Thoughts on recent movies seen-one "old", one "new".

Recent movies seen: 1) "East of Eden", 1955. Julie Harris, James Dean, Raymond Massey. 4 stars (out of 5). I've tended to avoid James Dean movies becuse the whole Dean phenomenon is so depressing (including the fact that the car accident that killed him wasn't his fault, despite popular belief), but I've read the book (Steinbeck) so I did want to see the flick. It's a pretty heavy melodrama. You may know it's a modern telling of the Cain and Abel story, but the best scenes in... the movie are those between Cal (Dean) and his mother (Jo Van Fleet), who he'd been told was dead. She's now running a bordello in a nearby town.
 

She's cold to him at first, but comes to see him as a like-minded rebel against Cal's father and his religious convictions. She eventually develops something close to motherly affection for him. The performance by Van Fleet is in many ways the highlight of the movie, and for once the deserving person actually got the Oscar (Best Supporting Actress). So-what would Dean's career have been like? Would he have been able to graduate to truly adult roles? Paul Newman was at his best when he played punks, such as in Hud and Cool Hand Luke. He was never quite as good again. Maybe the same for Dean. I don't know.


2) "No Country for Old Men", 2007. Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin. 4 1/2 stars. This is a Coen Brothers movie-screenplay/directing. Llewelyn Moss (Brolin) is shooting deer in the West Texas bush country. He misses the deer, but stumbles upon what's left of a drug deal gone gruesomely wrong. There are bodies everywhere, one guy barely alive begging for agua, and $1.5 million in cash-which Moss takes. Big mistake. (You need to overlook the fact that whoever killed most everybody left all that money behind).


Anyway, Moss later feels guilty over leaving the guy begging for water, goes back, and his truck gives him away. Javier Bardem is the psychopath who chases Moss and kills people with an ususual method best not detailed. Tommy Lee Jones is one of the old men of the title, those not prepared for a world where dozens are killed over a suitcase full of money. All the performances are fantastic, the dialogue is crisp and often funny, and despite the brutality the movie is, as they say, compulsively watchable.

Here are some things I really don't like

I don't mean to go all Andy Rooney on my readers (ah, the conceit that I have readers!), but it's a lot easier and more entertaining to write about things you don't like than those you do. (Right, Miriam?). Nobody wants to hear about how pretty the sunrise was, or that great dessert you had at Elaine's. (Elaine's is closed now anyway).


Nope-people want to hear why you hate Trump, or the Democrats, or kids driving around with bass blasters in their cars, or those little nasty yapper dogs, or people using their cell phones on speaker, or Jehovah's Witnesses (just tell them you didn't see the accident, as my late friend Rob used to say), or people who've had too much nip and tuck work, or people smoking pot at SEPTA stops that you're forced to ingest (the smoke, not the people, which would be even worse), or people on paleo diets, or vegans, or male white wine drinkers, or beer snobs (Can you imagine anything dumber to be a snob about? "I drink craft beer". Who cares? Beer ain't exactly upscale).....


No, I don't actually hate these people. I hope I don't literally hate anyone. But most of the people above really, really annoy me. I'm a conservative, so I believe in minimal government, but legislation directed at all of the above would have my full support.


Get cracking, McConnell.

A few thoughts on Charlie Rose

You know, you can't really accuse people like Charlie Rose of hypocrisy. Yes, he mouthed the "pro-woman" platitudes of the Left. But as a progressive he doesn't really believe anything. A thoroughly secularized progressivism inevitably reduces everything to, "Whose opinion is fashionable right now"? . The debased sexual culture Bill Clinton and such helped create was fashionable for a while. Unfortunately for Rose, it's somewhat less so at the moment.

Of course, people need to believe something, so everybody grasps at some motivator, even if it's just empty money- and power- seeking. It's all "eat and drink, for tomorrow we die".

So you can't accuse the Left of hypocrisy. They do stick to their script. A plush Manhattan high-rise is a pretty obvious token of success, whatever the price might've been to get it.


But progressives can, with justification, accuse conservatives of instances of hypocrisy, since we claim loyalty to the eternal verities liberals laugh at. The violations are often glaring.

In any case, I always thought Rose was a pretty engaging guy, though he was an obvious partisan-only conservatives got tough questions. But Charlie wasn't quite as engaging as he thought young women found him.

So-men with power often exploit women. Should they then be deprived of power, or is The Pence Rule a good idea?

What remains

Some thoughts for All Saints Day, from our old friend GK Chesterton:


"You cannot deny that it is perfectly possible that to-morrow morning in Ireland or in Italy there might appear a man not only as good but good in exactly the same way as St. Francis of Assisi. Very well; now take the other types of human virtue: many of them splendid. The English gentleman of Elizabeth was chivalrous and idealistic. But can you stand still in this meadow and be an English gentleman of Elizabeth? The austere republican of the eighteenth century, with his stern patriotism and his simple life, was a fine fellow. But have you ever seen him? Have you ever seen an austere republican? Only a hundred years have passed and that volcano of revolutionary truth and valour is as cold as the mountains of the moon.


"And so it will be with the ethics which are buzzing down Fleet Street at this instant as I speak. What phrase would inspire a London clerk or workman just now? Perhaps that he is a son of the British Empire on which the sun never sets; perhaps that he is a prop of his Trades Union, or a class-conscious proletarian something or other; perhaps merely that he is a gentleman, when he obviously is not. Those names and notions are all honourable, but how long will they last? Empires break; industrial conditions change; the suburbs will not last for ever. What will remain? I will tell you the Catholic saint will remain."


'The Ball and the Cross.'

The case against football

I don't mean to sound like a sports prude, if there is such a thing, but if you're an NFL fan, these guys are suffering catastrophic brain injuries so you can be entertained. How can you be okay with that?


On various other blogs I've issued screeds about football-why the teams aren't really trying to win (they make money regardless), with the result that the sport is basically just a hugely successful TV show. Or about how the sixteen game season's small sample size makes it all kind of pointless anyway. Not to mention the degree to which the game's success is linked to all the free publicity it gets in the media, or how the hype to thrills ratio is pretty skewed given that there may be five or six exciting plays (lots of "three yards and a cloud of dust" skirmishes) in a dreary three hour TV show.


But those are simply matters of taste. Much more important is that we now know much more about how risky the game is, which may be why kids' participation in the sport is declining-America's parents have the good sense to protect their kids.


Dr. Bennet Omalu, whose pioneering research into football's dangers was actively resisted by the league, says kids under eighteen shouldn't play football at all. He has the same opinion, it should be added, about other contact sports-they are simply too risky for the developing brain.


For the NFL'ers themselves, Omalu says no equipment can prevent the injuries caused by huge guys moving at great speeds. Far too may become suicidal, or zombies.

Of course there are other arguments against the game-the current kneeling idiocy, the fact that so many of the players are, well, thugs.


But the safety issue is the big one.

Hitler or Hefner

This quote from Malcolm Muggeridge seems apt:

"If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefner".

RIP Hugh Hefner.

The bizarre ritual (anti-ritual?) of anthem protests

The phrase has a strange ring to it-"anthem protests". Who would protest the playing of their own national anthem? The anthem, after all, and the displaying of the flag, and any other civic ritual you could name, aren't some sort of declaration that a nation is flawless.

We celebrate America, or at least acknowledge its worth, as a sort of truism of shared values-that a people, with a given set of civic beliefs, have created and sustained a nation in line with those values. But what happens when those values are no longer widely shared?

I don't intend to wade into all the political controversies that have me convinced we're a nation in name only. I'll just mention that we have a founding document that establishes the rules of the civic game. Increasingly that document, and the laws that operate under it, are seen as just so many words on paper, when one side is unhappy with the results. When such a point is reached, where the consequences of a long-established democratic process are "illegitimate" because the wrong party wins or the wrong policy is instituted, we are in the process of rejecting what made America succeed. The entire system is based on the idea that the results of our political process are by definition legitimate.

The essential orientation of America-as a nation organized towards the promotion of freedom and prosperity-is now rejected by half the nation. Freedom is dicey because people can use it for purposes not tending towards "social justice". Prosperity-the creation of new wealth, with the ultimate purpose of starting and maintaining families-is irrelevant. Redistribution of existing wealth (with the exception of Silicon Valley's vast hordes of same) is paramount. The fact that greater redistribution doesn't yield greater economic equality is irrelevant.


So we have one side wishing to maintain the old order, and another rejecting it entirely. What the latter would establish may still maintain some of the forms of democracy, but they will be toothless relics. Whatever means necessary to get to nirvana will be acceptable.


UPDATE: Miriam has some interesting thoughts on what was intended to be a cost-free exercise in virtue-signalling.

FURTHER UPDATE: A further reason not to watch the NFL-an appalling percentage of these guys are thugs. Here are detailed NFL arrest records. 

ONE MORE UPDATE: "The brontosaurus in the room": Roger L. Simon on the lie behind the protests-the notion that cops are what's wrong with the black community.


AND FINALLY: No matter how you play with the numbers, it is black men who are doing most of the killing of black men.

I haven't read what you wrote, but I know you're an idiot

The New Atheists aren't, shall we say, a group of intellectual heavyweights.

Edward Feser is, by any reckoning, a heavyweight, and here he decries the NA's who assail his book Five Proofs of the Existence of God without, of course, having read it.

Good God.

Links-mostly controversial

It looks like Obama spied on Trump and his campaign, as he also apparently did on reporters like Sharyl Attkisson. There should be outrage from all sides on this, but we're past the point where anything but results matters to the Left.

A fun little plaything-CodePen chord progression arpeggio generator. I've wasted hours with this.

Ray Fair, an economist famous for his election models, shows you here how fast you'll decline in chess and sports as you age. It's not pretty.


Buying the iPhone X-an exercise in irrationality. 

Want to know exactly what Bob Dylan played on his XM Satellite and Sirius XM radio shows? Now you can, or at least "the Best of".


Cardinal Dolan wants liberals to like him a little too much. Bending over backwards to avoid the dreaded label of "Islamophobia" doesn't show much spiritual leadership, but then again most of our American bishops act more like administrators than spiritual leaders.

Built on a lie

It is always best, when possible, to seek simplicity rather than complexity. Complexity is often used to obscure, simplicity to illuminate.

One uncomplicated truth we might ponder-Life is better than death. When thinking about abortion, we hear it said that this is a nuanced issue, one whose many circumstances and intricacies must be dealt with before taking a position, on the issue in general, or any particular choice to sustain or destroy life.


But there is another uncomplicated truth here-abortion always ends an innocent human life. There are no exceptions. The victim is never a deserving one, regardless of the circumstances of conception.

The allegedly pro-choice position argues that the creation and sustenance of life are equally valid choices. It isn't hard to see that this is a barbaric position. Unless, of course, we prefer to believe a lie.

And it isn't hard to see that the main pro-abortion argument-it is a woman's "right to choose" (note the avoidance of the word "mother" in this context), because the decision affects her, and only her-is simply not true. Abortion affects the baby, the father, the grandparents, all other relatives, friends, the community, the nation, the world. All are wounded by this choice.

Lies must be challenged with truth, even when, as in this case, the truth is already known by all, in their hearts. Everyone knows what abortion is, and what it does. But it will never be time to stop uttering these truths, not until this practice is gone from the world.

Beautiful women and mountaintops-the uses and abuses of technology

Here is a nice picture. We see a beautiful woman sitting on a mountaintop, enjoying a magnificent view. She's reveling in the splendors of nature in all their glory. A true, ahem, mountaintop moment.

One problem, though-she isn't enjoying the scene at all. It might be hard to see in the image as uploaded, but her eyes are closed. She's having a wonderful time, but it's due to the music she's listening to, music she could just as easily listen to at home.


This is an ad for headphones, as you may have suspected. The evident message from our corporate overlords benefactors is that we now need headphones, smart phones, devices, everywhere and anywhere. All situations call for the injection of at least a little virtual reality, lest the real thing bore us, trouble us, or fail to entertain us adequately, as in the case of this woman and her mountaintop view.

You half-expect to hear of people watching their devices while having sex. As a means of enhancing the experience, you watch OTHER people having sex!

Technology can be used, has been used, to improve people's lives, but are we past that stage now?

The power of positive salesmanship, bigotry, and Sen. Feinstein

I ridiculed the Norman Vincent Peale "Power of Positive Thinking" way of thinking in my recent post on the value of "negative" emotions. Peale more than deserved deserved it-not only is it a silly worldview, if you could call it that, he was rather an anti-Catholic bigot, as evidenced by his comments in the 1960 election campaign.

But having mentioned Peale, Amazon's marketing bot keeps putting that book, which apparently is still a big-seller, in the ads you see here. I have no control over that, of course.


Peale's comments put me in mind of the recent controversy started by CA Senator Dianne Feinstein, who bashed Federal court nominee Amy Barrett for her unconcealed Catholicism. Peale and Feinstein would likely agree on little, but both seem to think a good Catholic is one who should, well, shut up in public if he is serious about his faith. Peale would censor Catholics; Feinstein both Catholics and Peale.

The Left now endorses a narrow "freedom of  worship", rather than our long-established "freedom of religion", in which you may attend any religious service you like, but had better not bring those views to the public square.

Feinstein and many of her Democratic colleagues advocate the notion that secular politics is "neutral" politics, that early 21st century deism is the default, unbiased view of thinking folks. But, to state the glaringly obvious, it is not a neutral view, any more than a Catholic, evangelical, Muslin, or any other more explicitly worldview would be.


It is not, to be sure, really a secular view. It is more of a seemingly unreflected-upon Moral Therapeutic Deism-it doesn't exactly deny God, since few Americans are atheists. Rather, MTD reduces Him to a figure on the periphery, a vaguely benevolent figure who wants us to be happy but is little involved in human affairs, and certainly not politics.

September 11

On the "first" September 11, I was living in North Carolina. Somebody called and said, "Turn on the TV", and it was done. We witnessed the events. The day is otherwise a blur to me. I didn't watch the videos of the planes crashing into the buildings for many years. They still have an unreal quality to me, like a scene from a bad movie.
It is no good to pretend that in our modern world we have no enemies, that human nature has changed for the better, or that "the arc of history bends towards justice".
History, and the events of a mere sixteen years ago, teach us otherwise.

Emotions, good and "bad"

We tend to think of certain emotions-fear, anger, sadness-as bad. We are told to "think positive", or "Don't be so negative!". One particular quasi-religious empire was built around "positive thinking". Another, more contemporary one, tells us that a different sort of positive thinking combined with meditation will "attract" wonderful things to us, somewhere from the deep recesses of a universe that somehow is both personal and impersonal at the same time.

In any case, the so-called negative emotions are so described because they are unpleasant. No one likes to feel them, unless, I suppose, you're a pain glutton, patterning yourself on Jack Nicholson in The Little Shop of Horrors, but as an emotional, rather than physical, pain junkie.


For the rest of us, though, emotions act as signals. And so they cannot be bad in themselves. They tell us, remind us, to "Avoid this", or that "I'm sorry I lost this". We could no more lose our unpleasant emotions and be fully functioning humans than we could do the same if we lost our pleasant ones, or our reason.

But when we experience that signal, that pain, we want to turn away. We want to shut it down, now. Often this is a perfectly reasonable. So much of what we see on the Internet is designed to work us up to a strong emotional reaction, get a click, drive numbers.


But much of the time, in "real life", that strong reaction indicates there's something here that we need to think about. This is especially true if the reaction is particularly powerful. If someone says something I react to strongly, I must ask myself why this is. Am I really inconsiderate, or too slow to ponder why a given viewpoint angers me? What am I walling myself off from?

In a age of using electronic devices to, in effect, alienate ourselves from what we truly feel and think, it strikes me that these are worthwhile questions.

Trump steals black baby as trophy of TX trip, plans to make her White House mascot

As often as Trump says or does something beyond ridiculous, our "dispassionate" media will always out-Trump him. The two sides-the media, and Trump the media manipulator-truly deserve each other. They're basically Mo and Larry of the Three Stooges, poking each other in the eye on a daily basis. Enjoy the next three and a half years!

In any case, the above headline is a fake-I think. The difference between the National Enquirer and the New York Times is now more what schools the reporters went to than content.


We got Trump for a lot of nasty reasons, all of which are too unpleasant to detail, and he is no real antidote to any of that, but yes, Hillary would've been worse. That's what we're reduced to.

I didn't vote for him. I voted for Evan McMullin. The Mormon Roundhead.

Embarrassing.

A few good links

Some worthwhile reads:

Lynn on enjoying the eclipse, and also enjoying things that we see every day. Which makes me think of this: click it! (TY Dustbury.)

Ann Althouse on the outrageous Trump. 


Terry Teachout names his favorite big band tracks. Well, there are no tracks by Maynard Ferguson, Don Ellis, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Buddy Rich, or Thad Jones-Mel Lewis, but it's still a nice grouping.

Edward Feser and Joe Bessette present the Catholic case for capital punishment. It's impossible to argue, from a Catholic perspective, that CP is intrinsically wrong, like abortion or euthanasia.


Megan McArdle-"As a woman in tech, I realized these are not my people". Reflections on the Google memo.

Cartoons can be useful. 

"God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another"-Hamlet. The Bard might wonder at some current lunacies, like presto-chango sexes.


Father Mitch Pacwa, no longer SJ, is tossed out of the Jesuits after being caught with a Catechism.



538 has the Dodgers getting to 114 wins, two shy of the record.

Tear 'em down?

There is, you may noticed, some controversy over the Confederate statues that are found all over the South (having lived there, I can tell you every town has one), and even the US Capitol.

I'm 57 and do not recall any uproar over the statues until quite recently. So-have we suddenly come to some profound new understanding of what the statues' continued existence means? Or, do the statues, which denote an unavoidable fact of history that has had an enormous impact on life both North and South, lack in themselves any particular moral meaning or message as regards the justness of the Confederate cause as such?

As you may have guessed by the way I have framed the question, I am not persuaded that removing the statues amounts to anything more than virtue-signaling. The monuments may have been erected to, in various cases, celebrate slavery, honor the "valiant" fight against Northern oppression, or even (most likely I imagine) to merely commemorate the dead and wounded of virtually every Southern town.

I think the most important question, though, is-what do the statues mean NOW? Are they treated as shrines to The Lost Cause? Do people gather around them to ponder the halcyon days of the antebellum South? No-the memorials just note that the War we read about in books and on Wikipedia really did happen, and that it had a real effect on the towns and cities they're found in.

Ultimately, I ask: Why didn't we hang Jefferson Davis? We didn't hang him because you allow the defeated some measure of dignity, and allow history, rather than brute force, to settle issues where possible.

We all know the Confederate cause was a stupid one, in that it was both economically backwards and required the continuation of an evil institution. The point hardly needs to be reinforced.

Healing vs. Recovery

Distinctions are sometimes made in the field of mental health between "recovery" and "healing". I have tended to think of the former as simply representing the cessation of the more unpleasant symptoms of mental illness, and as a mere "way station" to true healing.

I am persuaded now, though, that healing is better described as completed recovery. Recovery calls for good coping methods to deal with the effects of the trauma that induced the "illness" in the first place. Once such methods are in place (therapy, exercise, proper nutrition, prayer/contemplation, etc), and have become habitual, then we can begin to heal-or rather, continue to heal. Note that medication should be used only as a last resort, and patients should be weaned off all psychotropic drugs as soon as possible. Medication can do no more than mask symptoms-it can never promote growth.


What is healing, then? It is the casting off of all false selves. It is becoming truly what we are, with no accommodations to the trauma that caused the false selves to arise, or to social norms. Does that mean we become moral free agents? No, it means that our truest selves are driven by love for others, and ourselves. Evil is "unreal"-it exists, to be sure, but only as a manifestation of unpursued goodness.

The truth is, we tend to either follow social cues, and pursue a path of mindless conformity, or go our own way for its own sake, casting ourselves as contrarians, as relentless pursuers of Truth, when in fact we may just be snobs. (I tend to be guilty of the latter). Neither is healthy.

It may sound solipsistic, and excessively in tune with the mindless slogans of our warped culture, but in fact we only need to be ourselves. The best, truest version of ourselves. This is wholeness. This is the healed human.

We slouch, exhausted but unified

Yes, Americans are in agreement about something, amazingly enough in these ultra-polarized times. Everybody but everybody agrees that 2016 was a cosmically awful year, the sort of year that must be punishment for something. Scandals, terrorism, ugly elections, foreign intrigues....God really piled it on in 2016, didn't He? We get it, Lord, we get it.

Or do we? I won't even speculate what the ill-treatment might be a result of. We all have our favorite pop culture or political targets, and most of them deserve all the scorn that can be thrown at them. But a loving God doesn't allow the unworthy success of a talent-free rapper or blowhard politician to be cause for an unrelieved twelve months of misery.


No, it must've been big this time. God really doesn't want to get into the backseat where the kids are, like a Cosmic Father pushed too far, but He will do it when it's called for. But we weren't just spilling soda back there or playing that damned awful music too loud.

I don't really have any answers, other than that our slide into post-Christian anything goes continued at its usual hurried pace this past year. But, nostalgia aside, that's nothing new. People have been bitching about the secularization of Christmas, say, since the first one, when I understand the Bethlehem Chamber of Commerce hit on the idea of having guided tours of the stable where Christ was born for a mere five shekels a pop.

Nope, it's nothing new. But maybe we've reached a tipping point. I don't know how you'd know such a point has been reached, and I'm more than aware that talk like this always spawns the "everything's cyclical, everything can't go downhill at once" response. Maybe.


The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. 

We must not question

To foster social harmony, the results of elections must be accepted unquestioningly by all parties, each and every time the Democrats win.