason to view Dillinger more kindly. In fact, this kind of comparison -- the crooks are bad, but the G-men are bad too -- is so lazy in the film as to become annoying. Worst of all is the segment where a lawman beats up the girlfriend and Purvis has to step in and rescue her -- mainly because we're supposed to feel for Purvis and it helps put him on the side of the good-bad guys, and maybe because someone figured the girl has to suffer some damage to raise the stakes.
All gangster-hero movies have to get out of these problems; the old black-and-whites usually did it will verbal pizazz and a morality that was just as bogus as Public Enemies' but lighter on the special pleading. Gable's exit in Manhattan Melodrama, of which we see a little in Public Enemies, is the flip side of Cagney's in Angels With Dirty Faces -- a moral conclusion that puts the weight of the downfall on the crook, not his environment. New-Hollywood movies like Bonnie and Clyde and Thieves Like Us were more interested in the hoodlum's environment, but also showed his relationship to it so we could at least get where he was coming from. Also, these heroes are ultimately losers. Dillinger is already a success when we meet him, and his relationship to Depression America is that of a star to his public, waving gamely from the back of a police car. Whatever happens, he's a winner. He has nothing to tell us but how he gets out of trouble, not how he got into it, or why.
There's some good acting in there -- Billy Crudup puts a nice crust of malice and authority on Hoover, and as Red Hamilton Jason Clarke has some scenes with Depp that suggest another, much more interesting movie about their relationship.
11:45 PM by roy edroso
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Friday, July 03, 2009
YOU STILL HAVE PALIN TO KICK AROUND ANYMORE. No way in hell she's dropping this valuable political equity. She'll lead her tribe of tea-partying neopatriots from a survivalist treehouse, either figuratively or literally. Even I enjoyed watching the video clips of her speech. I haven't seen this kind of addled positivity since Gracie Allen. Whatever she's on, I want some. And maybe America wants some!
Here's my Runnin' Scared roundup. I have since seen a consideration by neo-neocon that's especially impressive: But if Palin is running for president, perhaps she sees the danger facing us in the Obama presidency as so powerful and so imminent that she wants to devote more time and more speeches to fighting it in a very public way. Or perhaps not.
Your guess is as good as mine. In the immortal words of Olson Johnson: now who can argue with that?
5:13 PM by roy edroso
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Thursday, July 02, 2009
AN APPLE THAT STAYED ON THE TREE AND ROTTED. I, and you, have Harry Hutton to thank for this Jonah Goldberg jackpot that had escaped my notice, in which a reader complains to the author of Liberal Fascism of "the creeping leftism of something as supposedly benign as a thesaurus." Yes, the correspondent looked up the entries for "liberal" and "progressive" in Roget's and found them too positive. Goldberg can't leave mad enough alone:While annoying, none of this surprises me. I can't tell you how many people have told me that my book is idiotic on its face because the dictionary says so. I must pause here to revisit a previous Goldberg entry:The Washington Post's Dana Milbank quoted me as saying Harriet Miers fits the dictionary definition of "crony," as if it was a stinging rebuke of the White House. In reality, it was merely a factual statement. According to the dictionary, a crony is a longtime close friend or companion. Historically it didn't have a negative connotation. It derives from the Greek chronos (time)... This happily spares me the effort of making up an instance of Goldberg doing something like it -- for example, "The dictionary defines 'ass' as 'any wild species of the genus Equus,' so you're really calling me a mustang which is a compliment actually."
He goes on:By the way, my dad wrote about the deep-seated bias of dictionaries for the Wall Street Journal a few years ago. Oh no, you think, it can't be -- but it is: This is not the only instance of labeling-hesitation in Webster's New World--at least when the "leader" in question belongs to the "revolutionary" left. The dictionary can call Hitler the "Nazi dictator of Germany" but Stalin merely the "Soviet premier, general secretary of the Communist party of the U.S.S.R." Mussolini is an "Italian dictator," but Tito is "Yugoslav Communist Party leader, prime minister and president of Yugoslavia." Franco is "dictator of Spain" and Salazar "prime minister and dictator of Portugal," but Mao Tse-tung is "Chinese Communist leader, chairman of the People's Republic of China and of its Communist Party"...
Reference works carry with them, inherently, an air of authority, as if their contents are handed down from the heights of scholarship and learned precision. No one can feel right about error and tendentiousness slipping into the culture under such a guise. So it's congenital! It also makes me think of: "Why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk... ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children's ice cream." It's easy to forget, amid all the crazy sifting of signs and portents to which conservatives have resorted in the Obama era, that they don't have to be in defeat to think this way; Sidney Goldberg's article is from 2002. Something in them senses an unfair conspiracy in every nook and cranny of everyday life, even when they run the works,
Say what you will about liberals, at least when some of them get on about "heteronormativity," they're usually from the academic world, where such things are expected. Besides, conservatives will pick it up too when it suits them.
UPDATE. Commenter bleikker picks up something I'd missed: Goldberg pere complains about the preferential treatment given "when the 'leader' in question belongs to the 'revolutionary' left," as if other dictators e.g. Hitler and Mussolini were not leftists. It seems old Goldberg accepted the usual classification of fascists as rightists. I wonder: when the younger Goldberg started babbling to Dad his thesis that Hitler, along with everything else bad, was attributable to liberals, was Sidney proud that that his boy had amplified on his own "Infinity" with "Double Infinity"? Or did was the realization that Jonah represented his intellectual legacy the thing that finally killed him?
11:36 PM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, July 01, 2009
APOLOGIES. Sorry that posting has been so scarce. Basically I'm being worked to death, and whenever I devote time to anything outside my normal routine -- like cleaning the fridge -- everything falls apart. I am going to fix all this, probably by jumping off a roof, but in the meantime please accept as a token of my esteem this account of the latest New York tea party, this time in Times Square. I didn't stay for Stephen Baldwin because I was convinced early on that I had already gotten my money's worth.
10:07 PM by roy edroso
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