MSNBC asks Diana West, "Are Adults Acting More Like Teenagers?", as if there's some doubt about this trend.
I’ve temporarily decamped to campy Las Vegas for a couple of days. Posting will, needless to say, be sporadic. Maintain narrow stances in the interim.
Update Means-testing!
"President Bush has shown that he is up to speed on the latest historical discoveries on Vietnam. Those who are inclined to disagree should first get up to speed themselves."
What--leave the cocoon of the 1970s and its most fervent myths?
Your quote of the day:
“If it is properly sealed, it should not pose much of a threat unless it is dropped,” said former New York City emergency services director Jerry Hauer, an ABC News consultant.He was referring to the Phosgene "nerve agent" (apparently of Iraqi origin, to boot) found in an office at the U.N.
This time, you've really failed me, Hans Brix.
CNN, whose credibility became seriously in disrepute after finally disclosing "The News We Kept To Ourselves", is dropping Reuters, infamous for believing that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" (actually, CNN believes that as well) and even more ill-famed after "Picture Kill", involving Adnan Hajj, ace Photoshop expert.
Fortunately, CNN already has a new visual consultant all lined up to replace him!
And their producers can always call upon the crack editorial department here, if need be, to replace Reuters' text-based journalists.
And yet, despite all these incidents, Daniel Henninger actually seems to wonder why a growing number of people don't trust the legacy media.
Go figure.
Making the rounds today is a Condi Rice at Stanford story that's being reported like it's the equivalent of the sled at the end of Citizen Kane and its dollar-book Freud symbolism. But it's old news--here's a January 2005 Grauniad article with the same story.
Meanwhile, Karl of Protein Wisdom has a well researched history of the legacy media and Iraq. I'd add to it what's probably the first use of the Q-word regarding Iraq from CNN--three weeks before fighting against Saddam began in 2003, as well as my spotlight on Reuters' own particular photographic misadventures in the Middle East.
Which dovetails into Buckhorn Road's post on "The Magic Bullet Theory", as it applies to the wire services that are "reporting" out of the Middle East. While there's no mention of Arlen Specter or Oliver Stone, it's further proof that everything old is indeed new again.
My friend (and fellow Blog*Fest*West co-conspirator) Cinnamon Stillwell has some thoughts in the San Francisco Chronicle on the avenue (in front of the court house) where terrorism and censorship meet.
Mickey Kaus asks, “Who has to try to kill themselves in this town to make the front page?”
I couldn't believe--just a few days after their prospective new owner gave them a lecture on how they had to give customers the news the customers wanted--that the editors of the L.A. Times would run the Owen Wilson suicide-attempt story on page B-3. And they didn't! They ran it on page B-4. A little box on B-1 features the riveting headline, "Actor hospitalized." ... Let's see: A world-famous leading man actor, "one of Hollywood's top comedy stars," at the peak of his career, slits his wrists. ... In Los Angeles. ... Where movies are not just gossip material--they are what cars are to Detroit: the big local industry. Page B4! ... Once again, across the continent, with a three hour handicap, the New York Post had plenty of time to put a much better Owen Wilson story on its front page. ... I have run out of ways of saying that the LAT is a pathetic stuffy, faux-newspaper run by respectable liberal twits and doomed to die! Janet Clayton, the paper's well-connected, life-sapping AME, should grab an Annenberg School sinecure while she still can. ...As Mickey writes, for L.A., "movies are not just gossip material--they are what cars are to Detroit: the big local industry". How badly do you have to screw up the endless amount of story material dropped in your lap every day?More: B-4 and After Emailer X notes another example from the past few days:
When director John Singleton killed a pedestrian with his SUV, the news got buried in a squib on B4 in Saturday's paper. Even though the incident happened on Thursday evening and the newsroom had a full 24 hours to work on the story. [link added]Be merciless, Zell. It's your only hope.
As badly as the L.A. Times does...every day.
Meanwhile, Kathy Shaidle has some valuable rehabilitation advice for Wilson: "Woody Harrelson helping Owen Wilson kick drugs is like hiring Albert Fish to babysit your kids."
(Yet another storyline the L.A. Times would be too clueless--not to mention too leftwing--to run with.)
Tammy Bruce notes:
Richard Jewell has been found dead in his home at the age of 44. Jewell was in fact a hero by noticing the suspicious backpack left in Olympic Park, giving people enough warning and moving them out of the way, saving countless lives. Yet, even in today's headlines, the fact that the FBI let leak that he was a (convenient) suspect forever tragically overshadowed his heroism.Tammy writes that in her opinion:
The FBI gave the media a suspect in an attempt to quell the fears of the Olympics-attending public. Jewell was that sacrificial lamb and another travesty of the Clinton/Reno Department of Justice.Matt Drudge dubs him "the man the media murdered"--of course, Jewell wouldn't have been the first.
Heh:
Incidentally, three squares? I'll bet Laurie gave Larry hell for that line. Which would explain the bright idea he eventually had to celebrate their breakup.
That's the headline of this essay in industry bible Editor & Publisher. And why not? The media have gotten over objectivity on every other topic ages ago. Of course, given the organizations that big media donates to (or in NBC's case, the business that's their parent company), it's a pretty safe bet that they've long gotten over what ever "objectivity" they once had on environmentalism as well.
(H/T: RC)
Veteran actor Sir Ian McKellen gives a demonstration in magical thinking:
Sir Ian McKellen is so offended by the Bible’s anti-gay stance he makes a point of ripping out the relevant page every time he stays in a hotel room. The openly homosexual actor, a longtime campaigner for gay rights, accepts he shouldn’t vandalise the Bible, but finds it difficult to contain his outrage at the contents of Leviticus 20:13 when he spots the holy book in hotels. McKellen says, “It’s the one thing I find difficult to defend but do go on doing.” The Leviticus 20:13 passage reads: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.”Some random thoughts:
Update: Related thoughts from Daily Dollop.
(And where it all will end, only knows God.)
As a follow-up to my review for Pajamas of AMC's Mad Men (and in case you're wondering, I'm enjoying the mini-series quite a bit more these days than my original take, now that it's gotten past its overly expository folk-Marxist premiere episode), Rondi Adamson makes a great observation. If you buy into the Babbitt-like subtext of the series, "Every marriage fifty years ago, we are led to believe, was nothing but a loveless travesty, maintained for public perception only, secretly crushing the will to live of both partners." On the other hand:
Say what you will about the role of women fifty years ago, but at least they didn't go out in flippity-flops or stretch pants, flab showing, hair out of control, even the wealthiest among us looking like we're on our way to the convenience store nearest our trailer-park in order to stock up on Doritos. And say what you will about the men, but they wouldn't have dared show up at even a casual weekend barbecue in crocs and shorts, wearing an "I'd rather be sailing" t-shirt or a baseball cap adorned with some silly sports logo, fingers poised to scratch inappropriate areas publicly. They were groomed and matching, even as personal happiness eluded them.Speaking of the aesthetics of relationships designed largely for public consumption, don't miss her photographic comparison of now and then as an example of how society has "progressed" over the past 50 years.
Rondi's post reminds me very much of something that James Lileks once wrote about the era portrayed--ocasionally with a brush so heavy-handed it must weigh a ton, in Mad Men:
I'm fascinated by the post-war era--1946 to, say, 1964--and in many ways it was an absolute Golden Age. Not perfect; no era is. It's stupid to romanticize a period, but equally stupid to dismiss it for its failure to be as Perfect and Glorious and Wise as our enlightened time. It's easy to snicker at their fear of Communism, but in context I'd be scared too--the USSR was a heavily armed, expansionist totalitarian state, and its domestic apologists were not only wrong, but defending a system that equaled and bested the Nazis for prolonged brutality.Tip of the Trilby to the always stylishly-shod Manolo, who also links to the newest blog in his burgeoning fashion empire. I think the punchline at the end of this post actually was understood reasonably well during the era of depicted in Mad Men, and then forgotten, oh, about six or seven years later. I'd like to think that hopefully as The Great Relearning slowly (all too slowly) progresses, it too will be rediscovered.The '50s are sniffed at, I think, because the victors write the history, and in the cultural battles fought by the boomers, the '50s were the era of Mom and Dad, the era of rules, the era of oppression. To the boomers, the '60s are the Years of Glory, because that's when they got to go to college, live in dorms, stay out late and come home blitzed on ditchweed without answering a lot of questions. Being Boomers, they elevated this period to mythic status, and hence we've had to live with this incessant '60s worship ever since. Personally, I'm sick of it; I'm sick of their music, their fashions, their politics, their interminable self-satisfaction and narcissistic desire to regard their generation as the apogee of human endeavor. Yawn. It's been such a stultifying weight on society that we can't seem to come up with anything new--hence this never-ending cycle of nostalgia we're in. We must worship the '60s, be amused by the '70s, and loathe the '80s. Why loathe? Because that's when the boomers first started to feel out of touch, i.e., old.
These are all horrible overgeneralizations. That's the problem. Each era gets boiled down to a few pat symbols. The '50s are sock hops and tail fins. The '60s are protest and Woodstock. The '70s are shag and disco balls. The '80s mean greed and Izod. The '90s--well, who knows. It's all ridiculous; every era is much more than that, and at the same time no different than our own. People eat, work, raise kids, laugh, snore, worry about whether the sofa should go in that corner or over there.
All that said, I have only two points: I love living now, and wouldn't change this time for any other. Point #2: were it a choice between driving a minivan down a vacant suburb strip mall corridor eating a franchise hamburger and listening to some "Big Pimpin'" on the CD player, OR driving a turquoise BelAir around downtown Philly listening to Joe Niagara introduce Chuck Berry tunes on the AM radio--
Not even close.
The syndrome first given name by the good Dr. Krauthammer sure works in mysterious ways--it's caused Rush Hour 3 to become a hit, even as it somehow simultaneously caused Playboy to lose circulation.
Bush Derangement Syndrome--is there nothing it can't do?
Isn't this merely an update of Diane Sawyer's earlier Dictator ‘07 Whistlestop Tour but with guaranteed lower ratings?
I'm sure Katie will pack lots of radical chic designer scarves, needless to say.
Nicole Gelinas writes "Two years after Katrina, New Orleans desperately needs law and order":
As Reverend Nguyen The Vien, pastor of one of eastern New Orleans’s churches, told me earlier this year, “We’re here and we’re rebuilding”—with or without federal assistance. Indeed, Nguyen and his parishioners seemed to treat the subject of government help almost as an afterthought: it may help pay the bills if it ever arrives, but it’s not expected. After Katrina, neighbors fixed up Nguyen’s church under his direction so that they would have a “home base” for eating, sleeping, and showering. Then they set to work rebuilding houses, one by one. Residents of many other neighborhoods—white, black, and Asian—have done the same. As New Orleanians have found out the hard way, the work is backbreaking, but not impossible.Paging Mayor Giuliani--your next stump speech awaits.What individual New Orleanians can’t do by themselves is fix the city’s long-broken attitude toward criminal justice. Over and over again during my February trip to New Orleans, I heard how demoralized residents feel when they buy and install new appliances, pipes, and furniture for their flooded-out houses, leave for a day or two, often to temporary homes—and return to find their hard-earned new handiwork ripped out and stolen.
For generations now—and this is the city’s deepest problem—New Orleans has hobbled along without a real law-and-order presence. Criminals graduate from petty crimes to burglary to drug-dealing to carrying illegal weapons to gang robberies to murder, and face few consequences at any stage. The police, and especially the prosecutors, are ineffectual. Since Katrina, things have gotten much worse, in part because criminals, finding life difficult in cities that enforce the law, have returned to the Big Easy in numbers disproportionate to those of law-abiding citizens. Mayor Ray Nagin doesn’t try to fix things, perhaps because, as he often says, he believes crime is a social problem, rooted in a lack of opportunity for poor youth.
The Bush administration has deployed extra federal law-enforcement agents to try to get the worst criminals off the street. The state of Louisiana, meanwhile, has sent the National Guard to patrol half-empty neighborhoods. But just as the U.S. military can only do so much in Iraq when Baghdad’s local government is ineffective, the federal government can’t do much in New Orleans until the city’s local government changes its attitude and behavior. Residents have no reason to think that criminal behavior has predictable negative consequences, because Nagin and New Orleans district attorney Eddie Jordan have failed to make clear that people who commit crimes in New Orleans will be prosecuted.
But President Bush can use federal dollars to try to convince them to do it. In his speech in New Orleans on Wednesday, Bush should announce that he’s ready to ask Congress for $500 million over two years to overhaul New Orleans’s police and prosecutorial forces. But he also should say that the money is contingent on a pledge from Nagin and Jordan that their city’s Number One priority will be law enforcement. Bush should also tie the federal money to measurable results: rational arrests (from quality-of-life crimes all the way up to homicide), effective prosecutions, and, ultimately, fewer crimes.
It’s an enduring mystery why Bush hasn’t used the Katrina disaster to show the world that America can rebuild a major city using a bedrock conservative principle: law and order first. Democrats are welcome to propose the same idea, of course. Obama, Edwards, and Clinton have all mentioned New Orleans’s crime problem in their recent speeches. But they often tie it to a lack of staff and equipment in the city after Katrina—as if it’s a question of rebuilding something that was lost, instead of building from scratch the most essential component of any city’s success. Until politicians understand that basic difference, spending more money—or bragging about past billions spent—while tolerating intolerable conditions in a first-world city is nothing short of disgraceful.
As Glenn Reynolds writes, "Black people are fleeing San Francisco".
But then, who isn't?
Update: On the other hand, San Francisco does have some surprisingly encouraging economic signs, if you just know where to look. Meanwhile, Jeff Goldstein calls on Nancy Pelosi to have a true Profiles In Courage moment.
Related: "Mom, Dad meet my boyfriend, Winkle Paw".
James Taranto wryly notes that "Life Imitates the Movies":
As I've written before, it's Anthony Burgess' world, we just live in it."You've proved to me that all this ultra-violence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned my lesson, sir. I see now what I've never seen before. I'm cured, praise God! . . . I see that it's wrong! It's wrong because it's like against society. It's wrong because everybody has the right to live and be happy without being tolchocked and knifed."--Alex de Large (Malcolm McDowell) in "A Clockwork Orange," 1971 "First, I want to apologize, you know, for all the things that--that I've done and that I have allowed to happen. . . . I was ashamed and totally disappointed in myself to say the least. . . . I want to apologize to all the young kids out there for my immature acts and, you know, what I did was, what I did was very immature so that means I need to grow up. . . . I feel like we all make mistakes. It's just I made a mistake in using bad judgment and making bad decisions. And you know, those things, you know, just can't happen. Dog fighting is a terrible thing, and I did reject it."--dogfighting conspirator and erstwhile NFL star Michael Vick, Aug. 27, 2007
(If it's Stanley Kubrick's world, I'd sooner live in this one than the one with the Korova Milk Bar.)
Update: Of course, sometimes the Ludovico Treatment fails...
Wow, I am so retroactively ahead of the curve on this one!
That's what Tim Blair is joking in response to Washington Post Radio going off the air:
Washington Post Radio, which brought the newspaper’s journalists to the local airwaves, will go off the air next month after failing to attract enough listeners and losing money during its 17-month existence.What, you've never heard of it either? Exactly.Post Radio, which is broadcast regionwide on 107.7 FM and 1500 AM, was not able to draw even 1 percent of listeners during its first year.
At least the Wall Street Journal is smart enough to concentrate on Internet video: Once they purchased their cameras and built their green screen set, their ongoing costs drop like a stone; it's got to be a much cheaper strategy to give voice to their pundits.
Since he lacks the dotty elder statesman clout that permits the anchors at CBS's 60 Minutes to get a pass on their ethnic slurs, isn’t it time for Matt to a pay a visit to the General Electric Corporation’s resident in-house all-purpose Torquemada for absolution?
Mickey Kaus writes, "Has Big Hollywood made a single non-anti-US post-9/11 film I missed?"
I wish I could say Bill O'Reilly was wrong about Paul Greengrass' Bourne Ultimatum being an anti-American film, but I saw it last weekend and O'Reilly's right. It's not just that the script plays on opposition to Bush anti-terror tactics--waterboarding, etc. Or that in a moment of calm hero Matt Damon utters maybe 15 of the 40 words he speaks in the film and explains that he's simply trying to apologize for ... well, the CIA's sins, or maybe America's. Just because you oppose waterboarding and believe the U.S. has a lot to apologize for doesn't make you anti-American. The problem is the film is unredeemed by any sense that America or the American government ever stands for or does anything that is right. It is a big hit overseas. ...No kidding.The film also made me feel guilty, because I watched Greengrass' United 93 and left convinced it was a searing indictment of Bush's behavior in hours after 9/11. (Air controllers spend much of the film trying to locate the AWOL President they can obtain an order to shoot down the hijacked jet.) I didn't know anything about Greengrass, and the film looked like it had been based on actual records by a meticulously dispassionate observer. But Greengrass' Bourne film undermines his credibility and retrospectively dissolves United 93's anti-Bush power. I don't trust anything the man makes. ... P.S.: Has Big Hollywood made a single non-anti-US post-9/11 film I missed? I can't remember one (aside from Team America: World Police, which was a cartoon).. ... And don't say World Trade Center. That passed up several potentially epic patriotic moments (e.g. the Dave Karnes story) in favor of a tribute to the fraternity of New York transit cops. ... Next up: In the Valley of Elah, a well-made version of the Scott Beauchamp Story. ... Is it the international market that makes our studios behave this way? I sense an underserved domestic niche.
Curiously, in Black Hawk Down and We Were Soldiers, war films whose principle photography was presumably completed just prior to 9/11 and released in early 2002, (after which Tinseltown would enter into a temporary holding pattern, before letting it all hang out) Hollywood seemed to have reached some sort of an accommodation with the American military. I wish I could find the quote--I think it was from James Bowman, maybe Rich Lowry, that while Hollywood's never going to be pro-military, at least they've come around to treating the American soldier as a professional warrior, not a victim of jingoistic hawks.
But don't worry, if there's a President Obama or Hillary in 2009 and he or she decides we need to remain in the Middle East, Hollywood will be more than willing to turn on a dime. Again. Historically, the left has always been able to do smoother 180s than Tony Hawk, any day.
ABC reports, "The Future of the Workplace: No Office, Headquarters in Cyberspace--Some Companies Don't Care Where Workers Are as Long as They Get the Job Done".
Geez, Toffler wrote about telecommuting in The Third Wave in 1980. Numerous businesses (not the least of which is Pajamas) rely heavily on it. Wall Street firms used telecommuting to stay afloat immediately after 9/11. Why such a breathless headline from ABC?
The Grauniad reports, "Two of the BBC's most senior news and current affairs executives attacked the corporation's plans yesterday for a Comic Relief-style day of programming on environmental issues, saying it was not the broadcaster's job to preach to viewers":
The event, understood to have been 18 months in development, would see stars such as Ricky Gervais and Jonathan Ross take part in a "consciousness raising" event, provisionally titled Planet Relief, early next year.Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, Walter Duranty, David Halberstam, Woodward and Bernstein, Katie Couric, Arthur Schlessinger, Peter Jennings, and Pinch Sulzberger could not be reached for comment.But, speaking at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival yesterday, Newsnight's editor, Peter Barron, and the BBC's head of television news, Peter Horrocks, attacked the plan, which also seems to contradict the corporation's guidelines. Asked whether the BBC should campaign on issues such as climate change, Mr Horrocks said: "I absolutely don't think we should do that because it's not impartial. It's not our job to lead people and proselytise about it."
Some thoughts on artistic nihilism from Megan McCardle and James Lileks. McCardle writes:
Back when I wanted to be a fiction writer, I wanted to be the kind of fiction writer who has a dramatic slide into the abyss. It wasn't long after I stopped writing short stories that it occurred to me that dying old, desperate and alone probably wasn't nearly as inspiring for the people it happened to as it was for twenty-year olds looking for an excuse to smoke too much.In my teens, I caught a similar whiff of nihilism listening to the Velvet Underground and watching Mick Jagger and--phew!--Anita Pallenberg in Performance. I'm not sure what its youthful attraction is, but if it dates back to Fitzgerald's time, it's a remarkably long-lived trend. Which dovetails nicely into this post on the proto-youth movement of the 1920s and its sadly obligatory cynicism.
Why, young whippersnappers, I'm old enough to remember when satire meant Terry Southern and Larry Gelbart. These days, "satire" is your last refuge when your leftwing hyperbole goes too far, and you'd like a get out of jail free card without the demeaning hassle of having to utter the even more shopworn "I'm sorry if you were offended" line. Or as Ace wrote a few month ago, back when an earnest Rousseauvian primitive was called on her lunacy and also played the "satire" card:
Ah, well. Let's just chalk it all up to nuance. Lefties want a free reign to speak in absurdities, but also want us to go along with their calling verbal mulligans when their absurdities become punchlines.Which is also Andy Rooney's latest defense for an ethnic reference that, as Noel Sheppard writes, would have caused the left to reach for the smelling salts had Rush or Hannity uttered it. (And incidentally, it's not the first time that an ancient member of the 60 Minutes old guard was caught using similar opprobriums.)
Lots of details, and a running update, at Michelle Malkin's.
The Dissident Frogman explains the difference between a fired and non-fired cartridge to Agence France-Presse. His choice of costume should win him lots of fans at this "news" agency, as well.
Mark Steyn writes that "The American left completes its long strange trip of the last 40 years". If so, then this was a key signpost along the way.
Update: Related thoughts from Cassandra of Villainous Company.
This sounds absolutely horrific:
When Detroiters began to die on the first day, the list was easily contained on the front page of the paper. Dora Brady, 89, in her home on Sanford. Nathan Derby, 97, in his home on West Philadelphia. A worker at Dodge Main, collapsing on the line. A man working in a laundry, another in a restaurant downtown. A night watchman found dead when the office was opened. An elderly man found in a field at Telegraph and Ann Arbor Trail. Another beneath the street sign at Burlingame and 14th.It happened in 1936, not this year or 1998.Edison Fountain in Grand Circus Park was a popular cooling off spot for city youngsters.
There were 10 in all on the first day. No one could have known that it was only the beginning of one of the greatest and deadliest disasters in the history of Detroit.* * * Healthy men and women would start off for work in the morning and never come home, falling in the streets or at work when they were overcome by the sun and heat. Weeping relatives besieged Receiving Hospital and the morgue, where the dead were lined up in corridors since no space remained on the slabs. Doctors and nurses collapsed at their stations, overcome by heat and fatigue. "It's as if Detroit has been attacked by a plague out of the Middle Ages," one observer wrote.
(Via Small Dead Animals.)
News from the cartoon kingdom, as Berke Breathed's "Opus" cartoon gets censored for exactly the reason you'd suspect.
As does....The Dreaded Ball of Blasphemy!
In Commentary's "Contentions" blog, Michael J. Lewis has some thoughts on a recent essay by Yale's William Deresiewicz regarding America's increasing discomfort with the high priests of academia:
Deresiewicz, himself a professor at Yale, concedes that the modern professor is often a “careerist parvenu.” But if so, it is because he has no other choice; the old-boy network that once allocated teaching jobs among a small elite no longer exists. “[T]he old gentility rested on exclusion,” he explains, “and the new rat race is meritocracy in motion.” And he concedes that today’s professor is far more likely to sleep with his students than his pre-1960’s predecessors, but not with the freewheeling abandon that Hollywood imagines.(Via Pixologic.)Deresiewicz is more interesting when he moves from the sociology of the professor to the sociology of the American public—and why Americans seem so hostile to academics. His proposed explanation is fascinating:
Americans’ traditional resentment of hierarchy and hostility toward intellect have intensified since World War II and particularly since the 1960s. Elites have been discredited, the notion of high culture dethroned, the means of communication decentralized. Public discourse has become more demotic; families, churches, and other institutions more democratic. The existence of academia, an institution predicated on intellectual hierarchy, irritates Americans’ insistence on equality, their feeling that intellect constitutes a contemptible kind of advantage. At the same time, as American society has become more meritocratic, its economy more technocratic, people want that advantage for themselves or their children. With the U.S. News rankings and the annual admissions frenzy, universities are playing an ever-more conspicuous role in creating the larger social hierarchy that no one acknowledges but everyone wants to climb. It’s no wonder that people resent the gatekeepers and enjoy seeing them symbolically humiliated.Deresiewicz may well be right about this, but one element is missing from his spacious essay: the extent to which college professors have been complicit in their own loss of public prestige, particularly in the humanities, where Hollywood’s academic rogues are invariably found. Two generations ago they were respected for subordinating their lives to scholarship, and much of the prestige of their academic subjects—whether Shakespeare or Descartes or George Washington—accrued to them. Today, Shakespeare, Descartes, and Washington don’t seem to count as much as they once did. Now whose fault might that be?
Back in March, I asked if a movie like 300 might have a chance to wake Hollywood from its half-decade of artistic slumber, and concluded:
Obviously, not in the short term. With the exception of Spider-Man 3, virtually all of the innumerable trailers yesterday before 300 highlighted Hollywood's current phase: dank, gross, low-budget nihilistic horror films, and, in a very similar genre, the latest effort by Quentin Tarantino, which featured the disgusting image of a buxom young woman whose leg is amputated and replaced with a machine gun, which she alternately walks on and fires at the baddies (baddies being a relative term in a Tarantino movie, of course) by crouching in some sort of kung fu-style pose spraying bullets upward. (No, really.)Brent Bozell has some thoughts on this new genre of "torture porn":
As long as there’s been a Hollywood, there have been “horror” movies. But what qualifies as horror in the eyes of today’s horror movie manufactures is altogether different from anything Alfred Hitchcock considered as art.On the bright side, I think this "really violent wave" signals the end of the nation's momentary "big puritanical mode" the makers of Basic Instinct 2 used to excuse their poorly-conceived, poorly-written and poorly-acted sequel from achieving box office nirvana.Take Darren Bousman, director of the forthcoming horror flick "Saw IV." He eagerly told MTV.com that in his new movie, "There is a scene...where I physically regurgitated in my mouth...There is stuff in this movie that I’m dying to see whether it gets past the MPAA [ratings board]." Scenes that make the directors vomit make them happy? Bousman told a horror-movie website he’s looking forward to his next movie, a horror-film-meets-musical: "There’s nudity; there’s violence; there’s tons of hot girls; there’s breaking out in song while ripping spinal cords out. It’s great!"
Perhaps you’re thinking that these remarks sound like over-enthusiastic pre-release publicity, and I agree. But now take Eli Roth, the maker of the recent flop "Hostel: Part II." His delight with gory movie-making is breathtaking. He told Interview magazine that, "Everybody says that I'm different on the days we're shooting the gore – that I'm just extra happy. I try to have that same excitement and enthusiasm for every scene, but when we're doing some really disgusting scene I'll catch myself gleefully jumping up and down at the monitor. I'm so happy I could cry."
And then he said something even more remarkable: "We're in a really violent wave, and I hope it never ends. Hopefully we'll get to the point where there are absolutely no restrictions on any kind of violence in movies."
(As to why Hollywood is having to resort to tactics that would have made William Castle and Ed Wood--not to mention most carnival barkers--blush to sell tickets, click here.)
Don't worry, they'll follow-up on FoleyGate as soon as they get back to this even earlier election-eve chestnut.
The New York Times' ombudsman has some thoughts on what we once dubbed (ala the Feiler Faster Principle) the Internet Immortality Thesis.
As Michael Wade writes, Lee Harris' new book "will be gaining a lot of attention in the months ahead".
With inflation and unemployment spiraling out of control, that can only mean one thing: it's time for serious talk of a leftwing coup. Maybe even a putsch!
I'm only surprised at how long it took him to join the rest of the conspiratorial denizens in the Star Wars cantina; as Charles Johnson writes, the pomposity of his headline is a classic.
Update: Victor Davis Hanson adds:
Two observations come to mind.Speaking of which, David Frum has an amusing look back at how one of postmodernism's founding fathers was seduced by the Iranian revolution.First, we know why there is now a colloquial verb in English "to fisk."
Second, The "Even I" of Fisk's title should read "Especially I."
These are sad times in the West, but the inevitable wages of a quarter-century of elite postmodern thought.
If, as James Piereson suggests (and welcome to the party, pal! What took you so long?), the Cold War assasination of JFK led sixties-era Democrat elites down the rabbit hole of conspiracies, Noemie Emery brings a report on the latest comings and goings of the paranoid style:
The fascists are coming! Or rather, they're already here, installed in the White House, planning like mad to subvert the Constitution and extend their reign in perpetuity, having first suppressed and eviscerated all opposition and put all of their critics in jail. Thus goes the rant of America's increasingly unhinged left. If only, sigh many Bush partisans, wondering when this administration will get out of the fetal position and show some fighting spirit. To them, as to most reasonable observers, the White House shows the chronic fatigue of a two-term presidency reaching its final year. Nonetheless, paranoia about what Bush and Co. are up to preys on the minds of many progressives, who have progressed, in this case at least, beyond reason.(Incidentally, just to check, is Noamie considered a member of Bill Kristol's posse of thug rappers?)
My current favorite is Andrew Sullivan's newest riff, on "The Weimar President". I can only guess that Andrew believes that President Bush is an elderly figurehead leading a weakened but relatively benign quasi-socialist administration suffering the ravages of hyper-inflation and that Hillary, Obama or whoever his successor is, is the next Hitler, about to install a terribly malevolent war machine and concurrent massive welfare state?
Further deconstruction of this lead zeppelin of an analogy, here.
To follow-up on the Katie Couric post below, as I've written before, it can't be much fun to be CBS these days. Nikke Finke writes:
I've learned that egoist Les Moonves is talking out of both sides of his mouth concerning the erupting controversy over his CBS fall reality show Kid Nation. On the one hand, I'm told his CBS board of directors has been assured that the company is conducting "an internal investigation" into Kid Nation. "Everybody is being interviewed. All the footage will be watched. We will give the board a full report on what happened. This is of great concern," I understand directors were told. But, publicly, CBS is denying all allegations it violated any laws or put any children in jeopardy during the production. So how can Moonves stand behind CBS' denials when its own internal probe has barely begun? Or is there really no internal probe going on? Meanwhile, he hopes to ride the publicity from the controversy all the way to great ratings in September. For this and so many other reasons, Moonves needs to cancel the broadcast of Kid Nation.Finke writes, "I'm shocked by what I've just heard from CBS". Even if you'd Rather set aside the obvious reason, all I can ask, at this late date is...Why?
“There is no elegant way out for Katie", writes Myrna Blyth, quoting the last line in Ed Klein’s unauthorized biography, Katie: The Real Story:
What is interesting is the analysis of the reason for Katie’s morning TV success. According to Klein:While the money's nothing to sneeze at, Katie's timing is certainly suspect: taking over a show that was already damaged goods (arguably along with its entire news division) thanks to its previous anchor, that's broadcast on a legacy medium that, to put it mildly, has seen its better days.Andrew Tyndall, whose Tyndall Reports monitors television news said, “Being a morning anchor… requires wearing a multitude of hats. One a hard-news hat…a human-interest hat, a celebrity-interview hat and a household-feature hat. Nobody has been able to do four out of four in the morning but Katie.”But this skill set has proved of little help in doing the job that she now has and wanted so much, the job her journalist father always told her was the best one in television “sitting in Walter Cronkite’s seat.”Since her takeover of The CBS Evening News, Couric has suffered a disastrous year—and it isn’t getting any better. Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS who lured her to the network and masterminded the massive publicity campaign that preceded her first CBS broadcast, recently told a reporter he takes no responsibility for how her show has failed. Klein writes,
Katie [is now] damaged goods…At heart, Katie was not an anchor—sober, authoritative and wise. She had reached the height of television stardom by being what she had been in her father’s house: cute, funny and girlish. There was no way to reconcile her ambition with her personality.Kind of makes you tear up, recalling the way Katie used to do during human-interest stories on Today. But, hey, it is hard to feel sorry for someone making $15 million a year, especially if you were on the other end of one of her self-absorbed tirades.
"You know it's bad when your own ombudsman compares you to Richard Nixon".
As I've written before, whom gods destroy, they first make into unknowing Nixon parodies.
ESPN reports that the NFL has announced that they're suspending Michael Vick "indefinitely":
The NFL has suspended Falcons quarterback Michael Vick indefinitely without pay following his admission of guilt in a dogfighting scheme.A few days ago, Yahoo Sports' Dan Wetzel described Vick's recent travails as "Unique talent, inexplicable fall":On Friday, Vick filed his plea agreement in federal court admitting to conspiracy in a dogfighting ring and agreeing that the enterprise included killing pit bulls and gambling. He denied making side bets on the fights, but admitted to bankrolling them.
Friday afternoon, a letter to Vick from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said, in part:
"Your admitted conduct was not only illegal, but also cruel and reprehensible" and regardless whether he personally placed bets, "your actions in funding the betting and your association with illegal gambling both violate the terms of your NFL player contract and expose you to corrupting influences in derogation of one of the most fundamental responsibilities of an NFL player."
Goodell freed the Falcons to "assert any claims or remedies" to recover $22 million of Vick's signing bonus from the 10-year, $130 million contract he signed in 2004.
We've grown callous to the self-destructing rich and famous of sports and entertainment, be it from drugs or drink, divorce or gambling, even murder and mayhem.The key phrase there is "set up"; not in the sense of being framed, but being coddled by the NFL. For several months, Debbie Schlussel has noted that the NFL protected Vick's image on numerous occasions, including banninBut dogfighting? Did Michael Vick really blow it all – a $130 million contract and multiple endorsement deals – to pursue this barbaric hobby in the woods of Virginia?
"People are going to start looking at me with stupidity," Vick told ESPN during the NFL draft, when he was still declaring his innocence. "That's stupid."
It's beyond stupid. The NFL employs players who have been convicted of spouse abuse, involuntary manslaughter due to drunken driving and obstruction of justice in a homicide investigation, to name a few. It's not called the National Felon League for nothing.
In Hollywood, we've come to treat troubled actors and actresses as theater. In Washington, D.C., political sex and bribe scandals are met with a yawn.
Yet this one shocked America, in part because of the viciousness of the crime and in part because of its senselessness.
Vick isn't some talentless starlet or a hack politician. He was a true star with true ability, and in his prime at 27, set up to be a top player in America's top sport.