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May 31, 2009 - May 24, 2009

Saturday, July 05, 2008

JULY 4, PART 2. Since I'm the one who writes most of the sports coverage here, I notice more than the other IP bloggers that our earnest regular commenters seem to regard sports as mostly beneath comment, mere persiflage. But it's more than that. Today is a case in point. Many years, I find it ironic that the climax of Wimbledon coincides with Independence Day, but there are also multiple exceptions. Of late, Venus Williams (scroll down) has been responsible for all the exceptions, as she was today with her sister Serena, in a magnificent women's final that had a profound American resonance on several levels.

For example, leave it to the Europeans to misconstrue individual achievement by people within the same family as some kind of sinister and clandestine fix. Here's the reportage from the Brit newspaper The Independent:


I can understand. The Russians are congenitally and historically paranoid. They have their reasons. For them the fix is always in, and when they're speaking of their own country and countrymen, they're right. They traded the czars for the Soviet Central Committee, and all that changed was that the death toll increased. Now they are watching passively, as always, while their democratic president Putin systematically eliminates both democracy and personal rivals on his way to becoming the first popularly elected (but equally omnipotent) czar. The Brits are the perfect audience for such charges, because they, too, are used to fixes as part of the imperial tradition of aristocratic families who stage-manage the lives of their sons, daughters, vassals, and subjects.

What they have in common is that neither understands the American Way. The match the Williams sisters played today was a slam-dunk rebuttal of whiny Euro cynicism. Venus and Serena battled one another so passionately in individual points and games of such back-and-forth brilliance that even the most devoted dupe of Dementieva's demented conspiracy theory would have had to concede -- perhaps on the seventh deuce of game three in the second set -- that what elevated both sisters above their vanquished competition was how fiercely they wanted to win, a desire that was only heightened when they went toe-to-toe with each other. They were sisters before the match and, obviously and gracefully, afterwards, but not during. For two sets they were pure combatants.

Maybe it's wrong to use a boxing image like 'toe-to-toe' in an event of women's tennis, but that's another American aspect of this contest. To the rest of the world they may have been on a grass court, but to Americans they were indisputably 'in the ring.' It was, for us cowboy dolts, a heavyweight title fight with echoes of other great pugilistic duels. For example, Venus and Serena may be sisters, but they couldn't be more dissimilar in body type and overall aspect. With my long low-palate memory, I couldn't help being reminded of Ali versus Foreman. Venus is built like a greyhound, a slender and long-legged package of speed and almost fragile-looking keenness. Serena is muscular and deadly, an intimidating slugger who can hammer the opposition into early surrender. And that's how she started. She won nine of the first ten points, including an initial service break and a commanding first game of her own serve before Venus rallied and started showing off her dazzling quickness and even more dazzling improvisational skills. There was a key point in the first set when Venus went to the net and Serena blasted a power shot directly at her sister -- a clear bid at overwhelming Venus with a show of force -- which the greyhound's lightning reactions returned for a winner.

The match, ironically, was decided by a game Venus ultimately lost, on her own serve no less. She fell behind and then survived break point after break point, even scoring an ace on a second serve, but to no avail. Serena won the game and it seemed the momentum had shifted inevitably her way, but... No. Like Foreman, Serena had punched herself out. Venus immediately broke back on Serena's serve and cruised from there to victory. She had endured the knockout onslaught and, like Ali, she knew how to take a punch and counterattack with crushing authority.

That was the second level of American exceptionalism on display. Venus and Serena are sisters but not dynastic clones like we'd see in the Old World. Their games are different, and while their fire is equivalent, their matches are not like some predictable chess game between two near-identical peas in a generic old-school pod. They weren't trying to out-think, out-guess, out-smart the other. They were beautifully and fluidly in the moment, playing tennis against the best player either could imagine facing on the lawns of Wimbledon.


The post-game interviews confirmed what may sound like jingoistic inference. While the commentators had dwelt on the history of their previous confrontations, both sisters dismissed the possibility that the past played any role in the match. Venus was forthright in declaring that she avoided thinking about anything but the next serve and the next return. She wasn't acting out some ritual of family tradition but focusing on a single match for a fifth Wimbledon Championship. Which she won.

And then there was the final level of American competitive finery. In past years, a Venus victory at Wimbledon has resulted in a display of joy so utter and childlike that it almost transcends the match highlights. Not today. At the instant her final stroke ensured victory, Venus became Serena's big sister again and her celebration was a study in muted, gracious triumph. Serena's response was equally praiseworthy. She made no excuses, expressed no regrets, and omitted any mention of an awkward officiating moment which, due to her own good sportsmanship, cost her a gigantic set point. (When it occurred, a commentator volunteered that neither Williams sister had ever claimed a point she didn't earn fair and square. No record as to whether John McEnroe blushed...)

I admit it. I love the Williams sisters, both of them. Their designer lines of clothing, their ups and downs in competition, their increasingly unflappable politesse in the context of a world press that both adores and resents them, their fiery streaks of brilliance on the court. But most of all I love those incandescent smiles, which light up the world for a moment and make all the sniping and second-guessing look as petty as it is. They're an epitome of the American oxymoron -- unbridled competition existing side-by side with love and compassion in the kind of family most of the world regards with envy and resentment. The Williams sisters are pretty much an archetype of who we are as a people. More mature, accomplished, and admirable than all the ones who aren't in the finals would like to believe.

But go ahead. Tell me sports are a waste of time and not worth a blog at InstaPunk. I'm sure The Boss will be along shortly to say something important about Nietzche. Any minute now.

I probably won't be there, though. I'll be watching the Williams sisters in the Wimbledon doubles finals, partners again, like, uh, forget it...

P.S. Since it's also in my nature to criticize sports administration, I'll add another two unwelcome cents. I'm tired of seeing all the bouquets tossed by the sports commentariat to Billy Jean King and Martyna Navratilova for extorting equal prize money from Wimbledon for the female competitors. No, I don't disagree that women should get equal prize money. But I do think they should play best-of-five rather than best-of-three sets unless what they're really after is greater-than-equal prize money. Which is what they have at the moment. The best-of-three format dates back to a time when women were regarded as weak and inferior. Anyone who saw the Williams collision knows they could have played five sets today -- and maybe should have. All you women who want equality: What say we actually try equality? Too radical a thought? Probably. Especially if what you have in mind is tacit superiority. But, hey. I'm a sports fan. Which makes me a kind of idealist. Think about it.

UPDATE.  A day later. Now we've had one of the best Wimbledon men's finals ever. A five set nailbiter that lasted literally all day. The young lion Nadal finally deposed the five-year champion Federer after a gruelling struggle in which both had a reason to quit multiple times. Neither did. The outcome was not clear until the final point had been decided in the 16th game of the fifth set. Bad boy John McEnroe pronounced it the greatest Wimbledon final he had ever seen or been party to, which given his own history, is saying something. But he was right. The match was spectacular and magnificent -- even for American chauvinists like me. Interesting that when you make the adjustments for actual playing time, Nadal and Federer made less than half what the Williams sisters did. I'm not trying to take away from what Venus and Serena did, but what we saw today was men's tennis, meaning the best tennis in the world, and maybe the best tennis in history. Why should it be worth 40 to 45 cents on the dollar compared to the women's game? And, btw, does the LPGA play only 12 holes of golf per round?

Thursday, July 03, 2008

DARK STARS (& STRIPES). I know there will be a lot of grand rhetoric over the next few days about the value of American freedom and liberty and the debt we owe to those who have fought for it over the centuries. But there is more than one way to fight. This year, as we enter the last mile of our quadrennial presidential festival of lies, smears, empty promises, and full-of-it reportage, I'm thinking it's a propitious moment to remind ourselves of another grand American warrior tradition: misanthropy.

We have celebrated diversity and the uniquely wonderful attributes of so many distinct groups in our rapidly dis-integrating melting pot that we tend to forget an important truth -- that there's a hell of a lot wrong with all of them, us included. It is perhaps an unusual but energizing act of patriotism to realize how great this country is despite the unending frailties of human nature and the ill-founded vanities of the loudest among us. And it's arguable that one of the reasons for our national greatness is that we have somehow tolerated and even nurtured a small but hardy stream of wits who speak the harshest truths and make us like it. I'm dedicating this Fourth of July to them.

Here's an excerpt from a book review:

THE NOBLE WHITE MAN
Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches & Essays, 2 vols.
(Library of America, 2,126 pp., $70)

The Incredulous, accusatory question, "You don't like Mark Twain?" is one I heard throughout my young womanhood. The shocked inquisitor was always male. This particular gender gap has its roots in the way our schools teach Twain. In my day, junior-high English classes read Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and the story about the frog. Little girls despise little boys and frogs — the distinction is minimal at that age — so the damage is done. Whatever Twain we are forced to read in college invariably runs up against the pubertal mental block, so we spend the best years of our lives going around saying, "I can't stand Mark Twain."

I changed my mind in my thirties when l began to prefer non-fiction to novels and discovered Twain's essays. All of my old favorites, as well as some new ones, are contained in this superbly presented collection.

These books are secular bibles for our times — and not merely because they are printed on elegantly thin paper. Bill Clinton's living obituary is contained in the 1901 essay "Corn-Pone Opinions," a dissection of the man who "can't bear to be outside the pale; can't bear to be in disfavor; can't endure the averted face and the cold shoulder; wants to stand well with friends, wants to be smiled upon, wants to be welcome, wants to hear the precious words 'he's on the right track!'"

I don't want to violate the fair usage principle, but read the whole review. It's a beautifully concise introduction to some of Mark Twain's most outrageously "mean-spirited" writings, including what may be the most devastating demolition of a supposed literary great ever printed.

The reviewer is a huge fan of Twain at his wickedest, and I'm a huge fan of the reviewer, Florence King. Which is why this is a twofer. By all means (re)acquaint yourselves with the dark side of America's first genuine literary titan. It's no wonder this and that herd of disgruntled sheep are still trying to run his books out of libraries across the nation. Something about him remains fresh and sharp, still capable of drawing blood with his pen. But so is Florence King. She is a proud misanthrope whose essays for the National Review over the years have skewered fools on the left and the right in prose so distinctly apt as to seem unassailable. And, like Twain, she is very very funny.

You can go look up her life story elsewhere. I'm going to give you just a few excerpts to demonstrate her range of subjects and deftness with words. This is thoroughly unfair to her, by the way. Each of her pieces is its own whole, very difficult to cut InstaPundit style biopsies from. Consider them appetizers instead.

On recycling:

To get rid of useless furniture today you must hire a trash hauler to take it to the landfill, or else take it yourself, provided you own a truck and, if a woman, can lift a bureau and don't mind driving to desolate places like landfills. Otherwise, you have to rent a truck and find two strong young men you aren't afraid to let into your home. The only guaranteed way to get rid of old stuff is to buy new stuff from a store that takes your old stuff to the landfill for free.

Then again, the landfill may not take it... I bought a new air conditioner from a store that promised to take the old one off my hands. I thought it was a free service but they said they had to charge me $25 labor to take the condenser out before they would be allowed to throw the AC away; otherwise the landfill "wouldn't accept" it. Waste not, want not condensers.

My attic storage room is full of 15 years' worth of fritzed appliances and electric fans, but with neither janitor nor incinerator I am now faced with taking them unspayed to the landfill and finding out what it feels like to be rejected by a dump.

On TV cooks:

Emeril, who has a band, is the most nerve-wracking. All of them talk too much, kid around, do tricks with utensils, mug for the camera, keep up a steady stream of unfunny patter, and in general show off for the audience, who invariably respond like schoolchildren with a teacher who can't or won't maintain discipline. The din and distractions make it impossible to follow the recipes or study the techniques. Having an audience is part of the problem; it's like trying to cook and converse with your dinner guests at the same time. The kitchen is one place where show biz doesn't work; the sole shining exception being Julia Child -- a comic genius without trying.

Not all TV cooks are obstreperous. Martha Stewart is a model of discipline, but that's just the trouble. She reminds me of Fraulein von Frumpel, the villainess in a WWII-era Saturday serial designed to keep us phartlings pumped up for the war effort. Stewart says all the right homemaker things, but I can't help feeling that somewhere in there is an "Achtung!" waiting to come out.

On lists:

The trouble with lists is that they are the work of conformists. Take, for example, that old standby, the Ten Most Admired, an annual exercise in lockstep opinion ever since I can remember. Year after year, it was always the same; an overnight newsmaker might occasionally break through the phalanx of acceptable thinking, but otherwise it boiled down to the President, the First Lady, and Billy Graham.

The millennial lists exceeded mere conformity to achieve the most rigid political correctness yet seen. Nelson Mandela was on everything except Entomologists Who Changed Our Lives, Gloria Steinem was right up there with Edison on the one about light-shedders, and Crazy Horse joined Oscar Wilde on Most Misunderstood.

If the cure for democracy is more democracy, then the cure for lists is more lists, so I have compiled People I Instinctively Like for My Own Quirky Reasons Whether I Ought To or Not.

On a biography of Gloria Steinem:

The parable of the mud turtle comes at the end of this hagiographic book, but it so perfectly illustrates the feminist blind spot of both biographer and subject that I shall start with it.

Here is how Gloria Steinem claims she learned to respect the right to self-determination:

During a science field trip in college, she found a turtle beside a road. Afraid that it would get run over, she picked it up and carried it back into the woods where it would be safe — only to be told by her professor that it had probably taken the turtle weeks to reach the muddy shoulder where she wanted to lay her eggs, but now, thanks to Miss Steinem's help, she would have to start all over again.

"It was a lesson Steinem never forgot," writes Carolyn G. Heilbrun.

Really? Coulda fooled me. Miss Steinem has made a career of meddling in women's egg-laying habits and taking them where she thinks they ought to be. Now, in what is tactfully known as post-feminism, they are faced with the task of starting all over again.

On the publication of the letters of Ayn Rand:

Her most notorious trait emerges in a letter to Archibald Ogden, editor of The Fountainhead, who was to supply an introduction to the 25th-anniversary edition. In his draft he made the mistake of relating the funny things that happened during the editing of the book, and was promptly hit by a Scud missive: "You are entitled to your own views about humor. But you know mine, and you chose to ignore them — and there is no meeting ground." She cast him out and wrote the introduction herself.

On Ughs (her term for the squalid in our culture):

Since arrested development is as American as apple pie, it is easy to identify the subconscious motivation of the adult male Ughs who produce all these revolting movies and commercials. They are our tassel-loafered Taliban, engaged in a last, desperate striving for male domination under the tacit battle cry, "If you can't beat 'em, disgust 'em."

Unfortunately, it's getting harder and harder to disgust women these days, so the Ugh content of American life must keep expanding to fill the vacuum left by female modesty and delicacy. Consequently, our entire population now has a median age of 14, and a sense of proportion that never gets past the eighth grade.

I won't pretend I've done her justice. But here's an archive list at NRO, where you can also learn how to procure larger collections of her work.

If you get tired of the clicheed bombast this weekend, though, remember where you can find some quick and deadly antidotes -- and take the time to celebrate the fact that we still (for how much longer?) have freedom of speech in our country.

Happy Independence Day.

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Passing the Hat:

UPDATE. We couldn't be fonder of the guy, really, but if you've noticed (as we have) that he's not posting as regularly as might be expected of the only blogger on this site with joints and a circulatory system that actually work, it's not completely his fault. He has computer problems, he says. The volume of his email on technical issues would be sufficient to overflow the server storage capacity of most blogs, although the typical content of his excuses is even less interesting than what you find at geek blogs devoted exclusively to sysfile.dot.bat error messages.

I'm way too old to keep up with all the latest technology myself, but it's mortifying to read the catalogue of ills suffered by Brizoni's various computers. It probably doesn't help that the boy lives his life at a dead run -- from angry girlfriends named Cha Cha, Social Security agents insisting that everyone absolutely has to have a number, IRS goons convinced against all the laws of probability that a boy Brizoni's age should have generated some reportable income by now, and from alternative rock roadies still pissed at the last concert prank he pulled that forced the band to play a full set facing the audience. We understand all that. But these days, most girlfriends come equipped with fully functioning laptops; so why do Brizoni's missives always contain vaguely terrifying references to exploding transistors, blown steam gaskets, rusty valves, fried engine seals, catastrophic oil loss, and modems crippled by hamster failure? There's nothing specific we can point a finger at as demonstrably fraudulent, but we're getting suspicious. Very suspicious.

Today he sent us another email pleading for $32 he claims will procure a state-of-the-art system he's had his eye on for months. What he wants to do is trade in this perfectly serviceable looking Russian computer for "something newer."


The last time we gave him money for a "new" computer, he bought this:


He said it would improve his powers of concentration. But after we handed over the two sawbucks he demanded, he didn't post a damn thing. Then the ISP reported that his only internet activity was 12,246 hits on this one YouTube video.


I ask you. What are we supposed to do? We've been nothing but generous to date, though none of our largesse has resulted in anything you'd call an increase in his posting rate. Overall, I feel obliged to point out, we're in the hole for $68.37, with nothing to show for it. Which is why I'm tossing the whole dilemma out to our readership. If you're willing to take the risk, make a PayPal donation to InstaPunk in Brizoni's name. The boy says he needs an exterminator and a computer. In that order. I believe him. Why shouldn't you? I promise we'll pass along any money you send, less the usual handling and processing fees.


I mean, I'd advance him more of my own money, I really would, but there's only so much extravagant overspending a Scot can tolerate. You know how it is.

Please be generous. He's like a son to us.

UPDATE.  In a piteously pleading  follow-up, Brizoni has forwarded pictures of the "Millennial System" processor and display unit.



He claims he is absolutely on the "up and up" and that the $32 will be an excellent investment in "future bootylicious blogging."

Monday, June 30, 2008

MAYBE, MAYBE NOT. Mrs. CP is very fond of the Harry Potter saga, so while I have not read the books I have seen all the movies, most of them several times. I confess I don't see the anti-Christian threat or the lure of evil expressed by some fundamentalist Christians. Not having read her, I can't judge the quality of Rowling's writing except to observe that if she can captivate so many youngsters who might not otherwise read books, she must be talented indeed. (A lot of the critical carping I have heard about her prose strikes me as exactly that -- carping. And envious.) As a storyteller, which quality is ably rendered by movies, she clearly possesses an epic imagination that seems superior in its details to that of J.R.R. Tolkien if not as vast in the heights and depths of its vision. But these are quibbles. Harry Potter is obviously a stupendous literary creation, and none of what follows is meant as any kind of attack on J. K. Rowling the writer. The works are bound to live on for generations, and the topical observations I'm going to make will rapidly lose relevance. It's just that there are some interesting topical observations to make.

We watched Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix as soon as it was issued on DVD, and I thought I detected a certain internal contradiction in what were obviously contemporary political references then. Now, having seen it a second time this weekend, I decided to do some research to see if my initial intuitions were correct. I think they are. And I also think there's something worthwhile to be learned about the relation between truth and politics by taking a closer look at Rowling's intentions and the effects of her work.

[A brief timeout is in order here for a plot summary. Those who know the story can skip this paragraph. All the other Potter movies begin with a comic set piece highlighting the banality of his non-magical existence in a hellish suburb with his step-parents when he is not at the charmed Hogwarts School. This one doesn't. It begins with a near tragedy as Harry and his detestable civilian (i.e., non-magica) step-brother are attacked without warning by demonic entities bent on their murder. After saving both their lives with a spell, Harry is immediately expelled from Hogwarts for casting a spell in the presence of a civilian. His friends get the expulsion suspended pending a formal trial by the Ministry of Magic, where a kangaroo-court conviction is narrowly averted by the fortuitous appearance of counsel and a witness who had been misled about the timing of the proceedings. Upon returning to Hogwarts, Harry learns that one of his chief accusers, deputy minister Dolores Umbridge, has somehow been installed at his school with unknown and sinister authority over the old administration. He also learns that he's been targeted for persecution. An instance of insubordination results in his physical torture by Umbridge, and the rest of the student body also suffers as Umbridge begins to issue edicts against one school tradition after another. Harry resists by creating his own secret organization of students whom he teaches to do combat against a looming evil -- the wizard Voldemort -- whose existence is everywhere officially denied. In the end, after a climactic battle with the enemy so long denied by the Ministry of Magic, the reality of the threat comes to light and Dolores Umbridge is overthown. But not before the last surviving member of Harry's real family is killed in battle against the enemy Umbridge refused to acknowledge.]

When I first saw Phoenix, I thought (less succinctly, I admit), "How odd. She seems to be trying to do one thing and achieving something altogether else. And the 'else' is so much more fascinating because it's being done in spite of the author's superficial intent." It seemed to me that Ms. Rowling was reacting quite explicitly to the aftermath of 9/11 and the ramping up of the War on Terror by the Blair government and perhaps the Bush administration. (I had seen a similar turn in the BBC television series MI-5, which had gone from being a riveting spy drama to a gassy self-hating soap opera at the juncture when the U.K. began cracking down on Islamic jihadists.) My inference was that Rowling was a fairly conventional leftist who opposed some of the severe measures being taken to thwart terror in the UK. and the U.S., but in shoe-horning these concerns into an existing story that was at some level about the historic British battle against Hitler and Nazism (symbolized by the "dark lord" Voldemort), she had accidentally accomplished the opposite of what she meant to.

First, I had to confirm my suspicions about Rowling's politics. Discounting the considerable blather on the left and the right about these, I had to find more than convenient punditerpretations. Here's what Wikipedia reports:


All that is fine. Rowling is entitled to her political views. But her political symbolism in Phoenix is fairly transparent. The stiff coif and attire of Dolores Umbridge, not to mention the syllabication of her given and sur-names, are cartoonish spoofs of Margaret Thatcher, as is her declaration that "progress for the sake of progress is not desirable." How can one blame the Blair government on Thatcher? Easily if one thinks the way writers do, in terms of analogous relationships. Thatcher was seen by much of the world as the political "wife" of Ronald Reagan, the patriarch of the concept of the United States as " the world’s only remaining superpower." Ubiquitous U.K. characterizations of Tony Blair as the "lapdog" of George W. Bush are, in fact, resentful recapitulations of the Reagan-Thatcher relationship. For a European socialist, Bush is the direct descendant of Reagan's "cowboy diplomacy," and thus it makes literary sense to impugn Blair by depicting him as a Tory wife and fascistic accomplice of Bush in destroying western civil liberties.

Umbridge's torture of Harry is consistent with the leftist obsession to blame Abu Ghraib on the neo-fascism of the hated Bush-Blair administration of the war on terrorism. Just as obviously, the plaques of prohibitions that are nailed into the walls of Hogwarts are meant to suggest the fancied incremental losses of freedom associated with the post-9/11 era. Thematically, we are being encouraged to believe that the correct way to deal with the Voldemort threat would involve enlightened leaders like Obama and Clinton "because they are both great,” meaning, presumably, that they wouldn't have engaged in the distraction of persecuting Harry Potter rather than arming him against the real threat.

Which is where the whole thing breaks down in a loud splintering crash. All the larger elements of Rowling's story are already in place, and her trueness to her own conception requires her to be faithful to her original plot. She cannot change the fact that her villain is the Hitler-like Voldemort, who despite having been vanguished a generation ago is reacquiring power at a frightening and nearly invisible rate of speed. She cannot excise the extraordinary parallel between Hitler's Germany and Islamofascism as dire threats which the timid western European governments -- apart from Blair and Bush -- blindly fail to recognize as mortal threats to their existence. She probably doesn't even see the equivalence of Harry Potter teaching his fellow students to do battle and the United States unilaterally taking up military arms against a worldwide threat the "ministry" of the United Nations does everything possible to deny and make apologies for.

Worst of all, she doesn't seem to see the oxymoron of equating Thatcher-Reagan-Bush-Blair with the Umbridge faction of the Ministry of Magic who are determined to prevent the nation's youth from having the power to defend themselves against an enemy those in charge don't want to acknowledge. Thus, the kangaroo court that almost expels Harry in the opening scenes of Phoenix bears a far more striking resemblance to the appeasers in the U.S. Congress and Parliament -- and particularly the narrow law enforcement mentality toward the war on terror exhibited by Clinton, Obama, the U.S. Supreme Court, Red Ken, and George Galloway -- than it does to the Blair government or the Bush administration.

Here's the result. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix becomes, via the author's own political blinders, an allegory of itself; that is, an acting out of the process by which a well-meaning authority makes the wrong decisions under the delusion that it is conforming to the most high-minded of ideals. Do you get it yet? No?

I'll give you one more minute to think about it.

In the allegory within an allegory that is the Order of the Phoenix, J. K. Rowling is Dolores Umbridge. She's the one pointing an accusing, moralistic finger at precisely the people who best understand a threat she but dully perceives, and she's the one who winds up constituting a major distraction -- via the anachronistic plaques, and red herring villains, she nails to the walls of her own creation -- from a clear perception of the danger everyone needs to confront.

I'll hasten to point out that at some level, the author understands this. Or she would have done more violence than she did to her own story. At the end of Phoenix, it is Harry who is vindicated. The world of wizards and witches accepts that legalistic chicanery cannot be permitted any longer to disguise the existence of a genuine malevolent antagonist who means deadly harm to everyone. In this sense, Rowling has been complicit in the slaughter of her own political predilections, which are far slighter than her literary talents.

In this quite personal demonstration of artistic integrity, she puts me in mind of another master:


I'm looking forward to the movies that complete the cycle. I'm confident Harry will carry his mother safely through the ordeal.

REVENGE OF THE CENTRALIANS. I never thought it would happen to me. I found something so irritating the usual impotent venting on a blog didn't satisfy. I had to send an actual LETTER TO THE EDITOR. Like an ADULT. ICK.

Here's my best imitation of a properly dignified "letter to the editor" voice. This is how adults talk, right?

The Boss, a life-long curmudgeon and veteran of many correspondence wars, lent me his expertise. He shortened this from my original quite a bit. His biggest change was removing the lengthy section with illustrations comparing Dionne's sense of right and wrong to an abortion (he also refused to publish it on Instapunk, and forbade me to show, to anyone ever, my Photoshopping of Dionne's head pasted onto one of those photos of an aborted fetus with a dime next to it for scale.) He asked me to delete the word "batshit" too, but I argued it wouldn't be a true letter to the editor if they didn't have to replace at least one word or phrase with [brackets]. He also sneered, with the intimidating resonance of that 3-pack-a-day chest rumble, that he'd never seen that many italics in a real Letter to the Editor before, but whatever. Maybe in his day, a newspaper's typesetter, permanently stooped from years of backbreaking physical labor, would have to walk all the way to the basement on those rare occasions when some drunken Broadway reviewer needed italics, and set each 200-pound letter by hand. I tried to explain to him (The Boss) that it's all done on computers now. He gave me the classic old guy's disdainful sniff. Which meant he didn't disbelieve me, exactly, but was so unimpressed by modern technological developments that he felt he'd won the argument by contextual default. If he didn't despise me so much, I'd really hate him. I left him to his grumbling and whittling (soap, not pine, the old faker) and sent the letter with italics intact.

Beyond that, I kept it as stodgy and cordial as I could stand. I even used my [ED: totally spurious F-word] Christian name, which I typically go to great pains to avoid. (I'd get it legally changed, but that costs money, which is bullcrap.)

For the curious. here's the graphic I sent with my missive:


I don't know why Photoshopping hasn't caught on at real newspapers yet. It'd be more honest, in a lot of ways. More honest than E.J. Dionne's Brainwashing Corner, that's for damn sure.

Saturday, June 28, 2008

CYD. It started as a simple act of reminiscence, watching the 1957 production of Silk Stockings with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. But sometimes a movie becomes altogether new when the context of everyday life changes around it to a sufficient degree. That is certainly the case with Silk Stockings. It's no longer a period piece in the pure sense of the term but a glimpse at how far the western world has fallen from its once splendid heights. It now seems like a prescient satire, a time-travelling jeer delivered by our grandparents to their charmless, humorless, and wholly unworthy heirs.

It shouldn't have the impact it does. It's a musical remake of Ninotchka, the comedy about a beautiful but rigid Soviet apparatchik who is ultimately seduced by the temptations of freedom and capitalism. The songs are far from being Cole Porter's best compositions, and there is nothing in the script or the production that takes itself seriously enough to arouse the suspicion that it's some kind of message picture. And yet watching it in the summer of 2008, one can't help recognizing that the passage of years has effected a disturbing role reversal. The people who claim to be the most enlightened and 'progressive' among us today are so much more like Ninotchka than Fred Astaire's debonaire American entrepreneur that one can almost feel their disapproving presence in the audience as he wears away her doctrinaire facade.

She arrives in Paris from Moscow on a mission to return four wayward sybarites to the stern communist paradise of Russia. Her real antagonist is Fred Astaire, a movie producer who has seduced a Russian composer into scoring a Hollywood musical and corrupted the three Soviet bureaucrats sent to fetch him home. At this distance in time, what's most striking about the Astaire character is his refusal to take any of the communist political cant seriously. It just never occurs to him that it's anything but a ridiculous impediment to his plans. He knows that all he needs to win over the Russian men is champagne, beautiful women and an elegant hotel suite. and he accomplishes their conversion in a single musical number.

His certainty about Ninotchka is just as complete, but since she's a woman he knows he needs to be more patient. Yet he never once doubts that Paris, freedom, charm, and the correct set of baubles and pleasures will strip away her stern veneer.On the night he first meets Ninotchka, he escorts her onto the balcony of the hotel and urges her to appreciate the lights of the Champs Elysee. She misunderstands entirely and reminds him that it is Russians who invented electricity, which is therefore no cause for wonder. When he makes his first romantic moves, she informs him that sexual attraction is a perfectly ordinary and unremarkable chemical reaction against which she has been, apparently, politically inoculated.

In fact, she seems very like an earnest leftwing college student of today, so encased in politically correct poses about sex, capitalism, and "save the planet" orthoxies that there's no room left in her mind for joy, spontaneity, exhilaration, or simple desire. In her view politics is life, and all her most settled convictions turn every color gray and every human urge detestable. Ninotchka would have been a great member of Code Pink, NOW, NARAL, Moveon.org, and Greenpeace. Remarkably, what's harder is to summon a current day version of Fred Astaire's character. His easy and ebullient confidence in the rightness of living it up because life should be fun is the most outstanding anachronism in the movie.

It makes watching the movie an unsettling experience. How much is fantasy, and how much is truth? The simplistic progress of the plot is self-consciously a fantasy, but it also precludes in its whole ambiance any notion that given the choice, people would choose something other than a life of romance, excitement, dreams, and their accompanying pleasures. In this way, it stands as a startlingly cheerful rebuke to our contemporary masochistic obsession with guilt, self-punishment, the criminalization of petty vices, and perverse yearning for a Soviet-style leveling of the world economy.

Is it merely a pretty plot device that Ninotchka is liberated from her ideological prison by a pair of silk stockings and a suave alpha male? Or is there some elemental and inevitable fact of nature hiding inside this simple but delicious souffle? And if the latter, isn't the souffle itself a key part of the message?

I don't know. But get online to your Netflix account, and order up a serving of Silk Stockings. See if you don't find that it makes an extraordinary amount of sense somehow. Even if it doesn't it's still a delightful entertainment. How mny things can you say that about these days?

MAPLE STUFF. So we've taken some heat from the Great White North in the past. For dissing Canada. But we're not going to be apologetic anymore. Not only are they America Lite, they're also the land of Human Rights Commissions and political correctness gone stone damn crazy. There's really no need to be polite to them from now on. Neil Young, Don Henley, stop lecturing us about what it means to be free. We're just better than you are.

Especially those of us who are of Scottish descent. You see, being Americans, we can claim anyone we want as Americans, including people who have only made most of their money performing for Americans. Canadians, on the other hand, are more or less stuck with promoting Canadian-born mediocrities as the best they have to offer. Exhibit A: the Celine Dion cover above of an AC/DC song. Why would a Canadian do that? There's no point. And on top of it, why would you try to transform a pure, rutting male rock and roll storm into a quasi-Lesbian anthem? Unless you were all, always, nothing but a gang of wankers. You tell me.

Here's a video version of the real thing.


And here's a live version. In Toronto.


They're both better than the Canuck-Vegas version up top. Not even a Canadian will have the nerve to dispute that.

Here's the truth. You came to the freedom game way late. And now you're done. Fried. Finished. Caput. It's time for you to go crawling back to the emasculated UK and beg for admission to the European Democratic Peoples' Republic of Muhammed.

Done witcha.

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