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"Through desire a man, having separated himself, seeketh and intermeddleth with all wisdom." Proverbs 18:1
| Politics & Religion | Literature & Cinema  |
Ignorance - July 4, 2009 Obama has says he has a problem with interfering with Iran’s internal affairs, but he apparently has no problem with interfering with Honduras’, or Afghanistan’s. Katie Couric and other Obamaites called Sarah Palin ignorant for not preferring any newspapers over others. Obama apparently doesn’t listen to his own speeches. What makes one newspaper different from another is editorial. A President of the United States can and should go mostly to the horse’s mouth for both opinions and facts, not to pundit bias or local bias. But Obama seems to ignore even his own mind. But so do most voters. The complaint against invading Iraq was that it wasn’t a threat to the United States. Afghanistan doesn’t sell opium. The U.S. buys it.
Ethics - July 3, 2009 Peggy Noonan said Sunday morning that being puritanical without faith is worse than being puritanical with faith. Faith in what? In a particular religion, in some particular party, in ones particular self? We suspect that she meant the former, but the question stands because of the latter. Noonan apparently thinks that values are worthless unless they come from someone else. Noonan is sophomoric and needs to grow up.
No mob rule, and no anarchy - July 2, 2009 We would join the party of Abraham Lincoln or the party of George Herbert Walker Bush, but we wouldn’t join the party of Strom Thurmond or Trent Lott or Newt Gingrich Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. We would join the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Jimmy Carter, but we wouldn’t join the party of the Kennedys or Linden Johnson or Nancy Pelosi or Keith Olbermann or Joe Scarborough. When we hear of drawing lines in the sand, we think first of George Wallace, and he was an independent. So are Ross Perot and Ralph Nader, and we’d vote for none of them.
Pedophilia - July 1, 2009 Michael Jackson described his childhood days. He said that they began with three hours of tutoring and that they ended with a full day of work in a studio. He said he wept for loss as he passed children’s playgrounds. People wish most for what they want, what they’ve both desired and lacked. Jackson, as an adult, had enough money to play with anyone, but adults have more toys, more means of playing. Plainly what happened is that Joe Jackson killed his son. Michael may have loved children as well as he could. But Joe in no way loved his son. He loved his son as people love the horses they geld to race. He loved his son as the Roman Catholic Church loves the children it relinquishes to such as Father Goeghan. He loved him as Midas loved his daughter.
American pie - June 30, 2009 The eighties was the decade the music died. The preceding generation kept Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra and gave us Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, Barbra Streisand and Nancy Wilson, the Beatles and Bob Dylan. That was music born of joy and strife. The eighties bored the Cold War to death. Jazz deteriorated to rap, leaving us so desperate for musical creativity that Michael Jackson looked like a star. That was what was so thrilling about Thriller. Kids have always bought music they think they can perform, and now America’s Top Forty is all a moon walk.
Weapons of mass destruction - June 29, 2009 Early in Jimmy Carter’s presidency, he selected a fellow Annapolis graduate to succeed George Herbert Walker Bush in directing central intelligence. In the six months that spanned the middle of Carter’s presidency, his Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that the Shah of Iran would remain the Shah for at least ten years, and by the end of the those six months the Shah was out of Iran and running for his life, which didn’t last much longer. The Shah wasn’t nearly the threat that Saddam Hussein was, and Iran has been more of a threat to everyone since the Shah’s departure. But we tremendously admire President Carter’s stating the facts of the Palestinian issue, partly because facts eventually stand on their own merit, regardless of any words. Obama, despite his reputation as an orator, says that stating the facts might exacerbate the situation, specifically that stating the facts might diminish his relationship with Ahmadinajad. That no relationship exists is a fact. Ahmadinijad is responding to Obama’s wimping by calling it outrageously confrontational. Obama says “I said” more than does anyone we’ve ever known. But that fly paid as much attention to his words as anyone.
Swaggarting - June 28, 2009 Democrats are saying that Sanford’s political career is over. We hope so, but that could only be because a substantial number of Republicans hold a standard different from the electorate in general. The electorate elected and reelected Clinton despite or maybe partly because of behavior more flagrant and more frequent than Sanford’s. But the United States has gone nuts anyway. This week, CBS promoted drinking beer in the morning in its preschool time slot, and the FCC let them get away with it while still proscribing promoting drinking beer during evening football games. And we’re jailing mothers for letting their children eat too much.
Healthcare - June 27, 2009 In his press conference, Obama said that the United States and the international community were appalled at the threats and beatings and imprisonment in Iran, as though that were the extent of it. He referred to bleeding to death, but not to what caused the bleeding, not to killings. And Neda didn’t bleed to death. Obama’s only reference to Neda was in response to a question from a Palestinian journalist. Then he said it was heartbreaking and that there was something fundamentally unjust about it. He didn’t say that the something was killing. A bullet from Ahmadinejad to Neda’s heart killed her nearly as quickly and certainly as Obama killed that fly. No, Tomobama, we are not impressed.
Wimpocracy - June 26, 2009 Harry Smith’s Early Show once more has given us a glimpse of why the United States is having such a hard time supporting itself these days. He had a doctor tell us how to pack a child’s bag for summer camp. Weird. Prescription medications and hand sanitizer, and a comfort item with some of mom’s perfume on it. And be sure and write to the kid early, so he won’t be homesick. The land of Daniel Boone and Henry Ford is now led by a Hawaiian yuppie who gave his kids a hypoallergenic dog.
Where is whose voice? - June 25, 2009 Neda , shot in the heart, died nearly immediately, like Obama’s fly. Chris Matthews said it looks like Ahmadinejad won the election. Freedom of the press is dead in its tracks in Iran, leaving us with only citizens’ reports on the Internet! Does Matthews have a telepathic connection with mice in ballot boxes? What it looks like is that millions of people are risking their lives to say that it doesn’t look like that to them, and they are the people who put the ballots in the boxes. And Matthews also suggested that, if Obama were to use the freedom of speech we have in the United States and used to elect him to a bully pulpit for his, he would be giving Ahmadinejad an excuse to develop nuclear weapons. No one can give Ahmadinejad an excuse to develop nuclear weapons, and he’ll try to do it regardless of anything Obama says. Do you believe Obama reads two or three voters’ letters a day about anything? While we call Obama a great orator, he is refusing to orate. In his first press conference on the current crisis, he said he decries the threats and beatings. Of the killings, he said only that we’d seen a woman bleeding to death. He has no calling. Obama’s presidency is bleeding to death because he has no heart.
Significantly cheap - June 24, 2009 While Obama blows off Iran, his Secretary of State is involving herself in a child custody battle not personal to her, and look at the details of the case. The father, whose side Clinton has taken, is a model who wasn't supporting his family when the child's mother took him to Brazil and divorced herself from the father, and it isn't like that Rockefeller business. The father saw his son and estranged wife off at the airport. In Brazil, after the divorce, the mother remarried and had a daughter with her new husband, and died. It's all personal, not governmental as with that Cuban kid. But Clinton has made the question whether the governments should honor the boy's with to stay with his his stepfather and stepsister or force him to leave his home to live on another continent with the deadbeat. Of course a huge question is why she sides with the deadbeat dad, but the first question is why she should or would have anything to do with it.
Prejudice - June 23, 2009 In response to being asked whether he thinks the media are giving him a free ride, Obama said that one television station devotes itself 24 hours a day to criticizing his administration. We wouldn’t be surprised to learn that more than one of the many thousands of television stations do that, but the media seem to assume that he was referring to the Fox News network. If so, Palin doesn’t prefer any particular newspaper, while Obama doesn’t know what a television station is. But Palin plainly does read newspapers, while Obama apparent doesn’t watch Fox News enough to know that he isn’t its only subject. Yet, still, Fox News is the only major television network that doesn’t support Obama.
Iran is not a theocracy. - June 22, 2009
Israel is not a democracy. - June 21, 2009
How cheap can he get? - June 20, 2009 The person the media called the first black president couldn't preside over his own fly. Now, the first black president expects us to be impressed at his ability to hurt a fly. We are neither impressed nor amused. We would be impressed if he could preside over Ahmadinajad or Netanyahu or Pelosi. But he doesn't want to take ownership of the problem in Iran, as he doesn't want to tell Netanyahu to do anything the Israelis haven't already agreed to do and failed to do, as he let's Pelosi ram her agenda around what he says is his. We guess he just likes to talk. Neither are we impressed or amused by his comment that he had to skip a date night with his wife for Tai food in Bangkok to dine with the media, as neither would we if he had used our tax money for that.
Creep - June 19, 2009 Harry Smith's early show last week asked whether the new Calvin Klein advertisement on the outside of the five story building in Manhattan should be publicly displayed. Smith and ABC showed it on morning television, while kids are eating breakfast and watching television before going to school. So, apparently, Smith and ABC think is should be publicly displayed. And, apparently, the FCC thinks it should be publicly displayed. The FCC has no jurisdiction over the Manhattan building, but it does have jurisdiction over Harry Smith and CBS as it has no jurisdiction over Boston trolley cars painted as rum advertisements but does have jurisdiction over beer and Janet Jackson's nipple on television football broadcasts. We want to know why the FCC thinks a nipple is more pornographic than that advertisement and why ABC lets Harry Smith fill in for Bob Schieffer, as we want to know why the United States' justice system permits advertising booze on streetcars but not on television. We can turn off our televisions, but we can't keep our kids off the streets.
War, religion, and credibility - June 18, 2009 The book of Numbers begins with a count of all the Israelite men able for war, except the men of the tribe of Levi. Levi was the tribe of Moses and Aaron, and they were exempt from war so they could be priests or maintain the tabernacle. The third chapter of numbers designates order of battle. So we have to ask how Judaism is a peaceful religion, but we also have to ask how so many people survived then and there. The count is over 600 thousand, and adding the tribe of Levi and all the others exempt from war, with the conservative estimate of one wife and two children for each of the counted men and one person unable for war for each household takes the count to nearly twice the population of Manhattan. Manhattan is the most densely populated area in the United States, and what makes the density possible is that nearly every building has more than one story, and still Manhattan is more than twenty square miles, excluding Central Park. The Israelites were still living in tents in a barren wilderness.
The ditch - June 17, 2009 For weeks, Fidelity Investments has aired commercials saying we should give them our money so they can tell us what to do and where to go, letting them drive you down a green path of their making. We found those commercials despicable, and now Prudential is airing similar commercials. Be careful. Insurance companies are investment companies in business to make money, not for you, for them. Think for yourself and look closely at the market and at any company before you give it your money. It ain’t soap. Fidelity Investments is famous for corrupt business practices. Prudential is big, but it isn’t a rock. Don’t forget AIG.
Knocked up? - June 16, 2009 David Letterman said that Alex Rodriguez knocked up Sarah Palin’s daughter between innings of a Yankees game. Palin said that Letterman was joking about statutory rape and thereby demeaning young women anywhere. Letterman’s argument against Palin was that her daughter isn’t fourteen anymore but eighteen. Wrong daughter. But, anyway, eighteen is young, and much younger than Rodriguez, who is also much older than the boy who knocked up that young woman when he was nearly as young as she was. But yes years have passed, and a few years and having a child can teach much to a young woman. Letterman should have considered that also. Letterman also said that Governor Palin had initiated conciliation with him by inviting him hunting, as though she were comparable to a former Vice President and Secretary of Defense, and as though Cheney had shot his friend on purpose. Bad taste is a term too polite for Letterman. He relies on ignorance. Joe Scarborough, who talks like a Valley girl, said that Palin’s defending her daughter was like Rush Limbaugh’s calling Sonia Sotomayor a racist. Scarborough is as crazy as Rush Limbaugh, but the craziest thing about the whole situation is that Letterman and Limbaugh are popular. That’s tragic. It’s tragic because the populace is the electorate, and so the electorate must be crazy. And it is crazy, with the NOW and the NEA supporting Bill Clinton to preside after he destroyed the career of a female intern by being unable to preside over his own zipper. Kennedys are still what is is. Does Letterman's saying he's sorry and will try to do better mean he'll try to slam the right daughter next time?
P. T. Obama - June 15, 2009 P. T. Barnum said that a sucker is born every minute. A sucker is what anyone is who believes Obama’s claim that providing health insurance to all Americans will save tax payers hundreds of billions of dollars! Who’s going to pay the insurance companies? Providing health insurance to people who can afford to pay neither hospitals nor insurance companies will send more of those people to the hospital, obviously increasing overall cost. That would improve health care, but no way would it save taxpayers’ money. And part of the increase in cost would be the additional cost of administering insurance companies, making it partly another bailout for such as AIG. The most efficient way of improving healthcare would be for the government to subsidize hospitals directly.
War and Sports - June 14, 2009 Wars are always between aggressors and defenders. The aggressor starts the war, and the defender responds to protect the lives of the citizens of the body of people the aggressor attacks. Wars are always between differing causes. Sports are for fun. They are between peoples agreeing to fight against each other for no cause except the joy of conquest, or for money or pride. The Red Sox and the Yankees are different only in name and home base, and the players may be from anywhere and may be part of one team at one time and the other at another. The money and pride come from people with no monetary or cultural interest in the contest, except that they might be from the team’s home city, and few could participate competitively. They are mostly couch potatoes.
Unsafe at any speed - June 13, 2009 The next to last time Chrysler was in trouble, the inventor of the Mustang bailed it out. The last time, it sold itself to a German company that spun it back off as a loser because its brand was diminishing the prestige of the German company’s brand. Now, it’s sold itself to an Italian brand with less prestige than Chrysler’s. That inventor of the Mustang is an automotive engineer, as was Henry Ford and Ransom E. Olds’ brother Frank. But the federal government has appointed to supervise the General Motors bankruptcy a former chief executive officer of what’s left of Alexander Graham Bell’s company. Government and inheritance failed Bell and have weakened Ford and Edison. Maybe Ransom should have listened more to Frank. That former AT&T CEO says that business is business, which is the same as saying that money is money. But reality is that cars are not telephones, and the recipients of most of the bailout money are banks, which make their money by sucking up interest from your money buying your cars, your homes, your lives.
“In what respect, Charlie?” - June 12, 2009 We think Newt Gingrich is riding for a fall. He consistently subordinates reason to partisanship, but we appreciated two elements of his conversation with Harry Smith on Face the Nation Sunday. One was that his partisanship kept him from subordinating Colin Powell to Rush Limbaugh. The other relates more to Harry Smith’s inanity. Harry Smith replaced Katie Couric on the Early Show. We wondered what rationality moved a morning fluff anchor to the evening news, and now we’re wondering how a morning fluff anchor moved to Face the Nation, as we wonder who defined “the Bush doctrine”. Charlie Gibson also moved to evening news from morning soap and drugs. Katie Couric asked Sarah Palin which newspapers she preferred. Governor Palin said she didn’t prefer any as no President should, and Couric responded as though Palin were were ignorant by not being biased. We don’t remember Smith’s stupid question, but Gingrich’s response was essentially the same as Palin’s response to Gibson’s.
Despair - June 11, 2009 Israel’s response to Obama’s speech in Egypt was to say that the Holocaust caused the problems in Darfur. That sounds like something Brian Malaprop Williams might say. Darfur’s problems are like Ireland’s, though less controlled. Saddam Hussein cared nothing for Islam. Yogi Berra at least knew what is is. The Koran defines the war on terror in its first sura: Yes, the foundation of terror is despair. Consider how you would respond to being deprived of your right to pursue happiness and domestic tranquility, for millennia. People calling themselves Christians are oppressing each other in Ireland, as people calling themselves Muslims are in Darfur.
The record - June 10, 2009 Bill Clinton is Special Envoy to Haiti. George Herbert Walker Bush was Special Envoy to China after he was Ambassador to the United Nations and before he was Director of Central Intelligence. Bush wasn’t yet President, and all those positions are far beneath the Presidency, with Clinton’s present position furthest beneath it. Bill Clinton’s accepting his present position can only be a campaign move for Hillary. Like Kennedy, he campaigned on pretentions of caring for racial equality, despite his deeds. Kennedy did nothing for racial equality until Birmingham and Selma were on television, forcing him to recognize the United States, democracy. Bill is an absentee landlord in Harlem. Hillary said that the United States civil rights movement didn’t “really begin” until a white Texan signed a bill more than a century after the emancipation proclamation and nearly a decade after Rosa Parks’ bus boycott. And Tom Obama has said that she didn’t mean what she said.
How about the horses? - June 9, 2009 It’s about money. Look at the odds and the payoffs and do the math! How much money got Charismatic to break his leg at the wire and War Emblem to stumble at the gate and Mine That Bird to fade Saturday? The advertizing for this year’s Belmont Stakes focused on reviving interest in horseracing by comparing it to sports with human athletes, and that points to the other reason for the fade in interest in horseracing: compassion. Humans who care about horses don’t care about betting, while most humans equate horseracing with betting. We wonder why humans can’t legally shoot themselves with steroids but can legally shoot horses with anything.
Islam - June 8, 2009 The first sura of the Koran says that the problem with Judaism and Christianity is that people calling themselves Jews and Christians ignore Moses and Jesus. We have said that our problem with Judaism and Christianity is that people calling themselves Jews and Christians ignore the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes. We have also said that Joshua and Paul engineered that corruption. That sura also says that God does not love aggressors but that people should fight to drive aggressors from the places from which they drove them, and it orders not fighting against anyone who has done no evil. No, the Koran does not instruct the behavior that buried innocent people beneath masonry on 9/11. In fact, it instructs against it. Yet our news media and politicians call the perpetrators of such Islamic extremists. Yes, Islamic extremists would do to those perpetrators what they did to those innocent people.
Ignoring the past - June 7, 2009 Obama’s speech in Egypt was old redundancy. He said that the Palestinians should stick to previous agreements but not that the Israelis should. He said that the Israelis should stop building settlements on Palestinian land but not that they should remove the settlements they built after previous agreements to stop! U. S. news media say the conflict between Israel and the Arab world is decades long. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians began at Jericho millennia ago, and Mohammed solicited the support of Arabs for the Palestinians many centuries ago. And the Palestinians had nothing to do with either the Captivity or the Holocaust. And not even Joshua told anyone to wear fedoras or stuff notes into cracks in the walls of Jerusalem as thought they are the words of God. The Koran begins by pointing out that few people calling themselves Jews or Christians behave in accordance with the Ten Commandments or the Beatitudes. And most Muslims?
The word of God - June 6, 2009 Etymologically, good means God. Ethically, Judaism and Christianity are the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes. Historically, religion is hateful bigotry. Proverbs 18:1, according the King James Version of the Bible: “Through desire a man, having separated himself, seeketh and intermeddleth with all wisdom.” This substantially guides us. In the centuries between that translation and the one that has come nearest to it in popularity, we have discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls and many other manuscripts, but scholars still depend on the Masorites for Proverbs. Proverbs 18:1, according to the New International Version of the Bible: “An unfriendly man pursues selfish ends; he defies all sound judgment.” We have to ask whose self and judgment. The NIV’s translators said they’d tried to make it easy to understand, after the KJV’s translators said they’d tried to deliver the goods. But good is up to you.
Crazy - June 5, 2009 Half of the audience of American Idol said that they would stop watching the show, if the pompous jerk that leads it were to leave. Some men with whom we work told us that a town in Saudi Arabia beheaded a man who had sodomized a little boy, then hanged the corpse in the town square. They called that good, and we would call what the man did bad, but one of them also expressed regret that such as that can’t happen now on Boston Common. The Puritans hanged a woman on Boston Common for being a Quaker! The National Organization of Women and the National Education Association supported for the presidency of the land of the free a man who had destroyed the career of a female intern by letting her suck his dick in the oval office. Now, such people have driven a woman into a British psychiatric hospital by praising her for being able to sing while being ugly. Who or what are they to say she’s ugly? Horribly, such people are the people who define America by delivering dollars to Madison Avenue. They are the people who hear such as brainless Brian Williams tell the President of the United States that the General Motors bankruptcy might be his Vietnam, and don’t consider the comparison, its absurdity. Please stop this trend toward the decadence that declined Rome! We work for a hotel near Boston Common, and our largest security problem is such people leaving the nearby clubs at closing time.
Adam Smith - June 4, 2009 Obama said that Car and Driver magazine had named him auto executive of the year, as though that were funny, but it’s no joke. If Chrysler and General Motors fail, many thousands of people will lose their jobs, but other companies will take up the slack, supplying the demand for cars, demanding new employees. Chrysler has been so weak for years that the German company that produces Mercedes acquired it but spun it off because the association with Chrysler diminished the prestige and therefore the marketability of the Mercedes brand. Now, Chrysler is begging for Fiat, also European but less prestigious than Chrysler, to acquire them. Strom Thurmond and others left the Democratic party for the Republicans party when they though Kennedy’s response to television coverage of Birmingham and Selma was more about civil rights than about votes. Arlen Specter left the Democrats when the Republicans rewarded him for the magic bullet theory. But now he’s back. Ransom E. Olds built his first Oldsmobile long before Henry Ford built his first Ford, and GM’s most luxurious brand and its most sporty brand are named for native Americans, and its economy brand lives in a phrase associating it with mom and apple pie. But Camaro is dead while Mustang thrives with Lincoln ready to replace Cadillac. Consider the National Socialists (NAZI’s) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Whenever the word socialist arises in political preaching, next to raise its ugly head is dictatorship, increased government control, what Obama gives to Reed. The wealth of nations depends on a free market, not a bunch of jerks.
Afghanistan without kings or communists or theology:
| Dust, a novel
This film reminded us of the difference between war and sports, the difference between soldiers and couch potatoes, between Jessica Lynch and O. J. Simpson, between heroes and beggars, armies and gangs, duty and greed.
Hound Dog - a 2008 film If the lamb is the light, when will humans stop thinking they're of a higher class and lie down with them, instead of eating them to celebrate the death of the person they say is their Christ? We would like Dakota Fanning to play Norma Jean in the film from our screenplay we've based on our novel Dust, but she'd have to be more mature than the critics who call this film pornographic! She'd have to be adult, not what the Motion Association of America calls adult.
Doubt & Infinity - movies in two millennia With Doubt, Jewish producers and directors and actors say that Roman Catholics make horrible messes, no matter what they try to do or how they feel. With Infinity, Jewish producers and directors and actors say that Jews created nuclear weapons and are ashamed of doing it, and so feel sorry for themselves. Did Buddhism or Shintoism cause the holocaust? The Bible says that God delivered the Ten Commandments to Moses, and that Joshua set them aside after Moses’ death to invade the natives of the land that had supported Israel for many generations. And the Bible says that Jesus preached exactly the opposite of the pomp and perversion of the Roman Catholic church, which Saul of Tarsus created with the help of the so-called disciple who sank like a stone beneath the water where Jesus walked. Saul, calling himself Paul, said that God had shown him Jesus’ light, in darkness with no witness? The Bible says that Peter denied Jesus three times before the dawn of Christ’s crucifixion, and that the direct ancestors of Jesus were liars and cowards and thieves. That’s what made Muhammad create Islam, despair. How long must impatience break God’s promises?
On the Trail of the Assassins - a 1978 book The author, Jim Garrison, Orleans Parish District Attorney, the only person to prosecute anyone for the assassination of J. F. K., is as crazy as Ann Coulter and the persons he accuses, if he wrote the book. The book falls apart in many ways incidental to Garrison's hubris or paranoia. One way is by its inclusion of the terms “false sponsor” and “sheep-dipping”. The people Garrison tracked must have been sheep-dipped false sponsors, as he must have been on the other side of the coin his book flips like dice. The people he accuses range from the CIA to Johnny Carson, as though that huge body of people could have kept such complicity from the huge body of people with whom they associate, and so on to all of Earth. Another way is in its assignment of motive, a factor essential to any prosecution in court. Garrison would have us believe that hundreds of people in a dozen government agencies conspired against Kennedy on the basis of their belief that he was going to prevent the war in Vietnam. Besides the question of why anyone wouldn’t like that, a fact is that Kennedy sent more troops to Vietnam than Eisenhower had. We suspect a more obvious motive for that assassination, far beyond New Orleans. Kennedy killed those people at the Bay of Pigs, by changing the original CIA plan and refusing to accept responsibility. Kennedy changed United States relations with the Soviet Union from checkers to the verge of nuclear destruction of all life. So, a few genuinely concerned persons at top levels of the Soviet and United States governments killed him to prevent that destruction. The false sponsors must have been after the fact. We have no doubt that the assassination was a conspiracy, as we agree that Oswald couldn’t have done all the shooting. But the human resources management of the deed must have been more constrained, leaving the smoke and mirrors the book sells to people as crazy as Garrison.
Idocracy - a 2005 film This film predicts a future when people try to grow crops with Gatorade, where the hero saves the world by watering the crops. In the present, people calling themselves environmentalist are trying to save the world by putting corn into gas tanks, while people around the world are starving. That hero's name is Not Sure, while in this day and age people claiming to be smart say they're say they're not sure, when truth they know is than they simply don't know. Those people are the people who say we should do something for the people of Darfur while saying we shouldn't have done anything for the people of Iraq. They are people like Mitt Romney and John Kerry, like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Those people are the people who put criminals above persons who haven't had a chance to choose life better than crime and say their choice is compassionate, liberal. As this film indicates, those people are already taking their world into the dust this film predicts.
Rendition – a 2007 film Tolstoy was a communist before Marx and Lenin rationalized a way for Stalin to give Joseph McCarthy an excuse to terrorize as Hitler did. This film says what War and Peace says, that the cause of all war is the first person who obeys the orders of megalomaniacs like Napoleon and Hitler, and that the way to peace is recognizing that all of life is one family. And it says that the problem between Jews and Muslims is that Mohamed retaliated against Joshua’s violation of the Ten Commandments. It says what the fireman at the Children’s march said, when he refused to roll water unjustly.
Dances With Wolves – a 1990 film Or do humans only dance with words?
Across the Universe – a 2006 Film The Beatles are a microcosm. Kids sing about holding hands until they acquire power, and then they let go of their friends’ hands and their own minds, for what Solomon called vanity. Like Greece and Rome, the United States were a world power before they alienated their kids in Birmingham and Vietnam, and those children turned their nation into an escape from everything. The Beatles said they named themselves for the Beatitudes, before they turned to drugs, or after they rode them, to compromise, for fame. Now, Lennon is dead, and McCartney is white bread, and the First World is all Advil. Now, Lenin is dead, while Liverpool and the Irish suffer. Viva Las Vegas, the ways of the world. Irish and Iraqi suffer for no reason beyond the I in their names, as Israel suffers for no reason more than that humans prefer bigotry and drugs to the Ten Commandments, from the diamond minors in South Africa to the diamond merchants in New York, to you inactivists.
The Cotton Club - a 1984 film Our favorite lines in that film are from a white couple entering the club. The white man says, “At least they don’t let niggers in here!” The white woman asks, “They don’t let them into their own club?” So Richard Gere gets billing over Gregory Hynes, two decades after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and now two more decades have passed, making more than forty years. Bootleggers like the Kennedy’s owned Harlem in the roaring twenties, and now the Clintons have moved in! How long, O Lord? Now we’re engaged in a great civil war, to see whether Obama can run the Clintons out of Harlem, and the Whitehouse. Cotton is white, while pickers are black, and now black has another fight to pick.
The Order of the Phoenix - a 2007 film Harry Potter answered a question most of us think impossible. The way to world peace is through the understanding that is friendship. Nearly everyone claiming a religion claims it as a superstition, although every founder of every remaining major religion argued mainly one point, the sharing essential to prosperity, loving one’s neighbor. Terror isn’t Islamic, as it isn’t Mosaic or Christian. Terror comes from such as Crusades and Jihads. Terror is in what Joshua did and in what Osama Bin Laden is doing and in what Hitler did and in what Israel is doing. It's in what every bigot does, and it won’t stop until all of us stop trying to blame it on Moses or Muhammad or Jesus, on everyone but ourselves. It won’t stop until we stop making excuses to covet our neighbors’ land, until we stop perverting the teachings of the founders of our religions from the Rishi’s to Muhammad, into ignorance of them. Only then shall we have something worth fighting for, and stop fighting. The essential weapon for peace is not secret. It’s plain.
The Last Hangman – a 2005 film Tolstoi said, in War and Peace, that the cause of the Napoleonic Wars was the first French corporal. This film says the same, that the cause of killing is rationalizing some excuse for it, be it vengeance or following orders, or supporting one’s country, or one’s family, or oneself. This film also says that we’re all in that craziness together, but it does not loudly enough say that, were each of us to refuse, it would all stop. Snail darters would die of their own accord, and they and all else could rest in peace. That Pierrepoint fellow was not the last hangman.
Meditation XVII - a 1623 sermon John Donne, not Jack Kennedy or Ernest Hemingway, said this: "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
Doctor Zhivago - a 1965 film This film is about the infinites shapes of snow.
The Wind that Shakes the Barley - a 2006 film This film shows that Ireland and Iraq are similar far beyond the fact that the names of both countries begin with "Ir" when written in the Roman alphabet. Ireland means anger land, and anger dominates both countries. And so does greed. When an Irishman told us that the strife between Catholics and Protestants in his country has nothing to do with religion, we didn't understand. This film explains. And neither is the strife between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq religious, and nor is Israel.
Rebel Without a Cause - a 1955 film "I think a father knows his son."
Dear Frankie - a 2004 film Why won't Shane come back, and why does Rhett not give a damn for Scarlett, and why does Denisov not marry Sonia? The answer is that they do, if Frankie and Bonny let them! That’s the best of life.
The Professional – a 1994 film This film shows how trivial most of us are. NetFlix, now the premier purveyor of films, categorizes it as action and adventure, while it is mainly about family values. Until adults accept responsibility for children, we’ll keep killing.
Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid – a 2006 book Although Mr. Carter writes from the point of view and with the tone of his claim to Christianity, sometimes uses words and phrases particular to popular expression of persons calling themselves Christians, and occasionally points out facts particular to such persons, this book is nearly all factual. That is, rather than expressing opinions, it mostly points out circumstances and events verifiable through public records. Yet, it has a reputation for being controversial. Of course the reason is that few people bother to differentiate between facts and opinions, because most people are as opinionated and biased as some say Jimmy Carter is, and few people bother to research public facts, much less see for themselves, as Mr. Carter has. In fact, if the book has any shortcoming, it’s that Mr. Carter doesn’t succinctly point out the most significant facts defining the situation. Those facts are: that Israelites or Israelis have been oppressing Philistines or Palestinians since the battle of Jericho, an onslaught with no provocation whatsoever; that Israelis have killed far more people and broken far more promises than Palestinians have; and that the 1967 Israeli state was not one nation until 1949. Moreover, if that former head of government of the United States of America were to carry religious metaphors in defense of the United States of America, he might have pointed out how David defeated Goliath’s superior physical size. Now, Israel has nuclear weapons and air superiority through military aid from first world nations, as European nations took superior weapon technology on the Crusades. So, now, Islam is continuing Saladin's jihad, against the world whose trade center is now Wall Street. All a president needs to do to stop the terror is be fair. Smart is truth, beauty.
The War - a 1994 film Both of these works show that children could keep us from wars, were parents to give them the key, at ground level. They show that pride is the deadliest of sins, and that stupid is as stupid does. Intelligence is telling in, not jerking out. Responsibility is sharing. It's understanding.
The Sound of Music - a 1965 film This film, set at the beginning of World War II, screened at the beginning of the United States presidency's escalation of Truman's advisory mission in Vietnam into a full scale war Nixon would would end. Three years earlier, West Side Story screened, asking the same questions. One film is about nations, while the other is about gangs while the only difference is scale, while presidents have ignored the politics of both. Both films, in retrospect, should cause us to ask why they didn't change humanity's prospects. That is, we should ask why we care more now about American Idols than about the ordinary people of Iraq or Darfur. Both films have iconic weaknesses. In one, a poor nun saves a family of aristocrats, and the other's title suggests that west is better than east. But the two share an eminently importantly iconic question. How do you solve a problem like Maria?
Flags of our Fathers - two 2006 films The second of these is Letters from Iwo Jima. The first looks at Iwo Jima from the United States side, and the second looks at that island from the Japanese side, and both show flagging responsibility, of fathers. Anyone seriously considering these films in tandem with the rest of life will ask why so few humans look at the Israeli/Palestinian situation from both sides, and whether Stephen Spielberg does! Maybe he does, but when shall humanity in general learn that compassion is the only salvation?
The Time of Your Life - a 1948 film This film set the theme for the best of Hollywood since. We had a problem with its epitaph, when the bar owner took the sign out of the window inviting folks in to be themselves and tore it in two, saying that enough is enough. But then we remembered that integrity is always exactly enough and shouldn't need a reminder! What's your dream?
Shine – a 1996 film Nothing is more important than music. Nothing is more important than the harmony of inspiration. This film says that. The horror of the holocaust lives on, from the horror of the captivity. This film tries to deliver a lesson to the Germans and the Egyptians, and the Israelis, all of us. The holy land is hardly holy, despite how the sun shines on Karn Hattin. Why don't Christians visit the Mount of Beatitudes? In the sixties, when the great society sent millions of Americans to kill Vietnamese doing nothing but trying to live their lives as best they could, a popular song borrowed a melody from Rachminov s second piano concerto and assigned it the lyrics “When I was young, I never needed anyone. Making love was just for fun. Those days are done.” Rachmaninov’s third piano concert is more difficult to play than his second while his second, played more in the film, is more sweet. And popular music is more sweet now, in the war on terror that has made Bethlehem a combat zone. How is Christ's birthplace in the shadow of death? Astrology, psychology, stars and butterflies, what life comes down to is common sense. This film is quite lovely.
somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond - a 1931 poem A Harvard poet wrote that poem between the two world wars, between his imprisonment in France for driving an ambulance and German imprisonment of France for nothing. Films we find near to that poem are The Painted Veil and The Tiger and the Snow. Both films show what love between two people should be, as they show what love is. Imagine Nero walking the Great Wall, if you wish such as that. We all must remember that our enormous room is a small roe's chest. Otherwise we cannot love.
Dream Girls - a 2006 Film This film says that all African Americans will sell their souls, their friends and their children, their music and their health, to white silliness. And it says that their only salvation is Lincoln or Johnson or Clinton, or some other white lawyer, bailing them out. So not even Hollywood voted it best picture, while it voted its star an American idol.
Paradise Road - a 1997 film "Oh, my dear, that's one to tell your grand children. . . . Don't worry: I love God, even though I sometimes don't know what he's doing. . . . Love is like a flame; it burns and is visible to all. . . . None of us will ever leave Sumatra. . . . Amen."
Bound for Glory – a 1943 autobiography This book is exactly an autobiography. Other works in that genre try to explain the effect of the life in question on others’ lives. This book tells succinctly how Woody Guthrie grew to produce his effect. Woody and his story are works of dynamic integrity. We need to listen, closely. Woody Guthrie was communist, in the sense that we all should share God's bounty. He was not a Marxist or a Leninist or a Stalinist. Nor was he a Washingtonist or a Jeffersonist. Nor was he an Amerigo Vespugian or a Paulist or any other kind of excuse for a name.
Mary Poppins – a 1964 film The Civil Rights Act was the year of this film, a century after the Emancipation Proclamation. Now, more than two centuries after the Bill of Rights, and longer since that film than Moses led his people in the wilderness, parents keep raising their children to work against their neighbors, their mothers or fathers, anyone else. How long, oh Lord.
Reflections of a Cold Warrior – a 1996 memoire Richard Bissell was the principal administrator of the Marshall Plan, and the project chief for developing the U2 and what President Kennedy turned into the blood bath at Bay of Pigs. This memoir of Bissell's, published after his death, elegantly defers to the prerogatives of the presidency of the United States, but the facts are plain. Kennedy’s overweening might have made the cold war hot. He might have killed us all, were he not killed. Mr. Bissell is a world hero.
Jude the Obscure - an 1895 novel "Because we are too many."
Babel - a 2006 film With great technical and aesthetic prowess, this film shows how cheap and cowardly and stupid humans have become, the abstraction of the word “humanitarian”. Many of its details and time lines don’t work together, but neither do many humans attend much to what’s in their faces, rationalizing private greed against public concern. Journalists and politicians and doctors and lawyers keep trying to take advantage of the weakness of humans trying to be as suicidal, self-destructive, as they are. One of the twelve tasks of Hercules was to kill the Titan Antaeus, the difficulty being that Antaeus regained his strength whenever he was down to Earth. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences keeps proving itself Herculean. But most important are our children. Note the dedication.
The Milagro Beanfield War – a 1988 film This was a Sundance production. It’s set in New Mexico, the state of the united ones whose flag represents the sun. Its theme is the power of the people, and it shows how humans can unite for the best of their life and love, against the power of humans who unite for smaller selves. But it waves a rabbit dead to excuse firing to frighten humans. Beans contain as much protein as animal meat, leaving killing cattle less practical than killing trees for golfing. Humans eat like pigs, but we work harder at it. This film promotes considering the lilies of the field, while it promotes eating sparrows. It does not pass through the eye of the needle. But it helps.
Hollywood Ending – a 2002 film In this film, Woody Allen closes his career by admitting the cause of his success, that he has catered to hypochondriacs, people who seek only pity. Aristotle pointed out the technical difficulties of the staging of his time, and the French called those limitations an ideal and adhered to that absurdity long after Shakespeare freed the rest of us, and long after Eisenstein offered us Shakespeare’s best wishes, and now their pride is in ennui. Cinema, at its best, goes straight to our hearts by opening our eyes, not by giving us more weak excuses. In this film, Allen admits he has nothing on Eastwood. And cinema is still beginning. To show, to move. Just see.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter – a 1940 novel Richard Wright said that Ms. McCullers accepted blacks. More recently, linguists have called the non-white grammar and diction of blacks the “negro non-standard dialect”. African Americans no longer wish to be called Negroes, and Ms. McCullers did not accurately represent their dialect. But she did faithfully represent the lonely hearts of the down and out! Can Mick ever rediscover her music?
The Last Samurai - a 2003 film What’s the difference between a protagonist and an antagonist? This film is a story of redemption, a story of love for the best and worst of us. If one can divorce oneself from merchandising and violence, this film is beautiful. In its beginning, the protagonist is a soldier who failed to die in battle, a person dead of his past and living without future. In the end, his horse’s head is above his, as he bows to “the peace all of us seek and few of us ever find.”
The Elephant Man - a 1980 film This film, also in black and white, decades after The Wizard of Oz made color mainstream in motion pictures, shows also that much slowly changes. The 0000's, the 1420's, the 1930's, the 2000's, the same. We try to put others down to set ourselves up. And so we fail miserably.
War and Peace – an 1869 novel Tolstoy, while fathering thirteen children with a woman he married when she was half his age, is mostly about his love for her. The last hundred-some pages of the book he wrote while she bore most of them try to justify the book otherwise, as an essay on war regardless of peace. And, maybe so, he died leaving his wife, the mother of his children, to justify his thinking. Many of us live and die that way. We ignore our life.
"Nothing on Earth is worse than bigotry, |
| We must remember Rachel at the well ! |
