October 31, 2005
BUSH FIGHTS BACK. NOW TARGET TEHRAN
Now that the President has come off the ropes and has hurt his foes with a right hook to the jaw, Horsefeathers hopes he finishes them off with a knockout blow: a missile strike on Damascus--and/or Tehran. Hurry up please, it's time.
October 29, 2005
SCHOOL FOR NON-SCANDAL
Afficionados of scandal know the really juicy ones involve sex, lies, money and politics. Best of all are scandals in which hubris is followed by humiliation, and in which someone previously thought to be virtuous is exposed. Horsefeathers always turns hopefully to Page Six, after checking the box scores. We take non-partisan pleasure from scandals, since they derive from unchanging human nature and afflict liberals as well as conservatives. Regrettably, the 'Scooter Libby' scandal is pretty thin gruel. Where's the sex angle? Maureen Dowd sure tried when she spoke of Judy Miller's "entanglement" with Libby, but even she subsequently backed away from that one. Money? Nothing there. Lies? Okay, perhaps Libby lied to the grand jury (we'll adhere to the increasingly rare notion that an indictment is not proof of guilt)and that's a bad and stupid thing to do when there was no underlying crime, but is it scandalous? All one has to do to answer the question is recall the Clinton lies. Blow jobs in the oval office. Now there was something worth lying about! Besides we've known for centuries that government officials lie, as do journalists. In the 18th century, Dr. Johnson wrote: "...An Ambassador is said to be a man of virtue sent abroad to tell lies for the advantage of his country; a news-writer is a man without virtue, who lies at home for his own profit..."
Fortunately, there is future scandal potential in the prospect of bloviating self righteous journalists, the Tim Russerts of the MSM on the witness stand. Hypocrisy exposed can be satisfying, even in the absence of sex and money motives. Of course sex has not been entirely absent from the Libby investigation; the talking heads have worked themselves into a state of quasi-masturbatory excitement leading up to the indictment. However it's pretty obvious that their agenda-- bringing down the President and reliving their role in the Vietnam war, arouses only themselves and their fellow Bush haters of the Cindy Sheehan-Lyndon LaRouche-Michael Moore-Howard Dean left. Deep down they have to be disappointed by the prosecutor, Robert Fitzgerald for his statement that "This indictment's not about the propriety of the war." That's exactly what the MSM wants it to be about, and without that, where's the scandal?
October 22, 2005
OUR GOOD FRIEND, MAHMOUD ABBAS
"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
---George Orwell
Mahmoud Abbas, Holocaust denying disciple of Yasser Arafat, is now pretending to be a peace seeking moderate. He issues pious pronouncements deploring violence---on both sides, of course. Meanwhile, since Israel withdrew from Gaza what has occurred? Savagery and barbarism--except it is the so-called Palestinians who are murdering one another. Horsefeathers confesses to feeling some pleasure at this development. Since we believe the Palestinians are about as capable of organizing a functioning democratic state as our dog is of learning to speak Arabic, we'd prefer they kill each other and leave the rest of the world alone.
Mr.Abbas once again tried to play the victim card during his visit with President Bush. Accounts indicate (See Debka file)that the President wasn't buying. A particularly revealing demand was that the President lean on Israel to release imprisoned terrorists, or rather, in Mr. Abbas's words, "prisoners of freedom".
Bret Stephens reminds us what those prisoners of freedom were doing before they were caught. ".. One is Ibrahim Ighnamat, a Hamas leader arrested last week by Israel in connection to his role in organizing a March 1997 suicide bombing at the Apropos cafe in Tel Aviv, which killed three and wounded 48. Another is Jamal Tirawi of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades: Mr. Tirawi had bullied a 14-year-old boy into becoming a suicide bomber by threatening to denounce him as a "collaborator," which in Palestinian society frequently amounts to a death sentence.
And then there is 21-year-old Wafa Samir al-Bis, who was detained in June after the explosives she was carrying failed to detonate at an Israeli checkpoint on the border with Gaza. As Ms. Bis later testified, her target was an Israeli hospital where she had previously been treated--as a humanitarian gesture--for burns suffered in a kitchen accident. "I wanted to kill 20, 50 Jews," she explained at a press conference after her arraignment..." See the rest here.
President Bush believes that freedom is a universal yearning. For many Arabs that means the freedom to murder innocent Jews. Turning that murderous impulse inward against themselves is a preferrable outcome. Even Abbas's honeyed words, his efforts to blame Israel, cannot conceal the horror at the heart of Arab darkness.
October 18, 2005
NOTES ON WORDSMITH INTELLECTUALS: THE CASE OF HARRIET MIERS
"From the beginnings of recorded thought, intellectuals have told us their activity is most valuable. Plato valued the rational faculty above courage and the appetites and deemed that philosophers should rule; Aristotle held that intellectual contemplation was the highest activity. It is not surprising that surviving texts record this high evaluation of intellectual activity. The people who formulated evaluations, who wrote them down with reasons to back them up, were intellectuals, after all. They were praising themselves. Those who valued other things more than thinking things through with words, whether hunting or power or uninterrupted sensual pleasure, did not bother to leave enduring written records. Only the intellectual worked out a theory of who was best."
--Robert Nozick
In his famous essay, Why Do Intellectuals Hate Capitalism the late Robert Nozick tried to explain the widespread anti-capitalism of wordsmith intellectuals. He attributed it to the contrast between the praise for their verbal facility in school and the actual financial rewards granted them after their school days ended. The coin of the realm in school- high grades, summa cum laude diplomas, Rhodes scholarships and membership in self-flattering clubs like Phi Beta Kappa, produce expectations of similar welcome from the post-school world. Once out of school, however, our capitalist society doesn’t grant its greatest remuneration to wordsmiths, and so they become disaffected anti-capitalists. This is true as far as it goes, but Horsefeathers would add that there are many conservative wordsmith intellectuals, supporters of capitalism, who nonetheless share basic attitudes and assumptions with their liberal counterparts. Their wordsmith identity transcends mere economics. It's a matter of self definition. Nozick is correct to observe that outside the classroom, in the schoolyard, other things like athletic skill, leadership, physical prowess are rewarded. Horsefeathers recalls his own experience, assuming that classroom word skills would translate into schoolyard respect. It was a hard lesson to learn that instead willingness to take an elbow in the ribs without complaint on the basketball court counted for more than vocabulary. Horsefeathers also took note of the fact that the prettiest girls in high school seemed more impressed by baseball exploits than by insights into poetry.
Nozick is certainly correct in emphasizing the resentment of wordsmiths at a system that doesn't usually accord them great financial rewards. After getting straight A’s and grad school fellowships, spending 2 years at Oxford, sipping tea and shivering through the winter at Balliol, while discussing A.J. Ayer, it comes as a narcissistic blow to discover that a tenured professorship in English may not provide the income of a skilled plumber.Many attempt to recover from that wound by becoming pundits, and by criticizing their less verbally adept, intellectual inferiors. It restores a sense of high mindedness to pontificate on matters that may be of limited interest to all but their fellow pundits. Harriet Miers, barely known to them, is the perfect ink blot onto which they can project their deepest anxieties and resentments.
Horsefeathers naturally values words highly; after all we have plied the 'talking cure' for many years. Furthermore, we had an undergraduate education that included composing numerous essays for the likes of Lionel Trilling, F.W. Dupee and Mark Van Doren. Words were valued highly.When F.W. Dupee offered a spot in Partisan Review to a 20 yr. old undergraduate it constituted more flattery than he could handle at the time. The essay, on James Joyce never got revised and published. Amongst our fellow undergrads, pre-Meds were regarded with scorn, sort of like economics majors, as careerist philistines, uninterested in the higher pursuit of Truth and Beauty. How fortunate we were, to escape the prison of wordsmith pursuits to attend medical school! There it became quickly apparent that verbal skills were not nearly as important as we wanted to believe. Rather, skills reminiscent of the schoolyard appeared crucial. There were doctor-teachers, not noted for verbal glibness, who deftly wielded a life saving scalpel. This was immensely noteworthy to a bookish student. They often improvised and invented creative solutions to life and death problems. There were others who remained remarkably cool under pressure, and with a life hanging in the balance could quickly and skillfully insert a tube in a trachea, or thread a needle up a collapsing vein to deliver life saving medication. Horsefeathers remembers hesitating to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a suddenly collapsing, drug addicted, filthy and smelly man, but once doing so becoming part of a lifesaving moment. A wordless pat on the back was the sum total of praise received. This was very different from receiving Lionel Trilling’s encouraging words for an essay on Kafka, but it instantly became part of Horsefeathers’ sense of identity. A life saved can mean more in the long run, than kudos for one's intellectual astuteness. I learned I could be a doer, not just a word deploying idea man. All my literary strivings, my readings of symbolist poetry, my in depth assessments of Isaac Babel-- turned out to be of no importance when dealing with a post-op patient’s sudden bleed.
Apart from medical school experience, (regrettably no longer necessary to become a psychotherapist) calling on various non-verbal skills, there was the closeup view of real scientists and their research. No matter what the field or how remote from practical experience it seemed, one became acquainted with non-verbal creative thinking at the highest level. In fact, it became apparent that these scientists possessed a creative intelligence at least equal to the verbal pyrotechnics of a Saul Bellow or a John Updike. Experiments were devised that our precious wordsmiths would find too gruesome and unacceptable. In some fundamental way, we came to understand that these scientists were, in fact, smarter than our admired Professors of Literature. And is it not true, at this point in the early 21st century that the achievements of modern science far outstrip those of modern literature? In addition, we noticed that scientists seemed less interested in transforming themselves into adored celebrities in the way of so many contemporary wordsmiths. They weren’t constantly shouting to the world: ‘see how smart I am’. Certainly they possessed normal human ambition, and delighted in recognition, but, unlike writers like Normal Mailer, or Saul Bellow or Philip Roth, their central goal was the acquisition of knowledge, not celebrity. Still they sometimes had their acolytes, devoted to truth and beauty and convinced that words they uttered were sacred objects
Nozick’s analysis, as we have said, is incomplete, because there are many wordsmith intellectuals who do admire capitalism. Many of them write for National Review and The Weekly Standard. They are up in arms about the nomination of Harriet Miers. Horsefeathers would argue that what wordsmith intellectuals possess in abundance is a defensive disdain for those who do not share their overvaluation of words. In the Harriet Miers kerfuffle, we see wordsmith pundits, many whom we admire, going absolutely off the deep end because they don’t see, in Miers, one of their own. Horror of horrors, they don't recognize this SMU grad, this Texan who chose to attend non-Ivy schools. To David Brooks her prose is stodgy and lifeless. Brooks is utterly unaware of his own condescension, as is Frum. After all is said and done, Miers didn’t go to Harvard. She must be incapable of subtleties of thought. Yet has anyone produced more banality than Brooks in his superficial sociological disquisitions on American life? We’d say he produces approximately 1 out of 8 columns that can hold our interest until we’ve consumed our second cup of coffee. David Frum, an ex-speech writer has organized a petition to stop Ms. Miers even before she has had a chance to appear before the judiciary committee. Why? One suspects that Ms. Miers, in her duties at the White House, may have dared to correct or question something Mr. Frum wrote. Yet what deathless prose, or profound insights has Mr. Frum given us over the years? “Axis of evil”. Okay, and after specifying that we frequently agree with him, Mr. Frum has coasted pretty far on that particular banality. That plus his Ivy League, wordsmith credentials.
Let us be clear: we yield to no one in our wish that our President possessed the eloquence of Winston Churchill. However, it’s not his eloquence that ultimately determined Churchill’s place in history. After all, who knows whether Churchill’s pseudo Shakespearian prose style will stand the test of time. But his willingness to wage war until the end is a fact of history that cannot be effaced. Besides, if eloquence were all, Adlai Stevenson would occupy a role in the pantheon of political greats. Churchill is renowned for what he did, not for what he said. Mr. Bush will be remembered for what he did: going on the offensive against our Islamo-Nazis foes.
Horsefeathers is not especially concerned with the quality of Harriet Miers’s prose. In our life experience, skilled wordsmiths often turn out to be immature, the kids who ran to teacher when the schoolyard fight broke out. They readily panic under fire. It’s so easy to be a pundit, discoursing on the mistakes made by the doers. Further, while Horsefeathers recognizes the importance of the Supreme Court, the incredible significance wordsmith intellectuals give to its every utterance seems, to us non-lawyers, exceedingly parochial. Technology and science continue to change our lives far more than the verdicts of the supreme court. There ARE other institutions governing the workings of Democracy in the U.S. It is not highest on our list of priorities to see the poor legal reasoning in Roe v. Wade confronted and overturned. We know all the slippery slope arguments about the dangers of permitting social agendas to govern the court, but we have more faith in the common sense of the people to eventually prevail. And it's time to let go of it and get on with life in a world where technology will soon render debates about embryonic life meaningless. Roe V. Wade may have constituted poor reasoning, but it happened, and what are the results? We are physicians, and we do know that, since Roe V. Wade the days of women dying from infected abortions taking place under dreadfully unsafe conditions are over. Is that entirely bad? Furthermore, as Steven Levitt points out in Freakonomics, fewer unwanted children has meant less crime and lower social costs, thus more benefits to the rest of society. Whether the “Roe effect” has benefited conservatives electorally is also a question, since there are indications that liberal women have more abortions, thereby reducing the number of likely liberal voters 18 years later. In any case, though, the very same conservatives who argue that the Supreme Court has too much power over our lives, themselves grant it such power by making it appear that the appointment of one or another judge outweighs all other matters, including the prosecution of World War IV.
It comes down to this: wordsmith intellectuals, whether liberal or conservative, share a defensive disdain bordering on condescension to non-wordsmiths. They elevate their own importance, even in the intellectual realm. After all, how much do such pundits as Brooks, Frum, Lopez, et.al.understand of the greatest intellectual achievement of modernity: science? We see no evidence that they do. Instead, their grasp of the arcana of law, and of modes of legal argumentation is evident. Where is the understanding of the imperfect nature of human knowledge that would lead to a certain degree of modesty in describing someone like Harriet Miers whom they know so little about? Evidently wordsmith intellectuals, of left and right share an affection for utopian schemes of human improvement. They exalt the written and spoken word, and disdain the likes of Miers, for whom words are merely one among a number of means for mastering reality. At times our conservative pundits sound as though 8 justices all voting in lockstep with Antonin Scalia would bring Paradise on earth. Do they really think claims and counterclaims would not occur, and that arguments on all sides of issues would not have to be sorted out? Don’t they understand that even the finest mind can shift positions as facts change and new circumstances emerge? They are absolutists, dogmatic in their certitude and they risk alienating those allies who think life is complex, with often equally valid competing claims. It’s strange to see conservatives lacking the tragic awareness that life is full of complexity and that the law can never provide absolute certainty. The preference for great ideological battles, is a manifestation of the immaturity that is a built in inevitability for wordsmith intellectuals. Perhaps, after all, they should re-read the great classics of Western literature and relearn the lesson of flawed human nature. In these circumstances, we hope Harriet Miers prevails.
October 14, 2005
New York Times Headline:
At Least 85 Slain as Rebels Attack in South Russia.
A truthful headline would have read:
At Least 85 Slain as Muslim Terrorists Attack in South Russia.
In Timespeak, it takes reading deep deep into the 13th paragraph of the story before the "rebels", the "guerillas", the "insurgents" the "gunmen" are identified as, guess what? Muslims. I guess by then they'd exhausted their vocabulary of terms to conjure images of romantic rebellion, or else their efforts to shove the truth about the savages who murder innocents down the memory hole just ran out of steam.
October 13, 2005
In addition to writing unwatchable plays, Harold Pinter's contributions to literature include such memorable words as the following: " The <9-11> atrocity in New York was predictable and inevitable. It was an act of retaliation against constant and systematic manifestations of state terrorism on the part of the United States over many years, in all parts of the world..."
Can anyone guess why the Nobel Committee picked him?
October 11, 2005
I GOT THE BASEBALL BLUES
The end of the baseball season is a gloomy time for Horsefeathers. In fact we share Bart Giamatti's sense that baseball's final days, in October, are grimly foreshadowing other endings in life. It puts us in mind of Archibald MacLeish's great poem,
You Andrew Marvell, wherein he writes:
And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night
......
And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift, how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on.
And yet, Horsefeathers spent much of the last month gratefully enjoying baseball at Yankee Stadium. The flaws of the current Yankee team were evident all season and by the All Star break we were resigned to a season of loss. We had come to love the game in the World War II years, when players with names like Coker Triplett and Oscar Grimes butchered ground balls and made every game an adventure in mediocrity. Those were days when George (Snuffy) Stirnweiss, a pudgy second baseman, won a batting title hitting .309. Now the quality of play has become so fine that it gratifies our love of the game, even when our rooting interest seems doomed. Then, somehow, Joe Torre got his collection of rich, pampered athletes to play as a team, to submerge their individual talents in the larger enterprise aimed at winning.
We refuse to join in the orgy of A-Rod bashing, because we remember the many times this season when he made great plays in the field, or launched home runs to propel the team to victory. Without him, the Yankees would never have won the AL East and gotten to the playoffs.
One of the symptoms of the decline of our civilization is the behavior of fans, fueled by sportswriters and sportstalk radio. Everyone is an expert and a hanging judge. It’s ‘what have you done for me today?’ We should cherish this great athlete, and yet, and yet…. There is an unavoidable contrast between Rodriguez and his contemporary, Derek Jeter, the team leader. What is it that allows the less talented Jeter to lead and to lead by example. ‘Oh captain, my captain’ ran through my mind as he fought heroically to get the decisive win last night. You could see him urging his teammates on. Don’t quit, don’t give up, fight to the end. On the Normandy beaches Jeter would have been figuring out how to get up those cliffs at Pointe du Hoc. A-Rod might have been the best sniper, the most skillful rock climber, but he’d have been all too human, too anxious, too aware of his feelings, to take the kill shot. I recalled last night, those mid summer revelations of Rodriguez—that he had been in therapy with 3 different therapists at the same time: one for his marriage, one for his problems of early childhood and one for his sports related problems. Clearly he is immersed in our Oprahfied, therapeutic culture, where there's a therapist for every imaginable condition, as well as therapists ready to correct the actual conditions of life. He seemed determined to show that there really is crying in baseball. Could it be that the immense talent he possesses has been feminized so that in the showdown, the shootout at the OK corral, where the masculine virtues---focused aggression, the will to triumph and defeat the enemy---were absent. Is his talent undermined by softness of character and a yearning to be loved? How many times did he try desparately to hit a home run, only to wind up swinging and missing. What A-Rod needs is not therapeutic empathy, not encouragement to bare his soul and be more metrosexual. He needs to remember that baseball is a game whose object is to utterly defeat the opposition, preferably crush them so their defeat erodes their confidence. Self reflection is NOT required and may be paralyzing. If A-Rod’s reports of his fatherless childhood are meaningful enough to make him flinch from the ultimate triumph in order to protect his father from his own aggression, that is interesting to a psychoanalyst. But if it translates into a strike out when he’s expected to deliver a hit, such knowledge is worthless. We see plenty of people who fail in order to defeat their parents. However, is such psychotherapeutic exploration helpful to Rodriguez? We doubt it. Instead, we think Rodriguez would do far better if he stayed away from grievance counseling therapists, and read Thucydides or Victor Hanson on the nature of warfare. He's still young and if he can harness all of his talent in the service of defeating the Yankee foes there's no limit to what he can accomplish.
October 10, 2005
HORSEFEATHERS LOVES FUR AND SLAPSTICK
Anna Wintour, Editor-in-chief of Vogue, was hit in the face with a tofu pie this weekend in Paris. She was attending the Chloe fashion show. The thrower of the pie was an agent of PETA. PETA was miffed because Vogue runs fur ads and will not accept ads from PETA even for ready money. This is the second time this year that Wintour has got a tofu pie in the face from PETA.
Ordinarily Horsefeathers does not take sides in high fashion politics, but this event provides an opportunity to comment on two or three important issues: Excess, Power, and Symbolic Speech.
First, Excess. Clearly, two times is too much.
Power. Where there is no remedy for power so trivial that only a Frenchman would be interested, an occasional tofu pie in the face is a just reminder of one’s place in the universe. Even Kolinsky, the sly God of Celebrity and Fur, winks at the event.
Symbolic speech, which PETA would say a tofu pie in the face is, is a concept that is, to Horsefeathers, mostly meaningless. Speech (and written words) are, in fact, made up of symbols that stand for real things or acts but are meant to be used instead of real things and acts to express meanings more clearly and precisely. For example the words (written or spoken) “Anna Wintour, I hate and despise you because you are shallow, materialistic, and think you’re such hot shit because you’re the editor-in-chief of this shallow, materialistic magazine that nobody reads but shallow, materialistic people who think they’re such hot shit.” Such words express a great deal of meaning much more precisely than hitting Anna Wintour in the face with a tofu pie. But Horsefeathers does acknowledge that hitting Anna Wintour in the face with the tofu is funnier. Why?
Because it is something each one of us would like to do to Anna Wintour while she is the editor-in-chief of Vogue, even though one may not even know her. The words just don’t do it. Uttering those words, although accurate, would be humiliating because they suggest that our place is beneath hers, whereas the roles are momentarily reversed as the pie arrives on target.
So although Horsefeathers ordinarily views so-called symbolic speech as acts of aggression and not symbols at all, in the case of tofu pies in the face of the high and mighty it can only wink slyly like Kolinsky, the God of Celebrity and Fur and shout “Two Cheers for Tofu Pie!”
October 08, 2005
THE SOUND OF SILENCE: GOOD NEWS ON THE POP CULTURE FRONT
One remarkable indicator of improvement in American life: there seems to be no audience for infantile 'protest' music. Could it be that America has grown up enough since Vietnam so as to no longer welcome puerile adolescent rants disguised as pop art? Is it possible that the vast audience outside of Manhattan understands that this war is NOT Vietnam redux, and doesn't welcome songs telling us to embrace our enemies? In a Chicago Sun Times article, a '60's wannabe, Ekesa Mumbi Moody, (perfect!) laments that "...most pop songs are about love, partying or relationship drama.
''The climate of today is not really focused as much as it was then on being able to speak about different cultural issues or different situations that were going on politically,'' says Alicia Keys."
Horror of horrors, consumers of popular music might be more receptive in wartime to a love song like I'll Be Seeing You, than to a moronic protest song about the evils of the 'Bush regime'. Horsefeathers gives two cheers to the American consumer of popular culture. When will its producers wake up?
October 06, 2005
PAYBACK TIME FOR FRANCE: THEY'RE DROWNING IN THEIR OWN WINE
The French government, the French press, and the French intellectual establishment, members of the French elite all—eaters of snails and lovers of nuanced politics—love to make fun of Americans. They like to think of us as crude, simple, inarticulate, and tasteless Coke drinkin’ cowboys.
And two years ago when America—savior of France in 1944 and protector of France for fifty years of the cold war—needed a hand in ridding Saddam and his two psychotic sons from terrorizing the nations of the Middle East, the charming M. Chirac and the beautiful M. de Villepen smiled and thumbed their noses at us.
Horsefeathers is indebted to American novelist Alan Furst for supplying the description of the French character more succinctly than any other that we have encountered: Le plus on leur baise le cul, le plus ils nous chient sur la tete.
The more you kiss their ass, the more they shit on your head.
Two years ago, in response to the French betrayal, Horsefeathers decided to make a small economic war against the snail eaters. We declared an embargo on French imports, especially wine. We cancelled our flights to France, stopped buying Roquefort, replaced our cave with wines from Australia, California, even Chile, singing happily that we regretted nothing.
Sooner or later the worm turns. Payback time has arrived. In today’s New York Times we discovered that French winemakers have been forced to turn their wine into fuel for their cars and trucks because of a glut of wine on the market. French wine exporters are selling less than one tenth of the amount they used to sell to the United States. Apparently Horsefeathers’ indignation was not an isolated reaction.
America’s payback is not the only factor involved in France’s wine misery but it contributes significantly to the market collapse. The price of a bottle of wine in France is now about the same as a bottle of water.
Anyone who wants to share in the schadenfreude can click [HERE].
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
Horsefeathers was delighted and remains so, that Saddam Hussein was removed from power at relatively small cost in the history of warfare, and that Iraq remains a killing field for Jihadis. Our interest in whether the backward denizens of the Middle East achieve Democracy is less than our desire that they live in constant fear of what we will do to them should they attempt another 9-11. We're cheered that Arabs are killing other Arabs, rather than killing only non-Arab 'infidels'. We discern signs that infidels who fight back mercilessly are less and less the favored targets of jihadis. We also find that, rather than fueling appeasement, the ongoing depredations by Muslim jihadis are opening the eyes of many a naive utopian. The true believers in the cant emitted by our State Dept. seem fewer. How many still can assert with a straight face, that Islam means peace? Meanwhile, as Arabs continue their centuries old feuds and turn on each other with increasing ferocity, we can enjoy the spectacle of the Shiites despatching Arab justice to their tormenters, the Sunnis. These religious lunatics have as low a regard for each other as Horsefeathers has for all of them. Amazingly, there was a moment of blinding truth that, once uttered, was quickly smothered in diplomatic tut-tutting and apologies. It came from, of all people, Iraq's interior minister, Bayan Jabr, on Oct. 2 when he lashed out at Saudi diplomacy. Referring to Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, Jabr said Iraq would not be lectured by "some Bedouin riding a camel." Right on Mr. Jabr! He then added, referring to the House of Saud, "There are regimes that are dictatorships; they have one god, he is the king, he is god of heaven and earth, and he rules as he likes. A whole country is named after a family." When will we hear such bracing honesty from our own diplomats?
October 05, 2005
HORSEFEATHERS GOES TO THE MOVIES: LORD OF WAR
The new movie, “Lord of War” is “Major Barabara meets “Leviathan.” Anyone with a deep respect for human nature and a yen for an intelligent movie, for a change, will enjoy Lord of War. It is a dark satire written and directed by Andrew Niccol, a native New Zealander of all things, about a young man who grows up in Brooklyn’s “Little Odessa,” surrounded by Russian gangsters and finds his road to the American Dream by becoming an arms dealer. Becoming increasingly successful, he ends up selling to anyone who is interested in buying guns, tanks, helicopters, grenades, whether they are good guys or bad.
Our hero, Yuri Orlov, played by Nicholas Cage, is not exactly a hero, but not exactly a villain either. He is in fact both devil’s advocate and choric figure, much like that great character in “Major Barbara,” the international arms dealer Sir Andrew Undershaft.
The film is a political satire and darkly comic when showing, in fascinating depth, the international arms market, an industry never shown in film in such detail before. It is one of those rare films that is all about morality but is not preachy or appears to take sides, so the viewer is left with space enough to come to his own unique moral resolution, but not without thinking about the matter long after the closing credits are gone from the screen.
The screenplay is clever, even witty at times, in the use of music, visual effects and even sound effects—for example in one sequence every time a shot is fired you hear a cash register ring. And Cage’s acting and narration is extra-dry, even brut—perfect for the astringent tone of the film. Despite the forces of good arrayed against him—his wife, his brother, the good guy Interpol policeman played by Ethan Hawke—only Yuri understands, intuitively, the truth of his position in the universe. Like Undershaft he is a “necessary evil.” And like Undershaft in “Major Barbara” and Satan in “Paradise Lost,” Yuri has all the best lines.
You must not come late to the film lest you miss a brilliant tour de force during the opening credits. In fact Lord of War is one of the smartest screenplays of the year. Andrew Niccol, the author, is the writer of such thought-provoking films as “Gattaca,” “The Truman Show,” and “S1m0ne,” in “Lord of War” he shows his wit and satirical gifts as well.
Of course, as one might expect, the movie was not well received by members of the liberal press. A case in point is the review in the New York Times of September 16, 2005 written by the Times’ arrogant, intellectually challenged second-string reviewer, Manohla Dargis. “The screenwriter for ‘Lord of War,’ Andrew Niccol, lavishes a great deal of time and many words building a case against guns; unfortunately, the film's director, who also happens to be Mr. Niccol, enjoys playing with toy guns. His words may say no, but his overworked, overslick visual style says lock and load, baby.
“…it can be hard to hear the message (if there even is one), especially when that message carries a familiar, been-there, done-that…moralism. Like: guns are bad, corporations are soulless, and some first world governments traffic in third world misery. To which any reasonably informed viewer might be expected to wonder, and your point is what, exactly?
“Mr. Niccol's point here, it appears, is both to entertain and to instruct with the story of Yuri, a Russian émigré who rises from humble Brooklyn to become a globe-trotting gunrunner with all the moral reasoning of a flea….”
It is difficult for Ms. Dargis to see the point because she knows but one morality, has a tin ear for irony and a stunted sense of humor. Her moral sensibilities are easily overpowered when she encounters ideas like the Hobbesian notion that given human nature, war is a universal aspect of life.
In any case, if you're looking for an entertaining, intelligent action movie that will give you something to think and talk about afterward—this is the one.
<< Back to Horsefeathers
