Rangers Lead The Way
Alejandro Villanueva is a man who keeps his oaths. That is all. That is enough.
Potentiality is First Actuality
This has the potential to be the greatest movie ever made.
It won't be, of course. It's hard to live up to that kind of potential.
On the other hand, most movies don't even have that much potential. They're just another superhero flick, or another romantic comedy, or whatever. This one has real potential, and real potential is already something.
It won't be, of course. It's hard to live up to that kind of potential.
On the other hand, most movies don't even have that much potential. They're just another superhero flick, or another romantic comedy, or whatever. This one has real potential, and real potential is already something.
What About Confession?
Not that long ago I mentioned a film sequence from Roman Polanski's Pirates!, in which one pirate proposes to eat the other rather than starve at sea on a the equivalent of a life boat.
"Cannibalism is a mortal sin," the other says. "You will burn in hellfire."
"What about confession?" asks Captain Red. "What do you think confession is for?"
These questions come up from time to time.
"Cannibalism is a mortal sin," the other says. "You will burn in hellfire."
"What about confession?" asks Captain Red. "What do you think confession is for?"
These questions come up from time to time.
Fighting Inequality
School bans kids from having best friends.
Equality may just not be the right goal, most of the time. That doesn't mean it isn't crucially important in those limited cases in which it really is the right goal. It just means that, often, it's not what we should be after. Pursuing it instead of the proper goal is unlikely to work out well.
Thomas’s Battersea, the school George attends, bans kids from having best friends, Marie Claire reports. Instead, teachers encourage all students to form bonds with one another to avoid creating feelings of exclusions among those without best friends.Equality sure turns out to be a problematic goal. Maybe we should consider the possibility that it isn't always the right goal. Hannah Arendt said that the only sense in which equality was desirable was 'equality before the law,' which we have definitely not attained and could still usefully be working on achieving. Maybe most of these other senses of the word are actually even undesirable. I don't want good doctors and bad doctors equally likely to be my doctor, and indeed, I don't know that I want bad doctors even equally likely to be doctors. I'm sure I don't want everyone equally likely to be doctors, whether or not they are otherwise qualified.
The trend of banning best friends has been growing for several years, and it’s spread beyond European borders to American schools as well. Some psychologists and parents argue kids become more well-adjusted when they have larger friend groups and can avoid negative feelings associated with feeling left out.
Equality may just not be the right goal, most of the time. That doesn't mean it isn't crucially important in those limited cases in which it really is the right goal. It just means that, often, it's not what we should be after. Pursuing it instead of the proper goal is unlikely to work out well.
A Brief History of Selling the Iran Deal by Bashing Jews
The Obama administration's signature policy accomplishment was sold to the American people with a pack of lies, and an inversion of the Constitution.
What you may not have noticed -- I didn't, until it was pointed out -- was how much it was also sold with openly anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish deal opponents. Fold that in with the piece from last week on whether or not observant Jews might be rethinking their politics. It's not as if they haven't got good reasons to do so.
As for the rest of us, as we watch the Iran deal recertification process that's coming up in the next few weeks, it's worth keeping all this in mind. We were never told the truth about this. The 'ratification' process was an unconstitutional sham. That it is also built on what is at best a reckless unconcern with the threat of nuclear genocide aimed at Israel is worth noticing, too.
What you may not have noticed -- I didn't, until it was pointed out -- was how much it was also sold with openly anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish deal opponents. Fold that in with the piece from last week on whether or not observant Jews might be rethinking their politics. It's not as if they haven't got good reasons to do so.
As for the rest of us, as we watch the Iran deal recertification process that's coming up in the next few weeks, it's worth keeping all this in mind. We were never told the truth about this. The 'ratification' process was an unconstitutional sham. That it is also built on what is at best a reckless unconcern with the threat of nuclear genocide aimed at Israel is worth noticing, too.
What Killed Comedy?
I never especially liked Mel Brooks' style of comedy, but lots of people did. Everyone has therefore noticed his remarks on the baleful effect of political correctness on his art.
I didn't see as many people notice that John Cleese of Monty Python fame made very similar remarks quite recently.
I didn't see as many people notice that John Cleese of Monty Python fame made very similar remarks quite recently.
The problem is that people are knee-jerk in thinking something is offensive. Sometimes in my show I say, “There were these two Mexicans” and immediately the whole audience goes, “Oooh.” People think something is going to be offensive before it’s even been said. The story I then tell involves an American patrol boat in the Gulf of Mexico. The guy on the boat is cruising along, and suddenly sees two Mexicans going for the border. The guy says, “Hey, what are you doing?” And the Mexicans say, “We’re invading America.” And the guy on the boat says, “What, just the two of you?” And the Mexicans say back, “Oh no, we’re the last ones. The others are already there.”Cleese is both old and rich, which means he doesn't have to care what you think of his humor any more. That's good, because not caring if he offended people is how he got rich. I assume he got old in the usual way.
Oy, John.
But is that a nasty joke? Think about the content of it. The Mexicans are actually the heroes! They’ve won! There are millions of Mexicans in America. Are we trying to pretend that isn’t the case? So is that a nasty story to tell? I don’t think it is.
The Militia.
Well, I think they're all between 17 and 45. In 1595, the English in their musters began to count men with longbows as unarmed men. Don't know about shoes though.
To Autumn
In Georgia, this begins the best time of year.
In other places, the end of summer may be met with less joy. The thought of long winter months in snowclad rooms may be as oppressive as the long heat and humid air of the Deep South. But for us, here, today looks like the promise of crisp mornings and cool evenings, a season of bonfires and festivals crowned at last by the Yuletide.
I hope you find the joy in it.
A Female Marine Infantry Officer
The Corps finally found a woman who could pass its notoriously-tough Infantry Officer's Course (IOC). Over five years of attempts, the previous 36 women have failed (I have read in one source that this candidate failed once before, but that doesn't seem to be confirmed in every source). About one in four men who attempt the course fail it.
To her credit, she seems not to want to be named -- just to carry on with the work.
Good hunting.
To her credit, she seems not to want to be named -- just to carry on with the work.
Good hunting.
Did He Actually Say "Deplorable"?
The Holy See has taken a remarkably unwise position in response to President Trump's recent UN address.
What the President said was, "The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea."
As I understand it, Just War Theory endorses defensive war by legitimate governments. That is what is being described here.
Just War Theory does potentially have an issue with the totality claim: in theory one should wage war in the way most likely to allow noncombatants to survive. Yet this is not a threat to totally destroy North Korea by preference, it is a warning that there won't be any other option.
Military force may be the only way of countering proliferation, practically speaking. Is the claim that it would be better to allow nuclear proliferation to states like the DPRK than to stop it using military force?
Finally, I notice that the ideology in the DPRK's case actually calls for the elimination of religions like Catholicism -- indeed, of all religions except for their own weird cult around the Kim family. That seems like a point that the Church ought to be interested in.
The rising tensions over North Korea’s growing nuclear program are of special urgency. The international community must respond by seeking to revive negotiations. The threat or use of military force have no place in countering proliferation, and the threat or use of nuclear weapons in countering nuclear proliferation are deplorable. We must put behind us the nuclear threats, fear, military superiority, ideology, and unilateralism that drive proliferation and modernization efforts and are so reminiscent of the logic of the Cold War.A few things.
What the President said was, "The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea."
As I understand it, Just War Theory endorses defensive war by legitimate governments. That is what is being described here.
Just War Theory does potentially have an issue with the totality claim: in theory one should wage war in the way most likely to allow noncombatants to survive. Yet this is not a threat to totally destroy North Korea by preference, it is a warning that there won't be any other option.
Military force may be the only way of countering proliferation, practically speaking. Is the claim that it would be better to allow nuclear proliferation to states like the DPRK than to stop it using military force?
Finally, I notice that the ideology in the DPRK's case actually calls for the elimination of religions like Catholicism -- indeed, of all religions except for their own weird cult around the Kim family. That seems like a point that the Church ought to be interested in.
Meet Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich
Were that it were a happier occasion to introduce him to you, but in the aftermath of the recent school shooting at Freeman High School in Spokane, Washington, Sheriff Knezovich held a press conference where he spoke candidly and thoughtfully. I don't agree with everything he said, but he seemed refreshingly honest and considered in his speaking, and spoke the truth on many things. Perhaps someday he might consider running for a higher office.
It's a twenty two minute video, but there seemed to be value in most all of it, so I did not opt for edited versions. Some of the answers to the press questions were particularly excellent.
It's a twenty two minute video, but there seemed to be value in most all of it, so I did not opt for edited versions. Some of the answers to the press questions were particularly excellent.
Independence Referenda
Harald Hardrada
This video history has a couple of 'stretchers,' as Fritz Leiber put it, but for the most part it is accurate.
I'm a bit familiar with the history. When I lived in China I wrote a book, just for fun, on the Varangian Guard in Byzantium. I felt a kind of kinship to them, being in a very different and very old civilization. You could hardly get books to read in English at that point, although I'm sure it's better now. The ones you could get were all classics to avoid them being current-service Western propaganda, so it was a great time for me in that I read Moby Dick, and Ivanhoe, and Waverly, and many other great books I'd never gotten around to before.
So I'd say the stretchers are the idea that the Hardrada went to Vinland, for example; some of his exploits against the Arabs may be overstated. But he did have exploits against the Arabs, and he did venture widely. His is an interesting story, well worth knowing.
I'm a bit familiar with the history. When I lived in China I wrote a book, just for fun, on the Varangian Guard in Byzantium. I felt a kind of kinship to them, being in a very different and very old civilization. You could hardly get books to read in English at that point, although I'm sure it's better now. The ones you could get were all classics to avoid them being current-service Western propaganda, so it was a great time for me in that I read Moby Dick, and Ivanhoe, and Waverly, and many other great books I'd never gotten around to before.
So I'd say the stretchers are the idea that the Hardrada went to Vinland, for example; some of his exploits against the Arabs may be overstated. But he did have exploits against the Arabs, and he did venture widely. His is an interesting story, well worth knowing.
Sold
A Vox correspondent:
I have spent the bulk of 2017 writing about the different Republican plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act.That's just what I want done with it. Carry on smartly.
Graham-Cassidy, in my view, is the most radical of them all.
While other Republican plans essentially create a poorly funded version of the Affordable Care Act, Graham-Cassidy blows it up.
Riding the Tiger
We have gotten to the point at which it's necessary to start admitting to the things denied until this last week, perhaps because you can't proceed to indictments without admitting the wiretapping on which those indictments might be based.
Shane the Rebel?
Victor Davis Hanson is definitely right that Hollywood and others treated Confederates as 'cool' not that long ago, especially in the 1950s, and then again in the late 1960s and through the early 1980s. He's also right that this was done in two quite different ways: the 1950s Confederates were flawed men (especially in Stagecoach and The Searchers), whose code was ultimately destructive to themselves and the kind of civilization they represented. Nevertheless, they were possessed of at least some virtues that enabled them to do hard things on the frontier.
And in the Flower Power era, buttons and patches of the rebel flag were sold right along peace signs in various counterculture magazines. Just as bikers and hippies were two ways of representing rejection of 'the system,' the Outlaw Country thing was just one more mode of rebellion. I think Hanson is too harsh in his reading of this era, which was more youthfully foolish in its sense that it could just embrace the good things and walk away from the bad ones. Still, I wrote about all this recently myself, so I don't disagree that it was a feature of the era.
What really strikes me as wrong, though, is his reading of Shane.
The character who plays the Southern sodbuster is playfully but thoroughly mocked by the other sodbusters earlier in the movie. It's clear that they are prepared to accept him in spite of his Southern roots, but not to let him live down having been on the losing side of the war. There is therefore no sense that this conflict is a proxy between former Confederates and former Unionists (as was in fact the case at Tombstone in 1881, and thus legitimately colored several movie treatments of it: the Republican, Union-leaning Earp faction against the Confederate, Democratic cowboys).
Rather, what Shane does by repeating the sodbuster's chosen challenge is to take up the cause of a fallen friend, and make it good for him. It's not that the cause was otherwise Shane's; in fact, the power of the scene lies partly in the fact that it wasn't. He took up a cause that wasn't his, and made it good out of friendship.
Read that way, the sequence harmonizes with the larger sweep of the movie. Shane is really a medieval knight who, for love of a lady, enters into a feud between a virtuous landholder and an evil robber baron. Together, the virtuous landholder and the knight errant make good the better claim to the land; but the virtuous landlord is married to the lady, and the knight therefore has a hard choice. In Shane, he makes the best choice, riding off to suffer loss of love in return for knowing he did the right thing. It works out otherwise in other versions of the story.
As a knight errant, Shane doesn't have a cause of his own. That's why his entry into the feud is a sacrifice worthy of the lady; it's why his suffering in the feud is a sacrifice at all, rather than merely his feudal duty. During his defense of the lady's interests, he becomes a friend of the landlord, and his further sacrifices for the landlord are another set of noble sacrifices. His choice to avenge his friend the sodbuster is of this same kind. The sodbuster's cause is not Shane's, but Shane takes it up as a champion long enough to strike down the Black Knight in its name. Shane's nobility is in his willingness to do these things for no personal gain, nor out of any personal duty, but because of a virtuous love for good and decent people.
So no, Shane wasn't a Confederate taking up his old cause in a petty shootout in a tavern, having lost it in a war. That reading fails to grasp the kind of story that is being told, or the kind of man that Shane's character is supposed to be. It's a much older kind of story than that, a better kind.
And in the Flower Power era, buttons and patches of the rebel flag were sold right along peace signs in various counterculture magazines. Just as bikers and hippies were two ways of representing rejection of 'the system,' the Outlaw Country thing was just one more mode of rebellion. I think Hanson is too harsh in his reading of this era, which was more youthfully foolish in its sense that it could just embrace the good things and walk away from the bad ones. Still, I wrote about all this recently myself, so I don't disagree that it was a feature of the era.
What really strikes me as wrong, though, is his reading of Shane.
In George Stevens’s mythic Shane (1953), the tragedy of the post–Civil War heroic gunslinger seems eerily tied to his past as an against-the-odds ex-Reb. In contrast, the movie’s odious villain, Unionist Jack Wilson, is a hired gun and company man (brilliantly portrayed by then newcomer Jack Palance). Wilson shows off his bought cred by gunning down a naïve southern sodbuster, “Stonewall” Torrey (played by Elisha Cook Jr.), accompanied by slurs about the Confederacy. (“I’m saying that Stonewall Jackson was trash himself. Him and Lee and all the rest of them Rebs. You too.”)I've written about Shane too, and even that very sequence, but I never once had the idea that Shane was supposed to be a former Confederate. That doesn't strike me as a plausible reading of what happens in the movie.
In the movie’s final shootout, replaying the Civil War provides the catalyst for more violence. This time Shane — and the heroic South — wins for good, with a payback Civil War exchange with Wilson:
Shane: I’ve heard about you, Jack Wilson.
Wilson: What have you heard, Shane?
Shane: I’ve heard that you’re a low-down Yankee liar.
Wilson: Prove it.
Wilson is then blown back across the barroom under a hail of bullets. Even out on the Wyoming range, the Hollywood subtext is that sodbuster homesteaders can find a former Confederate loser to protect them, with courage and chivalry, against the northern corporatists trying to steamroll them. The noble savior Shane, we are assumed to believe, had no part in slavery or insurrection but was fighting for his southern soil in service to the Confederacy.
The character who plays the Southern sodbuster is playfully but thoroughly mocked by the other sodbusters earlier in the movie. It's clear that they are prepared to accept him in spite of his Southern roots, but not to let him live down having been on the losing side of the war. There is therefore no sense that this conflict is a proxy between former Confederates and former Unionists (as was in fact the case at Tombstone in 1881, and thus legitimately colored several movie treatments of it: the Republican, Union-leaning Earp faction against the Confederate, Democratic cowboys).
Rather, what Shane does by repeating the sodbuster's chosen challenge is to take up the cause of a fallen friend, and make it good for him. It's not that the cause was otherwise Shane's; in fact, the power of the scene lies partly in the fact that it wasn't. He took up a cause that wasn't his, and made it good out of friendship.
Read that way, the sequence harmonizes with the larger sweep of the movie. Shane is really a medieval knight who, for love of a lady, enters into a feud between a virtuous landholder and an evil robber baron. Together, the virtuous landholder and the knight errant make good the better claim to the land; but the virtuous landlord is married to the lady, and the knight therefore has a hard choice. In Shane, he makes the best choice, riding off to suffer loss of love in return for knowing he did the right thing. It works out otherwise in other versions of the story.
As a knight errant, Shane doesn't have a cause of his own. That's why his entry into the feud is a sacrifice worthy of the lady; it's why his suffering in the feud is a sacrifice at all, rather than merely his feudal duty. During his defense of the lady's interests, he becomes a friend of the landlord, and his further sacrifices for the landlord are another set of noble sacrifices. His choice to avenge his friend the sodbuster is of this same kind. The sodbuster's cause is not Shane's, but Shane takes it up as a champion long enough to strike down the Black Knight in its name. Shane's nobility is in his willingness to do these things for no personal gain, nor out of any personal duty, but because of a virtuous love for good and decent people.
So no, Shane wasn't a Confederate taking up his old cause in a petty shootout in a tavern, having lost it in a war. That reading fails to grasp the kind of story that is being told, or the kind of man that Shane's character is supposed to be. It's a much older kind of story than that, a better kind.
True Enough
“The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented. From the Soviet Union to Cuba to Venezuela, wherever true socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish and devastation and failure.”Some speechwriter deserves a pat on the head for that line.
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