John Phillip Law, the actor who played the well-tanned angel Pygar in one of the most absurd movies ever made, has died. Read the L.A. Times obituary.
Oh, and if you haven't seen Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy, you should. Have you ever wanted to see a sci-fi movie about the sexual adventures of a hot chick who travels the galaxy in a spaceship with brown shag carpet that actually covers the walls? I thought so.
Hey Mom, look at this!
(I call out my mom because I always have my best discussions about gender differences with her. I'm pretty sure my mom will actually agree with this piece by Barbara Ehrenreich. Even if I'm still not sure whether she supported Obama or Clinton for the Democratic nomination.)
Hillary's Gift to Women
. . . . Biology conditions us in all kinds of ways we might not even be aware of yet. But virtue is always a choice.Hillary Clinton smashed the myth of innate female moral superiority in the worst possible way -- by demonstrating female moral inferiority. We didn't really need her racial innuendos and free-floating bellicosity to establish that women aren't wimps. As a generation of young feminists realizes, the values once thought to be uniquely and genetically female -- such as compassion and an aversion to violence -- can be found in either sex, and sometimes it's a man who best upholds them.
We hear people throwing around the word "hero" a lot these days, mostly in reference to our soldiers fighting in Iraq. Heroes these soldiers may be, but let's also recognize some other heroes serving our country, even if they aren't lauded by the Hugh Hewitts and Rush Limbaughs of the world. Heroes like the military lawyers and judges who aren't playing along with the system of kangaroo courts set up by the Bush administration to try convict prisoners at Guantanamo:
The Supreme Court, then, is hardly the only thing standing between the president and kangaroo convictions at Guantanamo. The truth is that the best thing the commissions have going for them right now are the lawyers and judges in uniform who have, albeit reluctantly, refused to play along. If they'd been out on the battlefield, they'd have killed any detainee they met as an enemy. But they're not willing to see them killed in the wake of a sham trial. That's not because they value the lives of terrorists over the lives of Americans or because they value legal formalism over the exigencies of war. It's because they come out of a long military tradition of legal integrity and independence. And much as it must pain them, this precludes them from being yes men for the Bush administration at the expense of the rule of law.
I was talking about perfect books with a friend of mine the other day. Most of you can point to a few books that sit at the tippy-top of your all-time favorites. Books that have become almost sacred for you. But what is it about these books that separates them from the merely brilliant?
My friend said something about a perfect book commandeering her brainstem, whereas a brilliant book can only take control of her cerebellum, or her bilateral parietal lobes. Or something like that. So that got me thinking: what is it about perfect books that makes them perfect, for me? (More importantly: what's the best medical analogy to convey the difference for me between the perfect and the merely great?)
I try a few promising ones: while most of my favorite books induce complex partial seizures, the perfect books cause generalized tonic-clonic convulsions with complete loss of consciousness and prolonged postictal stupor. . . . Well, that's not quite true. Jonathan Franzen's Corrections made me twitchy, but only because it sucked. China Mieville's Perdido Street Station put me in a coma for two weeks, but it's merely brilliant -- not quite perfect. This neurological analogy just won't work.
How about this: merely great books make me incontinent of urine and stool, but the perfect ones give me profuse, watery diarrhea. . . . Well, that won't work either. Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow (a perfect book) didn't do anything to my GI tract at all.
I realize that I'm going to have trouble using a medical analogy to describe what separates the handful of perfect books from the longer list of great books I've read. My problem is that each perfect book affects me differently. One makes me cry like a baby and another haunts my dreams. One is like black coffee, and another like kentucky bourbon.
The best I can do at this point is give you a list of the few books I'd call perfect. The fact that this list overlaps with my friend's helps to explain why we get along so well.
The Human Condition, by Hannah Arendt
Watership Down, by Richard Adams
Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry
The Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien
What perfect books have you read? If you're kind, decent, and civilized, you'll recommend them here and not keep them secret. Don't be an idjit. Tell us.
Writing about the college admissions process, Yale law student Amelia Rawls repeats the truism that successful people aren't always nice. Her article is worth reading because she also points out that noble, concerned, and committed people aren't always nice, either:
I'm saying that sometimes some of these students will denounce world hunger but be unfriendly to the homeless. They will debate environmental policy but never offer to take out the trash. They will believe vehemently in many causes but roll their eyes when reminded to be humble, to be generous and to "do what is right."
It is these people, though, who often climb America's ladder of success. They rise to the top, partly on their own merits yet also partly on the backs of equally deserving but "nicer" people who let them steal the spotlight. Before they, or we, know it, they are the politicians and corporate executives subverting the very moral positions they espouse. They are the (frighteningly) many figureheads who purport to be leaders even as they embarrass our country and mar our history books.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes that "the bitterness of the fight for the Democratic nomination is, on the face of it, bizarre." Actually, the only thing that's bizarre is why Krugman would say this about a contest that has been astonishingly civilized and free of rancor.
I don't agree with, and I don't understand, Paul Krugman. On one hand, he insists Barack Obama cannot succeed because he is not cutthroat enough. I don't agree with that; he is succeeding precisely because he's not engaging in Nixonian hate politics.
Bizarrely, Krugman also criticizes the Obama camp for being too cutthroat with Hillary Clinton. I don't agree with that either; this has and continues to be a refreshingly positive campaign, even as it has become more and more intensely fought.
But I really just don't understand most of what Krugman says in his latest anti-Obama column. First, he says the race between Clinton and Obama is bitter. So bitter, in fact, that he finds it appropriate to compare it to "Nixonland," the "land of slander and scare, of the politics of hatred."
Huh?
I've been watching this campaign pretty closely, and I think it's been upbeat and cordial. Where's the bitterness Krugman is talking about? Both candidates have run on the issues and avoided negative attacks. Many of their supporters would be happy to support the other against the Republican in November. Krugman says of Obama supporters that they "want their hero or nobody." Huh? I'm surrounded with Obama supporters, and I haven't met the first one who said they'd sit at home if Obama isn't the nominee. Krugman can't see much difference between the enthusiasm for Obama and a cult of personality, of which the best example he can find is the support for George W. Bush after our toppling of Saddam Hussein. Huh? Although I think Bush supporters were mistaken about the nature of our victory in Iraq, I always thought that people supported Bush because they were mistaken about the facts or committed to political principles that I was not -- never that there was any "cult of personality" surrounding George W. Bush.
The truly ironic thing is that the reason the Obama campaign has caught fire is exactly because it, more than Clinton's campaign, stands for what Krugman says he wants to see: and end to the politics of hatred, an acknowledgment that "there are principles that matter more than short-term political advantage." And yet Krugman seems reluctant to support Obama precisely because it explicitly advocates an end to the politics of hatred. Doing that, Krugman comes close to saying in his other columns, is naive.
Krugman's judgment that Hillary Clinton ought to be the Democratic nominee for president is one with which I disagree. I only wish that I could understand it, and Krugman's columns aren't helping.
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In a few days I'll post the reasons why I think Barack Obama, not Hillary Clinton, should be the democratic presidential nominee. For now, please note what happened today.
I'm not talking about the potomac primary, I'm talking about the vote in the Senate to strip retroactive immunity from civil liability for telecom companies that cooperated with the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping of American citizens without a warrant.
A "yea" vote was a vote to strip the immunity, and hold telecoms accountable when they act illegally. A "nay" vote was a capitulation to the Bush administration's rule by fiat, and a vote against the rule of law.
Yea: Barack Obama
Nay: John McCain
Absent: Hillary Clinton
Ever the proud champion of principle, Hillary doesn't actively capitulate to her opponents. She passively capitulates.
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The subtitle of Benjamin Barber's latest book hints at his dislike of consumerism. Frustrated with the ubiquitous glorfication of "the market" in our current political discourse, Barber asks the following almost rhetorical question:
"After all, when religion colonizes every sector of what should be our multidimensional lives, we call the result theocracy; and when politics colonizes every sector of what should be our multidimensional lives, we call the result tyranny. So why, it might be asked, when the marketplace -- with its insistent ideology of consumption and its dogged orthodoxy of spending -- colonizes every sector of what should be our multidimensional lives, do we call the result liberty?" [219-220]
Continue reading "Modern infantilism -- does Benjamin Barber have the solution?" »
John McCain, the certain Republican presidential nominee, sees the 2008 elections like this:
Often elections in this country are fought within theIn other words, McCain is a committed Republican, notwithstanding the screetches coming from nutjobs like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. And that's precisely why either Obama or Clinton should be elected in the fall.
margins of small differences. This one will not be. We are arguing about hugely consequential things. Whomever the Democrats nominate, they would govern this country in a way that will, in my opinion, take
this country backward to the days when government felt empowered to take from us our freedom to decide for ourselves the course and qualityof our lives; to substitute the muddled judgment of large and expanding federal bureaucracies for the common sense and values of the American people; to the timidity and wishful thinking of a time when we averted our eyes from terrible threats to our security that were so plainly gathering strength abroad.
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