First Impressions – Au Revoir Les Enfants

Au Revoir Les Enfants tells the story of a boarding school’s struggle to keep three Jewish boys safe during the Nazi occupation of France.  The main plot line follows Julien Quentin, who develops from an intelligent but surly student at the school to a better, more ethical character who conceals one of the Jewish boys’ identities.

This plot alone makes for a mediocre movie, and mediocrity is the very worst that films concerning the Holocaust can worry about achieving.  Along the lines of Godwin’s Law, it is easy to invoke intense emotion over a charged subject, and so, little credit is due.

A more interesting theme did not fully emerge on first viewing: how does the placement of the film’s characters during the Holocaust contribute to their moral status?  Would we perceive the characters differently if we judged them only by their more mundane moral decisions?

Several examples may merit interesting discussion upon another viewing of the film:

1) Quentin: Quentin bullies other students.  He is curious, but too lazy and arrogant for his academic studies.  He views other talented students with hostility and jealousy.  In Au Revoir, his courage in facing the Nazi intruders redeems these flaws.  In the present day, perhaps every schoolyard bully would evince the same courage against Nazis.  But how many receive that chance?  Why should Quentin receive a higher judgment than the average bully, when his behavior differs only as a result of the caprice of time?

2) Père Jacques: The headmaster seems to run an indifferent school, with too many students, poorly supervised and disciplined.  Everything seems to be on the cheap.  In one moment, Quentin, looking at a fattening pig, remarks to the effect, “They’ll serve this on parents’ day, to give them the impression that we eat well.”  Would the stinginess and neglect of the headmaster be forgivable if he were not also a hero of the Holocaust?

3) Joseph: The kitchen helper is a mere boy, and takes abuse from the other boys because of his lowly status.  On the side, he sells items the students receive from their parents and gives them things they want instead.  When he is caught, he takes the fall.  Au Revoir leads us to condemn him because of his involvement with the Germans, but excluding this, one suspects that the beatings he receives would make him more a martyr than a traitor.

The debate over how circumstances affect a moral evaluation of these characters leads to quite an Aristotelian tangle (do actions matter, or intentions? etc.), but even if not morally enlightening, it is an interesting thought experiment.

Beyond merely contrasting transcendent moral characteristics with mundane ones, our thought experiment might also lead us to ask whether these transcendent characteristics outweigh the mundane ones.

For example, certainly Père Jacques’s heroism is laudable, and its cost is mortal.  But it is easy for a courageous man to exhibit courage when the situation clearly calls for it.  Transcendent struggles often have black and white answers.  What is murkier is how the père ought to act in day-to-day life.  Clearly he has a moral obligation to his students, to teach them, and raise them to be bright, principled, and capable youth.  But how hard must he try?  Must he spend every minute of every day on his task, or just a few?  Perhaps he should spend as many minutes as necessary to give the boys an average education.  But what if this number of minutes is impossibly hard to achieve?

In this character, as a man struggling, and perhaps failing, to overcome the banal challenges of everyday life, Père Jacques is much more familiar to us.  Perhaps many of us could hold our heads high in the face of the Gestapo.  But every man, staring down the barrel of a forty-hour week of drudgery and toil, from time to time turns on a subconscious cruise control, and fails to try his best.

And who knows what the consequences of such cruising might be?  Perhaps mundane moral failures differ from transcendent ones not in their consequences or importance, but only in their frequency.

Thomas Crown Doesn’t Like You

The Thomas Crown Affair is the story of a wealthy banker who grows bored with life and starts robbing banks* for kicks.  If the stories a society tells illustrate its aspirations, what does The Thomas Crown Affair tell us about our society?  Thomas Crown is smart, sexy, cultured, and rich.  He’s all of the things everyone wants to be.  But it’s not enough for him to have everything; just like a real-life Wall Street banker, he has to get away with the Big One, the great heist, too.

Does this mean we are a society of aspiring criminals?  Probably.  Who, in his heart of hearts, doesn’t want to be Thomas Crown?

That said, most of us are not Thomas Crown.  We’re the butler that he tosses his coat to, the stooges he hires as diversions for his crimes, or the sycophants that rake up his cash.  You see, although we like Thomas Crown and want to be like him, he doesn’t give a crap about us (unless his martini is served wrong).  He probably doesn’t even like us.

It is hard to forget that Thomas Crown is not just another wealthy guy, but a banker.  The detective investigating him takes pains to point out that he is a “finance geek”.  The fact that he robs a bank, and then leaves the bill for the ensuing investigation to the taxpayers, reminds us all too much of our recent financial sector bailouts.

That’s not all.  Take, for example, the famous golfing scene: after Mr. Crown makes an impossible swing out of a sand trap, a friend bets him that he can’t do it again, ten-to-one odds.  He takes it, misses, and dectuples down on the bet, in much the same way that your average banker takes $10,000 of collateral to leverage a $100,000 bet on the price of a mortgage-backed security.  “Tommy,” his good ol’ boy friend says, “That’s a hundred thousand dollars on a God-damn golf swing.”  “It’s a beautiful Saturday morning John… what the hell else have we got to do?”  What the hell else indeed?

He could go to dinner at a swank restaurant, or play funny jokes on the police.  He could bed a beautiful model, or just laugh maniacally to himself about all the money he’s stolen (actual scene in the movie).  But at the end, it’s all just window dressing: Thomas Crown is an idle sociopath, nothing less, nothing more.  His psychiatrist says it best: “And society at large… if its interests were to run counter to your own?”  We don’t need The Thomas Crown Affair to tell us the answer to that question.  Look no further than your friendly neighborhood investment bank.

To us, Thomas Crown is a symbol of those banks; to the bankers, he is an exemplar.  He is, like them, a wealthy criminal, but he is also many things they wish they were, but aren’t.  Specifically, he is manly, in every way and sense.  Thomas Crown got into Oxford on a boxing scholarship – a hilarious joke for him and the needy kid that didn’t get the scholarship.  Thomas Crown plays polo, drives dune buggies, flies planes, and (in the remake, recalling Richard Branson) races yachts.  Thomas Crown beds models.

Yes, Thomas Crown is not just smart and athletic, he’s sexy and cool.  A scene where Mr. Crown plays a prank on the police officers watching his house gives Steve McQueen a distinctive bad boy look, which I’m guessing accorded with his acting style in other movies.  But Thomas Crown isn’t just cool, he’s a smooth operator.  When his lover confronts him about his seeing another woman, he responds, “Hey, listen… she was just a way of putting you in touch with yourself.”  Wow, I want this guy!  Forget Richard Branson, this crap recalls David Tepper, the hedge fund manager notorious for keeping a pair of brass testicles on his desk.

So here we have Wall Street’s perfect image of itself.  It’s a club of athletes, adventurers, and sexy seducers who happen to be in finance.  That one little F-word at the end is the sticking point for these guys.  Why swindle all this money if they’re really athletes or adventurers?  This bothers them.  They know that a real man shouldn’t need to steal to fund his life.  That’s why the essential dimension of The Thomas Crown Affair is how Thomas Crown feels about his heist: thrilled.  He did it for kicks.  He did it because he was bored.  He did it for a challenge.  “It’s not the money.  It’s not the money,” he repeats.  Who is he trying to convince?

And if it’s not the money, what is it?  “It’s the system,” he says, the system being all those police and firefighters and hapless SEC regulators that the rest of us fund.  Presumably, The Thomas Crown Affair‘s Wall Street-loving auteur is trying to imply that underneath Thomas Crown’s sociopathy, megalomania, greed, arrogance, and wealth, there lies some sort of Prisoner-esque principled disagreement with society at large.  Bupkis.  It is the money.  It’s the money, and the art, and the women, and the house, and the car, and the boat, and the brass testicles.  It’s the complete package that every shivering pile of bupkis that ever managed to pull itself into an upright position ever wanted.  And what’s most important is that once we get the money, art, women, house, car, boat, and testicles, we’ll also be good-looking, cultured, clever, and composed, just like Thomas Crown.

In short, The Thomas Crown Affair is a paean to materialism masquerading as a sensitive portrait of a man who, underneath the masquerade, is a walking pile of childish cliches.

Off-topic note: I cannot resist mentioning the brilliance of the seduction scene in the original Thomas Crown Affair.  The shot from above the chess board of Faye Dunaway lounging in her cocktail dress, the table so narrow that her legs are practically wrapped around McQueen’s… brilliant.  The way she strokes her dress, disturbing it in just the right places, and then strokes the bishop – my kids will never watch that scene.  And the contrast between Dunaway’s sharp, decisive moves and steady stare and McQueen’s lip-biting, tentative hem-hawing… brilliant!  The best the newer Thomas Crown Affair can manage is Rene Russo wiggling her fat hips in a translucent dress.  (Do NOT call it dancing.)  How far we have fallen.

*I am referring to the Steve McQueen version of the movie. For those of you who prefer Rene Russo’s hip-wiggling, Mr. Crown steals art, not money.

Review (or at least notes) on Shakespeare’s Othello

I just watched a performance of Shakespeare’s Othello by the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company.  James Waterston was brilliant as Iago, and Grayson Powell and Fred Sullivan were competent as Roderigo and Brabantio, respectively.  At first, I was put off by Marianna Bassham‘s portrayal of Desdemona, but as I reflected on it, the interpretation of the role carries considerable challenges, which may be exacerbated by directorial choices.  Before we can fairly evaluate Ms. Bassham’s performance, we must think a bit about the strange Desdemona.

Consider: Iago is fascinating, but he is as one-dimensional as they come.  His sole desire is revenge.  All of his reflections, all his dialogue, all his actions, are directed toward this single objective.  Othello, Roderigo, Cassio are not even one-dimensional like Iago.  They are mere dupes, puppets in Iago’s schemes.

But Desdemona is an enigma.  Othello and Brabantio agree in describing both her beauty and her virginal modesty, leaving the impression that she is empty-headed and unassertive.  But she clearly has some boldness in her.  She ran away from her father to marry Othello, and had the wit to signal her love to him by wishing that there was “some friend of Othello’s that loved her, that could tell his stories to her.”  Ah, feminine charm!  Furthermore, she is assertive in her defense of her conduct to her father, and bold in her proclamations of love to Othello.  She presses Cassio’s case most strongly, and so has a clear sense of justice.

Desdemona is still “good”, unless tempting a man to marriage with coquetry is a crime.  She is not the virgin too innocent to do anything but good; rather, she is practical good, knowing what is right and standing up for it.  She gets what she wants.

The final acts of the play, seen in this context, are a puzzler.  Why does Desdemona obey Othello, and report to their marriage bed to be slaughtered?  As she waits for him, knowing that he is in a rage, she expresses a clear premonition that she is going to die.  She waits, worries, and does nothing.  At last, after a few feeble protestations of love, she dies.  Did she obey Othello because it was her wifely duty?  This is implausible; Shakespeare offers no speech supporting such an interpretation, and a girl practical enough to win a man by coquetry should have few qualms about fleeing to the protection of her father or her state to avoid a brutality that would be contemned by her people.

Desdemona Waiting to Die

The answer awaits a rereading of the play.  Ms. Bassham portrayed Desdemona as a strong woman.  She is fully aware of all that is going on around her; when the city councilors suggest that she stay at her father’s house while Othello defends Cyprus, her “No!” is resounding and resolute.  She fearlessly kisses and plays with Othello in front of underlings.  Then, as Othello slips into jealousy, Ms. Bassham allows a little bit of Desdemona’s sanity to slip away.  The death song she sings recalls Hamlet‘s Ophelia.

These decisions do a good job of reconciling the strength in Desdemona’s character with the strange decision to lay in supine waiting for Othello’s revenge.  But they leave a stranger question: if Desdemona is strong and good, how to reconcile this with the coquetry she displayed in seducing Othello?  Her blushing wishes and downward glances and fluttering eyelashes smack, if not of the deceitfulness of Iago, at least of a bit more canniness than a noble soul should hold.

This question caused me to view Othello in a new light: if Desdemona is canny, or even capable of lies, like Iago, could she be Iago’s equal, or opposite?  As the play progressed to the final acts, I imagined altering the intonation and blocking of every line to make Iago the hero defending his master’s honor, and Desdemona the treacherous seductress.  I do not think such an interpretation is fully supported by the text of the play, but in any event, Ms. Bassham gave a thought-provoking performance.  My Iago-hero fantasy was eased also by Mr. Waterston’s charisma.

We cannot pass without also mentioning Emilia.  She is clever enough to see, in Othello’s jealousy, the influence of an outside agent, but too loyal to Iago to entertain the notion that it might be him.  She passes up an opportunity or two of revealing his handkerchief treachery until she places it within the larger plot; at this point, murder most foul having been done, she forgoes her wifely loyalty and proclaims Iago’s guilt, in service of the right.  Of course, the scene in which she comprehends Iago’s plot, but not his agency, may not be meant to reflect cleverness, but only a ham-fisted ironic or dramatic gesture by the Bard.  Nonetheless, who said Shakespeare wasn’t a feminist?  Desdemona and Emilia are by far the most interesting characters here.

Edit: Upon reflection, I’ve decided to include some further comments on Ms. Bassham’s choices in her portrayal of Desdemona.

Website Review – LinkedIn (Sucks)

The latest and most repulsive invention of the Internet age is LinkedIn (where “Relationships Matter”).  LinkedIn is a place where sixty-five million “professionals” share information in accordance with LinkedIn’s draconian intellectual property agreement, which has to be seen to be believed:

“You own the information you provide LinkedIn under this Agreement, and may request its deletion at any time, unless you have shared information or content with others and they have not deleted it, or it was copied or stored by others users.  Additionally, you grant LinkedIn a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual, unlimited, assignable, sublicenseable, fully paid up and royalty-free right to use, to copy, prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, process, analyze, use and commercialize, in any way now known or in the future discovered, any information you provide, directly or indirectly to LinkedIn, including but not limited to any user generated content, ideas, concepts, techniques or data to services, you submit to LinkedIn, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties.  Any information you submit to us is at your own risk of loss…”

And that’s just the beginning!  Now I’m no lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that by the time you’ve clicked “yes” to that, LinkedIn owns anything you have ever or will ever come into contact with, seen, or encountered in any way (and anything you’re looking at now, including, presumably, my blog).

So what do these soulless buzzards offer you in exchange for everything?  Simply, the ability to exchange “information, ideas, and opportunities” with people with whom you are presumably “linked in”.  “Opportunities”!  What the eff does that mean?  My guess it that if you’re a whore, this pimp has just the customer for you.  I would love to see the statistics on the number of sexual liaisons directly or indirectly instigated by this site.  (Since LinkedIn presumably has the right to distribute, etc., these liaisons, I’m expecting www.hotlinkedin.com soon.)

Let me tell you something, maggots: I already know who my friends are, I already know what interesting ideas they have, I know their resumes better than my own face, and if I didn’t, I’d go over to their house, crack open a beer, and get an update.  I’ll be caught dead before I pass along a sweet opportunity (read: easy girl, cheap blow, Qaeda contact… who knows what they’re selling?) to someone I haven’t known and liked since I was two.

Ah yes, but I’m not a “professional”, you say.  Look, I don’t know exactly what a “professional” is, although I would assume it would be anyone who engages in a profession, i.e. the 52% of America that doesn’t live off of the government dole.  But in this context it clearly means something different.  Someone who wants more than just to mingle in the intimacy of their friends, in free and happy exchange of whatever is there to be shared.  Someone who wants to advertise and exhibit, to exchange their own virtues and goods with strangers in order to advance in the world.  Someone who wants to make money.  In short, a professional is either a merchant or a prostitute.

And here we come to the nub of the problem.  I’m not against the Internet.  I’m not even against “networking” sites; I find it useful that Facebook offers me a guaranteed way of staying in touch with “friends” who I’d probably otherwise lose touch with, and if I wanted a torrent of mental feces injected into my brain, Twitter has just the solution for me.  But what I object to is the social climbing.  I object to the mindless whores running around with Blackberries linking into and hooking up to anyone that looks like money.

It’s not the Internet’s fault, really.  These people were around before the Internet and before Blackberries.  There was Mr. Bigshot Lawyer, who only brought to dinner the friends who could chat up a client.  Mr. Bigshot Banker, who had something interesting to say to everyone in the room at the cocktail party.  Miss Slinkyshot Consultant, whose professional thigh-length skirt and two-button blouse reminded all the executives of her qualifications.  And on and on and on.

Why enable them?

Edit: For grammar.

Review – “Can’t Be Tamed” – Part 1

Where to begin?  In many ways, Miley Cyrus’s “Can’t Be Tamed” covers what, by the standards of our lightning-fast age, is very old ground.  A young pop diva clad in next to nothing bumping and grinding with a dance troupe while singing ambiguously sexual lyrics… the newest thing I saw was the special effects quality, which has mercifully improved from the days of “Oops, I Did It Again”.  Otherwise, change the words (including the pop star’s name), add a slight shift in theme, and this could be 2000.  Cyrus, after an abbreviated youth, is even being groomed to look like <Britney, Christina, Madonna, Go-on-a>.

So what’s new?  “Can’t Be Tamed” has received extraordinary media attention primarily, I think, because of Cyrus’s age, which is not yet the magical eighteen.  Prior to viewing the production, I had been misled by the blogosphere into thinking that there was some question as to whether the video is or is not age-appropriate.  If by “not age-appropriate” it is meant that the production is a bunch of suits marketing a seventeen-year-old girl’s body, then yes, it’s not age-appropriate.  As I watched the video, I couldn’t help wondering whether our culture has truly, finally, achieved decadence.

So what are the moral implications, vis-à-vis society, of this video?  (I have no idea what I’ll conclude.)

The proposition, by the opponents of a video like this, is that the sexual trafficking of a seventeen-year-old girl is wrong.  I think there are two lines of thought that commonly contribute to this proposition.  One (the “puritanical” proposition) is that sex, in all or most of its varieties, is inherently sordid, and that such trafficking as this video ought to be prohibited for the moral good of all concerned – producers, viewers, and diva.  The other (the “not-yet” proposition) is that, withholding judgment on the ultimate morality of sex, seventeen-year-olds do not possess the maturity, emotional stability, worldliness, or any of innumerable other qualities that are implicitly assumed to advance with age.

Let’s begin with the not-yet proposition, and defend it from some cheap attacks.  First, many will argue, the “not-yet” proposition is problematic because why should we say that eighteen-year-olds, but not seventeen-year-olds, have whatever qualities are necessary to make sexual decisions?  (An instance of the argument by degrees.)  And why assume that the advancement of these qualities is uniform?  Could not there be some who ought to be permitted to make such decisions earlier, and some later?  And what’s more, is there even broad societal consensus on what these qualities are?  Couldn’t we just call this an antiquated and unexamined tradition that Miley Cyrus, for one, can safely discard?

Let us propose that there is – yes, there is – a broad consensus on what some of these qualities might be, and a reason that they occur magically and exactly at eighteen for all men.  This is the notion of economic self-sufficiency.  There are many magical changes that occur at the age of eighteen, by virtue of laws having to do with wages, parental relations, taxes, criminal behavior, military service, etc. that treat eighteen-year-olds as adults but seventeen-year-olds as children.  Many – most – of these changes have nothing to do with sexual maturity, and we confess all of them to be arbitrary, but any discussion of sexual mores cannot escape these other laws as a backdrop.

But all we have really done here is punted the problem.  We have proven that there is an exact, defined difference between seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds that is not trivial (i.e. merely a tautology of their age), but we have based that proof on the existence of other arbitrary societal conventions that themselves are vulnerable to the argument by degrees.  So is there anything really magical about turning eighteen, that an enterprising crusader for sexual freedom, like Miley Cyrus, could not overturn?  I think even our most enterprising crusader would concede that infants are incapable of economic self-sufficiency, while the vast majority of forty-year-olds are self-sufficient.  To prevent the cruel economic usage of infants, which we almost universally condemn as violating the taboo against the exploitation of helpless humanity, we must have laws that decide who is self-sufficient and who is not.  Such laws cannot act on a case-by-case basis, because this would be prohibitively expensive.  They could act on a class-by-class basis, and classify individuals between zero and forty into multiple classes, some economically self-sufficient and some not.  This would appear to be the optimal solution, but it would probably be difficult to form a societal consensus on what the qualifications to enter into the self-sufficient class should be.  What’s more, in even today egalitarian society, such a practice would probably increase social stratification, which we deem repugnant.  (It is ironic that we should rely so much on our biases in a discussion of the sexual trafficking of children.).  In the absence of case-by-case treatment or class-by-class treatment, we are left with age-determinate universal treatment, or some system not relying on top-down determination of self-sufficiency.  The latter system would be sufficiently radical that we shall set its proponents aside as outside the sphere of our present discussion, for desiring to reform far more than sexual liberty.

Once we have arrived at age-determinate universal treatment, we are left only to quibble about the particular age at which people achieve economic self-sufficiency.  We assume that there is nothing logically impossible about that age being eighteen.

But the next objection to sexual liberty at eighteen also applies to economic liberty.  This is the argument that some achieve the qualities requisite for economic self-sufficiency far earlier than others.  Our logical demonstration that there ought to be a universal age of economic self-sufficiency would appear to preclude this argument, but perhaps the unfairness of such a system to those whom it oppresses, who possess all the prerequisites for freedom without its perquisites, is a persuasive argument against it.

In response to this, we would propose that the age at which economic self-sufficiency occurs follows a distribution heavily centered around a relatively narrow range of values, and that there may be numerous outliers.  Our task as legislators would be to select an age as the age of maturity that will give the overwhelming majority of citizens protection from exploitation before they are, in fact, economically self-sufficient, while letting a very few suffer from such exploitation because they are, in fact, not equipped to make their own decisions.  Those who are oppressed by the system for years, just like the few who are released prematurely, are the costs of justice and prosperity for the rest.  (Shockingly, I have written no post on the opposing positions on this problem presented in Crito and The Shawshank Redemption, but the case of the unjustly-treated individuals is itself a philosophical problem that we shall, again, set aside.  I have treated it extremely briefly here.)

We have now shown that there is a magical switch that does occur at eighteen, and that, logically speaking, this could maybe be justified, though we have not done so.  But is this related to sexual freedom?  To answer this, we must examine the qualities that could be requisite for sexual maturity.

Intellectual exhaustion sets in.  More later.  Who knew there was so much to say about such ephemeral strumpetry as Miley Cyrus?

Review – Borat

“Borat” is disgusting.  If the movie were a cultural satire, it would be forgiveable.  If it taught us something about the intolerance and backwardness that lives among us, it would be forgiveable.  If it were funny, it would be forgiveable.  But “Borat” is none of these things.  It is trite, boring, and ultimately, hurtful.

Among the most frequently-cited scenes in which Sacha Baron Cohen is supposed to reveal the truth about America is one scene in which Baron Cohen’s character asks a gun store owner what type of gun is best for killing Jews.  The owner replies, deadpan, “You need a Colt 45,” which is an Israeli-made handgun.  It’s unclear whether the man meant to be ironic, or simply wanted to sell a gun, but, considering the lack of an ensuing anti-Semitic tirade, it seems unlikely that his hope was the Borat would soon be gunning down Jews.

Much of the film’s humor trades on similar antics, with Borat’s stunts rarely inciting a reaction commensurate to their indecency.  Borat runs naked through a convention, fighting with his manager, he carries his own offal around in a sack, and he sings a horribly off-key mockery of the United States’ national anthem, which is quickly drowned in boos.  It’s clear that Borat lacks respect for the people he is attempting to satire, but what’s even clearer is that he lacks respect for himself.

Website Review – Lifeforliberty.org

Those visiting Lifeforliberty.org will want to start from the rear, where the breadth and organization of the website is at once visible, although in fairness to its authors, it was meant to be read from the front in a linear fashion; I will suggest quickly clicking through each page to reach the table of contents.

Lifeforliberty.org is a call to action for the implementation of several core libertarian desiderata.  It advocates non-violent protest as a means to achieve these desiderata, providing a brief sketch of how non-violent protest works, what it can hope to achieve, and what level of activism will be necessary to achieve a national impact.  The conclusion is that roughly 250 protesters, over 25 metropolitan areas, could cause sufficient disruption to garner national media attention.  This is predicated on the assumption that only one major highway need by blockaded in each area to create a sufficient disruption.  I am no expert on civil disobedience, so I will note evaluate this.  It is simply Lifeforliberty.org’s goal.

Being a thinker, my interest in Lifeforliberty.org is analytical.  What do these people want, why do they want it, and why have they chosen the means of non-violence as  their means of achieving it?

Lifeforliberty.org wishes its protesters to continue their actions until five demands are met: disassembly of the Federal Reserve, substitution of a national sales tax for a national income tax, enactment of a Constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget, enactment of a states’ sovereignty amendment, and enactment of a campaign finance amendment.  Though it will add significantly to the length of this review, I feel it necessary to deal with these demands one by one.

1) The dissolution of the Federal Reserve is an interesting idea.  This has been a pet project of Ron Paul, and many others, for some time.  On a principled level, I am not sure that the Federal Reserve is unconstitutional.  Congress’s old excuse for everything, the interstate commerce clause, appears to justify an organization whose function is to provide stability to the federal economy.  On a practical level, I think that this stability is a desirable thing.  I resent the recent incursions of the Federal Reserve into morally questionable territory, but I do not think it clear that these incursions were a necessary result of the nature of the beast.  After all, these actions were unprecedented, and perhaps with some legal tweaking, they will also be unrepeated.  For those unconvinced of the Federal Reserve’s importance, this link explains its basic functions, while a brief but rigorous excursion into macroeconomics, such as the one provided by Olivier Blanchard, should provide an understanding of why these functions are important.

2) The demand for the repeal of the income tax, and its replacement with a sales tax, makes me hang my head in shame for all libertarians.  While the income tax has become an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of citizens, this is again not the nature of the beast, but a result of Congress’s addiction to social engineering through taxation, and the Supreme Court’s unwillingness to stand up to Congress.  Furthermore, the idea that a national sales tax would not quickly be plagued by every single one of the problems that currently plagues the income tax is naive beyond expression.

3) The enactment of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution is perhaps Lifeforliberty.org’s most intellectually persuasive idea.  While macroeconomists, including the excellent Paul Krugman, often strongly make the case for the critical importance of expansionary fiscal policy – usually entailing massive budget deficits – I think that historically, it remains to be seen that such policy will not ultimately poison every nation that embraces it.  It is not easy for a democracy to elect a leader who promises higher taxes and lower spending, particularly with the old Republican canard – still obsessing the popular imagination – that promises higher revenues through lower taxes.  The macroeconomists appear to have the weight of current history on their side, because even with recent events, public debt as a percentage of GDP has remained relatively stable (look at the graphs on the right).  But it will not necessarily always be so, and some form of legal straitjacket, even if it is less restrictive than the one envisioned by Lifeforliberty.org, is an intriguing idea.  Public debt cannot rise above 100% of GDP anyone?

4) Enactment of states’ sovereignty amendment… I had hope to provide a link for the further explication of this idea, but it does not appear to have much backing in the libertarian, or even states’ rights communities.  Most people are simply in favor of a return to the Tenth Amendment.  Ignoring this minor philosophical difference, I will make a few remarks.  First, it seems to be the opinion of many legal scholars, as exemplified by a recent Harvard panel discussion, that the Constitution, while a very good thing, is not necessarily the pinnacle of good governance.  In particular, a government strictly constructed according to the Constitution may not be able to provide the level of stability and safety that it is necessary for a modern nation to have to survive.  Nonetheless, I personally think that it ought to be considered desirable to have our federal government on a firmer legal footing than the one it is currently on; if the Constitution becomes nothing more than a scrap of paper with antiquated ideas, then the limitations on the powers of our government essentially disappear.  Perhaps amendments to the Constitution are the way to do this, but that a states’ sovereignty amendment will be a panacea is not at all clear to me.

5)  The idea for a campaign finance reform amendment is as naive as the national sales tax, and merits no discussion.  Campaign finance reform itself, of course, merits a serious national discussion.

In short, Lifeforliberty.org makes a variety of demands, some more coherent and interesting than others, but many, at various levels, hopelessly naive.  While I do not wish to spend too much time kicking naive thinkers while they’re down, I must note that occasionally, Lifeforliberty.org’s rhetoric gets the best of it: “None could claim that the implementation of any of these five measure [sic] would bring irreparable harm to our beloved nation, while it has become undeniable that not acting upon these issues has led us upon a [sic] inexorable road to ruin.”  In the first place, I just did deny that we’re on the aforementioned road to ruin, and I’m hardly the most hostile audience these people will encounter.  In the second place, if this statement is true, then this movement should meet with virtually no resistance at all.  Should I start buying canned goods now?

Lifeforliberty.org does contain a couple of interesting ideas.  First, “We shall not cease until ALL of our demands, every last one, has been legally instituted in the full spirit of their intent!”  In short, the composers of Lifeforliberty.org have proposed to gather a group of 250 like-minded people, use these people to lay a stranglehold on our nation, and not to remove their grip until their demands are met.  While they characterize their movement as non-violent, from this perspective, it appears that they are proposing to take the rest of us hostage.  Either they believe their message is totally self-evident and will meet with universal embrace – which is evidently not the case – or they wish to impose their idea of good governance on others by what amounts to force.

The use of such force is the hallmark of a radical ideology.  In a previous post, I discussed that for a radical ideology to be logically coherent, it had to meet three criteria: it had to be of critical importance to the national dialogue, it had to be of immediate importance to the national dialogue, and it had to be obvious to the vast majority immediately upon hearing.  While Lifeforliberty.org effortlessly passes the first criterion, believing their message to be of the utmost importance to the survival of freedom, they present little argument that action is needed tomorrow, next week, or next year – indeed they present no timeline for the expected decay of our great nation – and it seems clear that their message is not manifest to everyone (unless I am exceptionally dense).

What I have advocated here is further discussion, rather than the immediate action that Lifeforliberty.org proposes.  Interestingly, Lifeforliberty.org has an answer for this too: “At this juncture, to hold on to the hope that situations will significantly change within the existing state of affairs goes beyond mere foolish denial and flies into the realm of flagrant irresponsibility.  One must have the courage to relinquish empty hope before one can rightly consider an alternative course of action.”

I found this statement fascinating.  It often does appear to me that our national dialogue is hopelessly corrupt.  The major news organizations appear to cater to twelve-year-olds, the most-listened-to talking heads are irrational bombasts, and good ideas seem to get little circulation.  Am I just wrong?  Is it my evaluation that is skewed, and my dialogue that is corrupt, or is Lifeforliberty.org correct?  Perhaps it is in fact true that mere talking will never solve anything, that the right voices will never be the loudest and most-listen-to.

What is the reason for optimism?  Oddly enough, I think China is the reason for optimism.  In China, the citizens of the free world have the opportunity to witness a brutal, repressive regime, a nation utterly repugnant to all lovers of freedom and humanity, but also a nation of rising power, of economic prestige, and soon, of prosperity and happiness.  In short, China gives the free world the perfect antithesis of all that we hope to be.  In this way, in a dramatic history of peoples more powerful than any voice, perhaps we will discover who we truly wish to be.

Review – “You Belong With Me”

Most of you will be reading this in search of puerile discussion about the recent Taylor Swift-Kanye West contretemps.  Click here and scroll to comments.

For the rest of you, the recent Video Music Awards brought to my attention the fact that Taylor Swift had made a music video out of “You Belong With Me”.  This video is a development of the narrative first elaborated in one of Swift’s prior music videos, “Teardrops On My Guitar”.

I thought this narrative, and this pair of songs, interesting and attractive because of the theme of unrequited love.  This theme is in some ways as popular as it has ever been, with numerous songs devoted to it over the past few decades, ranging from “Stacy’s Mom” to “I Will Survive”.  Swift’s songs are exceptional because they develop the theme in a relatively pure and simple way.  “Teardrops On My Guitar” dwells mostly on the object of the love and the singer’s feelings for it, while “You Belong With Me” brings the obstacle into clearer relief, reiterating and strengthening the singer’s feelings.

Swift, of course, is a beautiful young woman, and it’s not often we get to hear such sentiments pouring from such a face.  Indeed, perhaps I’ve been living under a rock, but I haven’t seen the theme of unrequitted female love much at all in recent popular culture without the contaminating themes of either jealousy or self-loathing.  Swift applies only the lightest touch of each, using them only as supports for the main theme – love of the object.

In any case, perhaps my delight in the songs clouds my artistic judgment of the movies, but after having watched the accompanying video to “You Belong With Me”, I was only disappointed.   The video begins well enough, with Swift and her beloved exchanging greetings through the windows of their neighboring houses.  This echoes the sense of possession indicated by the lyrics, which suggest that the singer and the beloved have shared an enduring and deep friendship.

Indeed, I thought this first scene nearly flawless.  Swift’s costumes were well-suited to the theme, presenting her as a reasonably attractive girl with a predilection for some (perhaps) unfortunate stylistic choices that, in our callous world, could be responsible for her seeming failure to excite the passion of her beloved.  In fact, I went so far, while watching the video, as to think of these costumes as “bold”… In a world where a starlet’s looks are more apt to earn her money than her words, it took at least a little bit of courage for Swift’s handlers to compromise her in this way, and rely instead on the strength of narrative, music, and sentiment.  My only nitpick for the entire first scene is the one tiny bit of choreography wherein Swift gestures to her tee shirt when the song mentions that she wears tee shirts.  Come on, guys.

After the excellent first scene, unfortunately, the movie went downhill.  If putting Swift in ragged clothes, big glasses, and silly hairstyles was bold, putting her in the school marching band uniform with pigtails was an attempt at camp.  In the ensuing scenes, the obstacle – this time played by Swift herself – appears, the same sleek, black-haired vixen from “Teardrops On My Guitar”.  She wraps herself around the singer’s beloved and makes sneering faces at the singer.  In the end, the beloved goes to a dance, the singer follow him there, and they reveal their love for each other, after the beloved pushes aside the black-haired vixen (apparently he’d been listening to enough Taylor Swift that his error dawned on him).  I can’t stress enough how incorrect I feel this ending is… nowhere in this pair of songs is there any indication of the singer achieving the object of her desire.  The ending is a total betrayal of the theme.

Still, Swift is young and beautiful, and the music is excellent.  In particular, the chorus verse of “You Belong With Me” injects more plaintive emotion than I’ve heard in most any song in quite some time.  Perhaps Swift could have a future in acting?

Review – Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V

It is not for me to judge the work of the Bard; furthermore, it is not for me to supplant him… this review is for those who have read Henry IV and Henry V and are looking for further thoughts. If you have not, cease wasting your time and do something productive!

-Here we find the source of “Discretion is the better part of valor.” Falstaff, the original arrant knave if ever there was one, after having mocked the idea of honor as consisting of mere air, plays dead to avoid fighting the dangerous Earl of Douglas. He then congratulates himself on his wisdom, saying “The better part of valour is discretion” (V.iv.118-9). The next time we find some pompous ass quoting this adage, we can remind himself that the valorous Harry became king of England, while discrete Falstaff was a corrupt drunkard eventually banished from Harry’s presence.

-Shakespeare is quite the handy royal apologist. Consider the bare facts as the common man would have seen them: Henry IV fought hard to put together a kingdom, while his son Harry Monmouth spent his days in idleness and moral dissipation. Meanwhile, Harry Hotspur fought valorously for England. Eventually, Hotspur, wronged by the king, turned on him; Monmouth, in a stroke of luck, defeated him in combat, and later went on to become a surprisingly decent king. Shakespeare succeeds in painting all of this as a plot, started at a very young age by Monmouth to become the best king ever… “So, when this loose behavior I throw off, / And pay the debt I never promised, / By how much better than my word I am / By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes.” (I.ii.78-81). Leaving aside the disingenuousness of such a scheme, this is surely the most incredible – literally speaking – explanation of the storyline seen by common perception that can be imagined. But Shakespeare does not stop here; the entire play seems to be an exercise in portraying Monmouth as tortured by the responsibility of preparing for the throne, while depicting Hotspur as a grasping fool… valorous, yes, but spending much of his time bickering with his allies and playing at dividing up territory… we see little in him of the maturity required to rule a nation.

-More on Monmouth: Shakespeare really is the the handy royal apologist: Harry Monmouth does not show his grief at his father’s illness not because he is not sad, but because there is no point in putting on what other people would view as a pretense. He cavorts around with his father’s crown not because he eagerly anticipates his own ascent to the throne, but because he truly, mistakenly believed his father to be dead, and wanted to “try with the crown as one would try an opponent.” My ass. “Accusing it, I put it on my head, / To try with it, as with an enemy / That had before my face murder’d my father, / The quarrel of a true inheritor.” IV.v.173-6.

-Through Shakespeare’s excellent writing, we conclude seeing Worchester as the ultimate villain… egging on Hotspur, lying to him as necessary, etc. This last is an essential part of Shakespeare’s case that Worchester is evil. But is he? Seeing no powerful argument here for the rights of Henry IV to the throne, we are inclined to accept, in the absence of any other story, Hotspur’s family’s story of how Henry IV ascended to the throne. And so ultimately, is this not merely a case of might makes right?

-Henry V… Shakespeare’s greatest hero? The entire war that is the central conflict of Harry V is waged on an imaginary pretense. We see clearly in the first act that the war is merely an attempt by the Archbishop of Canterbury to distract attention from a motion in parliament to seize the lands and possessions of the Church for the government. In the first scene he alludes to this law and mentions that to persuade Harry not to do it he will give him a huge sum of money. In the second scene, he unfolds Harry’s claim to the throne of France. He is by FAR the most forceful advocate of the war; indeed, almost its only advocate, aside from some peripheral comments from Exeter and Westmoreland. When Harry responds with worries on Scotland’s aggressiveness, Canterbury brushes them aside and replies that Harry should only take a quarter of his military to England… almost as if he wants Harry to fail… aren’t Harry’s inadequate numbers a major problem later at Agincourt?

Oh the arrogance of this apologism!  The scene where Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey are arrested is reminiscent of Jesus and Judas… wonderment is expressed that mere money could corrupt these three, much like it is said that Judas handed over Jesus for as base a motive as 30 pieces of silver. Henry calls it an inadequate motive, especially for Scroop. He further emphasizes that for his own person, he exacts no revenge, but for the safety of the kingdom, much as Judas’s offence was not against Jesus, but against the whole moral order of the world. And finally, like Judas, the traitors consider themselves unfit to live, and bemoan their crimes while dismissing their capital end. Perhaps the comparison is not so much arrogance… Judas and Brutus are the prototypical traitors, and I suppose it could be expected that they would be the first sources of comparison for anyone discussing treason.

-Finally, a recurring theme in this series of plays is the burden of monarchy.  Consider Henry V IV.i.116-170 and Henry IV, Part 2 III.i.6-32.

Review – Labor Pains

Lindsay Lohan stars in a movie about a secretary who tells her boss she is pregnant to stop him from firing her.  The movie mixes some hilarious and awkward moments with some awkwardly boring and hackneyed filler.  Ms. Lohan’s acting is perfect as usual, though her decision to die her hair is something like deciding to paint your shiny new BMW dirt brown.

There is perhaps little to be gained from a mostly-hackneyed made-for-tv comedy, but the story does follow a common literary motif, which I shall call the “comeback motif”.  Ms. Lohan’s character, Thea, after spending the time preceding the movie as a secretary living beyond her means and doing a poor job at everything finds, while living her new lie, that she now has a second chance at everything because of the different way that people view her.  She spends much of the movie “putting her life together”.  The motif is common: the hero has a dark and repugnant past, often criminal, usually “wasted” from the perspective of the audience.  Given a second chance, he seizes it and begins to act in a “virtuous” way, again from the perspective of the audience.  Often, the central conflict of the story is that even as the hero virtuously improves his lot in life, his repugnant past stalks him and eventually he must face and defeat it.

The motif is of interest because, if used properly, can perhaps be used to gain insight into the way a society views virtue.  For instance, Thea’s road to virtue is working late (till 9:00!), getting promoted, doing good work, and finding a faithful, upwardly mobile partner.  These are the classic American materialistic virtues, the Protestant work ethic in art.  Work hard and you shall find success.  There is little emphasis on any inner transformation in Thea.

This may all be a case of circular reasoning: how can we identify the motif unless we first label some part of the hero’s behavior after his second chance as being virtuous self-improvement?  But perhaps this misses the point of identifying literary motifs in the first place.  The application of a motif is to understand and frame a story, to model it and reduce it down to its parts.

Whatever the purpose, I find the materialistic framing of Thea’s steps to rebirth after her second chance interesting, even if “Labor Pains” was a dubious use of my time at best.