Election roundup
My apologies to my readers who are anxious to read my analysis of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. I’m getting to it. In the meantime, these three articles on the McCain campaign caught my eye and express my feelings much better than I could. All three are worth clicking through to.
All politicians stretch the truth, massage it into the best fit with their message. But, let’s face it, John McCain is running a campaign almost entirely based on straight up lies. Not just exaggerations or half truths but the sort of straight up, up-is-down mind-blowers we’ve become so accustomed to from the current occupants of the White House … John McCain is running the sleaziest, most dishonest and race-baiting campaign of our lifetimes. So let’s stopped being shocked and awed by every new example of it. It is undignified. What can we do? We’ve got a dangerously reckless contender for the presidency and a vice presidential candidate who distinguished her self by abuse of office even on the comparatively small political stage of Alaska. They’ve both embraced a level of dishonesty that disqualifies them for high office. Democrats owe it to the country to make clear who these people are. No apologies or excuses. If Democrats can say at the end of this campaign that they made clear exactly how and why these two are unfit for high office they can be satisfied they served their country.
So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him. On core moral issues, where this man knew what the right thing was, and had to pick between good and evil, he chose evil. When he knew that George W. Bush’s war in Iraq was a fiasco and catastrophe, and before Donald Rumsfeld quit, McCain endorsed George W. Bush against his fellow Vietnam vet, John Kerry in 2004. By that decision, McCain lost any credibility that he can ever put country first. He put party first and his own career first ahead of what he knew was best for the country … McCain made a decision that revealed many appalling things about him. In the end, his final concern is not national security. No one who cares about national security would pick as vice-president someone who knows nothing about it as his replacement … McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable. And McCain – no one else – has proved it.
Crooks. That’s the only word for it. There’s no noble or higher purpose here, there’s nothing admirable about it, not even in the most brutal, Machiavellian sense. They’re liars. They’re crooks. It is taken as a Republican given that anything that can gain power is justifiable, regardless of how loathsome it is or how depraved the fabrication … If we welcome open, direct lies into our political discourse, it’s not political discourse anymore — just the oratorical equivalent of an organized crime ring. McCain knows he can lie through his teeth and almost nobody will truly call him out on it — at least, not compared to all the people who will hear the lie. That’s been the strategy for every election involving the old Nixonites, from then until now, and there’s no chance it’s going to go away until there is a price to be paid for being a nationally televised liar. So when’s that going to be?
An idealist, but also a realist
MILFs and fishes.
A few days ago, I posted a snarky little piece on Sarah Palin. In it, I suggested that McCain, in giving Palin the VP slot on the GOP ticket, was rallying the far-right base by dangling the very real possibility of his imminent death in front of their hateful, blood-thirsty little eyes. To the left, I suggested, Palin is a veiled threat, but to the right she’s a coded promise.
Spielberg: Saving Private Ryan part 5
Act V of Saving Private Ryan goes from 2:07:00 to 2:42:27. Its structure is a little more complex than the previous three acts and in many ways it is a mirror of Act I. Each of the acts of Ryan has three "chapters" to it, but both Act I and Act V are weighted with extended battle sequences. Act I’s is 25 minutes long and is followed by two shorter chapters, Act V’s is slightly shorter, 21 minutes, and has only a 4-minute suspense sequence as a prelude, followed by a brief 4-minute epilogue. Both Act I and Act V are bookended, of course, by the "present-day" scenes in the Normandy cemetery. Spielberg being Spielberg, he "stands Act I on its head," making the Act V small where Act I’s was big, Act V about hand-to-hand struggle while Act I is about massive numbers of men overwhelming the odds. To take it further, Act V’s battle is about outmatched Americans defending a losing battle against a larger, more well-supplied force rather than Americans attacking a German defense position. It’s almost as though Spielberg, in Act V, puts us in the positions of the Germans in Act I — the shoe is on the other foot now, as it were, the heartless bastards of the pillbox have become the terrified GIs of the bridge at Ramelle.
Spielberg: Saving Private Ryan part 4
Act IV of Saving Private Ryan is its shortest and most quiet. It contains only one brief battle scene and a large chunk of "meet the cast." It goes from 1:44:00 to 2:07:00 and, like the previous two acts, has three sections, which I will call Meeting Ryan, Preparing for Battle and Edith Piaf.
Spielberg: Saving Private Ryan part 3
Act III of Saving Private Ryan lasts from 1:13:30 and goes until 1:40:00. Like Act II, it’s divided into three sections, which I will call The Plane(*), The Radar Station and Steamboat Willie.
Spielberg: Saving Private Ryan part 2
In all the excitement of Act I of Saving Private Ryan, I forgot to ask the all-important question: What does the protagonist want?
In Act I, of course, Capt Miller "wants" nothing more than "to take out that pillbox." To do this, he must risk his own life and the lives of dozens of his men, his metaphorical brothers and sons. It’s a first act not unlike the first acts of the Indiana Jones movies, a brilliantly-staged succession of purely physical actions — how does one retrieve a golden idol from a booby-trapped temple, how does one get from a Shanghai nightclub to an Indian village overnight, how does one take out a heavily-fortified pillbox from an inferior position.
This may be why some people dislike the opening of Ryan — narratively, all the 25-minute battle sequence does is show how Capt Miller took that pillbox. It could have been disposed of in a five-minute title sequence. Miller could then get his marching orders regarding Ryan by minute 10, the movie could have been an act, and a good half-hour, shorter. If it is not advancing the story of the saving of Private Ryan, what is that superlative opening sequence doing there?
Some further thoughts on Sarah Palin
I realize now that I’ve misinterpreted the nomination of Sarah Palin. When the story first broke, I was horrified and insulted that McCain would think so little of his honor and his country to nominate someone so vastly unqualified for the job. The idea that McCain, 72, feeble and approaching senility, would put this coarse, dim-witted monster a heartbeat away from the presidency was the final blow to my respect for him.
At the time, it seemed like Sarah Palin was McCain’s attempt to gather votes from disaffected Clinton supporters, and in that regard she was an insult of the highest degree, the notion that Clinton supporters would be so stupid as to vote for any woman, regardless of her neanderthal policies. Since then, partly though the courtesy of some of my readers here, I’ve learned that the purpose of nominating Palin was not primarily to lure Clintonites but to energize the Republican base, the evangelicals and fundamentalists, the anti-choice, anti-science, anti-compassion hard-liners whose only argument with Bush/Cheney is that they didn’t pursue their agenda strongly enough.
I now understand that, to a liberal, Sarah Palin is a crippling nightmare because she stands an excellent chance of becoming president, but to the Republican base, she’s an electrifying dream — because she stands an excellent chance of becoming president. McCain isn’t "throwing the base a bone" by nominating one of them to a powerless office, he’s extending hope to the base, who strongly disliked him before but will now come out and vote for him in droves in the hope that McCain will, in fact, die and office and give them the president they really want. To the majority of the country, McCain’s message is "You better hope I stay alive in office," but his message to "the crazies" (Rove’s term, not mine) is "Hey, you never know, I’m an old, old man."
Spielberg: Saving Private Ryan part 1
The more I look at it, the more I feel Saving Private Ryan is Steven Spielberg’s best movie. It’s not fun like Raiders, not fun like Jaws for that matter, and perhaps a tad less startlingly original than Close Encounters. It’s more emotionally devastating than Schindler or E.T., and less manipulative than both — it earns its sucker-punches several dozen times over. It’s a little earnest and occasionally leaden in its use of irony, but the execution — oh my lord, the execution. Conceptually, as a work of cinema there is little new, but Spielberg pushes his work as a director into ever-more sophisticated and surprising areas. The movie’s philosophy is simple — deceptively so — and presents a vision of wartime sacrifice and patriotism of unusual depth and complexity. Hold on, this is going to be really long.
Fairies and Fantasy: Eragon
I watched Eragon with Sam (7) and Kit (5) tonight, and, now that I know that there are untold legion of fantasy-movie fans within my readership, I have a question:
Why wasn’t this movie a bigger hit?