ARTY FARTY.

Shorter Jonah Goldberg: I bet those stupid liberal TV-show-makers thought they were making the Soviet Union look good, but I saw it and I still hate communism  farrrrt.

Longtime fans will be pleased to hear Goldberg's traditional empirical method is unchanged:

I gather the show’s creators think they are being subversive or at the very least very clever by getting viewers to root for the "bad guys." Those quotation marks are essentially Hollywood’s, not my own.

Maybe that was in the press packet. And:

Getting back to the slipperiness of popular culture, I have to wonder if the producers realize how much the show undercuts the Left, at least the Hollywood Left.

Leftists in Hollywood were always much more serious about communism than Leftists in New York and Washington, which inevitably led to the Socialist Workers Party purge of 1984. And:

Avoiding spoilers as much as possible, one character, an African-American Communist spy recruited from the civil-rights movement, should have the Left furious. If you take the character seriously (which I don’t necessarily recommend) he demonstrates not only the murderous commitments of the hard Communist Left, but he basically vindicates J. Edgar Hoover’s most extreme rhetoric about the civil-rights movement!

Expect this to be rolled up in conservative minority outreach: "Oh yeah, what about that guy on that show?"

AGAINST REASON.

Thanks Aaron M. Dellutri for directing me to this remarkable The American Conservative post by Eve Tushnet -- whose work I've noticed before -- suggesting we teach too much "critical thinking" in schools:

Critical thinking has so thoroughly colonized our idea of education that we tend to think it’s the only kind of thinking. Tests try to measure it, and ritzy private schools all claim to teach it. Critical thinking–analysis, not mere acceptance–is a skill we can all learn. And we’ve learned it too well. We’ve learned only critical thinking skills, and not the equally challenging skills of prudent acceptance: We don’t even realize that we need to learn when to say yes, and to what.

This sounds like a good line to try on that philosophy major chick you're trying to bang.

We teach students to find the undefended premises of an argument, or the contradictions in a claim. This is really easy.

Easy? Teachers, do you agree?

Every single argument has a premise for which it doesn’t and can’t argue, and every even mildly interesting worldview is built on conflict and internal tension. Not every contradiction is a reason to reject a worldview!

If some liberal were coming at her with a line like this, I imagine the words MORAL RELATIVISM would come flaming out of Tushnet's skull. But she's appealing to our higher unreasoning:

...What we don’t teach, and don’t even consider as something worth teaching, is the art of acceptance. The art of accepting somebody else’s thoughts, words, insights, and dwelling in them until they become your own as well. We don’t teach how to tell when you’re sure enough, when you really should take the leap of faith, when you should say, “Yes, my understanding is totally inadequate, but I believe"...

...And so we wait, and we keep our options endlessly open, hoping that some lightning-strike revelation will take the decision out of our hands. “When I met your mother I just knew...” “And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven...”

Lovely moments, surely, but how would you teach students to recognize them? "Tommy, look at Susie. Pretend she's the one for you, forever. Go!" "Well, Susie's nice and all but..." [Buzzer sounds, "F" dispensed.]

There's actually no place in education for such a thing, unless it's 1.) a cult leader's brainwashing session, or 2.) a school for religious instruction (but I repeat myself), which I suspect is the godly Tushnet's real model. Or, perhaps, a very bad classroom in which students are never challenged to go beyond what they already know, and are in fact given permission to stew in their own prejudices until they become a more transcendentally stupid version of themselves. You know -- the kind of place that folks who are always yapping about teacher "indoctrination" think a school should be.

We've been running with that old "reality-based community" thing for a while, but it never gets old because over time these people never get better at pretending that their real battle is not with liberalism but with Western Civilization.

UPDATE. Commenter Mortimer tells us this sort of thinking is popular even outside the meth labs of the right blogosphere -- from the Texas Republican Party 2012 platform (I don't know how I missed this):

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs.

Sara Robinson has a nice essay on critical thinking and schools at AlterNet, in which she also sticks up for teaching "the arts, crafts and humanities" -- something else Tushnet opposes ("we fetishize self-expression and novel or counterintuitive approaches to problems..."). They're so often wrong about everything important that it's hard to believe that isn't their goal.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT.

I don't usually do this, but my old colleague Steven Thrasher's story at Gawker, "Haaay to the Chief: The Military-Industrial Complex Conquers the Homos," is such gutsy journalism I'm sure many people will not even recognize it as such. Sample:

When SF Pride's electoral college of former grand marshalls selected Private Manning last week, it was time for these Professional Homosexuals to step in. Lisa Williams, SF Pride Board President, wrote that "even the hint of support" for Bradley Manning "will not be tolerated by the leadership of San Francisco Pride." Get it? Don’t even hint about it! 

The Professional Homosexual went on, completely without irony, to denounce her own organization's electoral college as "a system whereby a less-than-handful of people may decide who represents the LGBT community's highest aspirations as grand marshals for SF Pride," completely ignoring that she was one of a different handful vetoing their choice. According to her SF Pride bio, Williams is president of "One Source Public Affairs, a boutique consulting firm that specializes in the management of state, local and national political campaigns and strategic programs for non-profit organizations"...

As Jack Nicholson once said after doing a take with Brando on The Missouri Breaks: scorches the earth, doesn't he?

UPDATE. Some lively discussion of and dissension on Steven's story in comments. The main rap seems to be that he's just naively disappointed by the transformation of what used to be called the gay liberation movement into a political power brokerage that sometimes makes regrettable choices. (Longtime commenter Halloween Jack even calls the story "revisionist bullshit.") We can argue over what tradeoffs are worth making, certainly. I'd say the important thing is that Steven noticed the phenomenon at all -- especially the flow of military contractor money into big gay orgs. Too many people seem to miss that, in politics as in life, a lot of what looks like moral imperative is just arbitrage.

A CONSPIRACY SO VAST.

The President had some good gags at the White House Correspondents Dinner, one of the better (and better-reported) ones being, "These days, I look in the mirror and I have to admit, I'm not the strapping young Muslim socialist I used to be."

You all heard that one, right? You did? Well you're lying, because FrontPageMag's Robert Spencer has proven that the Lame Stream Media is covering it up:

Warner Todd Huston reported at Breitbart Monday that “in some of its reports on Saturday night’s White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD), the Associated Press failed to include one of President Obama’s own gags.”

Obama said: “These days I look in the mirror and have to admit, I’m not the strapping young Muslim Socialist that I used to be.” But, noted Huston, “in one version of the night’s story (as seen at Huffington Post, Time Magazine, Breitbart Wires, the Ottawa Citizen, and The Columbian to name a few), the AP’s Bradley Klapper forgot one part of the President’s joke,” reporting his words as “I’m not the strapping young Socialist that I used to be,”

Why? Did they think it had too much of a ring of truth?

Why did some editors at AP or at the publications that picked up the AP story think it necessary to run interference for Obama on this point?

The rest of the column is about how Obama is too a big Muslim.

You may be wondering what Spencer and his fellow idiots are trying to accomplish. My guess is, they're thinking about future generations. No one living at the present moment and aware of the news could possibly believe AP is purposely blocking Obama's famous joke. But down the road apiece, when the shattered remnants of the White People's Party are living in survivalist treehouses in the Dakotas, they're tell their children how Obama even admitted he was a Muslim and the media covered it up, and produce some dog-eared Wayback Machine files as proof. After all, they're big on heritage.

UPDATE. Speaking of the WHCD, Conan O'Brien apparently made a joke about Duck Dynasty and National Review's Greg Pollowitz spends hundreds of words ferociously insisting it wasn't funny. When I read that stupid thing about the reality show being a conservative touchstone, I thought it was just one guy's foolishness, but apparently it's a thing: Rod Dreher has gotten in on it, as have S.E. Cupp and those crazy kulturkampfers at Acculturated.

I kind of take the point, though -- if you're the sort of person who chooses what crap TV shows to watch based on ideology, <foxworthy>yew might be a conservative!</foxworthy>.

LIBERTARIAN OUTREACH ON GAY RIGHTS.

Hey, an NBA player says he's gay, great. This is something liberals and libertarians can agree on, right? Not if libertarians can help it! Matt Welch at Reason:

The Importance of Allowing People to Say That You Can’t Be a Gay Basketball Player and a Christian

He's talking about ESPN's Chris Broussard, who for the crime of criticizing the gay basketball player was beaten to death. Okay, not murdered, just beaten. Okay, not beaten, just criticized by people on Twitter, which is still censorship (because anything short of responding to Broussard's mouth-fart with "Intelligent people can disagree" and a pat on the back would be).

Broussard is predictably getting beaten to a rhetoric pulp on Twitter. And while I think today is a wonderful, watershed day for people (especially the artist formerly known as Ron Artest) to live as open and free as they wanna be, I agree with the New York Post editorial Robert George here: "Chris Broussard spoke what more than a few players feel. If such comments aren't expressed, a real conversation can't be had."

Actually America had this conversation for years. Thesis: "DIE FAGGOT!" Antithesis: (cries of pain). Fascist that I am, I don't see any point in reviving it.

And sometimes engaging with the I'm not ready to go that far just yet crowd brings out the best in activists. See, for example, Martin Luther King's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail."

MLK was glad people were opposing him -- in fact, he'd have been disappointed if people suddenly gave up and let him have what he wanted. Where'd be the fun in that? And getting assassinated was just an inevitable part of the process.

There is only one possible explanation for Welch's bizarre post: As I've been saying for years, libertarianism is just a hipper line extension of conservatism, the rightwing version of Budweiser Black Crown. So if liberals like something you'd imagine libertarians would approve, Reasonoids still have to maintain the anti-liberal brand positioning by bitching about it in a way the mouth-breathers can approve. The cleverer ones will do it by explaining how gay rights is statist, but with the kind of funding they have, there's really no need for a libertarian to be clever. Q.E.D.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the rightbloggers who think the Boston bombings are a good reason to stop the immigration bill, or immigration in general. The whole thing reminds me of the Palmer Raids as performed by a clown troupe.

GEORGE JONES, 1931-2013.

Just heard. I'll have something more to say later, maybe. His music was my good companion through some bad times; next to Sinatra in the When No One Cares era, maybe, nothing suits a sorrow binge like George Jones. (He's good when you're not sad, too, I later found out.) And while I normally don't give a damn what happens to famous people, his apparent ascent into happiness late in life was very cheering to me.

For now it's enough to say that along with everything else, George Jones was one hell of a singer.



UPDATE. He could be funny, too. Used to cover this one in a country band I was in:



UPDATE 2. In comments TomParmenter supplies "Rock  It," a number Jones did in his "Thumper Jones" secret rockabilly identity. But does anyone have tape of him singing as Donald Duck?

UPDATE 3. Just wanted to add:

• In high school a friend of mine saw him at the Westbury Music Fair and told me Jones was using the name "Tammy" in place of female pronouns, which got some gasps from the crowd. I thought maybe Jones had just been having an episode, but then I saw him on TV singing "If drinkin' don't kill me, Tammy's memory will" on some awards show. I can understand trading in on one's legend -- he did have a funny number called "No-Show Jones," and joked about his drinking -- but think about what it would take to declare yourself like that, to keep telling people that you'd had that one big love and it didn't work out. Jones was in show biz, but I think the feelings the songs talk about weren't an act.

• The "Ragged But Right" clip shows a younger, lighter Jones; his vocal instrument is pure and strong and he doesn't mess with it much. And that kind of material ("White Lightnin'," "Love Bug," etc.) doesn't call for messing with. The later Jones most people know, though, is the one singing those heartbreak songs, and by then he'd learned a few tricks. I think of "A Good Year for the Roses," where he moves between a low, confidential delivery ("After three full years of marriage it's the first time that you haven't made the bed") and those amazing, keening high notes ("As you turn and walk a-way..."). I say "tricks," but they don't sound tricky -- because, as difficult as most singers would find that kind of transition, Jones made it seem very natural, like that's just how it had to be sung. And that's part of what gives me goosebumps whenever I hear it. He goes from a wounded murmur to something like a howl of pain, and back again; the thing he's talking about isn't just sadness, it's torment; the inconsolable sorrow of lost love. The reason you can bear it, and maybe the reason he could, is that he made it into art.

THE NEW HISTORY'S GREATEST MONSTER.

Dame Noonington's hate-on for Obama has engorged to the point where she's comparing him unfavorably to Jimmy Carter. If we invade Syria, expect Noonan to pen a column from the POV of Bashar al-Assad, who will have mellowed becomingly with age, and whose personal happiness she will posit as the real reason that emotional cripple in the White House is after him.

REALITY TV VS. REALITY.

You stupid hippies think you own this country? Well, PJ Media's David Vicker has news for you! Duck Dynasty is popular!

Each week millions think they’re tuning in to watch the crazy and entertaining antics of a bunch of hirsuit, rich rednecks... What viewers are really watching are the Bitter Clingers candidate Obama so famously disparaged at a San Francisco campaign event back in 2008, and the Makers that President Obama denigrated in his “You didn’t build that speech” of 2012. If anyone in America clings to God, guns and religion, and did build that, it’s the Robertson clan...

..in a reliably Republican redoubt in rural Louisiana. Good for them, but what does that have to do with America in general? Well, to hear Vicker tell it, it's aspirational:

If annual sales, endorsement deals, and TV ratings are any indicator, the brand of Americanism these swamp rats are peddling is white lightning in a bottle. Down on our luck, out of hope, and sick-and-tired-of-change Americans can’t get enough of Duck Dynasty’s message, or its messengers. They take us back to the ideals that really work in this country.

The paterfamilias of this duck-call dynasty is worth about $10 million, in a parish where the estimated median household income in 2009 was $32,777. (Percentage of residents living in poverty in West Monroe, Louisiana in 2009: 25.3%.) And apparently the Robertsons are looking for a raise from their TV show.

Again, good for them; anything the traffic will allow, as the old song says. TV's currently full of Duck Dynasts and Real Housewives and such like; they're the modern equivalents of the swells and toffs whose adventures impoverished Americans have enjoyed following since the screwball comedies of the Great Depression. But nothing in our history suggests these entertainments mean the American People didn't mean what they said when they elected a President last November who was less than duck-dynastic.

Fantasies like Vicker's remind me of hippies who thought the country was really with them because Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate were big at the box office, despite the electoral returns.  Counterculture's a fun game to play when you're losing, but if culture, counter or otherwise, is meaningful to you, then its effect on electoral results -- actual or mitigating -- will not be so important. Decades later, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate are still worth watching, though. Can we expect the same of Duck Dynasty? If so, then politics is the least of our problems.

KILL US ALL, LET GOD SORT US OUT.

A lot of what the brethren have written about Boston has been deranged, but leave it to PJ Media/NewYork Post blowhard Michael Walsh to raise the bar. In this emission, his point is that with last week's lockdown the "pusillanimous toads... Gov. Deval Patrick and Mayor Mumbles Menino" had the city "cowering in fear" when they should have sent all Boston's able-bodied citizens out to shoot up the suspect and whatever got between him and them, or something equally butch.

There's plenty that's stupid and offensive in this, but connoisseurs will appreciate this bit about the 2004 Beslan school massacre, which Peters offers as a preferable model:

Note that, when the Russian military finally stormed the school, they were accompanied by armed residents of the village, desperate to save their children. In typical ham-handed Russian fashion, the former Soviets managed to kill almost as many people as they saved — but the point is they fought back.

Much better than last Friday's result, which was casualty-free as well as successsful, but without honor.

Sometimes I wonder if Walsh is just one of Col. Ralph Peters' secret identities.

POST-TRAUMATIC ATTENTION DEFICIT SYNDROME.

At The American Spectator Jeffrey Lord has one called "Jihad Blows Up the Liberal Utopia" and as you may have guessed, it reflects the growing rightwing consensus on Boston, which appears to boil down to Since you fuckers won't listen to us on any other topic, let us win you back with Terror! 

But as we saw in my recent Voice column, these guys also appear to have lost the self-discipline required to focus exclusively on the war-drum -- as one imagines they would if they were really serious about it -- without breaking into a tom-roll of talking points unrelated to the subject. It's like they want to go back to the Bush Years (now under new management and rehabilitation -- watch this space!), and they want to go now -- so rather than wait for Terror to soften the sheeple's minds, they just yell "Boo!" and then start yelling about deficit spending.

So after starting on-topic with "The Liberal Utopia is a land where gun background checks prevent mass murder" (I didn't say reasonably, I said on-topic), Lord veers, telling us the jihad has also blown up the Liberal Utopia of Social Security, Medicare, War on Poverty, etc.

He reaches what I would say is the nadir here, on the subjects of gun control and the apparent successor to Lena Dunham as the right's favorite female hate-object, Gabby Giffords:

Next up was former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who took to the Op-Ed page of the New York Times to say “I’m furious.” Giffords accused the Senate of being in the “grip of the gun lobby” fearful of political consequences. 

Gifford’s statement was filled with irony. There are people aplenty out there who have also discussed issues other than guns as being a problem in this area of violence in America. Indeed just this last Sunday Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley not only talked about guns but the role of abortion in what O’Malley called a “Culture of Death.” But did Gabby Giffords want to talk about abortion as a contributing factor?

In case you're wondering if you imagined it: yes, he did just ask why a woman who was shot in the head is more interested in gun control than abortion.

If their movement ever acquires a leader, I suggest for starters he or she should pass out some Ritalin.

TRIPPING.

Just looked in on Ed Driscoll's latest, yet another sprawling stream-of-semiconsciousness about how America was destroyed by the beatniks of the Frankfurt School and whatnot, and it's all too convoluted to pull apart but let me at least share with you this wonderful passage:

1968 contrasted the two American space programs: real-life NASA had to compete for attention with the Cinerama visions of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the top-grossing film of 1968, which smuggled its Nietzschian philosophy into movie theaters via space stations and talking computers, and was a magnificently photographed and scored exercise in liberal fascism.

Perfect as it seems, it's the next line that really makes it:

I don’t use the phrase lightly.

Please don't ever show him Forbidden Planet. They'll have to scrape him off the ceiling with a broom.

UPDATE. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard wins comments: "The black monolith represents the 90% Democratic African-American voting bloc." But the game ain't over! e.g. GregMc: "My god! It's full of shit!"; Spaghetti Lee: "'Lower the top marginal income tax rate, HAL.' 'I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.'"

UPDATE 2. This reminds me of the great Mad parody "201 Minutes of Space Idiocy," which reminds me of a lovely Film Comment article on Mad movie parodies you should read.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP....

.... about Boston. It runs long, but I had a superabundance of material. For example: The Czech Republic's press release, forced by general ignorance, that told people Chechans were not from the Czech Republic but from Chechnya, might prompt any number of reactions -- but check out this amazing response:

National 'Education' Association: YOU OWN THIS IGNORANCE.

John Birch Society paranoia PLUS War on Terror paranoia -- that's brilliant. Sometimes it's hard to believe they extemporize! 

WHAT, THEY FEEL SHAME?

Yeah, I wouldn't sign it either.

UPDATE. They finally put Kevin Williamson's name on it -- guess he drew the short straw.

ALSO, LET'S STORE GAS OVER BY THE SMOKERS' CORNER.

Cynical old cuss that I am, I never expected Democratic gun legislation to accomplish anything except the further embarrassment of their enemies. Looks like that's how it's playing out. The votes seemed choreographed to deliver maximum attention with minimal effect. They must think it was a good one to lose: Ours is a gun-friendly country, but not a gun-crazy one, and the sight of honkies jubilant at the defeat of a popular and harmless background check law may pay dividends for the Democrats down the road.

If that doesn't do it, we can always count on lunatics like Jack Dunphy to help. At PJ Whatsit he comments on a Ready Houston video that shows office workers fending off a shooter with chairs and coffee pots.  While he commends the can-do spirit, Dunphy is yet unsatisfied -- he wants those desk jockeys armed:

Wouldn’t it be far preferable to bring a gun to the gunfight instead of a chair or a coffee pot? ...If I were to enter an office building under those circumstances and ask some fleeing worker where the gunman was, I would hope to hear an answer like this: "He’s face down in the stairwell. Williams from accounting shot him."

I bet many of you folks are at an office right now. Take a look around.



Sure, arm the workplace. What could go wrong?

UPDATE. Arm the teachers, too.

DUH-BLE STANDARD.

Shorter Ole Perfesser: People expect me to disseminate bullshit indiscriminately -- what's your excuse?

UPDATE. Oh yeah, readers remind me, there's also his charming tweet to Gabby Giffords. Some guys prefer their targets wounded, I guess.

ALSO TOTALLY CONSERVATIVE: THOSE DELICIOUS BALLPARK FRANKS.

You knew it was coming -- from John Boot at PJ Media:

5 Core Conservative Values in the New Jackie Robinson Biopic 42

Among these:

2) There’s no substitute for a strong, loving nuclear family.

Demonstrated thus:

Robinson never knew his own father, who left his mother and her five children when Jackie was still a baby. In 42, when he gets the good news that the Brooklyn Dodgers want to give him a shot at being the first black player in the major leagues (in reality, there were some black players in the early days of baseball back in the 1880s), Jackie phones up his girlfriend Rachel (Nicole Beharie) and asks her to marry him right away. Later in the film, Jackie is seen cuddling his newborn son Jackie Jr. and telling him, “I’m going to be with you till the day I die.” Robinson, who along with Rachel raised two other children as well, was as good as his word, remaining a family man until his too-early death at age 53.

I'd like to see an extended version, in which scenes of Robinson eating prove the conservative value of nutrition.

UPDATE. In comments, Doghouse Riley: "The part about how Robinson -- who called himself an independent, but supported Republican candidates -- left the party after what he witnessed of the '64 convention and became a Democrat? Demonstrates the conservative value of voluntary deportation, I suppose."

DEMOCRACY PROMOTION IN ACTION.

At National Review, Otto J. Reich complains about the Venezuelan elections:

If I were still assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs I would urge the secretary of state to not recognize the results of this election unless and until independent auditors documented that it was accurate. Even then, it was not a free or fair election. All assets of the national government were mobilized to support Maduro and international observers and media report widespread “irregularities” in the process.. the will of the Venezuelan people is being thwarted.

From Wikipedia:

Reich held the post of Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the time of the 2002 Venezuelan coup d'état attempt on April 11, 2002 against Hugo Chávez. On the day Pedro Carmona was installed as president, Otto Reich summoned ambassadors from Latin America and the Caribbean to his office to express their support and that of the US administration for the new government.

They should start hiring guys off the street to do this sort of work, just to avoid this sort of embarrassing backstory. Then again, why bother?

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Rand Paul speech at Howard, and what a great success it was with the real audience, which was not the one in the actual room.

UPDATE. The paragraph breaks went away for a while, but they seem to be back now; please let me know if the formatting goes haywire again.

IS THIS WHAT WE SENT YOU TO COLLEGE FOR?

At PJ Media, Susan L.M. Goldberg explains that Family Guy is the poisoned fruit of feminism. No, really. A section about what a terrible father Peter is begins with this:

Never has a term been so despised in the ivy halls as “The Patriarchy.”

Later:

Whether it’s the military, the doctor, or the monkey in the closet, the men on Family Guy do more to avoid perceived threats than to confront them, even if it means putting their own self-respect on the line. Ironically, while feminism focuses on the disenfranchisement of women, it has often done so by disenfranchising men.

Later still:

Whether playing up to feminist theory or playing into the results of a generation of male bashing, Family Guy’s definition of masculinity is the monster pieced together between books and over Cosmos.

The italicized Cosmos is in the original, so I don't whether Goldberg means the drink or the Carl Sagan TV show. (It's also possible her demoralized copy editor was laying a trap to find out if she can even read.)

Best part is Goldberg's bio:

Susan L.M. Goldberg is a writer with a Master's in Radio, Television & Film...

Wingnuts used to make fun of cultural studies gush -- look at all those liberal brats "studying" Madonna! Now they're not only going to college for it (and worshipping the queen of CultStud crap, Camille Paglia), they're writing a ridiculous amount of horrible cultural studies gush themselves.

They seem to think they're plumbing the Dark Mystery of the Arts to find the pulse of the electorate, but they just remind me of Chris Cooper trying to kiss Kevin Spacey in American Beauty.