Quote of the Day posts

“Just as the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say 'thou shalt not' to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. ... Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.

”Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “disposable” culture which is now spreading. ...

“In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.”

-- Pope Francis in his first apostolic exhortation. You can read more here. Or almost anywhere.

Idiots on the right have criticized Pope Francis and imply someone has “gotten to him.” (“Yeah, Jesus,” came one reply on Twitter.) Idiots on the left say, "Hey, Pope, what about ...? then mention their pet cause.

Me, I'm just happy to have God on my side for a change.

“Saladin Chamcha in The Satanic Verses had been another attempt to create an anti- or opposite-self, and it was puzzling that in both cases these characters whom he had written to be other than himself were read by many people as simple self-portraits. But Stephen Dedalus was not Joyce, and Herzog was not Bellow, and Zuckerman was not Roth, and Marcel was not Proust; writers had always worked close to the bull, like matadors, had played complex games with autobiography, and yet their creations were more interesting than themselves. Surely this was known.”

-- Salman Rushdie in his memoir “Joseph Anton,” pg. 596

“She was capable of saying things of such majestic narcissism that he didn't know whether to bury his head in his hands or applaud.”

— Salman Rushdie, in his memoir “Joseph Anton,” about model/actress/chef Padma Lakshmi, whom he eventually married and divorced.

“I will freely admit joining in the mockery of Ronald Reagan for his naps and gaffes, and of George W. Bush for his struggle, as someone memorably put it, 'to wrap his lips around the English language.' But such mockery is nothing like the malice that rose against Jack Kennedy in his time and rises today against Barack Obama, for reasons that start with resentment of his race, and his grace, and just roll on from there, looking for presentable rationalizations.”

-- Ron Meador in his MinnPost piece, “Ugly political malice isn't as new, or as marginal, as we might like to think,” as he recalls cheers that arose from his sixth-grade classmates in Indiana when the teacher announced the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy. See also: “Heading into Nut Country: from Dealey Plaza to the Tea Party.”

From The Presidential Papers of Norman Mailer, special preface, written after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, for whom the book was ostensibly written:

Still, John F. Kennedy was a remarkable man. A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped. Kennedy was not in a hurry to stop us. I would not be surprised if he believed that the health of America (which is to say our vitality) depended in part on the inventiveness and passion of its outlaws.

Do we give too little credit for the rhetoric of our politicians? To the ways they attempt to appeal to us? For the ways they think we are? They think we are enough like this that it will help them win the election. And in thinking that, and in winning, do they make us more like that?

In my lifetime, it's always felt like the GOP has been the party of the past, and of smallness, selfishness and exclusiveness, while the Democrats have been the party of the future, and of inclusiveness. It has the larger spirit. I think JFK reflected this in his rhetoric. I think Pres. Obama does so now.

“If you sit by the river long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.”

-- a Chinese proverb, attributed to Confucius, which I came across in Salman Rushdie's memoir, “Joseph Anton,” pg. 532

“Time will say nothing but I told you so
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.”

-- W.H. Auden, in his villanelle, “If I Could Tell You,” which the father of a friend quoted on his daughter's Facebook page for her birthday. Pays to have smart friends.

“It is the biggest payout for assaulting people's eyes since 'Transformers 3.'”

-- Stephen Colbert on the $38K that former UC Davis campus police officer John Pike received in worker's comp. He claimed psychiatric damages (anxiety and depression) after footage of him pepper-spraying seated “Occupy” protesters in the eyes in Oct. 2011 became a viral hit.

“Dear God ... A distinguished novelist once told me that she had stopped writing fiction for a time because she didn't like her fans. I wonder if You can sympathize with her position.”

-- Salman Rushdie, in a letter to God, from pg. 283 of “Joseph Anton,” Rushdie's memoir of the post-fatwa years.

“I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up.”

-- Larry Klayman of Freedom Watch, a conservative political advocacy group, in front of the White House today.

Giving Klayman a run for his money.

“Some of the current GOP delusions: the deficit is rising (it isn’t); the debt is currently unsustainable (it isn’t); the public wants Obamacare ended (it’s split on even delaying it); climate change has nothing to do with human-produced carbon emissions (it is, according to almost every single reputable scientist examining the issue). Why are we surprised that the people who predicted a Romney landslide a day before he was trounced might actually be prone to believing in things that simply are not true by any empirical, objective standard? That’s the true danger here. Their epistemic closure is now not just threatening them, but all of us.”

-- Andrew Sullivan, “The Debt Ceiling Denialists,” The Dish

From Andrew Sullivan regarding a poll showing 41% of independents blame the GOP Congress for the gov't shutdown, while 33% blame Pres. Obama:

I’d find the narrow split among Independents unnerving, if I were the president. 33 percent blame the president for the shutdown and impasse? Given that he has already conceded sequester-level spending, and has cut the deficit in the last three years by the swiftest amount since the end of the Second World War, what else do they want him to do? If he were to abandon his signature domestic achievement after re-election, because of blackmail, we might as well give up on elections and representative government altogether.

I'm disappointed by those numbers but not overly surprised. We're not a smart people. We don't deserve what we've been given. We've been handed something on a platter, and we ask if we can have the platter, too.

Here's your talking point, also from Andrew Sullivan, if you run into one of the 33%:

What president has ever “negotiated” repealing a duly enacted law because one faction in one House has decided that it will shut down the government and destroy the US and global economy if he doesn’t? When has such a thing ever happened before? What are the Republicans offering in return? Nothing but the maintenance of basic government functions.

That's why it's blackmail, kids. That's why it's unprecedented. Figure it out, fuckers.

Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, wonders whether publishers don't have responsibility in the Texas schoolbook controversy:

When this issue is discussed, the publishers are talked about as if they have no agency, no ability to affect the outcome of these events. But they're morally culpable for participating in these farces. If they wanted, they could stand up to the state of Texas. So how can the people who work at a publisher in good conscience agree to write a biology textbook that treats evolution as a wild, unsupported idea? What if the Texas Board of Education demanded that their books discuss the “controversy” about whether the Earth travels around the sun or vice-versa, or the “controversy” about whether earthquakes happen because the turtle on whose back the world sits is scratching an itch, or the “controversy” about whether stars are actually faeries winking at us from up in the sky? Would the publishers say, “OK, if that's what you want, we'll write it and print it”? Someone should ask them where they draw the line on their integrity.

My review of “The Revisionaries,” a 2012 documentary on the subject.

So what is it about Texas and schoolbooks? A schoolbook depository in 1963 changed America's future. Now schoolbooks in Texas are trying to change America's past. Both for the worse.

“At midnight last night, for the first time in 17 years, the Republicans in Congress chose to shut down the Federal Government. Let me be more specific: One FACTION of one PARTY in one HOUSE of Congress in one BRANCH of government shut down major parts of the government. All because they didn't like ONE law.”

-- Pres. Obama, Oct. 1, 2013.

Ezra Klein, “Don't Forget What the Shutdown is Really About,” The Washington Post:

1) This is all about stopping a law that increases taxes on rich people and reduces subsidies to private insurers in Medicare in order to help low-income Americans buy health insurance. That's it. That's why the Republican Party might shut down the government and default on the debt.

Andrew Sullivan, “'What Kind of World Do These People Live In?'”  The Dish

Are you, Republicans, prepared to say that the countless working Americans who cannot now afford any of this should carry on without it indefinitely? People only have one life, you know. It can erode pretty quickly. On what moral grounds do you consign people to this fate when it is currently unnecessary? ... What hallucinating, self-serving monsters have you become?

Jonathan Chait, “How to Depose John Boehner,” New York Magazine:

Shutting down the federal government is not, by a far sight, the most dangerous, cruel, or ideologically blinkered thing the House Republicans have done. But it is surely the most baffling. They have taken an issue, broad disapproval of Obamacare, where they enjoy a modest but persistent advantage and turned it into an issue — shut down the government over Obamacare — where they stand at an overwhelming, three-to-one disadvantage. They stepped on the message of what’s sure to be Obamacare’s glitchiest day. They’ve followed a course of action their leaders know full well stands no chance of success yet carries massive downside risks. For an act of comparable cost-benefit political stupidity, you have to look to politicians who screw interns or hookers, and even that has a biologically explicable motivation.

The New York Times Editorial Board, “John Boehner's Shutdown”:

At any point, Mr. Boehner could have stopped it. Had he put on the floor a simple temporary spending resolution to keep the government open, without the outrageous demands to delay or defund the health reform law, it could easily have passed the House with a strong majority — including with sizable support from Republican members, many of whom are aware of how badly this collapse will damage their party. ... But Mr. Boehner refused.

Jon Stewart, “The Daily Show”:

This is not a game of chicken [as described in the mainstream media]. This is when someone is driving to work, and there's a car coming directly at them in their lane. That's not a game of chicken. That's an asshole causing a head-on collision.

Black Canseco, Twitter:

Everytime a White #GOP-er says “#Obamacare is like Slavery” I try to picture my ancestors going, “Man this is like healthcare!” #tcot

— Black Canseco (@BlackCanseco) October 1, 2013

The New York Daily News:

Feel free to add more below.

“Financial markets have long treated U.S. bonds as the ultimate safe asset; the assumption that America will always honor its debts is the bedrock on which the world financial system rests. In particular, Treasury bills — short-term U.S. bonds — are what investors demand when they want absolutely solid collateral against loans. Treasury bills are so essential for this role that in times of severe stress they sometimes pay slightly negative interest rates — that is, they’re treated as being better than cash.

”Now suppose it became clear that U.S. bonds weren’t safe, that America couldn’t be counted on to honor its debts after all. Suddenly, the whole system would be disrupted. Maybe, if we were lucky, financial institutions would quickly cobble together alternative arrangements. But it looks quite possible that default would create a huge financial crisis, dwarfing the crisis set off by the failure of Lehman Brothers five years ago.

“No sane political system would run this kind of risk. But we don’t have a sane political system; we have a system in which a substantial number of Republicans believe that they can force President Obama to cancel health reform by threatening a government shutdown, a debt default, or both, and in which Republican leaders who know better are afraid to level with the party’s delusional wing.”

-- Paul Krugman, “Rebels without a Clue,” NY Times.

Most of the quotes I quote (yes) are so I can remember them to quote them later. This is something I first read and wrote down in 1987:

He is so exceedingly anxious to justify himself that if he thinks he has said anything too precipitate or too general or only half true, he never stops qualifying, modifying, and extenuating, until at last he appears to have said nothing at all.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” pg.45

I've known people like this. Sometimes I'm one of them.

“In a way, you can see why the food stamp program — or, to use its proper name, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) — has become a target. Conservatives are deeply committed to the view that the size of government has exploded under President Obama but face the awkward fact that public employment is down sharply, while overall spending has been falling fast as a share of G.D.P. SNAP, however, really has grown a lot, with enrollment rising from 26 million Americans in 2007 to almost 48 million now.

”Conservatives look at this and see what, to their great disappointment, they can’t find elsewhere in the data: runaway, explosive growth in a government program. The rest of us, however, see a safety-net program doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: help more people in a time of widespread economic distress.“

-- Paul Krugman, from his piece ”Free to Be Hungry" in today's New York Times. Read to the last graf. (Like good to the last drop.)

“What Congress is doing right now is important. Unfortunately, right now the debate that's going on in Congress is not meeting the test of helping middle-class families. It's just ... They’re not focused on you. They're focused on politics. They're focused on ... trying to mess with me. They’re not focused on you.”

Pres. Barack Obama speaking at a Ford manufacturing plant in Liberty, Missouri, after the House GOP voted once again to defund Obamacare. This is a day after they voted to cut $39 billion from the food stamp program.

The votes on the passage of the budget, tied to defunding Obamacare, was 230-189, and pretty much along party lines—although one Republican, Scott Rigell, Virginia, voted against the defunding. Of the 10 Washington state reps, three of the four Republicans (McMorris Rodgers, Reichert, Hastings) voted in favor of defunding Obamacare; one (Herrera Beutler) didn't vote. The six Dems (McDermott, Kilmer, Larsen, DelBene, Heck and Smith) all voted against.

The above quote begins at 1:12:

“Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd, two of the most influential opinion columnists in the nation, are bad opinion columnists. Friedman is facile and dull. Dowd is snide without being witty, repetitive, and an occasional plagiarist, and worse. Today, they both have new columns in the New York Times. Both are bad. Not their worst work, but perfectly representative of what makes each of them bad. Which one is worse? Let’s investigate, together.

”Here is Thomas Friedman’s 'lede,' silly journo-speak for 'first sentence': 'I was at a conference in Bern, Switzerland, last week and struggling with my column.' Has ever a more Friedmanesque sentence been published?

-- Alex Pareene, “Who wrote a worse column today, Maureen Dowd or Thomas Friedman?”, on Salon.com

“You have to finish things—that’s what you learn from. You learn by finishing things.”

--Neil Gaiman, writer, via the brain pickings site.

“The Reagan Administration’s decision to tolerate Saddam’s depravities [with chemical weapons] proved to be a colossal moral failure and strategic mistake; it encouraged Saddam’s aggression and internal repression, and it allowed Iraq to demonstrate to future dictators the tactical value of chemical warfare.”

-- Steve Coll, “Crossing the Line,” on the history of chemical weapons use and what Pres. Obama should do in Syria, Sept. 9, 2013.

“Losing is the great American sin.”

-- sportswriter John R. Tunis (1889-1975), as quoted in Robert Weintraub's “The House that Ruth Built,” pg. 61.

“Chick's ass is like an onion—makes me want to cry.”

-- Hank Shrader (Dean Morris) in “Crazy Handful of Nothin',” season 1, episode 6 of “Breaking Bad.”

I know. Patricia and I are way late to this party; and while it's not giving me “The Wire” vibe yet, I'm liking it. Shrader seems this show's Roger Sterling: the eminently quotable semi-charming asshole.

We're now up to season 2.

Mark Harris, author of “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollwyood,” started a bit of a contretemps when he tweeted the following earlier today:

Current indie pet peeve: Lazy, slack, flabby dialogue and unshaped scenes passed off as “naturalism.”

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) September 5, 2013

Most folks were just dying to know which movie, or movies, he was talking about (I have my own thoughts), but Richard Brody of The New Yorker replied as follows:

@angryaesthete @thehighsign The taut and the shaped are not intrinsically better; such movies are often just airless plot mechanisms.

— Richard Brody (@tnyfrontrow) September 5, 2013

It's a common disagreement among critics and moviegoers: the well-structured and dull vs the formless and dull. I like being surprised by the new as much as anyone but lately I haven't; lately I've grown bored with the indie aesthetic. More from Harris:

@tnyfrontrow @thehighsign ...but what I'm seeing is directors who don't know how to write trying to turn their inability into an aesthetic.

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) September 5, 2013

Ha! Then this exchange:

@tnyfrontrow That's true only if you view directing as authorship and scripts as a blob of clay a non-artist hands to an artist. More later!

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) September 5, 2013

Brody, by the way, was the man who liked “Tabu” so much.

More later, as the man said.

In 1919, William Bridges Adams was appointed director of the Stratford-on-Avon Shakespeare Festival and pushed to use the theater for film as well as plays. Controversy ensued. George Bernard Shaw weighed in thus, as recounted in “Bernard Shaw on Cinema,” edited by Prof. Emeritus Bernard F DuKore:

In my opinion the Governors of Statford Memorial Theatre have acted very sensibly in resolving to sue the theatre for the art of the cinema instead of leaving it to eat its head off or harbor casual touring companies or strolling entertainers, very few of whom provide as edifying an entertainment as a well-conducted cinema theater with a good orchestra. There is nothing wrong with the cinema that is not equally wrong with the theater; and until Mr. Bridges Adams brought genuine Shakespear performances to Stratford the so-called performances of Shakespear's plays there were a far grosser insult to his art, his authority, and his memory than the films of Mr. Chaplin, in whom Shakespear would have been delighted.

And why leave off the “e” in Shakespeare's name? Short answer here.

Chaplin and Shaw hanging with British Airwoman Amy Johnson and Lady Nancy Astor in 1931. (Shakespeare not pictured.)

“Originally, believe it or not, Labor Day actually had something to do with showing respect for labor.

”Here’s how it happened: In 1894 Pullman workers, facing wage cuts in the wake of a financial crisis, went on strike — and Grover Cleveland deployed 12,000 soldiers to break the union. He succeeded, but using armed force to protect the interests of property was so blatant that even the Gilded Age was shocked. So Congress, in a lame attempt at appeasement, unanimously passed legislation symbolically honoring the nation’s workers.

“It’s all hard to imagine now ... that Congress would unanimously offer even an empty gesture of support for workers’ dignity. For the fact is that many of today’s politicians can’t even bring themselves to fake respect for ordinary working Americans.”

-- Paul Krugman, “Love for Labor Lost,” The New York Times, Sept. 2, 2013

Caught in the vise between high rent and low wages: a problem of the old Gilded Age and the new one. 

“So the notion that the public, which is generally happy to ignore critical opinion when it comes to big commercial releases, was suddenly compelled to obedience in the case of 'The Lone Ranger' seems a bit dubious.”

-- A.O. Scott, responding to charges, mostly from the movie's principles (Depp, Hammer, Bruckheimer), that all-powerful movie critics killed “The Lone Ranger” at the U.S. box office in a way they couldn't with ... take your pick: the “Transformers” movies, the “Twilight” movies, the latter “Pirates” movies. It's such an absurd charge you want to slap Depp across his pretty, privileged face.

Scott's article, “Maybe 20 Years From Now, Tonto: Reconsidering Box Office Bombs Years After the Fact,” which is unnecessarily careful, uses “Ishtar” as an example of a critical and box-office bomb that is getting a modern-day rehearing and possibly parole, and wonders which critical and box-office bomb this summer, in what is now officially called the summer of box-office bombs, might be rehabilitated 20 years from now. Scott picks “Lone Ranger,” since revisionism has already begun. But the French critics (and British critics, unnamed by Scott) who hold it up still need to answer, for me anyway, the following matters:

• If Tonto and the Lone Ranger are both created from tragedies of their own making, why are they treated like comic relief?
• Why further juxtapose the comic (Tonto and Lone Ranger getting away via railway handcar) with the genuinely tragic (the slaughter of the Commanches)?
• If the point is to upend the heroic myth via the comic and tragic, why buy into the heroic myth (complete with Wm. Tell Overture) in the final act?
• What the hell is Helena Bonham Carter doing here with her rifle leg?

Revisionist critics tried to do this with “Sucker Punch,” too. They tried to turn the stupid into the subversive. Best argument I've heard in this regard is still this reader's comment to my review of 2012's bomb, “Battleship.”

But “Lone Ranger”? Hi yo.

Apparently Johnny Depp believes that a powerless, dying race (movie critics) is secretly all-powerful.

“First of all, the Ichiro getting to 4,000 total hits thing is awesome. No qualifier. It’s awesome. Ichiro is a singular player, absolutely one-of-a-kind. No player in Major League Baseball history has stockpiled hits as quickly as Ichiro Suzuki. He has 2,722 hits in his first 13 seasons — that’s 175 more than Pete Rose. The fact that he now has 4,000 hits between his time in Japan and his time in the Major Leagues is a wonderful achievement and I’m glad it’s being celebrated. No qualifier. It’s awesome.”

-- Joe Posnanski, “Ichiro and Moon and Amazing Stories.” I'm with him through most of this: Ichiro, Warren Moon, stats that don't tell a true story. But I think he's wrong on adding in postseason stats. That's an unlevel playing field. That helps the counting numbers of the Yankees, maybe some Cardinals, maybe some Dodgers, maybe some Red Sox. It helps the counting stats of recent players, and the three- or four-tiered playoffs system, over players before 1969. It doesn't feel kosher to me. It feels like it's not telling a true story.

Ichrio Suzuki, tugging his sleeve, getting ready for one of 4,000 and counting.

“It is abominable that National Geographic would have anything to do with a hateful figure like Bill O'Reilly and I would be ashamed to have anything to do with the project.”

-- Rick Perlstein, author of “Nixonland,” to a National Geographic publicist who asked him to help premier their global television event, “Killing Kennedy,” based on O'Reilly's book. He says he hasn't heard back yet.

“An image comes to life here: a man on a piece of land. The land is damaged; the man has damaged it. But look: the man is powerful, strong and happy. ... This is what American history is like, but it is hard for us to accept: that a vigorous and splendid country could have been built by really guilty people. ... People who think that American enthusiasm ought to be curbed ignore this strong man and look only at the damage he has caused. Pinchot is one of a small number of powerful American men (Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt are others) who allow themselves to see both the glory of the vigorous man and the damage he has done. Pinchot takes note of the wonderful force that has been used to do the damage and asks that it be allowed to continue--but doing different work.”

-- George W.S. Trow describing Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, in his book, “The Harvard Black Rock Forest,” pg. 27.

“Obama’s political style is useless, apart from becoming the first black president, saving the US from another Great Depression, succeeding at getting universal healthcare, rescuing the American auto industry, presiding over a civil rights revolution, ending two failed wars, avoiding two doomed others (against Syria and Iran), bringing the deficit down while growing the economy, focusing the executive branch on climate change, and killing bin Laden. Yes, his ethos 'sometimes' 'collides' with political success.”

-- Andrew Sullivan, refuting Maureen Dowd's criticism of Obama's political style, in the post “MoDo's Pure Washingtonism.”

“If you're born with a gift, to behave like it's an achievement is not right.”

-- Woody Allen, What I've Learned, Esquire magazine. The whole thing is great. Make sure you read for the quotes on Mel Brooks, Bob Hope, and Ingmar Bergman. Not to mention his whole life philosophy—which, if you seen a Woody Allen movie in the last 40 years, not to mention the opening monologue of “Annie Hall,” you already know. In fact, see below.

“It's just an accident that we happen to be on earth, enjoying our silly little moments, distracting ourselves as often as possible so we don't have to really face up to the fact that, you know, we're just temporary people with a very short time in a universe that will eventually be completely gone. And everything that you value, whether it's Shakespeare, Beethoven, da Vinci, or whatever, will be gone. The earth will be gone. The sun will be gone. There'll be nothing. The best you can do to get through life is distraction. Love works as a distraction. And work works as a distraction. You can distract yourself a billion different ways. But the key is to distract yourself.”

“In the eyes of God, I doubt that I am a better person than Cap Anson. Self-righteousness is a poor foundation for a philosophy.”

-- Bill James on Joe Posnanski's site.

Short version: A Posnanski reader, quoting James, argued that Cap Anson doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame because he helped keep African-Americans out of the Major Leagues 100 years ago. Posnanski asked James to respond and he does so in measured and forceful fashion. Among other things, this point: “If you leave Anson out of a Hall of Fame, how would you justify including Ty Cobb? Cobb was certainly a MORE virulent racist than was Anson. Tris Speaker and Rogers Hornsby were members of the KKK. If Dizzy Dean had lived another six months he would have been indicted for fraud.”

“There are good reasons Baseball did not suspend any of [the previous superstars] by the way – but it still paints a picture. And the picture is of a bunch of kids trying to sneak into the ballpark without paying, and the helpless ticket guy (representative of MLB) trying to grab as many as he can, while shouting in a funny Irish accent: 'You … little … squirts … get back here … oh … when … I … get … my … hands … on … you!' And in the end the guy catches one, holds up him by the scruff of his neck, and says, 'I’ll make an example of this one, I will.'

”So Baseball wants to make an example out of A-Rod, and he’s the obvious choice because almost nobody likes him. Well, he brought that on himself. He’s pompous, a bit delusional, strange, certainly a cheater, certainly a liar, and anyway not good enough anymore to have many Yankees fans in his corner.

“When a governing body can unload on a wildly unpopular figure they tend do so with gusto and fury and all measure tossed out the window. So Baseball floated the crazy idea of a lifetime ban, cut off negotiations with A-Rod’s people, talked about keeping him off the field in the best interest of baseball and then slammed A–Rod with a suspension four-times longer (and many millions more expensive) than the others. None of it exactly seems 'fair' – the guy used steroids to become a better baseball player, like many others; he didn’t torch a village — but when it comes to A-Rod, how many people care about fairness?

“'Hit Da Roid!' the New York Daily News cover advised Rodriguez. 'Just Go!' the New York Post said a bit more succinctly.

So, at the moment, most people figure to side with Baseball no matter how big a suspension they give A-Rod. If they ruled that A-Rod should be imprisoned in the Tower of London, it would probably get 73 percent approval rating. But now the court shifts away from public opinion. The appeal process will probably take a while, allowing A-Rod to play. Baseball’s case against A-Rod might rely heavily on Biogenesis’ Tony Bosch, who isn’t exactly Walter Cronkite in the credibility department. They will have to make a strong case that what A-Rod did was SO much worse than what the others did. Maybe they have the goods. Maybe they don’t.”

-- Joe Posnanski, “Fair or unfair, Major League Baseball making example of Alex,” NBC Sports. Read the whole thing. So worth it.

“He was always thinking behind his own back."

-- Alison Rose, writing about her New Yorker colleague George W.S. Trow, in her memoir, Better Than Sane, as recounted in Ariel Levy's obit of Trow in New York magazine, Oct. 4, 2007.

Appropos of nothing: Without having known of the existence of this writer, I once wrote a novella about a young man obsessed with a girl named Allison Rose Landon.

“Who on earth was Ronald Reagan? The key is in the reaction of other Republicans to Mr. Reagan. They didn't know who he was. But they knew that when Reagan was allowed to be Reagan, something happened. What was that something? A kind of forgiveness, a kind of exit from every single difficult issue I've raised in this book. When Reagan was Reagan, you didn't have to think about it.”

-- George W.S. Trow, ”My Pilgrim's Progress: Media Studies 1950-1998,“ pp. 224

“Of the many traditions and quirks of baseball, I think my favorite is that baseball players — no matter how good or unknown or famous they might be — collect and return baseballs after batting practice. I love this tradition beyond words. I don’t mind baseball players getting hundreds of millions of dollars, not at all. They are fantastic athletes who play more games than anybody in any other sport, and they provide wonderful entertainment — they should get as much as anyone is willing to pay them. ...

But I hope that they always pick up their own baseballs. It’s a small thing, I know — we’re not exactly talking about the days when baseball players had to get winter jobs. But it represents something to me. Every time a coach shouts out, 'OK, get ‘em up,' and you see Barry Bonds or Derek Jeter or Chipper Jones or Dustin Pedroia or Miguel Cabrera go pick up baseballs and put them back into the bucket, I feel great. It is something that ties them to the game’s history. It is something that says,'No matter what I get paid, I’m a ballplayer — and while I might have yachts and sports cars and five homes, like all the little kids playing, I have to pick up my own baseballs.'”

-- Joe Posnanski, “Picking Up Baseballs,” a nice, even, piece about the recent firing of Tino Martinez as batting coach for the last-place Miami Marlins.

“[An FBI] file of only thirty-five pages: that must have disappointed Vidal when he saw his file. A file that contained no secrets—that, he would have said, was disheartening. And only half a dozen letters complaining about him. With a twinkle in his eye, he would have called that fact a crushing blow.”

-- Jon Weiner, The Nation, in his article, “The Gore Vidal FBI File,” about the 35 pages of nothing, and the lame right-wing attacks, that the FBI accumulated about Gore Vidal during the 1960s. At the same time, I think Vidal would have liked the notion that members of the FBI were forced to sit through “The Best Man,” taking notes. Like critics.

“... these tiny television listings [from 1950] ... were the seed out of which our national culture of irony and anger was to grow.”

-- George W.S. Trow, ”My Pilgrim's Progress: Media Studies 1950-1998,“ pg. 73

That's it, isn't it? Anger and Irony. Anger tends to be exhibited by the doofus right (Tea Party and FOX News) while irony tends to be exhibited by the vaguely educated left (”The Daily Show“ and ”The Colbert Report"). Both sides, all members of the diminishing middle and working class, contribute to the problem. The left laughs, the right fulminates. But the real battle is elsewhere.

“My argument with so much psychoanalysis is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness, when in fact possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people suffering. That the problem is not to undo suffering, or wipe it off the face of the earth, but to make it inform our lives.”

Arthur Miller in Adam Curtis' documentary “The Century of The Self” (2001)

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

—Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud and father of PR, in his book “Propaganda” (1928). As seen in Adam Curtis' documentary “The Century of the Self.”

The question for all of us, I suppose, is: What constitutes our invisible government, and thus our true ruling power, today?

“If you want to talk about long-term growth, you have to talk about policies that are familiar. ... Obama’s speech was, in a sense, the equivalent of saying that if you want to lose weight, you need to eat better and exercise more. And demanding that he offer up some “big, bold, and new” idea (as [Dana] Milbank, for instance, did) is like asking for a fad diet—lose thirty pounds in thirty days while eating only muffins!”

-- James Surowiecki, “Obama's Economic Speech: Boring is Not Bad,” on the New Yorker site

See also: Alex Pareene, “Beltway hacks Cilizza and Milbank solve the economy!” on Salon.com.

“If you think education is expensive, wait until you see how much ignorance costs in the 21st century.”

-- Pres. Barack Obama today in Galesburg, Ill., pushing a new economic policy designed to promote middle-class growth. The full transcript here.

“Today, whites support gun rights over gun control by a margin of nine points. By contrast, African-Americans support gun control over gun rights by a 44-point margin. [N.R.A. president David] Keene cites the traumatic memories of Jim Crow violence as reason to support gun rights; African-Americans cite the ongoing bloodletting in American cities as reason not to. ...

”Then there’s the thorny reality that not all self-defense is created equal. A study by the Urban Institute shows that just one per cent of cases in which a black person shoots a white person is ruled justifiable. When the races are reversed, in states without Stand Your Ground laws, that number climbs to 9.5 percent; in states with such laws, it reaches almost 17 percent.

“The N.R.A. has done little to ease the disparity. In May, 2012, Marissa Alexander, an African-American from Jacksonville, Florida, attempted to employ a Stand Your Ground defense after firing a “warning shot” during a dispute with her estranged husband, who had a history of domestic violence. (He was not harmed.) The claim was rejected and she was sentenced to twenty years in prison. The Alexander case appears to be precisely the kind of defense that the N.R.A. would support, especially as it strongly advocates guns as a form of self-protection for women, but the group has remained uninvolved.”

-- Jelani Cobb, “Perceived Threats: The Folly of Stand Your Ground,” on the New Yorker site

“If I was a big-studio production chief whose survival depended on greenlighting as many dumb-ass, CG-driven superhero-franchise-comicbook bullshit jizz-whiz movies (Batman Meets Superman, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Edge of Tomorrow, Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor 2, Captain America 2, Suck My Dick 3) as possible, I would need to get a colonic every weekend just to get rid of the poisons in my system. To say I would be seething with contempt for the tens of millions of fanboys who pay for my lifestyle … that would be putting it mildly. Ahab’s last words would have nothing on me.”

-- Jeffrey Wells, “Jean Luc Godard's Contempt,” on his Hollywood Elsewhere blog.

Ten-to-one someone's working on “Suck My Dick 3” right now.

Why Jeff mad? Make Hulk scared.

I know: the critic's lament.

“Red 2,” starring Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich, Mary Louise Parker and Morgan Freeman, opens today at theaters across the country.

Don't remember the original, “Red”? I do. I remember going to it on a dark day in October 2010 and leaving the theater in a darker mood. Here's part of my review:

How far have we fallen as a country in the last 30 years?

Our movies about the CIA used to be like this: The CIA is trying to assassinate the president of the United States! Oh my god!

Now they’re this: The CIA is trying to assassinate the vice-president of the United States! Yay!

Our fear used to be Frankensteinian in nature. The monster we created, the national security agency, had turned on its creator, the U.S. government, and through a rogue agent (“In the Line of Fire”), or with the help of the entire agency (“JFK”), was trying to remove the democratically elected president of the United States. The CIA, created to protect the people, but unaccountable to the people, was subverting democracy.

Now? In “Red”? The agency still sucks because it’s a bureaucracy and bureaucracies suck. But democracy sucks, too. The vice-president needs to be assassinated not only because he’s immoral but because he’s running for president—he has the money and the organization—and we have no faith that we the people won’t see through the money and organization, and we’ll elect him anyway. We are, in a certain sense, the movie’s unnamed villains. Democracy, a good idea in its day, doesn’t work with people as stupid as us.

“Red” grossed an unexpected $98 million domestic, $108 international. It's got a 7.0 on IMDb and a 72% favorability rating from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. So here we are again. The sequel looks even worse.

Further reading on the history of the CIA in cinema.

“Red 2” is hardly the beginning and hardly the end. The next few weeks will bring us sequels to “Wolverine” and “Kick Ass,” neither of which I liked. Well, barely anyone liked “Wolverine.” Even though everyone likes Wolverine.

Our krazy krew: bragging about toppling governments.

“The facts matter, and trials are all about facts. Every time there is a high-profile trial, observers rush to draw conclusions about the American legal system—or even about American society—based on the results. But the idiosyncrasies of the trial process generally make such judgments unwise. A dog walker, a security camera, a clearer audio on a 911 tape—and we’d be having a very different conversation about the Zimmerman trial.”

-- Jeffrey Toobin, “The Facts in the Zimmerman Trial,” on the New Yorker site.

“Last spring, I watched as hundreds of people, almost all wearing hooded sweatshirts, gathered in Union Square for an impromptu 'Million Hoodie March' in solidarity with the parents of Trayvon Martin. A current of outrage, undoubtedly, circulated within that throng. But Martin’s mother and father, Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton, were models of grace and fortitude, making consistent appeals for peace; they were not wild-eyed demagogues whose vision of justice was located somewhere between the Second Amendment and the Old Testament. I could barely hear them when they spoke to the gathering, but, even so, the calm dignity of their words and their gratitude for the outpouring of support were obvious. What I remember most is the sight of them making their way through the protesters to a waiting car, as if they were drifting on a tide of grief. There was anger in the crowd, but the sentiment that predominated—as it has in the immediate aftermath of the Zimmerman verdict—was simply sadness.”

-- Jelani Cobb, who's done some great work on the Zimmerman trial, in the piece “After the Verdict: the Zimmerman Non-Riots,” on The New Yorker site. First graph includes the latest awful thing Newt Gringrich has said.

“I hold other views, too, that would surely not be congenial to the right. In particular, I am perfectly willing to attack racial prejudice in arenas where the right evidently prefers to keep silent: for example, in the stark fact that capital juries, charged with meting out the death penalty, tend to value the lives of white murder victims far higher than the lives of black ones. (How many white people, in the 45 violent years after World War II, were executed for murdering black people? Answer: none. Yes, that's right: none...)”

-- Stephen L. Carter, “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby,” 1991, pg. 148

A few things about this quote vis a vis the Trayvon Martin verdict:

• It's not just capital juries anymore.
• The right is no longer silent on the matter. Now they gloat about it.

“I nominate J. D. Salinger as the least likely tweeter in literary history. A tweet is, by definition, a violation of one’s privacy—in the sense of making public thoughts that would otherwise be private—and Salinger was, for much of his life, fiercely private and seemed to want only the kind of applause that is made by one hand clapping. This wasn’t due to bashfulness—when he was young he went out to parties and to the dance clubs of his day. But for him the creative act of writing was deeply entwined with the nourishing condition of privacy, even secrecy. This privacy, in turn, not only surrounded his work but was embedded in it. His writing seems to be to be spoken in confidence directly to the reader, singular. That is why so many Salinger fans feel that their relationship with his books, especially to 'Catcher in the Rye,' is like an intimacy shared.

”Salinger’s defense of his privacy eventually came to seem as absurd as the attacks on it, but at the root of this defense wasn’t some terrible secret he had to hide but rather an idea of writing as a private ceremony.“

-- Thomas Beller, ”The Ongoing Story: Twitter and Writing," posted on The New Yorker site.

Jelani Cobb has a very good piece on the New Yorker site, “The Zimmerman Trial, Day 10: Stand Whose Ground?,”  about the set of assumptions in the trial and in the "Stand Your Ground law. They're assumptions they have in Florida and assumptions we have in the U.S. They're global assumptions, really.

An excerpt:

Amid their frustratingly uneven presentation, Assistant State Attorney Bernie de la Rionda and the rest of the prosecution have pegged their second-degree murder charges largely on the idea that [Trayvon] Martin was losing the fight on February 26th of last year, that he shouted for help, and that Zimmerman, a vigilante would-be cop, shot and killed him anyway. In plotting their route to conviction, they necessarily bypass another set of questions. What if he wasn’t losing the fight? What if Zimmerman is the one who called for help? What if Martin did swing first? And, most crucially, is an unarmed black teen-ager ever entitled to stand his ground?

The answers to these questions have bearing that is more social than legal, but they’re inescapable in understanding how we got here in the first place and what this trial ultimately means. George Zimmerman got out of his car that night as an amateur deputy and protector of the Retreat at Twin Lakes gated community. Trayvon Martin was a visitor to that community. Nowhere in Zimmerman’s initial emergency call does he broach the idea that Martin might belong there, that he might actually be someone who warranted protection, too. Instead, there is the snap judgment that the teen-ager is one of the “fucking punks” who “always get away”—a judgment that Zimmerman’s supporters and the Sanford Police Department either co-signed or deemed reasonable enough to absolve him of responsibility for what ensued.

What remains frustratingly marginal in this discussion is the point Martin’s friend Rachel Jeantel raised in her testimony—that Martin himself was afraid, that a black person might assess a man following him in a car and on foot as a threat, never mind that he might have seen Zimmerman’s weapon and suspected his life was in danger. The defense paid a great deal of attention to the implications of Martin referring to Zimmerman as a “creepy-ass cracker,” but, to the extent that we think about the epithet, we’re concerned with the wrong C-word. Imagine George Zimmerman being followed at night, in the rain, by an armed, unknown black man and you have an encounter that far exceeds the minimal definition of “creepy.” Indeed, you have a circumstance in which anyone would reasonably fear for his life. Add a twist in which that black man fires a shot that ends a person’s life, and it’s hard to imagine him going home after a brief police interview, as Zimmerman did.

“It’s easy to criticize Obama for sending mixed signals, and in Egypt that included the embarrassing spectacle of the White House’s Hamlet-like vacillation as both the Mubarak and Morsi regimes crumbled.

”But the administration can only be faulted for 'inaction' if you have a clear definition of what 'action' might be. This morning in the Times, for instance, Tom Friedman proposed that Egypt find a 'moderate path' to save itself — rather the same prescription he offered for America in its last election cycle — and while that is without doubt the perfect solution, it’s a wish, not an action plan. John McCain, the last active foreign-policy voice in the Republican Party, has called for America to suspend our $1.5 billion aid to Egypt, a pointless gesture that would only diminish whatever tiny leverage we have there. (Our aid package is dwarfed by the billions Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are now pouring into the post-Morsi order, or chaos.)

“Whatever lessons President Obama has learned or not from the Bush administration, the country took away at least a couple, possibly for a generation: (1) Don’t trust the entire bipartisan political-foreign policy-intelligence-punditry Establishment that pushed the war in Iraq; and (2) don't put American boots on the ground to build democracy in the Middle East.”

-- Frank Rich, “Frank Rich on the National Circus: Obama Looks Lost in Egypt for a Reason,” New York magazine

“I have had many talented people ask me how to get into the comic book business. If they were talented enough the first answer I would give them is, 'Why would you want to get into the comic book business?' Because even if you succeed, even if you reach what might be considered the pinnacle of success in comics, you will be less successful, less secure and less effective than if you are just an average practitioner of your art in television, radio, movies or what have you. It is a business in which the creator ... owns nothing of his creation. The publisher owns it.”

-- Stan Lee, co-creator of The Fantastic Four, Hulk, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Thor, etc., at an industry gathering at Lamb's Club, New York on Jan. 20, 1971. It was printed in National Cartoonist Society Professional Report, and reprinted on pg. 113 of Sean Howe's “Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.”

Cf. this line from the movie “Iron Man,” starring Robert Downey, Jr.:

Obadiah Stane to Tony Stark as he takes the arc reactor from his chest: You think just because you have an idea it belongs to you?

Not nearly 'nuff said.

Stan Lee, pretending.

“In the depth of her despair, she began to question Providence. Maybe her sons had failed not for lack of merit but because they were unable to overcome the disadvantage of an unsteadiness inherited from their father. Maybe her daughters and grandchildren had died because they were poor, and lived lives of squalor. Maybe not Providence but men in power—politics—determined the course of human events.”

-- Jill LePore, writing about Ben Franklin's sister, Jane, in “The Prodigal Daughter,” in the July 8 & 15 New Yorker. LePore's book, “Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin,” will be out in October.

“My mother married my father in 1956. She was 28 and he was 31. She loved him with a fierce steadiness borne of loyalty, determination, and an unyielding dignity. On their honeymoon, in a cabin in Maine, for their first breakfast together, she made him blueberry pancakes. Pushing back his plate, he told her he didn't like blueberries. In 55 years of marriage, she never again cooked him breakfast.”

-- Jill LePore, “The Prodigal Daughter,” about herself and her mother, and Ben Franklin and his sister, in the July 8 & 15 New Yorker

“But ultimately the Supreme Court will have to step in to complete the nation’s journey on marriage equality, just as it did in Loving v. Virginia, from 1967, when the Justices rejected the last remaining bans on interracial marriage. Kennedy’s opinion in Windsor makes plain that that day is drawing ever nearer. Scalia, as it happens, saw this more clearly than anyone. 'The real rationale of today’s opinion,' he wrote in his dissent, 'is that DOMA is motivated by a ”bare . . . desire to harm“ couples in same-sex marriages.' And he added, 'How easy it is, indeed how inevitable, to reach the same conclusion with regard to state laws denying same-sex couples marital status.' Scalia’s declaration was meant as a threat. We should consider it a promise.”

-- Jeffrey Toobin, “Adieu, DOMA!” in the Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker, July 8 & 15, 2013

“In Michigan a few years ago I spent 2 years trying to find a job teaching math - or doing anything whatsoever to earn an income. A Republican friend kept giving me job-finding tips, and telling me how my efforts were obviously ineffective, since I wasn't able to find employment. I could not get him to understand how hurtful his approach was. I kept telling him that if 10 people are applying for one opening, 9 will remain unemployed, no matter what they do. And since I was in my late 50's, I was always among those 9. I could not get across to him the depth of frustration & despair I was feeling.

”Thankfully, I finally landed a teaching position - in Cairo, Egypt. I'm one of the rare, fortunate ones. Meanwhile, my heart goes out to those who continue to struggle. I hope they stop voting for Republicans.“

-- Thomas Mischler, in the comments section under Paul Krugman's Op-Ed, ”War on the Unemployed."

“Hello, who am I talking to? Oh, Barack Obama? I wanted to thank you. I think your coming out for us made such a difference throughout the country.”

-- Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in United States v. Windsor, the case which led to the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) yesterday. Windsor, with attorney Roberta Kaplan, sued the federal government because she was charged $363,000 in estate taxes following the death of her spouse, Thea Spyer, in 2009. If her spouse had been a man, the tax would have been nothing.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled the following: “DOMA's principal effect is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned marriages and make them unequal. The principal purpose is to impose inequality ... DOMA undermines both the public and private significance of state-sanctioned same-sex marriages; for it tells those couples, and all the world, that their otherwise valid marriages are unworthy of federal recognition. This places same-sex couples in an unstable position of being in a second-tier marriage. The differentiation demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects, see Lawrence, 539 U. S. 558, and whose relationship the State has sought to dignify. And it humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples. The law in question makes it even more difficult for the children to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family and its concord with other families in their community and in their daily lives.”

“I spoke to my dad a few days [after the 2008 election]. He was nominally a Republican, and had voted for McCain. He was a little annoyed that his guy lost but was interested in getting my reaction.

”'How do you think Fox will take it?' he asked.

“'I think they'll take it okay,' I said. 'You know, give him the benefit of the doubt.'

”'Are you sure?' My dad sounded skeptical. 'I think it's going to be like Blazing Saddles, when the black sherrif arrives and all the townspeople panic.'“

-- Joe Muto, “An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media,” pg. 264. One of the best parts? The chapter heading is called: ”I Think He Said the Sheriff Is Near.“

Cleavon Little, taking on Richard Pryor's role, in Mel Brooks' ”Blazing Saddles" (1974.

“What is at stake? According to the most recent data, between 30 and 40 percent of gun acquisitions take place without any background check. Many of these transactions happen online, at gun shows and in private homes. Each of those guns represents a potential danger to the public. Following the elementary-school massacre in Newtown, Conn., in December, there was overwhelming support to end unsupervised gun sales. The N.R.A. fought back and, as everyone knows, won.

”More tragedy will result. A mountain of research has proved this danger.“

-- Former Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau in The New York Times Op-Ed, ”Let Shooting Victims Sue," June 24, 2013

“A few months into her tenure, [Bill] O'Reilly exploded with frustration when he was told for the third time in a row that [Sarah] Palin wouldn't be available.

”'I don't know why this woman refuses to help us out,' he vented. 'And when she does come on, she doesn't say anything. It's just the same BS talking points every time.'"

-- Joe Muto, “An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media,” pg. 280.

An icy relationship between two right-wing icons. According to Muto, one is smart, the other not so much. Guesses?

“From what we know so far about these N.S.A. programs—and that is a caveat that should condition virtually every statement and judgment about them, including those you are now reading—they have been conducted lawfully. The threat that they pose to civil liberties, such as it is, is abstract, conjectural, unspecified. In the roughly seven years the programs have been in place in roughly their present form, no citizen’s freedom of speech, expression, or association has been abridged by them in any identifiable way. No political critic of the Administration has been harassed or blackmailed as a consequence of them. They have not put the lives of tens of millions of Americans under 'surveillance' as that word is commonly understood. ...

”The N.S.A. programs represent a troubling increase in state power, even if—so far, and so far as we know—they have not occasioned a troubling increase in state wrongdoing. ... Are the programs truly efficacious? Do they truly provide an extra margin of safety sufficient to justify the resources poured into them, to say nothing of the domestic and international anxieties they inevitably provoke? Is it wise to entrust so many of their activities to the employees of private companies, which are ultimately answerable not to the United States and its Constitution but to corporate stockholders? Did it make sense to construct an intelligence behemoth that apparently cannot operate without giving an enormous number of people—more than a million—top-secret security clearances? And in what ways, exactly, might an ill-intentioned yet formally law-abiding Administration use its powers for nefarious purposes?“

-- Hendrik Hertzberg, ”Snoop Scoops," in The New Yorker. Worth reading the entire thing.

“So who's the villain in the story? It was a question Bill asked a lot. He felt that any good outrage-stoking story needed a tangible target for said outrage, a name and preferably a photo that could be splashed onscreen for the host to point to and say, This is the bad guy. This is the guy hurting you. ...

”[Liberal] judges weren't the only game in town. Some other good villains:

• Liberal college professors
• Liberal journalists
• Liberal politicians
• Liberal Hollywood celebrities
• Anyone who resided in the state of Vermont (especially liberals)

“Of course, any good villain story needed a hero as a counterpoint. In most scenarios, the hero was naturally Bill himself, the only one brave or bold enough to call out the villain ...”

-- Joe Muto, “An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media,” pp. 192-193.

I've pointed this out before. FOX-News is selling wish-fulfillment fantasy as surely as a Hollywood studio of old, with Bill O'Reilly as a John Wayne type for the folks at home to cheer on, and others subbing in for that night's requisite villain. Back in the day, though, people knew that the stories eminating from the dream factory were dreams, while O'Reilly and company claim to be news of the fair and balanced kind. They claim to report, they claim that you decide. In reality, the only reason it's being reported is because you've already decided.

Dude even looks like the devil.

“Ratings were actually pretty decent at this point, due to a resurgence in a type of story that we began referring to as 'MPWW'--Missing Pretty White Women. ...

”Fox has an entire department devoted to doing nothing but crunching the ratings data ... And what the ratings told us in early 2006 was that viewers were just not interested in any missing women who weren't young, pretty, and white.

“'It's racism, pure and simple,' Amy, one of the bookers, posited on a Wednesday morning as we all looked at the previous weekend's ratings. We'd done three segments on Natalee [Holloway], followed by one on a missing black girl, and the numbers had plumeted when we made the switch.”

-- Joe Muto, “An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media,” pp. 146-149.

“Fair and Balanced. We Report, You Decide. Everyone knew it was bunk. A sham. Over the next eight years at Fox, I never met a single employee, not the truest of true believers, who wasn't cynical about what our main purpose was.

”'We all know the “Fair and Balanced” thing is bullshit,' a very conservative O'Reilly Factor producer told me once, late at night, after we'd had a few drinks. 'We're not here to be fair. We're here to give red meat to our viewers.'

“'To stir up the crazies, you mean,' I said.

”He laughed. 'Yeah, to stir up the crazies. Because outrage equals ratings.'"

-- — Joe Muto, “An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media,” pg. 119.

“Twenty-five years ago, you could apparently reference William Blake and Susan Sontag in a movie intended for a mainstream audience. The fusion of high and low culture is a well-established phenomenon, but 'high-low' now means smart guys talking about zombies: It doesn't mean baseball players talking about Walt Whitman. ...

”Of course, the main lesson of Bull Durham is that intelligence is vastly overrated anyway. That's the source of the pain behind the comedy: One of the worst things about knowing things is knowing that your knowledge doesn't really matter. It may help you get the record for most home runs in the minor leagues, but it won't keep you in the big leagues, and it won't help you get the girl, at least not at first. Wisdom doesn't matter nearly as much as the arm. The first lesson that Crash imparts to Nuke is 'Don't think. It can only hurt the ball club.' The last lesson he himself learns at the end is 'I don't wanna think about nothing. I just wanna be.'“

-- Stephen Marche, ”Why Bull Durham is the Greatest Sports Movie Ever Made,“ Esquire. Here are my thoughts on ”Bull Durham.“ And of course you can rank the baseball movies yourself at our handy-dandy Baseball Movies Rank-o-Meter.

”Don't try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they're fascist. Throw some ground balls - it's more democratic."

“In the 1970s, a psychologist and neuro­endocrinologist named Kim Wallen noticed that the sexual behavior of rhesus monkeys was affected by the size of their cages. In close quarters the monkeys went at it like mad, and the male seemed to initiate sexual activity, which in turn seemed to confirm the prevailing idea that female monkeys were entirely sexually passive.

”But in larger cages, as in the wild, the females were the ones who chose their partners and initiated sex by following the males around and touching them demonstratively. The small cages, with their forced proximity, reduced monkey sex life to intercourse, obviating all the mating rituals in which female lust was the essential factor that set sex in motion. After Wallen’s observations, primatologists started seeing evidence that many kinds of female primates initiated sex, while their male counterparts pretty much sat around waiting for the ladies to take an interest in their erections.

“Are we that kind of primate?”

-- Elaine Blair, reviewing Daniel Bergner's “What Do Women Want?” in The New York Times Book Review. This piece should win awards for its headline (“I'll Have What She's Having”) and its two illustrations: the eye-catching cover illustration by Malike Favre and the supersmart inside illustration by Luci Gutiérrez.

“Fox had some other less obvious rules about what we couldn't show on air.

”'You can't use tape of the Twin Towers going down,' Marybeth told me. 'The bosses think it upsets people.' ...

“Another rule: If we were producing tape of same-sex weddings to illustrate a gay marriage segment, we had to cut away before the couple kissed.

”'We showed two guys kissing once and people at home completely freaked out,' Marybeth explained. 'Hundreds of calls to the switchboard, thousands of angry e-mails.'"

-- Joe Muto, “An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media,” pg. 89.

“[In 1996], Fox launched just a few months after MSNBC, which--due to the backing of Microsoft and NBC News--was deemed by media critics as a more credible competitor to CNN. But Murdoch had given Ailes a mandate: Do whatever you can to beat CNN. And Ailes thought he had a solid strategy to do so, reasoning that the conservative hordes who flocked to talk radio were being underserved by CNN, which had a perceived liberal bias. Give those conservatives a home on cable TV, Aisles' reasoning went, one that serves up both openly conservative opinion and conservative-slanted reporting that is thinly veiled as ”straight“ news, and they'll become habitual watchers.”

-- Joe Muto, “An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media,” pg. 57. (Yes, I'm reading this book at lunch every day.)

“That was my first brush with a not-so-well-kept dirty little secret of the news industry: Fox had hundreds of slick, pre-produced four-minute obituary videos filed away and read to go at a moment's notice for almost every prominent celebrity and politician over the age of sixty. Every once in a while if a shift was particularly slow, I'd give myself a morbid thrill pulling the obit compilation from the tape library and watching a few of the pieces. Fox was hardly alone in this practice--my understanding is that all the networks and cable channels have similar compilations. But Fox stood out with the unique spin it gave certain figures. My favorite was Bill Clinton's, whose obit is hilariously Foxified, spending almost half the running time on Lewinsky and other bimbo eruptions. Meanwhile, the Dick Cheney obit makes him out to be a heroic freedom fighter, practically Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rolled into one.”

-- Joe Muto, “An Atheist in the Foxhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media,” pg. 51

“The point is, for a show to display viewer-made art wasn't unusual in and of itself, but the piece mounted next to the door in the Sean/Greta headquarters stood out; it was enormous, and clearly done by someone who knew how to wield a paintbrush. The giant oil-on-canvas showed Sean Hannity's massive grinning head on a TV screen with a Fox News logo, with confetti flying through the air behind him. The artist, in an inspired bit of wishful thinking, had added an on-screen graphic that read OBAMA DEFEATED IN HISTORIC LANDSLIDE.

”At least if they fire my ass, I thought as a I passed the thing, I'll never have to see this fucking asinine painting again.“

-- Joe Muto: ”An Athiest in the FOXHole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media," pg. 32

“We have been taught that meritocratic institutions and societies are fair. Putting aside the reality that no system, including our own, is really entirely meritocratic, meritocracies may be fairer and more efficient than some alternatives. But fair in an absolute sense?

”Think about it. A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement, and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate--these are the folks who reap the largest rewards. The only way for even a putative meritocracy to hope to pass ethical muster, to be considered fair, is if those who are the luckiest in all of those respects also have the greatest responsibility to work hard, to contribute to the betterment of the world, and to share their luck with others. As the Gospel of Luke says (and I am sure my rabbi will forgive me for quoting the New Testament in a good cause): 'From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded' (Luke 12:48, New Revised Standard Version Bible). Kind of grading on the curve, you might say."

-- Ben Bernake in a talk at Princeton University this weekend.

“I don't know a single soul, and I've seen every fucking movie in town, and that includes the Steven Seagal movie. I'll never forgive you for this. [Exhales]”

-- American woman in Paris hotel room on the phone with her boyfriend, and, unbeknownst, being robbed by Irma Vep (Maggie Cheung), in Olivier Assayas' “Irma Vep” (1996)

“It seemed to him that he had been afraid all his life, but in recent years, or so it seemed, he had learned how to take a step into his fear, how to take the action which frightened him most (and so could free him the most). He did not do it always, who could?, but he had come to think that the secret to growth was to be brave a little more than one was cowardly, simple as that ... ”

-- Norman Mailer, writing about himself in the third person, in “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” pg. 185

“I have decided next year I will not seek a fifth Congressional term. This decision was not impacted in any way by the recent inquiries into the activities of my former presidential campaign or my former presidential staff."

-- Michele Bachmann in a video on her campaign website, as reported in The New York Times.

My favorite line in the story comes not from Bachmann but from Times staffer Gerry Mullany:

Mrs. Bachmann is known for her strong anti-abortion stance and adherence to Tea Party values but her presidential campaign was marked by frequent stumbles and her candidacy failed to catch fire in a crowded field of candidates that included Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Herman Cain, who all eventually lost to Mitt Romney.

Failing to catch fire among those candidates is like a movie failing to catch fire in a crowded field of Rob Schneider and Wayans brothers comedies.

I also like this from author Rick Perlstein, who posted a link to the Bachmann's video on Facebook:

Fifty bucks to anyone who can listen through the whole thing. No email checking, not texting—no cheating.

She's leaving the House ... bye bye....

“Making information free is survivable so long as only limited numbers of people are disenfranchised. As much as it pains me to say so, we can survive if we only destroy the middle classes of musicians, journalists, and photographers. What is not survivable is the additional destruction of the middle classes in transportation, manufacturing, energy, office work, education, and health care. And all that destruction will come surely enough if the dominant idea of an information economy isn’t improved.”

-- Jaron Lanier, “Who Owns the Future?,” pg. 16

“We started to work [on 'The Producers' on Broadway] and it was shortly after that, sadly, that my husband [director Mike Okrent] became ill with leukemia ... and we lost him. [She begins to break down.] Sorry.

”He wanted me to go on as the director and choreographer. I didn't think I could do it just because how I was feeling. But Mel said, 'Stro, you will cry in the morning and you will cry in the evening. You'll cry before you see me and you'll cry after you leave. But you will laugh all during the day.'

“And it saved me. It really did.”

-- Susan Stroman, director and producer of the Broadway musical “The Producers,” talking about Mel Brooks for the PBS American Masters documentary, “Mel Brooks: Make a Noise,” which aired Monday night.

“To recap: Don’s real name is Dick Whitman. His prostitute mother died in childbirth; his dad, her john, beat him. His fundamentalist stepmother called him a 'whore’s child.' Then his father got kicked in the head by a horse, and the stepmother moved in with her sister, herself a prostitute, living in a brothel. The stepmother, heavily pregnant with Don’s half brother, prostituted herself to her brother-in-law, as the teen-age Don knelt outside her door. He watched them, through the keyhole, have sex. C’mon, now. This is no longer the backstory of a serial adulterer; it’s the backstory of a serial killer.

”We haven’t even got to the part where Whitman goes to fight in Korea, accidentally blows up his superior officer, Don Draper, steals his identity, forms a secret relationship with his widow (she’s motherly, yet also somewhat prostitute-like, since he pays for her upkeep), becomes a greaser, and seduces a model who is also concerned primarily with appearances. Eventually, he gets into advertising, and when his half brother, Adam, finds him, Don rejects him, and Adam hangs himself. It’s not that none of this makes sense, or could make sense; it’s just too much, overdetermined. None of the other characters has this sort of reverse-engineered psychology, and for good reason: it’s a lazy way to impose meaning.“

-- Emily Nussbaum, in her New Yorker piece, ”Faking It: 'Mad Men''s Don Draper problem," an article that is particularly smart on Don's ad campaigns at the show's beginning and now: how he avoided death with cigarettes in 1960 and how he sees it on a Hawaiian beach in 1968.

What can I say? It's all true.

“A lot of what’s known about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can be traced back to a chemist named Charles David Keeling, who, in 1958, persuaded the U.S. Weather Bureau to install a set of monitoring devices at its Mauna Loa observatory, on the island of Hawaii. By the nineteen-fifties, it was well understood that, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, humans were adding vast amounts of carbon to the air. But the prevailing view was that this wouldn’t much matter, since the oceans would suck most of it out again. Keeling thought that it would be prudent to find out if that was, in fact, the case. The setup on Mauna Loa soon showed that it was not.

”Carbon-dioxide levels have been monitored at the observatory ever since, and they’ve exhibited a pattern that started out as terrifying and may be now described as terrifyingly predictable. They have increased every year, and earlier this month they reached the milestone of four hundred parts per million. No one knows exactly when CO₂ levels were last this high; the best guess is the mid-Pliocene, about three million years ago. At that point, summertime temperatures in the Arctic were fourteen degrees warmer than they are now and sea levels were some seventy-five feet higher.“

-- Elizabeth Kolbert, in her piece, ”Lines in the Sand," mostly about whether Pres. Obama will approve the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta, Canada to Nebraska. Her arguments against, including an explanation of what tar-sands oil is, start in the 7th paragraph.

“I understand there’s a common fraternity creed here at Morehouse: 'Excuses are tools of the incompetent used to build bridges to nowhere and monuments of nothingness.' Well, we’ve got no time for excuses. Not because the bitter legacy of slavery and segregation have vanished entirely; they have not. Not because racism and discrimination no longer exist; we know those are still out there. It’s just that in today’s hyperconnected, hypercompetitive world, with millions of young people from China and India and Brazil — many of whom started with a whole lot less than all of you did — all of them entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything that you have not earned. (Applause.)

”Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination. And moreover, you have to remember that whatever you’ve gone through, it pales in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured — and they overcame them. And if they overcame them, you can overcome them, too."

-- Pres. Barack Obama in his commencement speech to Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga., yesterday.

“When Mary Lucia played The Suburbs' 'Love Is The Law' just after 5 p.m. yesterday, historic yesterday, I was on the freeway driving home from the Minnesota State Capitol, ears still ringing from the cheers and cries of thousands of happy lovers, law-makers, and families. It was beyond poignant, and for me, one of the greatest moments ever heard on The Current; a perfect, yes, marriage of civic pride, music, roots, community, love. Over the last month or so, this is the (30-year-old) tune that's been running through my head — 'kewpie dolls and urine stalls will be laughed at the way you're laughed at now' — and today I'm proud to be from the state that gave us such a timeless anthem and message. Long may it play...

-- Minneapolis writer and singer Jim Walsh, author of ”The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting,“ on Minnesota becoming the 12th state to legalize same-sex marriage.

”Love is the Law" was the big song from my first, confused, awful steps away from high school and into college.

Marriage equality passes the Minnesota Senate, 36-30, May 13, 2013. Gov. Mark Dayton will sign it into law today.

“... the truth is I carry a 'faulty' gene, BRCA1, which sharply increases my risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer. My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman ...

”Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy. I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex ...

“But I am writing about it now because I hope that other women can benefit from my experience. Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action.”

-- Angelina Jolie, “My Medical Choice,” in a New York Times Op-Ed, May 14, 2013.

“A man's got to keep playing if he's fit. Don't quit until every base is uphill.”

-- Babe Ruth, recovering from cancer surgery, to Hank Greenberg, who was visiting him in his hospital room before reporting to spring training, Feb. 1946. As recounted in John Rosengren's book, “Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes,” pg. 305.

Babe Ruth on Babe Ruth Day, 1947. It would be his last visit to Yankee Stadium.

“[A]s Ronald Reagan made his plea for unity, he spoke with a mildness, a lack of charisma, even a simplicity, which was reminiscent of a good middle-aged stock actor's simplicity—well, you know, fellows, the man I'm playing is an intellectual, and of course I have the kind of mind which eve gets confused by a finesse in bridge.

”They cheered him wildly, and he looked happy, as if something had gone his way ...

“Still, unlike Nixon, Reagan was altogether at ease with the Press. They had been good to him, they would be good again—he had the confidence of the elected governor of a big state, precisely what Nixon had always lacked; besides, Reagan had long ago incorporated the confidence of an actor who knows he is popular with interviewers. In fact, he had a public manner which was so natural that his discrepancies appeared only slightly surrealistic: at the age of fifty-seven, he had the presence of a man of thirty, the deferential enthusiasm, the bright but dependably unoriginal mind, of a sales manager promoted for his ability over men older than himself. ... Besides, darkening shades of the surreal, he had a second personality which was younger than the first, very young, boyish, maybe thirteen or fourteen, freckles, cowlick, I-tripped-on-my-sneaker-lace aw shucks variety of confusion. For back on Tuesday afternoon they had been firing questions at him on the order of how well he was doing at prying delegates loose from Nixon, and he could only say over and over, 'I don't know. I just don't know. I've been moving around so quickly talking to so many delegations in caucus that I haven't had time to read a paper.'

”'Well, what do the delegations say, Governor?'

“'Well, I don't know. They listen to me very pleasantly and politely, and then I leave and they discuss what I've said. But I can't tell you if we're gaining. I think we are, but I don't know, I don't know. I honestly don't know gentlemen,' and he broken into a grin, 'I just don't know,' exactly like a thirteen year old, as if indeed gentlemen he really didn't know, and the Press and the delegates listening laughed with him as if there were no harm in Ronald Reagan, unless the lightning struck.”

--Norman Mailer, “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” pp. 70-72.

From Amy Davidson's post, “What Charles Ramsey and Amanda Berry Knew,” on the New Yorker site, about the rescue of three women from a home in Cleveland. I have no words; these are good ones:

“So, you know, I figured it was a domestic-violence dispute,” Charles Ramsey told a reporter for the ABC affiliate in Cleveland, explaining what happened after, as he put it, he “heard screaming. I’m eating McDonald’s. I see this girl going nuts trying to get out of the house.” Ramsey, and others who gathered, helped her break open the door, kicking it from the bottom. She told them her name, Amanda Berry. She had been kidnapped at the age of seventeen, ten years ago. There were two other women in the house, Gina Dejesus, who is now twenty-three, and Michelle Knight, now thirty, who had also been held for a decade. There was at least one small child.

Ramsey’s 911 call is transfixing. “Yeah hey bro,” it begins, “you check this out.” His intensity, the McDonald’s shout-out, his undoubtedly loose paraphrase of Berry’s account (“This motherfucker done kidnapped me and my daughter”), and also his competence (he does a better job with the essentials like the address than the 911 operator) make him one of those instantly compelling figures who, in the middle of an American tragedy, just start talking—and then we can’t stop listening. (See Ruslan Tsarni, Ashley Smith.) But one phrase in particular, from the interview, is worth dwelling on: “I figured it was a domestic-violence dispute.” In many times and places, a line like that has been offered as an excuse for walking away, not for helping a woman break down your neighbor’s door. How many women have died as a result? They didn’t yesterday.

“Obviously, there has been no shortage of news to cover over these past few weeks.  ... But even when the days seemed darkest, we have seen humanity shine at its brightest. We’ve seen first responders and National Guardsmen who have dashed into danger, law enforcement officers who lived their oath to serve and to protect, and everyday Americans who are opening their homes and their hearts to perfect strangers.

”And we also saw journalists at their best — especially those who took the time to wade upstream through the torrent of digital rumors to chase down leads and verify facts and painstakingly put the pieces together to inform, and to educate, and to tell stories that demanded to be told.

“If anyone wonders, for example, whether newspapers are a thing of the past, all you needed to do was to pick up or log on to papers like the Boston Globe.  When their communities and the wider world needed them most, they were there making sense of events that might at first blush seem beyond our comprehension.  And that’s what great journalism is, and that¹s what great journalists do. ...

”And in these past few weeks, as I’ve gotten a chance to meet many of the first responders and the police officers and volunteers who raced to help when hardship hits, I was reminded, as I’m always reminded when I meet our men and women in uniform, whether they’re in war theater, or here back home, or at Walter Reed in Bethesda — I’m reminded that all these folks, they don’t do it to be honored, they don’t do it to be celebrated.  They do it because they love their families and they love their neighborhoods and they love their country.

And so these men and women should inspire all of us in this room to live up to those same standards; to be worthy of their trust; to do our jobs with the same fidelity, and the same integrity, and the same sense of purpose, and the same love of country.  Because if we’re only focused on profits or ratings or polls, then we’re contributing to the cynicism that so many people feel right now."

-- Pres. Barack Obama striking a serious note at the end of his speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner, Sat. April 27, 2013. Particularly like the last line.

“What is it with ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]? Jacqueline Stevens, a professor of political science at Northwestern, studies unjust deportations and detentions. She has concluded that, on any given day, roughly one percent of ICE's tens of thousands of prisoners are U.S. citizens. Stevens has documented more than forty U.S. citizens who have been deported. The true number of cases, even recent ones, is unknown. ...

”[T]he FBI's vast database ... produced many records of Mark Daniel Lyttle as a U.S. citizen with a valid Social Security number. There was no record of a Jose Thomas being connected to Lyttle or to his prints. Why were the biometrics ignored? Evidently, the goal of these searches was not to discover who the detainee was but to deport Jose Thomas. Information that was consistent with deportation was treated as accurate. Information was that inconsistent was treated as false.“

-- William Finnegan, ”The Deportation Machine: A citizen trapped in the system," in the April 29, 2013 issue of The New Yorker.

See also: The War in Iraq.

“Writing is of use to the psyche only if the writer discovers something he did not know he knew in the act itself of writing.”

-- Norman Mailer, “Death, the 11th Presidential Paper,” in his book, “The Presidential Papers of Norman Mailer,” 1963, pg. 219

“Anybody who wants a quick solution for a permanent problem is a lowgrade totalitarian.”

-- Norman Mailer, “An Impolite Interview,” in “The Presidential Papers of Norman Mailer.”

Jonathan Eig, author of “Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season,” was nice enough to read my review of “42” and tweet the following:

@eriklundegaard You nailed it. Couldn't have said it better myself. I'll probably write a short column next day or two. But this is perfect.

— Jonathan Eig (@jonathaneig) April 14, 2013

The short column is his “Nine-inning Review of '42'” for Chicago Sports Side. He liked the movie more than I did, left the theater happier than I did, but we're not far off. I agree in particular with his 8th and 9th points:

8. “42” tries too hard to please. It wants the endorsement of the Robinson family, Major League Baseball, historians, and fans young and old. It wants to educate and entertain. It wants black fans to feel pride and white fans to appreciate how far we’ve come. It succeeds in almost every one of those ways. It makes for a good movie, but not a great one. “42” plays it safe, something Jackie Robinson never did. Robinson was a complicated man, full of fear and fury. I wish more of his complexity made it to the screen.

9. I left the theater smiling. I enjoyed the movie, and so did my kids. But I found myself wondering how it would have turned out if Spike Lee had directed. He might not have done better, but I don’t think he would have played it safe.

Safe. The right kind.

“The [Hengdian World Studios] lot is 27 times larger than Universal and Paramount combined, but it's still not enough: on average, there are 20 movies or television dramas being filmed simultaneously, and many more directors are waiting to begin shooting. Filmmakers are eager to to tap into China's box office, which last year totalled $2.7 billion, surpassing Japan to become the world's second largest. Others come to supply China's gargantuan television industry: the country has more than 2500 stations.”

From Ian Johnson's article, “Studio City: In a remote spot in China, the world's biggest movie lost is getting even bigger,” in the April 22 New Yorker. It's a fascinating bit of contemporary history even if the article itself is so-so.

One of the many sets, expertly built, on the Hengdian World Studios lot, which makes it feel like one of the Hollywood studios during its glory days.

“Senators say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets.”

-- former U.S. Representative and gun victim Gabrielle Giffords in the NY Times Op-Ed, “A Senate in the Gun Lobby’s Grip,” April 17, 2013, after a group of senators (below: 41 Republicans, four Democrats, one procedural) blocked passage of mild gun-control reforms including background checks.

“A twenty-year-old man who had been watching the Boston Marathon had his body torn into by the force of a bomb. He wasn’t alone; a hundred and seventy-six people were injured and three were killed. But he was the only one who, while in the hospital being treated for his wounds, had his apartment searched in 'a startling show of force,' as his fellow-tenants described it to the Boston Herald, with a 'phalanx' of officers and agents and two K9 units. He was the one whose belongings were carried out in paper bags as his neighbors watched; whose roommate, also a student, was questioned for five hours ('I was scared') before coming out to say that he didn’t think his friend was someone who’d plant a bomb—that he was a nice guy who liked sports. 'Let me go to school, dude,' the roommate said later in the day, covering his face with his hands and almost crying, as a Fox News producer followed him and asked him, again and again, if he was sure he hadn’t been living with a killer.”

-- Amy Davidson, in the New Yorker piece, “The Saudi Marathon Man,” on the Saudi national who, this Monday, went from bombing victim, to bombing suspect, to person of interest, to double victim.

“I had a late hockey game last night, which means about an hour in the car listening to late-night talk radio call-in shows. There's nothing like late-night talk radio call-in shows to restore your confidence in the portions of the media that are NOT late-night talk radio call-in shows.”

-- my friend Dave during a Facebook discussion of my previous post on the Boston Marathon bombings.

“When Jackie Robinson went to the Major Leagues, that was the beginning of the modern-day civil rights movement. That was before Rosa Parks said, ‘I don’t feel like going to the back of the damn bus today.’ That was before Brown vs. Board of Education. Martin Luther King was a sophomore at Morehouse College at the time. Jackie Robinson went to the Major Leagues and that’s what started the ball rolling. That was the start, man! Are you listening?”

-- Buck O'Neill to two ignorant NY shock jocks in the 1990s, as recounted in Joe Posnanski's book, “The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America,“ and on his blog today. It takes place just before the incident with the woman in the red dress, which is one of my favorite stories. I also like this bit Joe adds: ”I once asked Buck if he could have been the first black man play in the Major Leagues. He said no. He said that task needed someone extraordinary, someone fierce, someone who would not stand for injustice, someone who would not bend to ease of inaction or the force of hatred. I said, 'You could have done it.' He said, “No, that was for Jackie. I had a different role.'”

“All of life is futile and pointless. I'm so unhappy.”

-- Dave White at the end of his scathing review of “Scary Movie 5” on Movies.com.

I've been there, dude. Off the top of my head, here are the movies that made me feel that way:

• National Lampoon's Gold Diggers (2004)
• Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
• Sucker Punch (2011)

“The myth — and it is a myth — that the 1970s were Britain’s lowest point persists mainly because 'winners' of Thatcher’s upward wealth redistribution are more likely to write books and newspapers columns and host television shows than former miners are.”

-- Alex Pareene, “The Woman Who Wrecked Great Britain: Margaret Thatcher earned every single cheer that greeted her death,” on Salon.com

So how did Woody Allen approach you [about being in his movie]?
It just came out of nowhere. I got this e-mail: Woody Allen wants you to come in for something. I’ve been waiting for that e-mail my whole life.

-- Louis C.K., in the David Itzkoff Q&A, “For Louis C.K., the Joke's on Him,” in The New York Times.

“When I am writing my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.”

-- Roger Ebert, after cancer took away his lower jaw and his ability to speak, in Chris Jones' 2010 Esquire piece, “Roger Ebert: The Essential Man.”  Roger died yesterday at the age of 70.

“Ebbets Field was a whole different thing. It took a lot of character to be a Dodger fan and none to be a Yankees fan.”

--Robert L. Ostertag, lawyer and Mets fan, in Ken Belson's piece, ”A Fan’s Ballpark Routine Outlasting the Park" in The New York Times, April 2, 2013. Ostertag has been going to Mets' home openers for 50 years now. He's 81.

“[In 'Olympus Has Fallen'], the Speaker of the House (Morgan Freeman) takes command, but the only one who can save the President—not to mention the world—is a disgraced former Secret Service agent, Mike Banning. He’s played by Gerard Butler, a second-tier star from Scotland whose lack of humor may remind you why Bruce Willis has lasted so long as an action hero.”

-- David Denby, “The Current Cinema: Rough Rides,” March 2013. Here's my review of “Olympus Has Fallen.”

Butler: happy times.

One of the disadvantages of Google, or search engines in general, is that you miss all the stuff you'd find on the way to finding what you're looking for.

For my review of “On the Road,” for example, I couldn't find, online, James Baldwin's criticism of Jack Kerouac, so I began to go through my books. Those things on the shelves back there. I thought it was in an early essay but “Notes of a Native Son” seemed too early. So maybe “Nobody Knows My Name”? And there it was. The last essay: “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy.” The white boy in this case being Norman Mailer, not Kerouac.

But on the way to that discovery I re-read a few of the other essays, including the first, “The Discovery of What It Means to be an American,” and came across the line below. He's talking about the various differences between America, where he was born, and Europe, where he became an artist:

On the contrary, [Americans] have a very deep-seated distrust of real intellectual effort (probably because we suspect that it will destroy, as I hope it does, that myth of America to which we cling so desperately).

It's been a while since I've come across a sentence that so succinctly defines the message of the GOP generally and FOX-News specifically: distrust the intellects (elites) and cling to the myth (tall in the saddle). Most real intellectual effort destroys absolutism, which is what myths are about. Intellectual effort is hard, wish fulfillment is fun. Why we're where we are.

It's a shame, by the way, that James Baldwin wasn't around to see the election of Barack Obama and the shift in American attitudes toward homosexuality and same-sex marriage, the latter of which is being played out before the U.S. Supreme Court this week. Baldwin would have been 89 this year.

“Filming Superman was sometimes tedious and exasperating. I spent months hanging on wires for brief moments in the movie that would then have to be reshot. But ultimately it was a wonderful experience. One of my favorite memories is of running into John Gielgud in a hallway at Pinewood Studios. We had met before at a social occasion; now I was dressed in full Superman regalia. As he shook my hand he said, 'So delightful to see you. What are you doing now?'”

-- Christopher Reeve, “Still Me,” pp. 193-94

“We're all heading to the same station [death]. There's a great line by T.S. Eliot: 'There's only the trying. The rest is not our business.' Just keep trying. Do what you can, but don't stop, and particularly don't stop at that sign that says success. Run that light. Run that light.”

-- Robert Redford, in Scott Raab's great profile, “Free at Last: The Robert Redford Story,” in the April issue of Esquire. I'm like Raab, coming of age when Redford was ascendant, and have my own Redford stories. (I wrote a small piece on Redford's political movies in 2007.) I might get to the others one day.

“Mr. Dahlberg? Mr. Ken Dahlberg?” Bob Woodward, trying.

“These leftist stooges for anti-American causes are always given a free pass. Isn’t it time to make them stand up and be counted for their views?”

-- Joe Scarborough, talking about Iraq War protesters in April 2003. In his piece, “MSNBC selectively remembers the Iraq War,” Alex Pareene makes sure Scarborough stands up and is counted for his views.

Further reading about the Iraq War on this site:

• Miss Me Yet? Part I
• Miss Me Yet? Part II
• Where are Iraq War movies popular?
• Tom Waits' “Day After Tomorrow”
• 'Fuck it, we're going in.'
• Movie Review: The Hurt Locker (2009)
• Movie Review: Green Zone (2010)
• Movie Review: Fair Game (2010)
• Movie Review: The Tillman Story (2010)
• Movie Review: Restrepo (2010)

“MAD [magazine] has never been successfully sued, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying. The magazine once received a letter from Lucasfilm’s legal department after their Empire Strikes Back parody, demanding that they recall all printed copies of the issue and destroy them. MAD replied by sending a copy of another letter they had received the previous month—from George Lucas, offering to buy the original artwork for the Empire parody and comparing Mort Drucker to Leonardo Da Vinci and the parody’s writer, Dick De Bartolo, to Mark Twain. They never heard from Lucasfilm’s legal department again.”

-- Grady Hendrix in his article, “Cahiers du CinéMAD,” about the history of MAD magazine's movie parodies, in Film Comment. Here's a Wiki list of MAD's film spoofs. The first I remember is “A Crockwork Lemon.”

Two panels from MAD's 1977 parody of “Star Wars.”

“Louie Gohmert is not just a nutjob — he is a singularly useless and unaccomplished nutjob. The man has been in the House of Representatives since 2005 and in all that time all he’s done is generate hundreds of outraged blog posts.

”Gohmert is the perfect spokesperson for the modern conservative movement, because his Congressional record is made up of an endless series of inflammatory, stupid and outrageous public statements, instead of any legislative accomplishments whatsoever. He has done nothing at all since he arrived in Washington besides repeatedly say degrading and insulting things about gay people and Muslims and immigrants. He doesn’t really seem to take any issue remotely seriously and has no apparent interest in actually advancing conservative policy goals. He’s done nothing for conservative causes beyond rile up liberals and repel sensible people.

“At CPAC he is Elvis.”

-- Alex Pareene, in the article, “Louie Gohmert treated like rock star at CPAC.” The piece also has maybe the best subhed ever written: “Longtime crank with no actual accomplishments very beloved at conservative conference.”

“So it turns out that the thesis here is 'Washington is obsessed with the deficit debate but we need to focus on the jobs crisis,' which is basically a Paul Krugman column, except [Peggy Noonan's version is] the insane version where the reason we are having a tax showdown is because Barack Obama is obsessed with inflicting misery on Pittsburgh because he hates Republicans. Got it. Thanks, Peggy.”

-- Alex Pareene, “Celebrated author, speechwriter and columnist Peggy Noonan: Obama made Pittsburgh depressing because he did not pass a stimulus bill,” on Salon.com. It's pretty funny and awful. But Peggy Noonan is pretty funny and awful.

“This is the biggest sin. This is the best kid that ever lived. Without him, there would've been no Superman.”

-- Director Richard Donner in the DVD commentary for “Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut.” He's initially talking about what a sin it is that the producers, Alexander and Ilya Salkind, cheapened their product, his “Superman” movies; but then the film's dedication to Christopher Reeve comes up and he alludes to the real sin of Christopher Reeve having lost his life. He goes on to talk about Reeve for another five minutes. It's quite touching.

“Like so many other parents of children with special needs, I’m leading a life of many decibels of desperation. Those pictures of my son, recklessly plastered all over the social network? I’m desperate for you – for the world, really – to fall in love with him, or, at the very least, respect him, maybe even develop a sense of responsibility for all kids like him. And by kids, I mean human beings, so please don’t get wrapped up in ageism. We’re all kids, and I want the world to love mine, because someday I won’t be around to take care of him.

”Love may endure, but I don’t think my enduring love can ensure clean clothing, good food, superhero stories, and a warm, safe bed for him when I’m not around, or when my wife isn’t. We know our daughter is the best big sister he could possibly have, and she’ll step up when and if the time comes, but you know, this is a marathon that requires many people to help one person run a good race, and that’s why I post the photos. Big love is way better than no love, and too many caring hands are better than two or too little.“

-- Jerry Grillo, father and writer, in his must-read post, ”Loud, Graphic, Measured Desperation."

“I found the film, which doesn’t have narration, to be exhaustively researched and arrestingly powerful. Most importantly, it answers a lot of questions I and everyone have had about the author. There is previously unseen footage and photos, and a rich depiction of that unfathomable period in Salinger’s career when The New Yorker magazine was able to publish a new J.D. Salinger story fairly regularly.

“There also are details of: his WWII soldiering in Normandy and interrogation of Nazi prisoners; his love affair with Eugene O’Neill’s daughter Oona, and the crushing disappointment of losing her to Charlie Chaplin while Salinger fought in Europe; Salinger’s habit of locking himself away in his New Hampshire cinder block bunker for weeks at a time to write; his penchant for taking a week to craft a single sentence; the damage his silences caused his family; the futile efforts of friends to reintroduce him to the world ...

”Even more intriguing, Salerno’s documentary also reports on what J.D. Salinger literary works might be in the famed secret vault, where 45 years of unpublished writings are rumored to be kept.“

-- Mike Fleming, Jr. on Shane Salerno's documentary, ”Salinger," which was recently purchased by the Weinstein Co. for distribution later this year. For me, though, the unfathomable period in Salinger's life isn't his New Yorker days (roughly 1947 to 1956); it's 1965 on. But I'm excited for the doc. My own life with J.D. Salinger here.

“The broadcast. I’d almost forgotten that’s what it was: an event in which the intended audience was elsewhere, in anonymous living rooms stocked with chips and wine. You knew this because of the time-outs for commercials that broke the show’s momentum every few minutes, reducing it to a series of short, lame bits that forced us—the supposed chosen ones, who were really just extras brought in to fill the shots—to cravenly, insincerely applaud a show that sucked even worse in real life than on television ...

”That night confirmed my suspicions: The heart of the matter with the Oscars, and with Hollywood generally, is that there is none. Just when you think you’ve reached the epicenter, the VIP room within the VIP room, a shift occurs, a reversal of perspective, and you find that you’re on the inside looking out with much the same sense of longing and displacement you felt when you were looking in.“

-- Walter Kirn in his New Republic piece, ”Oscar Grouch: I'd like to thank the Academy for nothing,“ about attending the Oscars in 2010 when his novel, ”Up in the Air,“ was turned into a film starring George Clooney and nominated for six Oscars. It won none.

Kirn: ”I did feel bad for Clooney, though. The junkets had endeared the guy to me. He’d hit on my girlfriend, which I took as a compliment. He’d refrained from sleeping with my girlfriend, which I counted as a favor."

“I am so afraid that my life is living me, and soon will be over, and not a moment of it will have been my own.”

-- Alma Garret (Molly Parker) in the final episode of the second season of “Deadwood,” “Boy-the-Earth-Talks-To,” written by Ted Mann. Yeah, I know, we're late to the party.

“You remember the war in Afghanistan, right? The one the U.S. military has fought since 2001 in a country far from our Homeland­-obsessed shores? The grinding, mystifying conflict in which more than 2,000 American soldiers have died? Anybody?”

--former Stars and Stripes reporter Martin Kuz in his review of Jake Tapper's book “The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor.”

“First off, there's probably not a damned thing the Yankees can do about A-Rod's contract. It was always a foolish deal, unless they had an unlimited budget and were willing to cut him when he stopped hitting. It seems that neither of those conditions apply. Not yet, anyway. Fortunately, the contract is good for Baseball, as it's ridiculous profligacy like this that keeps the haves from completely dominating the have-nots. So thank you, Steinbrothers, for paying your dreary third baseman a king's ransom. Now live with it.”

-- Rob Neyer, “Is it time for the 'A-Rod Rule'?” on mlb.sbnation.

Joe Posnanski, as always, has a nice, measured piece on the affair.

Encore.

“It occurred to me — it was an actor that murdered Abraham Lincoln. And therefore, somehow, it is only so fitting that every now and then an actor tries to bring him back to life again.”

--Daniel Day-Lewis, upon accepting the SAG award for his performance in “Lincoln.”

“There’s no perfect measure of how frequently filibusters occur. The closest thing we have to a count is the number of cloture votes the majority mounts. From 1917 to 1970, the majority sought cloture 58 times. Since the start of President Obama’s first term, it has sought cloture more than 250 times.”

-- Ezra Klein in his New Yorker article, “Let's Talk: The move to reform the filibuster.” The full article is only available to subscribers so get with it already, people.

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, providing no peace, has actually filibustered himself.

“The United States spends more on defense than all the other nations of the world combined.”

-- Jill Lepore in her article “The Force: How much military is enough?” about the history of the Department of Defense and its budgets. Must-read.

“I'm hoping for a flurry of retractions. A Marine spokesperson said yesterday that she couldn't confirm or deny that Beyoncé wasn't lip-syncing, and pretty much every media outlet assumed that was an admission. ... It's bunk. That lady was singing live. ... I've done a bunch of lip-syncing, in music videos, and it's very easy to spot. Anyone who performs in, shoots, or edits music videos can see the tiny, observable latency endemic to lip-syncing. Beyoncé either sang live, or she's the most gifted lip-syncer in the history of humanity. ...

”For me, the most compelling evidence that Beyoncé was doing it for real is the HELL YES smile on Joe Biden's face. Now, that is, clearly, a dude standing two feet from an electrifying lady singing like a motherfucker.“

-- Musician Mike Doughty, ”Beyoncé Wasn’t Lip-Syncing: A professional musician goes deep on the inaugural non-scandal,“ on Slate. Read the whole thing. He makes it all fascinating and understandable. Even a music doofus like me gets it.

”Now, that is, clearly, a dude standing two feet from an electrifying lady singing like a motherfucker." — Mike Doughty

“Fifty? Good god, Lundegaard! Earl Weaver, Stan the man — and now this!”

--Josh Karp in his Facebook birthday message this afternoon.

“This could have been an interview with Condoleezza Rice. ... [Kathryn Bigelow's] basic argument: 'People tortured people. After that torture took place, we got Bin Laden. Please reach your own conclusion.' That's like if someone were to say, I dunno, 'Islamic terrorists perpetrated 9/11. In Iraq, the government is Islamic and has done some terrorist-like activities. 'Nuff said.'”

-- Andrew Reed, on yesterday's blog post, “The Annotated Kathryn Bigelow Editorial,” in which she defends, kind of, her film “Zero Dark Thirty.” Reed's synopsis of Bigelow's basic argument is the best I've read anywhere: New Yorker, Salon, Daily Dish.

“[Kenny] Lofton is one of the better examples of what I have come to think of as the Tummy Delusion. There are plenty of people who have told me that Kenny Lofton is not a Hall of Famer, essentially, because HE IS NOT A HALL OF FAMER. Right? He just doesn't feel like a Hall of Famer. He never felt like a Hall of Famer. This idea of going back and breaking down his career and reevaluating his career is all well and good, but it doesn't replace that gut feeling ... Good player. Sure. Hall of Famer? No. OK. Move on. Places to go. People to see.

”I obviously feel differently about it. For one thing, I think the first gut is usually off. Someone just emailed me to say that  if Steve Garvey is not a Hall of Famer, Edgar Martinez certainly cannot be a Hall of Famer. And that's fine except Edgar Martinez was a much, much, much, much better hitter than Steve Garvey. I keep hearing about Garvey as a Hall of Famer … the guy's career on-base percentage was .329. Edgar Martinez's was .418.

“I mean, I don't really think anything else needs to be said. What could Steve Garvey possibly do to make up for 90 points in on-base percentage? Garvey got 792 more plate appearances than Martinez — a bit more than a season's worth — but made 1,400 more outs. That Martinez hit with considerably more power as well doesn't even need to be said.”

-- Joe Posnanski, “The BBWAA Project: Center Field.” My thoughts on Edgar.

“I recently read that the co-creator/artist of Spider-Man, Steve Ditko, is a big-time Objectivist and Ayn Rand fan. How much must he hate it that his most famous creation's most famous quote is 'with great power comes great responsibility'?”

--friend and colleague Ross Pfund.

The opening panel to “Amazing Fantasy #15.” It may be the first time I ever read the word “wallflower.” Even though I was one.

“Not teasing—flirting. Does anyone know the difference? A tease is a con. You press a spot because you know that it can be pressed, and while the sucker is feeling the pleasure or the pain resulting from the pressure, you take something from him. 'Do you have the money? Good. Good. She'll be right down. Wait here; she'll be right here.' And then nothing. A flirt doesn't do that. A flirt does a dance within the context of giving pleasure. Referring to this, referring to that. And suddenly, following the references, you find a little surprise. Nothing enormous. Nothing like 'Feed on me.' Nothing like that. Something small with a bow on it. It's a pleasure. A surprise, and a gift.”

-- George W.S. Trow, “Within the Context of No Context,” pp. 94-95

Erik

I really enjoyed your review of “Lincoln”—you brilliantly put words to the sentiments I felt about Daniel Day-Lewis' performance (and to what I felt about the 'Abe' of the movie generally).
 
I agree with your criticism of Downton Abbey, but I have to say that Maggie Smith doesn't even have to say anything to be worth watching. She has had some of the most classic facial expressions in that show—it's fantastic! It's too bad the show does not seem to want to be its better self. That said, I believe you misspelled the actress Michelle Dockery's name. You might wish to correct it.
 
Sincerely,
Daniel

Daniel isn't kidding. I left off the “D” in Dockery for a “C.” That's not a good mistake—since corrected. Thanks, Daniel, and the army of copy editors I have out there.

“He spelled it with a what?”

Nate Silver, who kept me sane in October, answered questions on Reddit today. When he mentioned that politics is more delusional than sports, he was asked which of the two is more frustrating to analyze. His answer:

Politics. I don’t think it's close. Between the pundits and the partisans, you’re dealing with a lot of very delusional people. And sports provides for much more frequent reality checks. In politics, you can go on being delusional for years at a time.

That last line is killer.

“The first time I watched Daniel [Day-Lewis], in the first shot on the first day of shooting, was the first shot of the movie. He comes into the room and his son is asleep by the fireplace, and he lays down next to his son. That was the first time he actually performed Lincoln, and I cried when I saw that. And on the last shot of the last day, with Lincoln on his death bed at the Petersen House — and only minutes later the film was done, we wrapped the company and all got together. And Daniel embraced me, and then he spoke to me for the first time in four months with his English accent, and made me cry even harder. And it made me cry because I wasn't ready to say goodbye to this warm and generous President who I had gotten to know better than all the history books I've ever read, and all the research I ever did. And perhaps the surprising financial success that our picture's enjoying right now is in no small measure due to the people not wanting to say goodbye to Lincoln either.”

-- Steven Spielberg at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, honoring his and their best actor. My take on Day-Lewis' performance was similar. Third paragraph. Currently, “Lincoln” has grossed $144 million at the box office, the 17th highest-grossing film of the year.

“Another point is that the 'invaders' [in Peter Berg's 'Battleship'] only brought 5 ships, don't fire unless fired upon, go to extremes to avoid killing anyone (they don't even have guns) and when one of the aliens corners the scientist dude, does he kill him? No, he freaking tries to comfort and calm him down.

”There is a tragedy to be found in this movie and I would have loved to see the same events from the aliens' point of view...“

-- a reader named ”Mavado“ in the comments field under my scathing review of ”Battleship.“ I didn't think anyone could say anything that would make me want to watch ”Battleship“ again, but this comes close. Is ”Battleship“ like ”Starship Troopers“? Is it a send-up of alien invasion movies? Are we the villains in it, recognizably so by the movie's creators? Holy shit, if so.

Do Rihanna, the USN, and paranoid world governments kill peace-loving aliens in ”Battleship"?

“He’s such a generous spirit, you’d be embarrassed to behave in a small way around him.”

--Tobias Wolff on his former student, the novelist George Saunders, as quoted by Joel Lovell in his New York Times Magazine piece, “Stay Open, Forever, So Open It Hurts.” Online, the piece is known as, “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year.” That book is called “Tenth of December,” in case you're interested.

“People didn't like the [1964 World's] Fair. People tried to like it, though. They agreed to like it. The Fair was hard to like, but they agreed to like it. Not to like it was the same thing as to break the agreement that was all that stood between them and being alone.”

-- George W.S. Trow, “Within the Context of No Context,” pg. 113

“We’re craving the nondigital even more these days, the authentically human interaction. We need to see some schmuck sweat.”

-- Jerry Seinfeld on the necessity of live stand-up comedy in an age when almost everything can be seen online. From the article, “Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up,” in The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 20, 2012.

“This is the guy I relate to more than any athlete. His precision, incredible precision. Look at his body type — he’s made the most of what he has. He’s the hardest guy to get out. He’s fast. And he’s old.”

-- Jerry Seinfeld on Ichiro Suzuki in the article, “Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up,” in The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 20, 2012

“In a new bit, [Jerry] Seinfeld likens a man to a balloon. At the outset of a romantic relationship, the balloon is buoyant and beautiful and 'the woman holds on tight' for fear he’ll fly away. Flash forward, and the balloon’s doddering around, off in a corner somewhere, low to the floor, pathetically unable to 'even lift up its own string.'”

-- from Jonah Weiner's New York Times Magazine piece, “Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up,” from Dec. 20, 2012. I just got around to reading it. It's worth it. The above joke is a good harbinger of both the end of the year, which is upon us, and next month, during which I'll turn 50.

Jerry Seinfeld explains the Pop Tart joke on the New York Times site.

I don't agree with all of Nathaniel Rogers' annual lumps of coal in this post from a few days ago. He has five items listed on his “Most Overrated Anything” list, and I'd  argue that Amy Adams was hardly what was wrong with “The Master,” while “Life of Pi” was a more fascinating movie than he lets on. But yes to “Silver Linings Playbook.” At one point during that movie I did something I've never done at the theater before: I got out my iPhone and checked my email. Don't worry, I was in the last row! No one around me! Even so. Takes a lot for me to do that. Although my threshold keeps getting lower.

The quote of the day, though, is for No. 4 on Nat's list: film critics. We actually kind of disagree on this, too, since he thinks they're shirking their advocacy duties while I think the biggest way they fucked up was allowing others, namely pundits, to point out the main moral issues, or shortcomings, with “Zero Dark Thirty,” after a month of nothing but adulation from critics. That still pisses me off. If, in fact, the pundits are correct. I'll finally get to see the movie next week. 

But we agree here:

It's not helping, I don't think, that the online conversation is increasingly oroborus-insular and consensus-premature since movies are withheld from public view too long and by the time the conversation has opened up critics have tired of playing with them, like cats who've grown bored with their own tails or a dead mouse.

My real complaint, of course, is with the studios and distributors, who hold the best movies until the end of the year, then force-feed them to us at Christmastime.

“I will almost never like a movie about a road trip, about some sick or suffering family member or emotionally stressful family situation, about a boy/girl’s troubled relationship with his/her mother/father, about a childhood that’s unhappy, about self-discovery in high school, about mothers who are crazy, fathers who are unloving. These types of films, however, dominate American independent filmmaking and are the sole reason why, during the Seattle International Film Festival, I do everything in my power to avoid watching and reviewing movies made by unknown or emerging American directors. Give me French, Chinese, Mexican, Iranian—anything but indie American filmmakers and all of their road trips and family issues.”

--Charles Mudede, in the Northwest Film Forum article, “A Vivat Mudede Top 10 List,” compiled by Liz Sheppard. The above comes in at No. 6. I love it. And I disagree completely, vehemently, with No. 5.

“In his remarks, Senator Kennedy had much the better argument [than the NRA], which is not surprising since his case is irrefutable. He pointed out that in this decade the number of civilians killed by firearms at home is many times the number of soldiers killed in Vietnam. In 1965 alone, 5,600 murders, 36,000 assaults and most of the 68,000 armed robberies were committed with guns.

”It is easy to argue that these crimes could have been carried out by other means. But advocates of gun-control legislation are making an effort to reduce the toll of death and suffering; they are not offering a panacea. Because a gun is easily concealed, readily available, and achieves its purpose immediately, it is the favorite weapons of the jealous lover, the excitable adolescent and the demented crank. No other weapon can make that claim.“

-- New York Times editorial on a meeting between Senator Ted Kennedy and the NRA on April 5, 1967 vis a vis upcoming gun control legislation. The Times editorial advocated banning ”the sale of firearms through the mail“ and ”the registration of guns with the police.“ A year later, after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed by Congress and signed into law by Lyndon Johnson. It mostly prohibited the interstate transfer of firearms except by licensed dealers, since this was the method Lee Harvey Oswald purchased the rifle that killed Pres. Kennedy in Nov. 1963. The Times editorial, quoted above and below, is the second mention of ”gun control" in the New York Times archives. The first occurred in 1965.

Who are your heroes in real life?
I really love Barack Obama. Sorry if that’s like “Ew. The president. That’s lame.” I love Barack Obama. What a great man. I’m so lucky to have voted for that guy.

--Louis C.K., in the Proust Questionnaire in the latest Vanity Fair. His answers are so good they put to shame almost everybody else's, including mine from a few years back, since most of us play along with VF and Proust. Louie doesn't.

Oh, and it's another connection, as if we need it, between Louis C.K. and Marcel Proust. 

Together again. Proust, I'm sure, never envisioned some of Louie's answers.

“The only thing more beautiful than a baseball park full of screaming fans is an empty park with not a fan in sight. I mention this because it's a sentiment I feel every time I go to work.”

-- Bob Lundegaard in an email to his ne'er-do-well son, Erik, about the film “Moneyball.” His job, referenced above, is tour guide at Target Field in beautiful downtown Minneapolis. if you go, be sure to ask for him by name.

An empty ballpark of the beautiful kind, not the Safeco Field kind.

“By the time I reached the coffee-shop door … my self-confidence had collapsed. Panic had taken its place. I believed I was the ugliest, dirtiest little old bum in Manhattan. If I went into the coffee shop, everybody would be nauseated. They would throw me out and tell me to go to the Bowery where I belonged.

“But I somehow found the courage to go in anyway—and imagine my surprise! It was as though I had died and gone to heaven! A waitress said to me, 'Honeybunch, you sit right down, and I’ll bring you your coffee right away.' I hadn’t said anything to her.

”So I sit down, and everywhere I looked I saw customers of every description being received with love. To the waitresses everybody was 'honeybunch' and 'darling' and 'dear.' It was like an emergency ward after a great catastrophe. It did not matter what race or class the victims belonged to. They were all given the same miracle drug, which was coffee. The catastrophe in this case, of course, was that the sun had come up again.“

--Walter F. Starbuck in Kurt Vonnegut's 1979 novel, ”Jailbird"; pp. 165-66

My morning. Book by Kurt Vonnegut, pottery by Ingrid Sundstrom, keyboard by Apple.

“No one is a bigger admirer of The Hurt Locker than myself (I was one of the first fans out of the gate,) but Zero Dark Thirty delivers on a more precise, exacting and muscular level — it's dry and fierce and austere and Day of the Jackal-ish (minus the sex) and much more exacting and verite than even I expected. And yet it builds and delivers like a great melodrama, or a great melodrama according to Biggy-Boal's new rules.”

--Jeffrey Wells in his post, “ZDT, Django Double Bill,” in which he lauds the former movie (Katherine Bigelow's “Zero Dark Thirty”) and disparages the latter (Quentin Tarantino's “Djano Unchained”). I'm looking forward to both, but mostly to “Zero Dark Thirty.” Every time I see the trailer (below) I lose interest in the movie I'm about to see.

“The notion of a pervasive constructed world of falsehood and illusion built on the fabrications of the press and the liberal establishment has long been central to the American far right. And since Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater before him, the knowledge that its supporters have their own truth, that they are forced to battle continually against an intensively propagandized false reality, has been a vital energizing trump of “movement” Republicans. It means that Republicans, whether in power or not, are always in opposition. Even when they hold the White House and Congress, still the great bulk of the news media in New York and Washington with its vaunted “objectivity”; the culture industry in New York and California with its Hollywood vulgarity and easy virtues; the permanent bureaucracy of unionized government employees and teachers with their sinecures and perks—all remain immovably liberal. Republicans, “in power” or not, are forced to struggle always to conquer false truth, and that constant struggle has been a source of great motivating mobilizing power ...

”Of course occasionally into these great self-sustaining master narratives comes a rude interruption from something…real.“

-- Mark Danner, ”How, and What, Obama Won," in The New York Review of Books, which is a delicious, delicious read.

“The players must understand the owners aren't against them. But the owners are fed up with Miller. They simply aren't going to let Marvin Miller run over them anymore.”

--Paul Richards, vice-president of the Atlanta Braves, in 1972, just before Marvin Miller and the MLBPA ran over the owners big time. In the process, of course, the owners became richer than ever.

The quote comes from Red Smith's article, “Owners' Armor Has Its Chinks,” in the April 9, 1972, New York Times. Miller died yesterday at the age of 95.

It's an intersting article--available as .pdf on the NY Times site. Basically Smith lets the owners hoist themselves.  August A. Busch, Jr. (St. Louis Cardinals) talks about baseball being not a game but a business, and they need to treat it like a business. Then Bob Howsam, GM of the Cincinnati Reds, complains that to Miller “money seems to be his only concern,” as if that's not a business concern as well. In his autobiography, “A Whole Different Ball Game,” Miller cites Smith as one of the few scribes who didn't take cheap shots at the union, and who asked probing questions to get at the facts.

Here's the Times' obit.

MLBPA rep Marvin Miller, and player rep (and 1971 NL MVP) Joe Torre, at the end of the April 1972 players strike.

“I’ve got a mandate to help middle-class families and families that are working hard to try to get into the middle class. That’s my mandate.”

--Pres. Barack Obama, last week in his first press conference since winning re-election.

Pres. Obama talks to the press, Nov. 14, 2012 (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson).

“Dec. 27: In an attempt to score more runs, the Mariners announce they are moving third base closer to home plate.”

--Jim Caple, “Off Base Predictions for the Rest of the Year,” on ESPN.com. I'm also a fan of Nov. 16, Nov. 17, Thanksgiving Day, and the various ways the Yankees try to get rid of A-Rod.

Safeco Field, with its unfair location of third base.

“Here is the real world in proportion:

”David Petraeus has had sex outside his marriage, as have many men and many women. Human sexuality and compulsion are not in any way related to intelligence.  It’s not that the dumb or powerful are more prone to fucking around, or that the intelligent and powerless do it to any greater degree.  It’s that men in general are hopelessly and permanently prone to contemplate sex and furtive romance and, sometimes, to act on it.   The reasons they do so are crude, ordinary and inevitable.   Women are also hopelessly and permanently prone to contemplate furtive romance and sex — and yes, I changed the order, I know — and the reasons they do so are only marginally less crude, ordinary and inevitable.

“Professionally, David Petraeus understood a helluva lot more than John McCain conveyed to Roger Simon in two minutes of conversation.  For one thing, if Mr. Simon wanted to be honest, he might acknowledge that it was Petraeus who saw the morass that was Iraq even as it began, who famously turned to a journalist on the march into Baghdad with the 101st Airborne and declared openly:  I know how this begins, but explain to me how this ends?  That alone makes the man more astute and more valuable than an entire White House, most of the Pentagon, and much of the American press corps, which itself failed to raise so much worry when war in Iraq was being debated, or rather, not seriously debated at all.  It certainly makes Petraeus smarter than most of America, which largely supported that disastrous intervention.”

--David Simon, “Stray Penises and Politicos,” from his own website, The Audacity of Despair. It describes my feeling about all of this better than anything I've read or even thought.

“At the end of his life, the boxer Joe Louis said, ‘I did the best I could with what I had.’ It’s exactly what I would say of my work: I did the best I could with what I had.”

--Novelist Philip Roth, annoucing his retirement from writing at the age of 79.

My recommendations from the Roth oeuvre: ”Goodbye, Columbus,“ ”Portnoy's Complaint,“ ”Reading Myself and Others,“ ”The Ghost Writer,“ ”Zuckerman Unbound,“ ”The Anatomy Lesson,“ ”Patrimony.“ I think his best is ”The Ghost Writer." His novels in the '90s won numerous awards but I was not a fan. All the same, he was the right fielder of my starting nine of the literary world. 

Philip Roth Unbound

“I think of this as an election where we stuck to our values: Make sure Social Security and Medicare benefits are protected, and millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share. To me, that’s the heart of it. That’s really where the basic social contract is reaffirmed.”

--Elizabeth Warren, U.S. Senator-elect (D-MA), in the article, “Is Elizabeth Warren's Victory the End of the Tea Party?,” on AlterNet

“The president's oration was almost a summation of his core belief: that against the odds, human beings can actually better ourselves, morally, ethically, materially, and we can do so more powerfully together than alone, and that nowhere exemplifies that endeavor more than America. It was Lincolnian in its cadences, and in some ways, was the final, impassioned, heart-felt rebuke to all those, including his opponent, who tried to portray him as somehow un-American. How deeply that must have cut. How emphatically did he rebut the charge.

”What he reminded me of was how deeply American he actually is - how this country's experiment truly is in diversity as well as democracy. And his diversity is not some cringe-worthy 1990s variety. It is about being both white and black, both mid-Western and Hawaiian, both proudly American and yet also attuned to the opinion of mankind.

“As for the next four years, there is time enough for that. But I stand by these words. And one felt something tectonic shift tonight. America crossed the Rubicon of every citizen's access to healthcare, and re-elected a black president in a truly tough economic climate. The shift toward gay equality is now irreversible. The end of prohibition of marijuana is in sight. Women, in particular, moved this nation forward - pragmatically, provisionally, sensibly. They did so alongside the young whose dedication to voting was actually greater this time than in 2008, the Latino voters who have made the current GOP irrelevant, and African-Americans, who turned up in vast numbers, as in 2008, to put a period at the end of an important sentence.

”That sentence will never now be unwritten. By anyone.“

--Andrew Sullivan, ”The American President," on The Dish

“I know that political campaigns can sometimes seem small, even silly. And that provides plenty of fodder for the cynics who tell us that politics is nothing more than a contest of egos or the domain of special interests. But if you ever get the chance to talk to folks who turned out at our rallies and crowded along a rope line in a high school gym or — or saw folks working late at a campaign office in some tiny county far away from home, you’ll discover something else.

”You’ll hear the deep patriotism in the voice of a military spouse who’s working the phones late at night to make sure that no one who fights for this country ever has to fight for a job or a roof over their head when they come home. You’ll hear the determination in the voice of a young field organizer who’s working his way through college and wants to make sure every child has that same opportunity. You’ll hear the pride in the voice of a volunteer who’s going door to door because her brother was finally hired when the local auto plant added another shift.

“That’s why we do this. That’s what politics can be. That’s why elections matter. It’s not small, it’s big. It’s important. Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated. We have our own opinions. Each of us has deeply held beliefs. And when we go through tough times, when we make big decisions as a country, it necessarily stirs passions, stirs up controversy. That won’t change after tonight. And it shouldn’t. These arguments we have are a mark of our liberty, and we can never forget that as we speak, people in distant nations are risking their lives right now just for a chance to argue about the issues that matter — the chance to cast their ballots like we did today.”

-- Barack Hussein Obama, the 44th President of the United States (and still heavyweight champion of the world), in his victory speech last night in Chicago.

This was my favorite part of a very good speech. It encourages us not to give in to cynicism, which is the easiest thing to do. So why do it? Why not try to do the hard thing? He seems like the adult in the room. Again.

There was also this moment at the end, when he redefined the word by which he is most known, and which, to many, has become a cynical punchline since 2009:

“I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope. I’m not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the road blocks that stand in our path. I’m not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight. I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.”

Four more years. Thank God.

“That’s why elections matter. It’s not small, it’s big. It’s important.”

“Every now and then, I run across the stray Romney supporter. I’ve been instructed to wish them a nice day and move on. 

”I’m not good at following instructions.“

--my friend Ben Stocking, ”The Obamanator,“ helping to get out the vote for Pres. Obama in the projects of Newton, Florida, as recounted in his post, ”Greetings from the Campaign Trail."

“I confess that as a liberal Democrat I'm amazed that Obama isn't 20 points ahead in the race. Yes, he had that one lousy debate, but what a truly vapid, uninspired candidate Mitt Romney is, standing for nothing, a glistening shrine to hackitude. Romney's been compared to Nixon in his mendacious duplicitous insincerity but Romney's actually worse: Nixon knew stuff, he did his homework, not like Romney, who has a vacancy sign on his brow whenever he's forced to discuss an issue--usually foreign-policy related--that he's had six or seven years to study up on if he hadn't been such a complacent, incurious sumbitch too busy admiring his fucking hair and winning smile in the mirror. I really thought he'd be smart enough not to glue himself to Tea Party positions that become a mite uncomfortable in the general election, such as hey let's send disaster relief back to the states or better yet privatize it, but no, he pandered like a fan dancer. His shape-shifting about the Detroit bailout couldn't be more spazzy. And he's the best the Republicans had!”

--James Wolcott, “The Good, the Bad, and the Soggy” on the Vanity Fair site.

With apologies to Jason Robards and William Goldman, actor and screenwriter of “All the President's Men,” from which this quote was taken (slightly out of context):

You know the results of the latest Gallup Poll? ... We're under a lot of pressure, you know, and you put us there. Nothing's riding on this except the first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters. But if you fuck up again, I'm gonna get mad.

Here's the scene:

“In the nineteen-seventies, the balance of power began to shift from production to capital, and corporate America started to seem lumbering and inefficient. This shift was the business world’s version of the sixties—one (younger and impatient) group of politically conservative businesspeople challenging another (older and more traditional) group. The field of battle was not politics, culture, dress, or taste in music. It was the American corporation, and the consequences for the whole society were profound. The business sixties wound up rearranging most of the American economy. General Motors has fewer than half as many employees today as it did in 1955, and, among the American corporations that were great at mid-century, it’s hardly alone. George Romney was an organization man. Mitt Romney became a transaction man: someone who moves assets around with a speed and force that leaves many of the rest of us bewildered. The insurrection in business has profoundly affected the lives of most people who work, pay taxes, and get government benefits. It is the backdrop to this Presidential election.”

--Nicholas Lemann in his Oct. 1 New Yorker article “Transaction Man: Mormonism, private equity, and the making of a candidate.”

“If you believe in the value of every human life, if you believe that lives that aren’t filmed have meaning, then you have to believe in theater.”

--Craig Wright, playwright, in the New York Times.

“When [Coco] Crisp squeezed the baseball, the Oakland Athletics completed one of the more amazing and unlikely seasons in the sport's long and storied history. The Texas Rangers, of course, are still alive. But as Wild Cards, not champions. The A's are the champions. And nobody in the whole world saw it coming.”

--Rob Neyer, “Athletics Blow Out Rangers, Win American League West.”

CF Josh Hamilton commits rare error that allows 2 runs to score, as Oakland beats Texas 12-5.

(BTW: These moveable gif files like the U2 song “Stuck in a Moment,” aren't they? They're like bad memories, played over and over again in your mind. And each time, it plays the same. I find them a bit disconcerting.)

• “On any subject other than their own work, [actors] should keep quiet.” --1952
• “Moderates don't make themselves heard on public issues. It's too bad because moderates make democracy work. --1968
• ”My living depends on people not getting mad at me. No matter what, I've never felt a significant part of the audience was mad at me. ... The trick is to state your views as moderately as you can.“ --1984
• ”Moses was a conservative. You don't mess around with Moses. He was an angry, harsh leader, not a friendly fellow.“ --1998
• ”[Regular people] have precious little time or resources to battle misguided Cinderella attitudes, the fringe propaganda of the homosexual coalition, the feminists who preach that it's a divine duty for women to hate men, blacks who raise a militant fist with one hand, while they seek preference with the other.“ --1998
• ”The last two generations have abandoned even the idea of greatness. The media, academe, the creative community, now extol the ordinary, enshrine the victim.“ --2000
• ”Vote freedom first. Vote George W. Bush. Everything else is a distant and forgettable second place. This is the most important election since the Civil War. Al Gore, if elected, would have the power to hammer your gun rights right into oblivion. Instead of fighting redcoats, we are now fighting blue blood elitists.“ --2000
• ”My Dear Friends, Colleagues and Fans: My physicians have recently told me I may have a neurological disorder whose symptoms are consistent with Alzheimer's disease...“ --2002

Most of the above quotes are from Chapter 7 of ”Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics," by Steven J. Ross.

c

This isn't a quote so much as a summation and a warning. Jill Lepore's New Yorker article, “The Lie Factory: How politics became a business,” on the rise and ascendancy of Clem Whitaker, Leone Baxter and Campaigns, Inc., the first political consulting firm in the world, which mostly handled right-wing candidates and issues in the 1930s, '40s and ''50s, includes this line: “Whitaker and Baxter weren’t just inventing new techniques [to win political campaigns]; they were writing a rule book.”

This is the rule book. See if you can spot familiar political techniques:

1. Make it personal: candidates are easier to sell than issues.
2. If your position doesn’t have an opposition, or if your candidate doesn’t have an opponent, invent one.
3. Pretend that you are the Voice of the People.
4. Attack, attack, attack. (Whitaker: “You can’t wage a defensive campaign and win.”)
5. Never explain anything. (Whitaker: “The more you have to explain, the more difficult it is to win support.”)
6. Say the same thing over and over again. (Whitaker: “We assume we have to get a voter’s attention seven times to make a sale.”)
7. Subtlety is your enemy. (Baxter: “Words that lean on the mind are no good. They must dent it.)
8. Simplify, simplify, simplify. (Whitaker: “A wall goes up when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think.“)
9. Fan flames. (Whitaker: “We need more partisanship in this country.”)
10. Never shy from controversy; instead, win the controversy. (Whitaker: “The average American doesn’t want to be educated; he doesn’t want to improve his mind; he doesn’t even want to work, consciously, at being a good citizen. But there are two ways you can interest him in a campaign, and only two that we have ever found successful.“ You can put on a fight (“he likes a good hot battle, with no punches pulled”), or you can put on a show (“he likes the movies; he likes mysteries; he likes fireworks and parades”). “So if you can’t fight, PUT ON A SHOW! And if you put on a good show, Mr. and Mrs. America will turn out to see it.”)
11. Winner takes all.

It's like finally finding the Covenant of the GOP.

Baxter and Whitaker helped elect conservative candidates and defeat progressive legislation for decades. “A wall goes up when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think," Whitaker said.

“In this profession of leading men’s minds, this is the reason I feel it must be in the hands of the most ethical, principled people—people with real concern for the world around them, for people around them—or else it will erode into the hands of people who have no regard for the world around them. It could be a very, very destructive thing.” 

-- Leone Baxter quoted at the end of Jill Lepore's New Yorker article, “The Lie Factory: How politics became a business,” She and her husband, Clem Whitaker, were the biggest and most inovative political consultants in the middle of the 20th century. Among other things, they helped: defeat Upton Sinclair in his bid to become governor of California in 1934; defeat Gov. Earl Warren's California health care proposal; defeat Harry S. Truman's health care proposal; usher in the era of dirty, media-driven, money-driven politics.

“'Government by Whitaker and Baxter' appeared in The Nation in three parts, in April and May of 1951. ...[The author], as Whitaker and Baxter must have very well understood, had played by different rules from theirs. He hadn’t been simple. He hadn’t attacked them. He had taken time to explain. He hadn’t invented an enemy. He hadn’t taken remarks out of context. He hadn’t made anything up. He hadn’t lied.”

“Whitaker and Baxter went to Washington and persuaded a hundred congressmen to let them read their constituent mail. At the start of the campaign, Whitaker reported, mail from voters 'was running four and half to one in favor' of Truman’s plan [about national health care]. Whitaker and Baxter went to work. 'Nine months later it was running four to one against.'

-- from Jill Lepore's New Yorker article, ”The Lie Factory: How politics became a business,“ on the rise and ascendancy of Clem Whitaker, Leone Baxter, Campaigns, Inc. and politcal consulting. Among the charges against Truman's plan was the notion that it was ”socialized medicine."

“The scuttling of his health insurance plan was a confirmation for [Gov. Earl] Warren of the nature of the political process, in which advocates of programs based on humanity and common sense were pitted against selfish, vindictive special interests.”

-- Earl Warren’s biographer, G. Edmund White, on the defeat of the California governor's proposed 1945 health care legislation, which was demonized by the political consulting firm, Campaigns, Inc. Previously, in 1942, Campaigns, Inc. had helped elect Warren. The quotes above and below appear in Jill Lepore's excellent New Yorker article, “The Lie Factory: How politics became a business.”

“In 1942, the problem with Earl Warren was that he was grim. Baxter said that, to get women to vote for him, he and his wife had to agree to have a picture of their family taken, and publicized. Warren’s wife, Nina, objected. 'She didn’t want to exploit her family,' Baxter said. 'But we knew that he had to get that family.' They took a picture—Earl, Nina, and their six children. They look like the Von Trapp Family Singers. Campaigns, Inc., distributed three million copies.”

“Upton [Sinclair] was beaten ... because he had written books.”

--Clem Whitaker, one of the first political consultants, in Jill Lepore's New Yorker article, “The Lie Factory: How politics became a business,” on the rise and ascendancy of Whitaker, Leone Baxter and Campaigns, Inc., the first political consulting firm in the world. Among other things, Campaigns, Inc. placed out-of-context quotes from Sinclair's books and novels every day on the front page of The Los Angeles Times.

From the Los Angeles Examiner, 1934.

“[W]hen modern advertising began, the big clients were just as interested in advancing a political agenda as a commercial one. Monopolies like Standard Oil and DuPont looked bad: they looked greedy and ruthless and, in the case of DuPont, which made munitions, sinister. They therefore hired advertising firms to sell the public on the idea of the large corporation, and, not incidentally, to advance pro-business legislation. It’s this kind of thing that [Upton] Sinclair was talking about when he said that American history was a battle between business and democracy, and, 'So far,' he wrote, 'Big Business has won every skirmish.'”

--Jill Lepore in her New Yorker article, “The Lie Factory: How politics became a business,” on the rise and ascendancy of Clem Whitaker, Leone Baxter and Campaigns, Inc. Much, much recommended.

Leone Baxter and Clem Whitaker of Campaigns, Inc., the first big political consulting firm.

He: There's a lot of trouble behind a bar.
Me: How do you mean?
He: The drinking. Plus everyone wants to fuck the bartender. It's a good job to have in your 20s, but once you hit 35...

--Conversation at the Hilton Garden Inn Hotel bar, in Eagan, Minn., while watching “Monday Night Football.” The guy I was talking to, another guest at the hotel, looked a bit like Lawrence Tierney in “Reservoir Dogs,” but with black-framed glasses. He was the father of at least two, and was talking about his daughter, who had recently graduated from college with a dual degree, neither of which she was using. Instead, she was bartending and teaching snowboarding in Colorado. At one point, despite his words, I said, “You seem proud of her,” and he shrugged without shrugging. “The world was made for people like her,” he said. “Now my son. He studies, plays by the rules. He'll struggle his whole life.”

Could've talked to the dude all night.

Lawrence Tierney in “Reservoir Dogs.”

Q: How did you and Gene Wilder become friends?

A: These things are gradual. We played tennis together, then he met Gilda Radner, I became friends of both of them, and I arranged for their wedding here, their engagement dinner; and then, you know, it just got solidified. Some lawyers feel it’s important to keep the desk between themselves and the client--so that they have respect from the client. And I feel that to know me is not necessarily to disrespect me.

--Eric Weissmann, entertainment attorney, during my Q&A in the Feb. 2011 issue of Southern California Super Lawyers magazine, “Take Your Violin and Go Back to Vienna!” Mr. Weissmann, a gracious interviewee, also has great stories on Burt Lancaster, Mel Brooks, the making of “Jaws,” and escaping Nazi-occupied Europe as a child.

I thought of Lundin's tweet about the deaths at the American embassy in Libya yesterday while driving home from work. The deaths occurred to protest Sam Becile's anti-Islam movie, “The Innocence of Muslims,” which Jeffrey Welles calls a ridiculous, “grade-z” movie. Some wonder whether Sam Becile is a real person. (Sam Becile? Imbecile?) Some wonder whether the movie is a real movie.

What made me think of Lundin's tweet again was the song that played on the car stereo: Steve Earle's “Little Emperor,” written for George W. Bush. In particular, these lines:

Hey Little Hypocrite
What you gonna say
When you wind up standin' naked
On the final Judgement Day
How you gonna justify it
Who you gonna call
What if it turns out that
God don't look like you at all

For all the above idiots.

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

In response, the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real.

--from “Deafness Before the Storm,” by Kurt Eichenwald, author of “500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars," in the New York Times Op-Ed.

“So did you see the AP fact-check of Bill Clinton’s long speech last night? It’s sort of amazing. Like, for example, while Bill Clinton claimed that the Romney/Ryan campaign is dishonest, the reality is ... MONICA LEWINSKY.

”CLINTON: 'Their campaign pollster said, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.” Now that is true. I couldn’t have said it better myself — I just hope you remember that every time you see the ad.'

“THE FACTS: Clinton, who famously finger-wagged a denial on national television about his sexual relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky and was subsequently impeached in the House on a perjury charge, has had his own uncomfortable moments over telling the truth. 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,' Clinton told television viewers. Later, after he was forced to testify to a grand jury, Clinton said his statements were 'legally accurate' but also allowed that he 'misled people, including even my wife.'

”How is this a checking of a fact?“

--Alex Pareene, ”The AP's Amazing Clinton 'Fact Check,'" Salon.com

*  *  *

Not sure what's with AP these days. They often run extremely conservative and/or opinionated stuff under the guise of objectivity. I first noticed it--but have noticed it many times since--while working on a profile of Robert Rubin, litigation director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area:

Rubin, of course, is aware of the more famous Robert Rubin, the former treasury secretary, but there was a day last November when, if you were online, “You didn’t have to go through Robert E. Rubin to get to me,” he says.

It was the day an AP story came out critical of the fact that the only two lawyers to sue under a provision of the 2002 California Voting Rights Act were the two lawyers who helped write the provision: Joaquin Avila and Rubin. The law, according to the article, “makes it easier for lawyers to sue and win financial judgments in cases arising from claims that minorities effectively were shut out of local [at-large] elections.” The story, despite a passing reference to Rubin’s salaried position, also implied that the two lawyers were getting rich from it. Headlined “Jackpot: Lawyers earn fees from law they wrote,” it spread quickly on anti-lawyer blogs.

“It was very biased and one-sided,” Brown says of the article. “They didn’t ask for competing points of views, they didn’t discuss the purpose of public-interest impact litigation. It suggested that these lawyers were in it for the money; but a lawyer like Robert Rubin has dedicated his entire life to public interest work. He’s certainly not in this line of work for the money.”

“I’ll make two points,” adds Brad Seligman, a civil rights attorney with Impact Fund. “The first is voting rights litigation is extremely difficult. It’s often unsuccessful. And unlike many other areas of the law they don’t create any damage pot. The only way to get paid in those cases is if you actually win the case. Then it’s up to a judge to decide how much you get paid. That’s number one. It’s unlike almost every other area of law. There are no rich lawyers doing voting rights cases.

“The second is Robert is an employee of a nonprofit organization. He doesn’t make any money personally from these cases. And his salary level as an employee is way lower than what he could command in private practice. In fact, if he was in private practice, given his reputation and experience, he’d be making a million dollars a year. But he’s working in a nonprofit agency.”

“How can I not be serious? What's not to be serious about? What could I take more seriously than this? And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?”

--from Don DeLillo's “Underworld,” pg. 323. I've always like that description. I think that's what gets most people, eventually: the enormousness of the known forces in the world.

 “Did it hurt? No, it felt good. Of course it hurt. You get hit with a 90-something-mile-per-hour fastball, it's going to hurt.”

--Derek Jeter, Yankees shortstop, after being hit in the head by Indians pitcher Cory Kluber last Friday, Aug 24.

I know. Some of you are wondering if it's really me, the majority owner of the Yankees Suck page, writing this, but, you know, it's a good response. Made me laugh. Gotta tip your cap. Jayson Stark has more on the records Jeter, Mike Trout and Adam Dunn might break this September to remember.

Some scary footage of the beaning (while it lasts) here:

“What arrogance! Who do you think you are anyway? ... The movie colony may root for the Jews all they wish but don't think that the people of the United States are going to fall in with your plans. ... Those of us who know World History and the Bible know that the Jews have always been in trouble up to their ears. ... They are trouble makers.”

--a letter from a self-proclaimed “Bible Christian” in Minneapolis, Minn., to actor Edward G. Robinson, who, as part of an anti-Nazi organization in Hollywood in the 1930s, called for a boycott of Germany in early 1939. At the time, according to Steven J. Ross' “Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics,” “nearly two-thirds of Americans believed that Jews as a group had 'objectionable traits' and over 50 percent thought that Nazi Germany's antisemitism stemmed partially or wholly from the actions of German Jews.” (pp. 97-102)

“'We did build that,' has already been established as one of the more dishonest political memes in a campaign season undisturbed by shame. The Republicans took a clumsy phrase from an Obama speech in July, in which the president pointed out that most American business successes have been assisted by infrastructure, education or incentives underwritten by the government. The Republican spin-masters whipped this into a preposterous claim that Obama denied American entrepreneurs any credit for their creations. The fact that this slogan has been thoroughly debunked has not kept it from being the defining theme in Tampa.“

--Bill Keller, ”Lies, Damn Lies and GOP Video," on The New York Times site.

What's the mandate if Romney wins? What's the lesson? The GOP always contends that people get ahead by hard work; if Romney wins, it will be obvious to all but the most blinkered that he won with money and lies ... which at least will be a more honest appraisal of the way the world works.

ADDENDA:

• Paul Krugman nails it.
• George Packer on the frightfully misinformed GOP.

On the day after the day Gore Vidal died, when I was compiling my 19 Gore Vidal quotes of the day--which led regular reader, Biblical Studies scholar, and frequent Happy Hour comrade Uncle Vinny to complain “What part of 'of the day' don't you understand?”--one of my Vidal books, “Rocking the Boat,” was on loan to a friend, so I couldn't go through it to search what I'd underlined and present it, wah-lah, here. Now I've got it back. On with the countdown.

Number 20!

“When John Crosby of The New York Herald Tribune went on vacation in the summer, he asked me to write a column for him. I wrote about The Unamericans. Well, sir, the Radical Right really hit the fan. The counterattack began. From ultra-foolish Fulton Lewis Jr. to the Committee's chairman, Francis Walter, the attack was suspiciously the same. The book should be completely discredited because Donner had been a Communist. None of the charges made against HUAC were answered. The smear-tactic, second nature to these patriots, is always the same: get your critic on some other ground; never answer a charge; never defend, attack!”

--Gore Vidal in “HUAC Revisited,” December 1961, from his book of essays, “Rocking the Boat.”

Plus ca change...

“If they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.”

--Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson on the Republican party during the 1952 election.

From the Left:

Look, Ryan hasn’t “crunched the numbers”; he has just scribbled some stuff down, without checking at all to see if it makes sense. He asserts that he can cut taxes without net loss of revenue by closing unspecified loopholes; he asserts that he can cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge, without saying how; he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work. This is just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal.

--Paul Krugman, Nobel-prize-winning economist, in his post “The Ryan Role,” on the Conscience of a Liberal blog.

From the Right:

The Ryan Plan boils down to a fetish for cutting the top marginal income-tax rate for “job creators” — i.e. the superwealthy — to 25 percent and paying for it with an as-yet-undisclosed plan to broaden the tax base. Of the $1 trillion in so-called tax expenditures that the plan would attack, the vast majority would come from slashing popular tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance, mortgage interest, 401(k) accounts, state and local taxes, charitable giving and the like, not to mention low rates on capital gains and dividends. The crony capitalists of K Street already own more than enough Republican votes to stop that train before it leaves the station.

In short, Mr. Ryan’s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices. And it couldn’t pass even if Republicans were to take the presidency and both houses of Congress. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, social insurance or the nation’s fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist prosperity — just empty sermons.

--David Stockman, former director of Office of Management and Budget under Pres. Reagan, in his Op-Ed, “Paul Ryan's Fairy-Tale Budget Plan,” in The New York Times

Who knew the Right would be more brutal to him?

1. “Many millions of working-age Americans would lose health insurance. Senior citizens would anguish over whether to pay their rent or their medical bills, in a way they haven’t since the 1960s. Government would be so starved of resources that, by 2050, it wouldn’t have enough money for core functions like food inspections and highway maintenance. And the richest Americans would get a huge tax cut.”This is the America that Paul Ryan envisions. And now we know that it is the America Mitt Romney envisions.“
   
   --Jonathan Cohn, ”Six Things to Know About Ryan (And Romney),“ The New Republic


2. ”Ryan does a good job of cloaking his radicalism in unthreatening everyday language. He doesn’t foam at the mouth or get too academic. He doesn’t blather on about Friedrich Hayek or Saul Alinsky. As he was standing up there saying, “we won’t replace the founding principles, we’ll reapply them,” he looked more like the youthful general manager of a baseball team—a Theo Epstein or a Brian Cashman—than a committed ideologue.“
   
   --John Cassidy, ”Why Romney Picked Ryan: Let's Change the Subject from Me,“ The New Yorker


3. ”People love that Paul Ryan! The only downside, with Paul Ryan, is everything he believes.“
   
   --Alex Pareene, ”Romney’s running mate distraction campaign reaches its zenith,“ Salon.com 


4. ”Ryan’s views are crystallized in the budget he produced for House Republicans last March as chairman of the House Budget committee. That budget would cut $3.3 trillion from low-income programs over the next decade. The biggest cuts would be in Medicaid, which provides healthcare for the nation’s poor – forcing states to drop coverage for an estimated 14 million to 28 million low-income people, according to the non-partisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. ... In all, 62 percent of the budget cuts proposed by Ryan would come from low-income programs.
   
   “The Ryan plan would also turn Medicare into vouchers whose value won’t possibly keep up with rising health-care costs – thereby shifting those costs on to seniors. At the same time, Ryan would provide a substantial tax cut to the very rich – who are already taking home an almost unprecedented share of the nation’s total income. Today’s 400 richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together.”
   
   --Robert Reich, “The Ryan Choice,” RobertReich.org 


5. “Ryan and other conservative leaders, among them Senator John Sununu, of New Hampshire, wanted to be sure that Bush returned to [Social Security privatization] in 2005. Under Ryan’s initial version, American workers would be able to invest about half of their payroll taxes, which fund Social Security, in private accounts. As a plan to reduce government debt, it made no sense. It simply took money from one part of the budget and spent it on private accounts, at a cost of two trillion dollars in transition expenses. But, as an ideological statement about the proper relationship between individuals and the federal government, Ryan’s plan was clear.”
   
   --Ryan Lizza, “Fussbudget: How Paul Ryan Captured the GOP,” The New Yorker 


6. “... anyone who believes in Ryan’s carefully cultivated image as a brave, honest policy wonk has been snookered. Mark Thoma reviews selected pieces I’ve written about Ryan; he is, in fact, a big fraud, who doesn’t care at all about fiscal responsibility, and whose policy proposals are sloppy as well as dishonest. Of course, this means that he’ll fit in to the Romney campaign just fine.
   
   ”As I said, I have no idea how this will play politically. But it does look like a move from weakness, rather than strength; Romney obviously felt he needed a VP who will get people to stop talking about him.“
   
   --Paul Krugman, ”Galt/Gekko 2012,“ The New York Times 


7. ”Mr. Ryan is a national figure of some repute — before Saturday morning, his national name recognition was about 50 percent — but he has never been elected to anything larger than his Congressional district of about 700,000 people. Members of the House of Representatives have only occasionally been selected as running mates. The last one on a winning ticket was John Nance Garner, the speaker of the House, in 1932. The last time an ordinary member of the House was elected vice president, and the last Republican, was more than 100 years ago: in 1908, when William Howard Taft and James S. Sherman, a New York congressman, were chosen by voters. (Coincidentally, that fall was also the last time that the Chicago Cubs won the World Series.)“
   
   --Nate Silver, ”A Risky Rationale Behind Romney's Choice of Ryan," Five Thirty Eight

For me? The key to taking down Ryan is not what he'd do to Medicaid and food-stamp programs, because, for most people, if it doesn't affect them, they don't care. The key to taking down Ryan is in his overhaul of Medicare and his attempted overhaul of Social Security. The social safety net that is holding you up, or might hold you up one day? He wants it down. Money that the government already has, for the few tattered programs it has, Paul Ryan wants to give away, in the form of tax breaks, to the richest people in this country. More for those who have more; less for we who have less. The health of the country, in essence, be damned.

“...the film is redeemed—rescued from itself, ironically, by another mouth. Rimmed in scarlet, it belongs to Anne Hathaway. She plays Selina Kyle, a Catwoman in the making, though really just a jewel thief. Deft and purring, she seems to pounce in from another land entirely, a Hitchcockian pleasure ground of light fingers and matching repartee, and her expression is that of a grown woman who surveys all these sombre boys, plus their whizzing toys, and sees only Bat-crap. When Bruce dances with her at a costume party, the music behind them is Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” which must be Nolan’s idea of a waltz; yet still she smiles. Her silver heels are like knives, her working costume is tauter than a second skin, and, when she straddles the Pod, as if planning to have kittens with it, the only one not to notice is poor old Batman. What can you expect? This is a fellow whose permanent frown is ready-carved between the brows of his black rubber mask, and who was warned by Alfred not to take up Gotham’s cause, because “there is nothing here for you but pain and tragedy.” Christopher Nolan, for all his visionary flair, wants to suck the comic out of comic books; Anne Hathaway wants to put it back in. Take your pick.”

--Anthony Lane in his review of Christopher Nolan's “The Dark Knight Rises.” I agree with a lot of this. Hathaway was my favorite part of the movie, and Lane's line about kittens kills. Plus comic book movies need to be fun again--as “The Avengers' was. On the other hand, Batman should be humorless and tunnel-visioned. Otherwise, why be Batman? My review here.

Lane: ”When Bruce dances with her at a costume party, the music behind them is Ravel’s 'Pavane for a Dead Princess,' which must be Nolan’s idea of a waltz; yet still she smiles.“

ADDENDUM: Pres. Obama agrees that Anne Hathaway was the best part of ”Dark Knight Rises"

“Tucked away in Seattle, Hernandez has won a Cy Young Award and made three All-Star teams, but he continues pitching against the Yankees as if he has a chip on his shoulder, as if their entitled lineup needs a stir.

”The last time he faced them, he hit three batters. This time, on Saturday afternoon, the Yankees could hardly hit him, as he utterly mystified their offense with a two-hit shutout in the Mariners’ 1-0 win at Yankee Stadium. ...

“There was no sign of hesitation from the Yankees’ hitters Saturday, but Hernandez can be an intimidating presence. He is a hulking right-hander with an expressionless focus and superb athleticism balanced on thighs the approximate size and shape of fire hydrants.”

--Zach Schonbrun, writing for The New York Times, on the Seattle Mariners 1-0 victory over the New York Yankees yesterday. Is Schonbrun, a 2011 j-school grad, now covering the Yankees for the Times? His online resume still lists him as a freelancer. He's certainly writing like he has something to prove. I'd say he's writing as if the entitled lineup at the Times needs a stir ... except no one in print journalism is entitled anymore, not even the folks at the Times.

“Once, in candid mood, she confessed that rage mader her orgasmic. I forgot to ask her if sex ever did. But I did enjoy her candor about herself.”

--Gore Vidal on his mother, Nina Gore, in “Palimpsest,” 1995

“...Clinton seems almost in the Kennedy class of innummerable brief encounters with that majority of the electorate which, appreciatively, favors him by an astonishing 24 percent over Dole, while with the male minority he barely holds his own. Women like men who like women, no matter how exasperating.”

--Gore Vidal, “Clinton-Gore II,” GQ, October 1996

“Mr. Manchester has written a book [Death of a President, 1967, on the JFK assassination] hard to resist reading, despite its inordinate length. The narrative is compelling even though one knows in advance everything that is going to happen. Breakfast in Fort Worth. Flight to Dallas. Governor Connally. The roses. The sun. The friendly crowds. The Governor's wife: 'Well, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you, Mr. President.' And then one hopes that for once the story will be different—the car swerves, the bullets miss, and the splendid progress continues. But each time, like a recurrent nightmare, the handsome head is shattered. It is probably the only story that everyone in the world knows by heart. Therefore it is, in the truest sense, legend, and like all legends it can bear much repetition and reinterpretation.”

--Gore Vidal, “The Manchester Book,” Book Week, April 9, 1967

“Like all legends it can bear much repetition and reinterpretation.” And has.

“To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun.”

--Gore Vidal, “Screening History,” 1992. This may be the Vidal quote I quote most often. Two pages later, Vidal writes, “Today, where literature was movies are.” I read it at age of 30, a budding, flailing writer, and it was news to me. It shouldn't have been. Do we amend it yet? Do we write: “Today, where movies were...” What? Video games? Are we there yet? Can we get there from here?

“... this does not mean, as I am said to have said and did not say, that history is fiction. I only suggest that much of what we take to be true is often seriously wrong, and the way it is wrong is often more worthy of investigation than the often trivial disagreed-upon facts of the case.”

--Gore Vidal, “Screening History,” 1992

“I would make history the spine of the mandatory twelve years of state-imposed indoctrination. ... By the last year of high school, the young adult would know pretty much where the human race (as well as his tribe) had been in time and space; and where it now is. So much general knowledge might even inspire him to show interest in where we are going or could go. During the twelve years, those of a scientific bent  would be encouraged and various additional courses made available to them. Those interested in the arts would be sternly discouraged from pursuing any of the arts. This will save many people from lifelong disappointments while limiting production, in the most Darwinian way, to the born artist who cannot be discouraged.”

-- Gore Vidal, “Screening History,” 1992, on how he would remake the U.S. education system.

“I was born eight years after the end of the First World War. As I was growing up, it was well remembered that we had got nothing out of that war in Europe except an attack on the Bill of Rights at home and, of course, the noble experiment, Prohibition. Young people often ask me, with wonder, why so many of us enlisted in 1943. I tell them that since we had been attacked at Pearl Harbor, we were obliged to defend our country. But I should note that where, in 1917, millions of boys were eager to go fight the Hun, we were not eager. We were fatalistic. In the three years that I spent in the army, I heard no soldier express a patriotic sentiment, rather the reverse when we saw the likes of Errol Flynn on the screen winning freedom's war, or even worse, John Wayne, known to us by his real name, Marion, the archetypal draft-dodging actor who, to rub it in, impersonated a Flying Tiger in the movies.”

--Gore Vidal, “How We Missed the Saturday Dance,” Newsweek, January 11, 1993

John Wayne and Paul Kelly in “Flying Tigers” (1942)

“Put bluntly, who collects what money from whom in order to spend on what is all there is to politics, and in a serious country should be the central preoccupation of the media.”

--Gore Vidal, “Hersh's JFK,” The New Yorker, December 1, 1997

“On June 3, 1996, The Nation showed in a foldout chart how most of the U.S. media was now owned by a handful of corporations ... As I studied this beast, I felt a litle like Rip Van Winkle. When last I nodded off, there was something called the Sherman Antitrust Act. Whatever happened to it?”

--Gore Vidal, “Mickey Mouse, Historian,” The Nation, September 30, 1996

“The media constantly deplore the drug culture and, variously, blame foreign countries like Colombia for obeying the iron law of supply and demand to which we have, as a notion and as a nation, sworn eternal allegiance...

”Although drugs are immoral and must be kept from the young, thousands of schools pressure parents to give the drug Ritalin to any lively child who may, sensibly, show signs of boredom in his classroom. Ritalin renders the child docile if not comatose. Side effects? 'Stunted growth, facial tics, agitation and aggression, insomnia, appetite loss, headaches, stomach pains and seizures.' Marijuana would be far less harmful.“

--Gore Vidal, ”Shredding the Bill of Rights," Vanity Fair, November 1998

“While filming With Honors in Chicago, I was told that since the star, Joe Pesci, had a degree of control over the cast, the producer proposed five names to him for the part of the villainous Harvard professor. Four English actors and me. Alec [Guinness]'s name headed the list. Pesci is supposed to have said, 'Why do we always have to go for an English asshole for this sort of part when we have one of our own?' Thus, I was hired.”

Gore Vidal, Palimpsest, 1995

“I also came out for federal aid to education, a sign that I was a pro- or crypto- Red. The incumbent made much of this. He finally debated me in his county of Scoharie. The dairy interests were powerful in that section, and I had to learn, rather quickly, all about milk marketing orders, a subject far from my heart. As the milk producers were few though passionate—and rich—I responded to threats that they would do me in if milk was not properly subsidized by saying that I was essentially the consumers' candidate and consumers outnumber dairymen by a vast number. Then, innocently, I wondered aloud whether or not these subsidies were—well, socialist? If so, we had achieved socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.”

--Gore Vidal on his 1960 run for U.S. Congress (NY-29th), in his memoir, Palimpsest, 1995. He lost, of course, but began a tradition of writers with a political bent (Mailer, Buckley, Mailer again, Vidal again) running for political office and losing. In this 1960 New York Times profile on the 34-year-old candidate, the newspaper or record describes Vidal as slender, sharp, sophisticated, and (and despite the publication of The City and the Pillar 13 years earlier) “a bachelor.”

“This morning, Jackie [Kennedy]'s will was described in the Italian press. Lee [Radziwill] was left out of it on the grounds that Jackie had done quite enough for her in life, which was certainly true. I wonder if, at the end, Jackie had come to dislike Lee as much as everyone else did. Happily, Lee's malice is mitigated by her slowness of mind.”

--Gore Vidal, Palimpsest, 1995

“'Whenever there's a Republican president, I'm a Democrat, and when there's a Democratic one, I'm out of step.'”

--Gore Vidal, quoting his grandfather, Sen. Thomas Pryor Gore (D-OK), in the chapter, “Dah,” from his memoir Palimpsest, 1995. Gore, we're told by his grandson, thought no foreign war worth the life of an American, and when wired by the Oklahoma City chamber of commerce to vote for war in 1917, he wired back, “How many of your members are of draft age?”

“Without the idea of free will, the human race is of no interest at all; certainly, without the idea of free will there can be no literature. To watch Milton's Lucifer serenely overthrow the controlling intelligence of his writerly creator is an awesome thing.”

--Gore Vidal, “Lessing's Science Fiction,” The New York Review of Books, December 20, 1979

“In any case, write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect: that is the only way out of the dead end of the Serious Novel which so many ambitious people want to write and no one on earth—or even on campus—wants to read.”

--Gore Vidal, “Thomas Love Peacock: The Novel of Ideas,” The New York Review of Books, December 4, 1980

“Most men—homo or hetero—given the opportunity to have sex with 500 different people would do so, gladly; but most men are not going to be given the opportunity by a society that wants them safely married so they will be docile workers and loyal consumers. It does not suit our rulers to have the proles tomcatting around the way that our rulers do.”

--Gore Vidal, “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” The Nation, November 14, 1981

“When Confucius was asked what would be the first thing that he would do if he were to lead the state—his never-to-be-fulfilled dream—he said rectify the language. This is wise. This is subtle. As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: You liberate a city by destroying it. Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”

--Gore Vidal, “The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas,” The Nation, January 11, 1986

“I had seen [Ronald Reagan] in the flesh for a decade or so as each of us earned his mite in the Hollyjungle. Ronnie was already notorious for his speeches for General Electric, excoriating communists who were, apparently, everywhere. I had never actually spoken to him at a party because I knew—as who did not?—that although he was the soul of amiability when not excoriating the international monolithic menace of atheistic godless communism, he was, far and away, Hollywood's most grinding bore—Chester Chatterbox, in fact. Ronnie never stopped talking, even though he never had anything to say except what he had just read in the Reader's Digest, which he studied the way Jefferson studied Montesquieu.”

--Gore Vidal, “Ron and Nancy: A Life in Pictures,” from The New York Review of Books, September 29, 1983

“Mais precisez, mon cher monsieur, n'allez pas trop vite.”

--Marcel Proust, in 1919, when asking diplomat Harold Nicholson to explain his work. Proust wouldn't be put off by a general description; he wanted all the details: the sham cordiality; the handshakes; the maps; the rustle of the papers; the macaroons.

The quote is taken from the third chapter of Alain de Botton's “How Proust Can Change Your Life,” which is the book's most meaningful chapter to me. People complained about the 3,000-page length of “Remembrance of Things Past” even when it was published 100 years ago. “I fail to see why a chap needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns before falling asleep,” wrote Albert Humblot, head of Ollendorf, a publishing house. Jacques Madeleine, a reader for another publishing house, Fasquelle, 700 pages in, complained, “...one doesn't have a single, but not a single clue of what this is about. What is the point of all this? What does it mean?” An American reader, 27, who spent years with the book, wrote Proust himself. “Just tell me in two lines,” she suggested, “what you really wanted to say.”

This is a battle, on a much smaller level, of course, that I've been fighting most of my writing life. Editors generally want shorter and shorter pieces—from 1,000 words, to 750, to 350, to 140 characters—for what they feel are shorter and shorter attention spans. The Internet, with its unlimited space, hasn't helped. The opposite. The pace of life speeds up, and it seems normal for every generation until it doesn't, until it speeds past them, and that becomes the norm for the next generation. That's partly why I write here, for nothing, rather than elsewhere, for something. Elsewhere, they're not interested in 3,500-word reviews of “Moneyball.” They want trash. And in such small portions, too.

De Botton juxtaposes the above complaints against Proust with Proust's own complaints about the newspapers of his day:

That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty thousand men, the murders, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors, are transformed for us, who don't even care, into a morning treat, bleinding in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of cafe au lait.

But he kept reading the newspaper. He even turned one news-in-brief account of a young man killing his mother, and then, bumblingly, himself, into a five-page article with overtones of the Greek classics.

It's this kind of detail and precision, De Botton argues, which leads to understanding, and sympathy, and empathy, while abbreviation, which is what we mostly get, leads to the opposite. Generally the deeper you go into someone's story, the more you care. The more you skim, the more you tweet, the less you care. Speed things up enough and eventually you wind up with societies like ours.

Proust, reflective.

“After watching this I've finally decided that I just don't like Aaron Sorkin. The clip pretends to rise above jingoism (but ends up falling hard for it), above a straw-man of liberalism, and instead presents a sentimental, white-washed version of US history. And it does so with the intent of rallying us all to 'remake' the US as the 'greatest country in the world'... a misguided, foolishly competitive errand if there ever was one. ...

”'If liberals are so smart, how come they lose all the time?' If you think this line is funny, enjoy it. Liberals look back at the last 100 years of politics and see huge, lasting victories: women's suffrage, major civil rights victories for blacks, winning the Cold War, creation and protection of Social Security/Medicare/ Medicaid, and the widespread acceptance of gay rights. What can conservatives be proud of in that time? Give me your list; 'destroying the power of unions' better be on it.

“I'm judging Sorkin on seeing plenty of 'West Wing' and 'The Social Network.' It's feel-good, self-important drama, not drama that has much to do with the real world. His writing is catchy, like eating a bucket full of Skittles. It's juicy and gives you a little high; when it's over you just feel gross.

”This bullshit about how America didn't use to be 'afraid,' and how we 'used' to make decisions based on facts, etc. is just nauseating. Look at the Japanese internment camps during WW2, look at the Sedition laws in WW1. Look at Joe McCarthy. Americans, throughout history, like every other country in the world, ever, have always had a wide streak of fear, paranoia and irrationality. Throwing pixie dust around about how we used to be soooo strong, and how that was based on the strength of our 'core values' that we've somehow drifted away from is ridiculous. The US was incredibly strong following WW2 because we'd devoted our entire nation to the purpose of building up our military. We entered the war long after it was over, and lost a tiny fraction of our materiel and men after the rest of the major powers had crushed each other. We were the only one left standing. And we were able to do that because we basically had the Western Hemisphere to ourselves. If you swap the American People with the Russian People circa 1938, there is nothing inherently Awesome about us that would have dealt with Hitler any better than the Russians did.

“We've also had the luxury of starting modern life in 1700 on a fantastically huge, undeveloped treasure trove of natural resources. Every other major nation was surrounded by competitors, and had been developing their natural environment for hundreds if not thousands of years. The exploitation (some good, some bad) of resources in our 300+ year history has given us a titanic 'head start' in the race to become 'the greatest.' For a time following WW2, we were probably 'the greatest'... not that I give a shit about which country is 'winning' that race, nor should anyone.

”So... do I think the media should switch to reporting facts, and encouraging rational debate? Of course. It would make us wiser, and lead to better policies. Do I think Aaron Fucking Sorkin is contributing to this cause in any way? Nope. He's selling Hallmark cards.“

--my friend Uncle Vinny in a Facebook rant against the five-minute open to Aaron Sorkin's HBO series ”The Newsroom,“ which he apparently saw via Neil deGrasse Tyson's Facebook page. For the record, Mr. deGrasse Tyson posted the video because ”One of the great forces of delusion is under-informed pride of country." Here's the clip:

“Mom, I'd rather die in New York than live in New Jersey.”

--Vito Russo, gay liberation activist in the 1970s, AIDS activist in the 1980s, and author of “The Celluloid Closet,” refusing his mother's offer to stay with her in New Jersey when he revealed to her he was dying of AIDS. It's part of Jeffrey Schwarz's documentary, “Vito,” which premiered last night on HBO. I only saw the second half—basically from Reagan on—which was powerful. I'll watch the first half later this week. 

“That James Holmes is insane, few may doubt. Our gun laws are also insane, but many refuse to make the connection.”

Roger Ebert in his New York Times Op-Ed, “We've Seen This Movie Before,” on the gunman who opened fire on a movie-theater crowd at a midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises,” last night in Aurora, Colorado.

You’ve also been a big proponent of the legalization of marijuana.
Marijuana! Heavens, oh yeah. It’s just the stupidest law possible...

--Morgan Freeman, during a Q&A with Newsweek's Marlow Stern, on The Daily Beast site. My years-old piece on Morgan Freeman here. My years-older review of Dan Baum's critique of the War on Drugs, “Smoke & Mirrors,” here.

I came across this while re-reading Gore Vidal's book of essays, “Rocking the Boat,” from 1963. The review itself, “Two Immoralists Orville Prescott and Ayn Rand,” appeared in Esquire magazine in July 1961

Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read. She has just published a book, For the New Intellectual, subtitled The Philosophy of Ayn Rand; it is a collection of pensées and arias from her novels and it must be read to be believed. Herewith, a few excerpts from the Rand collection.

• “It was the morality of altruism that undercut American and is now destroying her.”
• “Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequence of freedom…or the primordial morality of altruism with its consequences of slavery, etc.”
• “I am done with the monster of ‘we,’ the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame. And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: ‘I.’”
• “To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men.”
• “The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral….”

This odd little woman is attempting to give a moral sanction to greed and self interest, and to pull it off she must at times indulge in purest Orwellian newspeak of the “freedom is slavery” sort. What interests me most about her is not the absurdity of her “philosophy,” but the size of her audience (in my campaign for the House she was the one writer people knew and talked about). She has a great attraction for simple people who are puzzled by organized society, who object to paying taxes, who dislike the “welfare” state, who feel guilt at the thought of the suffering of others but who would like to harden their hearts. For them, she has an enticing prescription: altruism is the root of all evil, self-interest is the only good, and if you’re dumb or incompetent that’s your lookout.

She is fighting two battles: the first, against the idea of the State being anything more than a police force and a judiciary to restrain people from stealing each other’s money openly. She is in legitimate company here. There is a reactionary position which has many valid attractions, among them lean, sinewy, regular-guy Barry Goldwater. But it is Miss Rand’s second battle that is the moral one. She has declared war not only on Marx but on Christ. Now, although my own enthusiasm for the various systems evolved in the names of those two figures is limited, I doubt if even the most anti-Christian free-thinker would want to deny the ethical value of Christ in the Gospels. To reject that Christ is to embark on dangerous waters indeed. For to justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil. For one thing, it is gratuitous to advise any human being to look out for himself. You can be sure that he will. It is far more difficult to persuade him to help his neighbor to build a dam or to defend a town or to give food he has accumulated to the victims of a famine. But since we must live together, dependent upon one another for many things and services, altruism is necessary to survival. To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy. That it is right to help someone less fortunate is an idea which has figured in most systems of conduct since the beginning of the race. We often fail. That predatory demon “I” is difficult to contain but until now we have all agreed that to help others is a right action. Now the dictionary definition of “moral” is: “concerned with the distinction between right and wrong” as in “moral law, the requirements to which right action must conform.” Though Miss Rand’s grasp of logic is uncertain, she does realize that to make even a modicum of sense she must change all the terms. Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life a right action is consideration for the welfare of others. In the one case, through a state which was to wither away, in the other through the private exercise of the moral sense. Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.

Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society...

Here's a quote from Marcel Proust, from around 1907, that I came across while reading Alain de Botton's book “How Proust Can Change Your Life”:

“[The telephone is] a supernatural instrument before whose miracle we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or to order an ice cream. ...

”Since we are children who play with divine forces without shuddering before their mystery, we only find the telephone 'convenient', or rather, as we are spoilt children, we find that 'it isn't convenient', and we fill Le Figaro with our complaints."

Here's Louis C.K.'s update 101 years later. Apologies that the audio is slightly out of sync with the video:

UPDATE: a portrait of the artist as a stand-up comedian.

“I'll never forget an extended interview I did with Kirk Douglas in Laredo, Texas, between takes of Eddie Macon's Run ('82). I was doing a set-visit piece for the N.Y. Post, and since Run wasn't much more than a servicable B-level programmer we mostly talked about his career hallmarks...

”I told him I half-loved the foyer freakout scene with Lana Turner in The Bad and the Beautiful. And much of The Devil's Disciple. And almost all of Champion. And every frame of Paths of Glory and The Big Sky and Lonely Are The Brave. And then I made an attempt at quoting his “eight spindly trees in Rockefeller Center” speech from Ace in the Hole. Douglas was drinking a bourbon (or something fairly stiff), and I remember his leaning forward at this point and saying, 'You've really done your homework.'“

--Jeffrey Wells, ”Not By a Long Shot," on his Hollywood Elsewhere site.

Louis Menand, who's too smart for this country, has, in the latest issue of The New Yorker, a good piece on a new James Joyce biography. As New Yorker writers are wont to do, he spends more column inches delivering his own mini-bio of the artist as young, middle-aged and old man than in actually reviewing the book. But it's a great read. It also includes my favorite recent example of the parenthetical.

Menand writes about Joyce's love of puns. He writes about the near autobiographical nature of his work. He writes about how some of his characters have the same names as the people they were based upon, and that's why Joyce never returned to Ireland, because he was afraid of libel suits. He writes about Joyce's favorite writer, Dante, “another exile, who created a verbal universe that he populated with old Florentine comrades and enemies, each caricatured with exquisite precision for all time, and who placed at the center of his imaginary cosmos a woman he had fallen in love with after seeing her on the street, Beatrice Portinari.”

Then he goes into Joyce's Beatrice, Nora Barnacle, a Galway girl, who, in 1904, was working as a chambermaid in Dublin when Joyce saw her on the street and asked her out. She didn't show for the first date. She did for the second. Menand writes:

They walked to Ringsend, on the south bank of the Liffey, where (and here we can drop the Dante analogy) she put her hand inside his trousers and masturbated him. It was June 16, 1904, the day on which Joyce set “Ulysses.” When people celebrate Bloomsday, that is what they are celebrating.

I read that last night. Laughed out loud. The entire piece can be found here: “Silence, Exile, Punning: James Joyce's chance encounters.”

In the meantime, other great examples of the parenthetical? Bueller?

...and yes I said yes I will Yes.

“Dear Jane, it would distress me big time if you were to lose a minute's sleep over this. I know I haven't. And besides, you're probably not off by much.”

--Former Red Sox pitcher Frank Sullivan, 82, responding via email to author Jane Leavy, who had referred to him as “the late Frank Sullivan” in her book, “The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood.”  As reported in her article, “Sully and the Mick” in the book “Damn Yankees: Twenty-Four Major League Writers on the World's Most Hated (and Loved) Team.”

When she phoned to again apologize, he was again classy and humorous. “Water off a duck's back,” he said. “Don't forget you're dealing with a guy who was booed by thousands.”

Later in his career, Sullivan, who was 97-100 with a lifetime 3.60 ERA, appeared in two All-Star games, and ended his career in Minnesota about the time I was being born in Minnesota, posed for Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post cover “The Rookie.”

Sullivan, No. 18, third from left.

“In the end, it ended as it had to end. Cleveland waits. And LeBron James won just like he knew he would.”

--Joe Posnanski in his bittersweet post, “LeBron: Champion”

“I was born in 1928. Same year as Mickey Mouse, but he made out better—straight to Hollywood, straight to the cosmetic department. I did not approve of his buying into all that crap and letting his soul get despoiled. I remained poor and depressed, as a Brooklyn child should. Mickey wasn’t depressed but anyone who looked like him should have been. He became a schmuck, a very famous schmuck. And God knows I adored him, but I was a schmuck, too. I lived in Brooklyn.”

--Maurice Sendak (1928-2012), author of “Where the Wild Things Are,” to Marianna Cook, in a New Yorker Postcript, “Wild Things,” May 21, 2012. It's unfortunately an abstract of the article, not the whole thing. Fortunately, you can subscribe to The New Yorker, and should. And if you haven't seen Sendak in his two-part interview with Stephen Colbert, you should check that out, too. Sendak may be the best partner Colbert's ever had.

“The maintenance of a complex society depends increasingly on routine work, work with no zest or creativity. The things we eat, clothes we wear, places we live become increasingly standardized, because standardization is the price we pay for the prices we are able to pay. Life ticks along for most of us like a Woolworth's alarm clock. We grow used to the rhythm imposed on us by our need to subsist: soon we get to like our bondage.”

--Anthony Burgess, “The Clockwork Condition: The author comments on his most famous book, in 1973,” in the June 4/11, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.

Happy Thursday.

“Remember, Don…when God closes a door, he opens a dress.”

--Roger Sterling, whom I liked more and more this past season on “Mad Men.” Which makes me think Matthew Weiner will make me hate him next year.

“It’s not exactly a news flash that [Adam] Sandler isn’t making movies for me or people like me, but even by the standards of his lackadaisical, vulgar comedies, 'That’s My Boy' plumbs a new low. (Admittedly, it’s probably not worse than the insulting 'Grown Ups' or the bilious and hateful 'Jack and Jill,' although it’s dirtier than either. Suddenly 'You Don’t Mess With the Zohan' and 'I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry,' both of which are basically terrible, look like understated works of Lubitsch-style comic genius.)”

--Andrew O'Hehir in “Adam Sandler Hates You,” his review of “That's My Boy,” which, incidentally, died at the box office.

“Markets don't just happen.”

--Gov. George Romney

“No one in his right mind would today argue that there is no place for the federal government in the reawakening of America. Indeed, we need another Republican-sponsored Marshall Plan for our cities and schools.”

--Henry Cabot Lodge

Both men were urging greater federal involvement in business and education to the platform committee at the 1964 Republican National Convention. According to Rick Perlstein, in his book, “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus” (pg. 374), they were met with “stony silence” by a committee taken over by uncompromising, upstart Goldwaterites—the same type who now run the GOP, and to whom Romney's son, Mitt, now pays obeisance.

Gov. George W. Romney and son in 1964.

“When we started writing the show, I said to the writers, ‘In order to write, I think you need to have an idea in your head about what the purpose of life is. It doesn’t matter what idea you have, you just have to have one. So if you think life is a Darwinian struggle for survival, then at any given moment when you’re confused about what to write, you can say, ‘Well, if life is a Darwinian struggle for survival, then I guess this is what we should do.’

“‘But if you’re going to write on this show, you have to provisionally at least go along with what I believe, which is that the reason for living is to love and create. But then you look at the world and you realize that that’s not happening everywhere, is it? There must be a reason why. Why is it not happening? The reason it doesn’t happen is fear.

“People are essentially good, so they want to solve the problem of fear. So they go, ‘I know what I’ll do. I will make money. And if I make enough money, I will then feel safe enough to love and create, and it will immunize me against fear.’ But that’s an illusion, because the fear is too big and the money is never enough.

“The real answer is that people do not need money in order to love and create; they need purpose. So I said to the writers, ‘Armed with that four-pronged idea that love and creation are the positives, fear is the problem, money is the false answer and purpose is the real one, then at any given moment you know how to write a story on ‘Underemployed.’ Every episode, over and over again, is the story of people learning in various ways that the answer to the problems of our age is not money, it is purpose.”

--Craig Wright, playwright, and writer for “Six Feet Under,” “Brothers and Sisters,” and creator of “Dirty Sexy Money” and the new MTV show “Underemployed,” in Jim Walsh's MinnPost article “Craig Wright and MTV's 'Underemployed' Feel the Pain of Millennials”

On the way to see Craig Wright's “Orange Flower Water” at the New Century Theater in downtown Seattle, June 2009

“We can't justify foreign aid funds which went to the purchase of extra wives for some tribal chiefs in Kenya.”

--Then-GE spokesman and sometime actor Ronald Reagan in a speech to the Young Republicans Convention in February 1964. “Our money” going to “bad black people” was merely a forerunner to Reagan's “welfare queen” stump speech in the 1970s, which helped Reagan ride into the White House in November 1980 and change the country.

The above quote is from “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus,” by Rick Perlstein; pg. 336. (Much recommended.) According to Perlstein, the speech was received “with delerium” by Republicans, who obviously haven't changed much in the past 50 years. They're still filled with delerium. They're still fostering resentment of those with less. And they're still harping on Kenya.

Ronald Reagan in 1964.

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry, don't cry

--Paul Simon, “The Boy in the Bubble,” from his album “Graceland”

“That you're not very talented needn't be the end of it.”

--John Irving (my literary No. 5 hitter) in his memoir, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, p.131.

“Why don’t I believe in God? No, no no, why do YOU believe in God? Surely the burden of proof is on the believer. You started all this. If I came up to you and said, “Why don’t you believe I can fly?” You’d say, “Why would I?” I’d reply, “Because it’s a matter of faith.” If I then said, “Prove I can’t fly. Prove I can’t fly see, see, you can’t prove it can you?” You’d probably either walk away, call security or throw me out of the window and shout, ‘’F—ing fly then you lunatic.””

--Ricky Gervais, “A Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais: Why I'm an Athiest,” The Wall Street Journal.

Later in the article, there's this: “You see, growing up where I did, mums didn’t hope as high as their kids growing up to be doctors; they just hoped their kids didn’t go to jail. So bring them up believing in God and they’ll be good and law abiding. It’s a perfect system. Well, nearly. 75 percent of Americans are God-­fearing Christians; 75 percent of prisoners are God-­fearing Christians. 10 percent of Americans are atheists; 0.2 percent of prisoners are atheists.”

“I was just working as a mechanic and one day I got this call from the boss and he said, ‘Hey, Paul Simon is in town, you know, and he’s looking for some musicians.’ And I said, ‘Paul Simon, who is Paul Simon?’ I mean I had no idea. And then the guy tried to explain to me. He’s singing all the songs. You know, like the songs from Simon and Garfunkel. And I’m like, ‘It doesn’t ring a bell.’ And then I take my bass and I go to the studio and so I meet Paul and Roy Halee, the engineer, and they’re like ‘Hey, man, let’s, you know, let’s play some.’ We’d play a chord — Paul would smile ... and then he’ll stop and change it. We didn’t know why is he changing? But he needed another part there that we didn’t know. Then he’ll break and give us different chords, and then we learned different things, and it was like going back to music school.”

--Bass player Bakithi Kumalo on Paul Simon and the making of “Graceland,” from the documentary “Under African Skies.” The quote was included in Thomas Friedman's column today. Here's my review of the documentary from last week.

“I'm the President of the United States not the President of the People Who Agree With Me. And by the way if the Left has a problem with that, they should vote for somebody else.”

--Pres. Josiah “Jed” Bartlet, “West Wing.” I've often been defending Pres. Obama along these lines over the last three years. The clip:

In “Under African Skies,” Joe Berlinger's documentary about the making of Paul Simon’s “Graceland” and his return to South Africa 25 years later to perform a concert with the musicians with whom he worked, Simon recounts how back then he wondered whether the songs they were recording shouldn't be more political. He wasn't blind to what was going on in South Africa, after all; he felt the tension. Shouldn't the album reflect that tension?

So he asked the South African artist, General M.D. Shirinda, about the song that became “I Know What I Know.” What were its original South African lyrics? He assumed they would be political. This is what Shirinda responded:

“Remember in the sixties when girls wore short skirts? Wasn’t that great?”

The trailer:

“Forgive me, but if someone had told me two decades ago that by 2012, a black president would be endorsing gay marriage, I would have asked where he got that stuff he was smoking.”

--Andrew Sullivan, “The Greenwald Pounce,” on his blog “The Dish”

“We all need genius. It's essential to know that Great Souls are out there, revealing the potential of the species, and we want to believe that true genius creates itself, and forces itself on the world. But we only know those geniuses who have broken through, and when we look at their stories, we often find that a random stroke of luck or a passionate believer made all the difference. If ever there was a movie genius, it was Charlie Chaplin. But anyone who works in movies will tell you that when it comes to pictures, nobody does anything alone.”

--Jon Boorstin, from the article “Who Invented Chaplin's Tramp?” in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Charlie Chaplin in “The Kid” (1921). But who helped him invent the Tramp?

“The New York Yankees have their own cologne. It's made from the most expensive ingredients of all the competing colognes.”

—Stephen Colbert

“I guess some of this mad right-wing love comes from the idea that in America, anyone can become a Rich Guy if he just works hard and saves his pennies. Mitt Romney has said, in effect, “I’m rich and I don’t apologize for it.” Nobody wants you to, Mitt. What some of us want—those who aren’t blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money—is for you to acknowledge that you couldn’t have made it in America without America. That you were fortunate enough to be born in a country where upward mobility is possible (a subject upon which Barack Obama can speak with the authority of experience), but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged. That it’s not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It’s un-fucking-American is what it is. I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share. That our civics classes never taught us that being American means that—sorry, kiddies—you’re on your own. That those who have received much must be obligated to pay—not to give, not to “cut a check and shut up,” in Governor Christie’s words, but to pay—in the same proportion. That’s called stepping up and not whining about it. That’s called patriotism, a word the Tea Partiers love to throw around as long as it doesn’t cost their beloved rich folks any money.”

--Stephen King in a must-read, fun-to-read column, “Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!” on The Daily Beast site

“There’s just something about Sarah Palin that upsets me. Sometimes you can’t argue with a stupid person. It’s like a toy super villain absorbing your firepower—you point out their mistakes and it makes them stronger.”

--Barry Blitt in the online article: “New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant To See.” I also like Blitt's Monica/Hilary cover and Art Spiegelman's Lady Justice.

“'She was funny and lethal right up to the end,' said Craig Seligman, a speaker at Pauline Kael's memorial service. 'One day when she was near death and I was trying to divert her with chatter about working as an editor, I said, ”It never ceases to amaze me how many people who call themselves writers actually can't write.“ And she said — very weakly — ”Yes, they say things like 'It never ceases to amaze me.'“'”

--from “Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark” by Brian Kellow, which the old man, Bob Lundegaard, is currently reading. Thanks, Dad!

“I hate America very deeply. The economic repression of the masses—institutionalized. Even Lenin couldn't foresee the extent of that.”

--Bill Haydon (Ian Richardson) in the 1979 BBC-TV miniseries, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” based upon the novel by John le Carré.

Bill Haydon, Soviet spy and traitor, with George Smiley (Alec Guinness) in the foreground.

“Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature.”

—Opening line of Roger Ebert's review of the new movie “Think Like a Man.”

“It’ll never be boring with him.“

-- Miami Marlins' owner Jeff Loria, about manager Ozzie Guillen before the ”I love Fidel Castro, I respect Fidel Castro“ controversy that led to his five-game suspension last week. The above quote is taken from the April 9th New Yorker article ”Old Fish, New Fish: The Marlins get a Miami makeover,“ by Ben McGrath.

At one point in the article, just before Loria says the above, he and Guillen engage in what sounds like an Abbott & Costello ”Who's On First" routine. It's really someone rational trying to follow the logic of someone who is ... less so:

Guillen: If I get this man [Loria] to where he should be, it gonna be a raise.
Loria: The World Series?
Guillen: Oh, no, that’s up to them. [Nods toward players on field.]
Loria: Oh, so they should get the raise.
Guillen: I get paid to win World Series.
Loria [impatient]: O.K. So just do it.
Guillen [nods toward players again]: They gonna do it. My job? Hey, listen, if I get involved in the game more often, that means we’re horseshit. See, I stay away from them? That means we winning.

The full article, worthwhile, can be read here.

Guillen and Loria practice their routine earlier this year.

“Remember how he used to agitate on the bases? You never knew what he was going to do... So I decided I had better switch over and work from a stretch position. But you can see right there what happened—Robinson had broken my concentration. I was pitching more to Robinson than I was to Hodges, and as a result I threw one up into Gil's power and he got the base hit that beat me.”

--Vic Raschi, pitcher, New York Yankees, most likely talking about Game 2 of the 1949 World Series, which Brooklyn won 1-0.

“Carl Furillo got all the headlines the next day, and he deserved them, because he did the job. But I knew that it was Robinson who had distracted me just enough to get me to hang that curve.”

--Gene Conley, pitcher, Milwaukee Braves, most likely talking about a game, May 2, 1955, in which, in the bottom of the 12th inning, with one out, Robinson walked and Furillo followed with a 2-run, walk-off homer to beat the Braves 2-0.

It's stories like these, both from Donald Honig's oral history, “Baseball: Between the Lines,” which must give any sabremetrician pause about their ability to quantify every aspect of the game. Some stuff just doesn't show up in the stats.

Jackie Robinson, in 1955, breaking concentration

“The written rules were rigid and righteous, while the real rules were often wide open and dirty.”

--Eliot Asinof in “Eight Men Out,” his great book about the 1919 Chicago White Sox/Black Sox scandal.

Eight men who got caught, and punished, so we wouldn't know the written rules weren't the real rules.

“The moment you start preaching in a film, the moment you want to teach your audience, you are making a bad film.”

--Douglas Sirk (1897-1987), film director. I first heard this quote in Martin Scorsese's documentary “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies,” a must-watch for anyone who cares about film.

“You get Ingrid Bergman giving you a certain look in a movie and everyone thinks you're gorgeous."

--Humphrey Bogart

“They just came back and said, 'You're fired.' I really didn't say anything. It was like — God, I can't lose my job. I got to have my health insurance.”

--Jennifer Owens, who worked in an Amazon.com warehouse, called a “fulfillment center,” in Campbellsville, KY, in the article, “Intense Pressure on Warehouse Floor,” the fourth of The Seattle Times' four-part series on the online company.

“I'm just trying to get along without shoving anybody, that's all.”

--Henry Fonda as Tom Joad in John Ford's “The Grapes of Wrath”

SCENE: Yesterday on the Wenatchee ferry during the 4:35 PM run from Bainbridge Island to Seattle. A middle-aged man, quiet but charming, and devastatingly handsome, is hanging on the prow of the boat by himself, in the sun, and attempting to ignore the cold winds buffeting his windbreaker. He looks around toward the rest of the boat, and then up, where, on the level above him, another middle-aged man, less quiet and not quite so charming, and certainly not devastatingly handsome, is hanging with his wife. He yells down at the more charming man.

LESS QUIET MAN: You're supposed to spread your arms wide like you're in that “Titanic” movie! “King of the World!” [Laughs]

[More charming man looks up at the man, back at the prow of the boat, then back up at the man.]

MORE CHARMING MAN: Isn't there supposed to be a girl?

LESS QUIET MAN'S WIFE: That's right! [Laughs]

MORE CHARMING MAN: You get me a girl who looks like Kate Winslet and I'll do that 'King of the World' thing for you.

In truth, I was surprised we were still making 'King of the World!' jokes on the Wenatchee ferry in 2012, but I guess the movie did just get a re-release. But I had a nice ride over to Seattle. Kate Winslet did not show up.

“[Early French filmmaker George] Méliès was non-stop women. He loved the ladies, married often, had 150 mistresses if not a thousand. Méliès in a nutshell. Méliès died poor—the fate of all those who pursue something out of love.”

--Henri Langlois in the documentary “Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque.” Langlois died in 1977, aged 62, and poor.

Langlois, who pursued film.

“Nothing is so deathly to enjoyment as the relentless march of a movie to fulfill its obvious purpose.”

--Pauline Kael, from her 1969 essay, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” which I culled from this Jonathan Kirshner quadruple book review. I'm not sure if Kirshner's review had an obvious purpose, but he told me so much of what I already know, or what is already established, that I never bothered to finish it.

“I am certainly not an advocate for for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects.

”But I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.“

-- Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval on July 12, 1816. I first came across this while reading Gore Vidal's ”The Second American Revolution and other Essays (1976-1982).

“People who look ahead are very rare. Most people look to the past. We walk backwards, we back our way through life. We move forward but always while looking backwards. People who envision their future and move toward it, peering ahead, are incredibly rare.”

--Henri Langlois in the documentary “Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque.”

“Jack [Kirby] also watched the [1990] Captain America movie. He attended the premier with Mike [Thibodeaux] by his side and thought the beginning--Cap fighting the war--wasn't that bad. Once the film moved to the present, however, showing the Red Skull on an island, he was appalled.

”'He fought to get his name on that thing,' Thibodeaux said. 'But when he came out of the theater, Jack was saying he wanted his name off the movie.'“

--from ”Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and the American Comic Book Revolution,“ by Ronin Ro

”Captain America" was created by ... Ah, forget it.

“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”

--Ernest Hemingway.

I forget where I read this. I have an old Word doc with favorite quotes in it that I haven't looked at in a while and this was among them. It's also my 100th Quote of the Day, or the 100th Quote of the Day officially titled “Quote of the Day.” There are others with different titles. I chose this one for the 100th quote because ... well, that's it, isn't it? That's what we need to do. It's a quote that should be tattooed on the knuckles of my hands.

“There is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.”

--Gore Vidal, in his essay, “Love Love Love,” which first appeared in the Partisan Review, Spring 1959. Vidal was a privileged man: most things in life are more debasing than this. But the description does fit most every job I've had in my adult life.

“It's quite simple to kill off your public. A distant example: Moscow. 'Ivan the Terrible' is released in Moscow and audiences flee. They can't take it. But why not? Because the were no longer operating on the film's level of artistry. Why? They'd seen nothing but crap for ages. When you feed the people crap, they lose their taste buds.”

--Henri Langlois, in the documentary “Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the  Cinémathèque” (2004). Langlois is considered the father of film preservation, the father of the auteur theory, and the father of the Nouvelle Vague.

“If you want your art to matter, stay in touch with the world. Keep in the human drama, take walks, go to baseball games, chase women, argue with waiters, ride motorcycles, hang out with children, play poker, visit Paris as often as possible and always keep in touch with the craggy old guy with the bad cough who runs the news stand.

”Kubrick apparently did very little of this. The more invested he became in his secretive, secluded, every-detail-controlled, nothing-left-to-chance lifestyle in England — which he began to construct when he left Hollywood and moved there in the early '60s — and the less familiar he became with the rude hustle-bustle of life on the outside, the more rigid and formalized and apart-from-life his films became.“

--Jeff Wells, from his 2000 review of Stanley Kubrick's ”Eyes Wide Shut,“ recently resurrected on his Hollywood Elsewhere site after rewatching the film on Blu-Ray. He also quotes from David Thomson's review: ”It is a shock to find that the film is only 159 minutes. Every frame feels like a prison."

“Apparently, he was not totally ignorant of one of life's great secrets: women don't look for handsome men, they look for men with beautiful women.”

-- Milan Kundera, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” pg. 12.

“It’s not intellectual. You’re mostly aware of what you don’t like. Henry Moore said something like that. You keep chipping away at what isn’t an elephant. And Miles Davis said: ‘Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there’ — I’ve put it on my wall. We think the conscious is the determining factor, and actually it’s the least reliable instrument. The knowing is the infringement.“

--Dustin Hoffman in ”The Tao of Hoffman" by Giles Foden in The New York Times Style Magazine, Sunday, March 4, 2012

“Despite its soft environmentalist message 'The Lorax' is an example of what it pretends to oppose. Its relationship to Dr. Seuss’s book is precisely that of the synthetic trees that line the streets of Thneedville to the organic Truffulas they have displaced. The movie is a noisy, useless piece of junk, reverse-engineered into something resembling popular art in accordance with the reigning imperatives of marketing and brand extension.”

--A.O. Scott in his review “How the Grinch Stole the Lorax” in The New York Times

“The studios that churn out 'This Means War' and its ilk ... seem geuinely worried that an audience left to contemplate human deeds without the assistance of sonic or editorial frenzy might start to think for itself. People might look at Chris Pine's eyes and wonder, first, why a blue so startling and unreal should suggest not the gleam of a born seducer but one of the stronger brands of industrial cleaning gel. And, second, whether the character he depicts here, for all its vigor, is anything more than a jerk.

”That is certainly how Lauren [Reese Witherspoon] reads him at the start. They meet at a video store, a setting that might have seemed fresh and topical sometime around the summer of 1993. He actually says, 'I know movies. And women,' a boast that would be correct only if uttered by George Cukor.“

--Anthony Lane in ”The Current Cinema: Big Men," in the 2/27/12 issue of The New Yorker

Cukor and subject. His IMDb CV.

“The fact that the Oscar telecast is a bust, that it is doomed—almost designed—to be a bust, and that the varying degrees of bustness are all that separates one year from the next, should neither surprise nor even dismay us, because the Academy Awards are like teen-age sex. It’s all about the fizzing buildup, and the self-persuading aftermath: the occurrence itself, nowadays, is nothing but fumble and flub...”

-- Anthony Lane, “The Oscars: Man or Muppet?” on The New Yorker site, in what is easily the best post-Oscar commentary. Most critics fulminate. They snipe. Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes of The New York Times write about the Academy's doomed ratings ... even though, they admit, the ratings were up 3.7 percent. The Hollywood Reporter slams host Billy Crystal, as it slams all hosts, even though he was funny and got off several of the evening's best lines, particularly: “Nothing takes the sting out of these tough economic times like watching a bunch of millionaires giving golden statues to each other.” Julia Turner over at Slate.com actually criticized the way Penelope Cruz looked. (“The look is blah ... stupid princess gown.”) Lane keeps the proper distance. He expects little and is amused when he gets less. He unleashes bon mots with a shrug. All other critics should read and learn.

“Ryan Seacrest,” Lane writes, “whose very name resembles a brand of luxury yacht, so smooth are the waves on which he sails through life...” Choppier waters here thanks (and yes, thanks) to Sacha Baron Cohen.

“When Ted Williams refused to wear a necktie in the late 1940s, he got scant argument from Red Sox manager Joe McCarthy, even though the skipper insisted that everyone else on the club be so attired. When a sportswriter asked McCarthy why he let Williams get away with it, the manager offered a simple answer. 'I want to be fair,' he said. 'Any other gentleman on this club hits. .390, he won't have to wear a necktie, either.'”

--Jason Turbow and Michael Duca in their book, “The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing & Bench-Clearing Brawls: The unwritten rules of America's pastime.” According to the book's footnotes, they got the quote from “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Cooperstown,” by Mickey McDermott and Howard Eisenberg.

Ted Williams, tieless, signing a contract at the desk of Red Sox general manager Eddie Collins at Fenway Park in the late 1940s. Photograph by Leslie Jones (1886-1967). Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

“...rarer has it been clearer to me that 'the Academy' is not a monolithic individual entity we conveniently paint it as for the purpose of analysis, but a hive of conflicting individual opinions and personalities. The new voting structure for the Best Picture race is a case in point. We know each of these nine nominees received at least 5% of the number-one votes cast, suggesting a diverse range of committed camps. The people responsible for The Tree of Life being on the list are not the same people who put War Horse there, who in turn are different from the sneaky contingent who came through for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

”There's evidence of contrasting impulses within individual branches, too. Are the actors who rallied for Demián Bichir the same ones who are high on Rooney Mara? Are there Academy screenwriters who are equally jazzed about Bridesmaids and A Separation? I'm sure there are some — speaking as the person whose best-of-2011 list found room for Margaret and Immortals — but I'm sure you'd find plenty more who are befuddled by at least one of those nominations. Get angry with the Academy if you like, but wonder first what — or who — you're even getting angry with.“

-- Guy Lodge, ”Stuck in the middle with you: Thoughts on the Oscar nominations,“ on the ”In Contention" site. Which is now, what, HitFix? Too bad.

“After nearly twenty years in England, my wife and I had taken the decision to move back to America for a while, to give the children the chance of experiencing life in another country and my wife the chance to shop until 10 P.M. seven nights a week. I had recently read that 3.7 million Americans, according to a Gallup poll, believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another, so it was clear that my people needed me.”

--Bill Bryson, “Notes From a Small Island” (1995), pg. 5

“Feeling wrapped in light gives me a sense of spiritual atmosphere. You've got light, you needn't feel alone.”

--Cinematographer Sven Nykvist (1922-2006), in the documentary “Ljuset håller mig sällskap” (“Light Keeps Me Company”), which is currently streaming on Netflix.

Some of the movies Nykvist photographed:

• 1993 What's Eating Gilbert Grape 
• 1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors
• 1989 New York Stories (segment “Oedipus Wrecks”)
• 1988 The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• 1983 Star 80
• 1982 Fanny and Alexander
• 1978 Autumn Sonata
• 1978 Pretty Baby
• 1976 Face to Face
• 1973 Scenes from a Marriage
• 1972 Cries and Whispers
• 1970 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
• 1968 Hour of the Wolf
• 1966 Persona
• 1963 Winter Light
• 1961 Through a Glass Darkly
• 1960 The Virgin Spring

“Has there ever been a more decent, upstanding, all-American president, with his dog and his family and his Apollo Theatre song solos, treated more shamefully by his opponents? I’d be more horrified by the abuse if I wasn’t sure it was backfiring.”

--Joan Walsh, “Demonizing the decent guy who is president: Will the crazy-nasty GOP attacks on Obama provoke a voter backlash to defend the flawed but human Democrat?,” on Salon.com.

“As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.”

--Adam Gopnik in the article, “THE CAGING OF AMERICA: Why do we lock up so many people?” in the January 30 issue of The New Yorker

“Many would argue, if they ever had cause to think about it, that one Bad News Bears movie was enough. But no nine-year-old baseball-loving boy in 1977 would agree, not even one who had, unlke me, seen the first movie. The sequel came out that summer, after Little League season had ended all over the land, and who wouldn't want the season and the summer to somehow go on and on?

”The makers of the Bears sequel keyed in on this need to go on and on. Really, the premise of another Bears movie couldn't have been otherwise: there would have to be another game. But whether by design or happy accident, or some combination of the two, the sequel not only centers on the idea that the season can go on but continually frames it as an urgent question: can the season go on? It is, in a way, the prototypical sequel. Its plot mirrors the very question of its exisence. One story has ended. Can there be another?“

-- from ”The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training,“ by Josh Wilker, part of the ”A Novel Approach to Cinema“ series edited by Sean Howe.

I think ”Breaking Training“ one of the worst baseball movies ever made; but Wilker's short book, with its asides to the American myth of the road, the catchphrases of ”Happy Days,“ Jimmy Carter's ”malaise“ speech, the ”USA! USA!" chant, and the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, and how they all intertwine with this horrible, horrible movie, is something close to a work of art.

“When I had lunch with the unnaturally clever actor Stephen Fry, for instance, he said it was no big deal that he was an actor, a novelist, memoirist, television personality, talk-show host, and amateur magician who in his spare time had written the script for a Christmas pantomime at the Old Vic, and who, when his friend Emma Thompson's book was swallowed by her computer, resurrected the lost chapters by single-handedly repairing the hard drive (he dabbles in technology on the side). Fry suffers from manic-depressive disorder--also in his spare time, he researched and hosted a television series in which he explored his and others' experiences with the illness--and I think one of the things that distresses him is that no one else is as smart as he is. Bu he would never put it that way; he claims it's all a fluke.”

--Sarah Lyall, “The Angle Files: A Field Guide to the British,” pg. 147.

“Perhaps the master of the British art of telling stories against oneself is the writer and playwright Alan Bennett, who is about the closest thing Britain has to a national treasure. He seems genetically incapable of being pleased with himself. When asked by the actor Ian McKellen in 1987 whether he was gay or straight, he responded that it was like asking a man crawling across the Sahara Desert what sort of water he preferred, Perrier or Malvern.”

--Sarah Lyall, “The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British,” pg. 154

“It seems to me that a Democratic president who gets us health care reform and tough new financial protection for consumers, who guides the economy through its roughest period in 80 years with moderate success (who could do better?), who ends our long war in Iraq and avenges the worst insult to our sovereignty since Pearl Harbor (as his Republican predecessor manifestly failed to do, despite a lot of noise and promises); a president who faced an opposition of really spectacular intransigence and downright meanness; a president who has the self-knowledge and wisdom about Washington to write the passage quoted above, and the courage to publish it: that president deserves a bit more credit from the left than [Thomas] Frank is willing to give him.”

--Michael Kinsley in his review of “Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right,” by Thomas Frank, which is as critical of Pres. Obama as Frank's previous book, “What's the Matter with Kansas?,” was critical of Kansas.

“Mantle's might inflicted damage on bats, balls and egos. ... Billy Pierce, then pitching for the White Sox, recalled a July night at Yankee Stadium in 1959 when Mantle KO'ed a rookie outfielder with a line drive. '[Jim McAnany] went to catch the ball, and it hit him right in the chest,' Pierce said....

”'Just to the right of the breastbone,' McAnany said. 'I just went down like I was shot. It knocked me off my feet.'

“Jim Kaat of the Minnesota Twins sought divine intervention when he fell behind on The Mick. 'Two-and-oh on Mantle, Earl Battey would wave his arms and make the sign of the cross.'”

--from Jane Leavy's “The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of Amerca's Chlldhood”

“The best days of the Tri-State Mining District were ten years gone when Mutt [Mantle] moved his family to the region. The land's lucre was first discovered in 1848, the year Mantle's great-grandfther, an English coal miner, immigrated to America. The Twenties were the glory days. Between 1908 and 1930, the ore that came out of the mines was worth more than $300 million. The human cost of extracting the wealth was clear as early as 1915, when doctors noted pulmonary disease in almost two out of three miners ...

”Silicosis was feared and far more common than the random but inevitable collapse of rock. A clinic opened in Pitcher in 1927, but it was for the benefit of the mine operators, who were anxious to cull the sick from the workforce. Doctors provided advice but no treatment. Annual X-ray examinations were compulsory. Miners were required to carry a wallet-sized health card certifying that they were free of disease. Those whose X-rays came back positive were fired the same day and could never be hired by another mine. An attorney for Eagle-Picher explained the company's methodology for ridding the area of silicosis and the rampant tuberculosis that ensued: 'When they get sick and can't work, we throw them on the dump heap.'“

--From Jane Leavy's ”The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood," pg. 43

Q. How did you prepare for the role [of a former P.O.W. turned war hero who might also be an undercover jihadist in Showtime's “Homeland”]?

A. I investigated post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ve been to a unit where people are suffering from it, and I read a lot of literature. I looked at footage of soldiers in the combat zone. I found “Restrepo” to be unbelievably useful.

--Actor Damian Lewis (“Band of Brothers”) in the Q&A “A World War II Soldier Enters the Post-Iraq Age,” in the Sunday New York Times

“I love baseball. You know, it doesn't have to mean anything, it's just beautiful to watch.”

--Leonard Zelig in Woody Allen's “Zelig” (1983)

Target Field, July 4, 2011.

“The greatness of 'Funny People' hinges on Sandler’s ability to adeptly capture the sadness of a comedic actor looking back on his career when confronted with mortality. And Sandler nails it! Hits every goddamn note, moment and scene, masterfully. And while I do believe he’s a great actor (when he wants to be), part of it also comes from Judd Apatow so skillfully tapping into Sandler’s own regret about his own choices and then seamlessly filtering them through the character of George Simmons. That’s why the parodies within 'Funny People' — like 'Re-Do,' where a lawyer gets magically turned back into a baby or 'MerMan,' the story of a male mermaid — hit so hard. It feels like Sandler is acknowledging the ridiculousness of his filmography and owning up to it.

”That’s what makes 'Jack and Jill' so perplexing. How can you soberly acknowledge all that one year, and then star in 'Jack and Jill' the very next? And more important, how can you leave that much talent on the table? It’s like turning down the opportunity to play for a championship in order to spend another year on a bottom feeder.“

--Toph Eggers, screenwriter, in the salon.com piece ”The Tragedy of Adam Sandler."

“If you live in France and you have written one good book, or painted a good picture, or directed one outstanding fim, 50 years ago, and nothing ever since, you are still recognized as an artist, and honored accordingly. People take their hats off and call you maitre. They do not forget. In Hollywood--in Hollywood you're as good as your last picture. If you didn't have one in production in the last three months, you're forgotten, no matter what you have achieved ere this.”

--Erich von Stroheim, “Classics of the Silent Screen: A Pictorial Treasury” by Joe Franklin

“Yes, a great game and never mind the early stuff. Tied five times, it produced six lead changes, and rehabilitated itself, from stinker to thriller, along the way. Stricken Cardinals fans at Busch Stadium stood in silence in the ninth inning and again in the tenth, with their mittened paws covering their faces up to the eyes, while their team teetered on the brink of elimination, one strike away from winter. In the ninth, with the Redbirds down by two runs, there was a brief shot of Cardinals ace pitcher Chris Carpenter and a couple of teammates laughing about something at the dugout rail, and I thought, What’s with these guys? Now we know...”

--Roger Angell in his New Yorker post “Cards Win”

*  *  *

“The Cardinals' next four hitters were Lance Berkman, Allen Craig, David Freese, and Yadier Molina. Holland throws left-handed. Berkman, a switch-hitter, is significantly better against righties than lefties, so letting Holland pitch to Berkman made sense. Indeed, Holland retired Berkman on a fly ball.

”After that, though? The Cardinals had three right-handed hitters coming up, and Washington had Mike Adams, one of baseball's best right-handed relief pitchers, warming up in the bullpen. It was the eighth inning. Mike Adams makes his living in the eighth inning. Against right-handed hitters, especially.

“Washington didn't leave the dugout, but Craig left the yard with a solo homer that trimmed the Rangers' lead by a run. Eventually, Adams did enter the game and killed an incipient St. Louis rally. One wonders, though ... Would Allen Craig have hit a home run against Mike Adams?

”Oddly, nobody's really talking about Adams' late entrance, perhaps because everybody still seems to think that Derek Holland walks on water. Hint: He doesn't. He's a good pitcher who pitched great in Game 4, and might be slightly more effective coming out of the bullpen than starting. But he's not Mike Adams.“

--Rob Neyer, ”2011 World Series, Game 6: Did Ron Washington Blow It?“

*  *  *

”Feliz looked uncomfortable on the mound, but I think he tends to look that way. Part of the magic of Mariano is the placid look, the slumped shoulders, as if this is all just a formality, as if he had already saved the game a few hours before and is only performing it once more for those people who missed it. Feliz, though, is a bit twitchy, he expresses disgust, his motion is violent and impassioned, and I thought after he walked Berkman he looked unsure.“

--Joe Posnanski, ”Game Six“

*  *  *

”Really and truly, this was an ugly game for about six or seven innings. But then it got beautiful right at the end.“

--Lance Berkman in Jayson Stark's piece, ”David Freese, St. Louis, Force Game 7"

“I find they are pedestrian people. Their consensus is cliche. Something is good because they've seen it before.”

--Herbert B. Leonard (1922-2006), producer of “Naked City,” “Route 66,” and “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin,” and known as a writer's producer, as quoted in Susan Orlean's biography, “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and The Legend.” The “they” he is referring to are studio executives.

“Hitler cared deeply about animals and animal welfare. 'In the Third Reich,' he once announced, 'cruelty to animals should no longer exist.' Some of the earliest laws enacted by the Nazi Party pertained to animal protection, and violators could be sent to concentration camps. Vivisection, tail docking, and neutering were banned...

”What accounted for this concern for animals? Some of these laws, such as a ban on kosher butchering and on Jews having pets, were probably enacted because they furthered the goal of religious persecution; the restriction on vivisection might have been an effort to inhibit Jewish scientists. But the Nazi reverence for nature and natural order was more far-reaching and fundamental than a simple anti-Semitic attack. The pagan-like worship of nature as an immutable force was at the core of the Nazi belief system. Nature, with its invioable schematic and pitiless ranking of strong over weak, was held up as a model and a justification for the Nazis' worldview, and therefore nature and animals had to be honored and protected...

“Nazis also used their attention to animal well-being as a way to further humiliate their victims ... illustrated by the Angora Project, a rabbit-breeding program operated by the SS at the Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald concentration camps. Raised by inmates at the camps, the rabbits lived in gorgeous hutches and were fed lavish meals; their fur was trimmed and used as insulation in Luftwaffe pilots' winter jackets. But Henreich Himmler, the chief of the SS, who ran the project and kept a notebook documenting it, also wanted the rabbits for another purpose; he liked the starving prisoners to be reminded, as they prepared meals for the animals and cleaned their cages, that they had less value in the Nazi world order, deserved less dignity and fewer rights than the animals they cared for.”

--Susan Orlean, in one of the many interesting sidebars in her book, “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend,” pp. 145-46

“That year [1927], Rin Tin Tin was designated the most popular performer in the United States, and his four films—A Dog of the Regiment, Jaws of Steel, Tracked by the Police and Hills of Kentucky—were box office hits as well as critical successes. The Academy Awards were presented for the first time, and Rinty received the most votes for Best Actor. But members of the Academy, anxious to establish the new awards as serious and important, decided that giving an Oscar to a dog did not serve that end, so the votes were recalculated and the award was diverted to Emil Jannings, for his performances in both The Way of the Flesh and The Last Command.”

--Susan Orlean, “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend,” pp. 88-89. Orlean will appear next Friday, October 28, at SIFF Uptown for a reading, a Q&A, and a showing of the Rin Tin Tin silent film “Clash of the Wolves.”

The original Rin Tin Tin in “Hills of Kentucky” (1927).

“To rid the world of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki and Moammar Qaddafi within six months: if Obama were a Republican, he'd be on Mount Rushmore by now.”

--Andrew Sullivan, “A Tale of Two Presidents”

Also worth reading: Sullivan's post, “The Untold Story of the Actual Obama Record.”

I'm disappointed that we didn't get better articles about the Yankees' quick postseason exit from stalwarts Rob Neyer or Joe Posnanski. But the Internet's a big place and good comments could be found. My favorite is listed last. Enjoy.

“It hurts. It hurts for the Yankees to lose in the playoffs and for their season to end. I once knew a therapist who said that sports were a leading cause of depression among men – trailing behind events like losing a loved one or being fired from one’s job. I take these losses seriously. I also know that the closer your team comes to winning it all, the harder it is to have them lose. I remember 2001. I know this might sound like self-entitled nonsense to fans of teams like the Cubs who haven’t sniffed a World Championship in eons. But every Yankee fan is also a fan of less successful teams. My California Golden Bears haven’t seen a Rose Bowl since Eisenhower was President, but it didn’t hurt that much when they gave up 29 unanswered points to Oregon last night.”

--ItsAboutTheMoney.Net, “A Rational Goodbye to the 2011 Season”

*  *  *

Dear Mr. Manners,
I'm really enjoying the fact that the Red Sox choked to miss the playoffs and that the Yankees lost in the first round. Is it poor manners to root against them and mock the teams and their fans?

-- United S. (of America)

Dear United Schadenfreude of America,
Normally it is poor manners to find joy in the failure of others, but rooting against the Yankees and Red Sox is as American as mom, apple pie and baseball teams trying to buy championships. I have no problem reveling in their defeat. However, I would encourage you to balance your ridicule with a positive comment to show that you are a person of refined manners.

Say: “Keep your chin up ... so you can see the scoreboard, which is the official record of you being a loser.”

Or: “Hey, no one wins them all. In fact, some teams only win one of them in 11 years, which is almost impossible if you think about it, considering they had the biggest payroll in every one of those years.”

--D.J. Gallo, “Mr. Manners' Etiquette for Sports World”

Keep your chin up...

*  *  *

“Not enough fans understand that the baseball playoffs are a crapshoot. Since 1990, you know how many teams with the best regular-season record have won the World Series? Three — the '98 Yankees, '07 Red Sox and '09 Yankees. If you make the playoffs, you essentially have a 1-in-4 chance of reaching the World Series. If you get to the World Series, you have 1-in-2 chance of winning. So if you make the playoffs every season you should win a World Series once every eight years. In their past eight trips to the postseason, the Yankees have reached two World Series and won one. Exactly what the odds would predict.”

-- David Schoenfield, “The Day After: Yankees Postscript”

*  *  *

And my favorite...

To the Sports Editor:

The Yankees’ postseason failure over the last two years suggests the possibility of another Curse of the Bambino. Its predecessor never made sense: why would the Babe have been anything but thrilled to be sent from Boston to the greatest sports stage of the era? Overshadowing Ruth’s monument with the huge tribute plaque to George Steinbrenner? Well, that just might be cause for vengeance. So here is the new curse: the Yankees will never win another World Series until the plaque is moved to a more appropriate site.

-- Charles E. Knapp, Scarsdale, N.Y., “At a Loss in the Bronx”

Magic, Maier, gone.

“But [Pauline] Kael had stumbled upon something that could be very disconcerting to the best film critic in the world, just as it appalled the man [Orson Welles] who was increasingly the idol of young directors: that the movies were not and never would be good enough, deep enough, to hold his interest. He had gone deep—no one yet had gone deeper. But it was not enough, not compared with literature, music, painting or just watching life go by. The movies, in other words,  are the art of a culture prepared to settle for the shallow. The artistic status of the filmmaker was not actually substantiated by the work. Citizen Kane was the first move to reveal that—and Welles, for a long time, was the lone man who noticed it.”

--David Thomson, “Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles,” pg. 398

Discuss.

“You're a Christian, right, Chad?

”Yeah.“

”You believe in Jesus?“

”Yeah.“

”Have you ever seen him?“

”No, I've never seen him.“

”Ever seen yourself get hitters out?“

”Yeah.“

”So why the fuck do you have faith in Jesus when you never seen him, but you don't have faith in your ability to get hitters out when you get hitters out all the time?“

--2002 Oakland A's pitching coach Rick Peterson to 2002 Oakland A's reliever Chad Bradford in Michael Lewis's ”Moneyball," pg. 253.

“Your time is limited so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of someone else's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition; they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

--Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Address, 2005. Via Jim Walsh.

“[Bill] James's first proper essay was the preview to an astonishing literary career. There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurements of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- and under-valued, who couldn't? Bad as they may have been, the statistics used to evaluate baseball players were probably far more accurate than anything used to measure the value of people who didn't play baseball for a living.”

--Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, pg. 72. The movie, starring Brad Pitt, and which has been getting astonishingly good reviews (“Has to be described as an example of what Hollywood does best” - Andrew O'Hehir; “...in its own quiet, unspectacular way, this movie courses with life” - Dana Stevens), opens tomorrow.

“When the axe came into the woods, the trees whispered, 'The handle is one of us.'”

--a Turkish proverb quoted in Arlene Kim's book of poetry, “What Have You Done to Our Ears to Make Us Hear Echoes?”

Arlene Kim reading from her book of poetry, “What Have You Done to Our Ears to Make Us Hear Echoes?” at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle; September 2011

“Though I have some respect for 'The Virtue of Selfishness,' her collection of essays ... I don't think there's a need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings. I don't know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement.”

--Christopher Hitchens on Ayn Rand, from the Q&A portion of his lecture, “The Moral Necessity of Atheism,” given on February 23, 2004 at Sewanee University

“8.46 pm. So far, we have repealed universal health insurance, Dodd-Frank, much of the Pentagon, the Department of Education, and are so-so on Medicare and social security. What should government actually do to help the economy? Cut and reform taxes. Unless Obama proposes to cut taxes. Then that's more spending. ... God, this is depressing.”

--Andrew Sullivan, a half-hour into live-blogging the Republican/Tea-Party Debates, over at The Dish

“I do think there is a tendency to underestimate audiences, I do think there is an appetite to be stretched. I do think people want to hear language at its best on the screen. I'm optimistic about it having an enormous audience.”

--Colin Firth on “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” specifically, and the film industry in general, at the Venice Film Festival.

I go back and forth on this issue, bitching about audiences one minute, insisting that audiences are smarter than we realize the next. I think studios pay too much attention to market research and test screenings, and don't promote and distribute better movies the way they should, and that, if they did, these movies would make money. At the same time, there are a lot of Big Jim McBobs and Billy Sol Hureks out there.

“As the writing team came back from Victorville, and as Houseman returned to New York, Welles took over the task of making the script into a picture. From mid-April to mid-July, the script came down to 172 pages [from 268]. Many episodes were abandoned—for example, Kane's honeymoon with his first wife, Emily; a later meeting between Kane and his father, when the older man is remarried to a 'young tart'; Kane's son's involvement in a fascist movement; a good deal of political byplay with an oil scandal; scenes in Rome, when Thatcher goes to visit Kane; an affair Susan Kane has with a younger man at Xanadu. These deletions made Kane simpler to follow—and we should realize that nothing hurt it more on first release than its difficulty. In addition, Welles strengthened the line of dramatic consequence—the way Kane's career hinges upon the exposure of the love nest during the electoral battle with Jim Gettys, and the way Susan's nightmare career breaks the bond between Kane and Leland.”

--from “Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles,” by David Thomson; pg. 147

“I can’t help wondering if 'Believing Is Seeing' is the first installment in a three-volume attempt to make sense of the relationship between the documentarian, the documented and the truth. I hope so. For Morris, the truth is (as they say) out there; the question is how to pick our way in its direction. There is no mechanical means of doing so, he argues; the camera is never wholly obscura or lucida. Perhaps this is why Morris’s book feels so human. It combines the hubris of his ends — the desire, shared by approximately all of us, to lay claim to the truth — with the humility of his means.”

--Kathryn Schulz in “Limited Vision,” her review of Errol Morris' new book “Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography,” in last Sunday's New York Times

At an outdoor dinner party last night, overlooking Puget Sound, the subject got around to freedom vs. safety, and I mentioned how most people would give up the former for an imagined version of the latter (not a very original thought), and that our reaction to 9/11 was indicative of this (another not very original thought). One of the other guests disagreed. We went back and forth in a genial enough manner. He felt we hadn't given up any freedoms post-9/11. Then he talked about how 9/11 was foreseeable to anyone who was paying attention. We had the following exchange:

He: Anyone who didn't see 9/11 coming was an idiot.
Me: Or in the Bush administration.
He: Don't go there.

At this point I was warned away from the conversation by the hostess. I later found out that the guy I'd been talking to was, like the hostess, a Republican and a Bush supporter. If only I'd known. I would've totally gone there.

“In so many respects, the Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament, representing sixty-two countries and nearly every ethnic group and religion in the world. There was an ex-hippie stockbroker, the gay Catholic chaplain of the New York City Fire Department, a Japanese hockey player, an Ecuadoran sous chef, a Barbie doll collector, a vegetarian calligrapher, a Palestinian accountant. ... The manifold ways in which they attached to life testified to the Quranic injunction that the taking of a single life destroys a universe. Al-Qaeda had aimed its attacks at America, but it struck all of humanity.”

--from pg. 415 of Lawrence Wright's “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaed and the Road to 9/11”

“Your mother has asked me to adopt you. Do you know about that? I've thought about it and I've decided that it's not a good idea. I came here to tell you that.

I didn't know your dad but I think he was a great guy. He gave you a load of things: your name, your face...

So you already have a father. Okay, he's dead. That's sad. But it was before you were born and it's not easy to mourn a stranger.

There's a German poem about a boy whose mother is dead. [Speaks German] That means,”Your mother's soul lashes out at the sharks before you.“ That poem always reminds me of you because I think your dad's soul protects you from sharks.

So it wouldn't be a good idea for me to pretend to be your father now. Your mother used to say you and I should be friends. But a grown-up and a child shouldn't be friends. I know that when I was little, I didn't like those grown-ups who'd try to charm me or try to establish complicity with me. ...

I carry you in my heart now. Even if you turn into a total bastard or I don't see you for 1279 years, I have to think about you because I enjoy doing it. As a child, you don't have to think about grown-ups or about me. Unless you need to. ...

You see, the past isn't what's vanished. No, it's what belongs to us. What belongs to us now are the memories we both have. It's weird, isn't it? Because there's no name for what we share. ...

And I'd like you to see that doctor you got on well with. A child shouldn't talk only to his mother. A mother is great to look after you, to love you, for you to love, etc. But she's not enough to make you grow up. You need an extra adult to help you to grow so you're not shut up in the love between parents... and children. Maybe that scares Nora and not you. Nora probably thinks, ”My God, am I a good mother for Elias? Let's see the doctor.“ And you think, ”Nora's the one who needs the doctor, not me!“

That's smart. You can separate what she wants from what you want. In a way, you're right but... This is the only advice I have for now: Of course, we're always right. But it's always possible that we could be a bit wrong too. Being a bit wrong is very good news! It means you don't have the whole answer. That life will be more exciting and full of surprises than you thought.”

--Ismaël (Mathieu Amalric) talking to Elias (Valentin Lelong) in the great epilogue to Arnaud Desplechin's “Rois et reine” (“Kings and Queen”) (2004).

I've had some good conversations today, long ones, too, but this short, awful conversation stands out. I was leaving Metropolitan Market on Mercer with some red peppers for Patricia, who's recovering nicely from arthroscopic surgery, thank you, when a clean-cut, 20-ish dude, a young man really, waved his hands at me to get my attention. I looked down at his table, on which there was a poster of Pres. Obama with a Hitler moustache and the words “Dump Obama.” He smiled at me. I shook my head at him and kept going. He called after me.

He: Are you ready to end the madness?
Me: Yours?

And kept going.

“Toscanini once recorded a piece 65 times. You know what he said? 'It could be better.'”

--the father (Brad Pitt) in Terrence Malick's “The Tree of Life,” no doubt channeling Malick, a perfectionist, for whom 65 attempts is a dry run.

Larry Bowa: And the thing is, he did it the right way--without steroids.
Mitch Williams: He did it with hay. Oats and hay.

--MLB Network announcers, and former Major Leaguers, reacting to the news of Jim Thome's 600th career homerun.

My reaction? Thome is the 8th player in baseball history to do this. Derek Jeter was the 28th player in baseball history to reach 3,000 hits. Which got more press?

I wrote the following for an essay but it turned out to be the little darling that had to be cut. I offer it here instead:

My parents were married in 1960 and didn’t last much longer than their 13th wedding anniversary, for which, I remember, my older brother, younger sister and I made them a cake. It was single-layer and heart-shaped. You baked a cake in both a square and a round pan, set the square cake like a diamond, cut the round cake in half and then placed either end on the flat, upper-sides of the diamond. Voila: a heart. I liked how easy it was to make a heart: just take two familiar shapes and make that third, more complicated shape. It turned out that marriage—in which two familiar shapes make a third, more complicated shape—wasn’t so easy.

“I’ve never understood exactly why we [we have a debt ceiling], or why anyone can think it’s ‘fiscally responsible’ to vote against raising the debt ceiling when we’ve already incurred the responsibilities. It’s like not paying your bills. It’s silly to go through the posturing that you’re saving money by not voting to increase the national debt.”

--Rep. Tom Foley on raising the debt ceiling, in The New Yorker: April 1979

“As inconsequential and virtually indistinguishable sub-Judd Apatow white-boy comedies fueled by prison-rape gags and pants-pissing anxiety around black people go, ”Horrible Bosses“ is pretty solid entertainment.”

--Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com.

His full review here. My review here. We have pretty much the same take on the movie - right down to its inconsequentiality. “The bosses are ... three caricatures rather than three human beings,” I write. “Farrell and Aniston's horrible bosses never remotely resemble real people,” O'Hehir writes. Add it up and it's 70% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Hey Little Hypocrite
What you gonna say
When you wind up standin' naked
On the final Judgement Day
How you gonna justify it
Who you gonna call
What if it turns out that
God don't look like you at all

--“Little Emperor” by Steve Earle, from the album “I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive”

“When you say MEDIUM, we hear LARGE.”

--Sign outside the Southdale Theater, an AMC chain, promoting AMC's “Stubs” program, which involves tracking your movie purchases (seemingly for you, really for them), rewards for every $100 spent (encouraging you to spend that), and free upgrades on popcorn and “fountain drinks” (i.e., the cheap stuff). Bad name, bad campaign, bad slogan. Seriously, when I say 'medium,' I'd rather you heard 'medium.'

THE BELIEVER: Rumor has it that you turned down the chance to direct Disney’s remake of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner because you felt they weren’t interested in really exploring racism.

HAROLD RAMIS: The way they wanted to do it didn’t have a lot to do with the colossal amount of pain and violence that swirls around racial injustice. It would’ve been like an episode of The Jeffersons. What’s the point? But who knows, maybe that’s as much as most people want. I can’t tell you how many people have told me, “When I go to the movies, I don’t want to think.”

THE BELIEVER: Does that offend you as a filmmaker?

HAROLD RAMIS: It offends me as a human being. Why wouldn’t you want to think? What does that mean? Why not just shoot yourself in the fucking head?

--Conversation between actor-writer-director-surgeon Harold Ramis and Eric Spitznagel, from the March 2006 issue of The Believer

“But the vote [on same-sex marriage before the New York legislature, which passed last night 33-29] and the lead-up to it showed us something else, too, something we ought to see often, but don’t: the spectacle of politicians changing their minds. That, in fact, has been one of the singular benefits of the same-sex marriage debate overall. On most issues, partisanship and the fear of being labelled a waffler effectively discourage politicians from publicly wrestling with conscience and contradiction. But same-sex marriage has been different. Public opinion on this issue has shifted fast in the direction of approval and party affiliation has turned out to matter somewhat less than other factors: generation, whether somebody has gay friends or relatives, gut feelings. President Obama can say that his views on whether gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry are 'evolving'—and in this context, as in few others, 'evolving' doesn’t by itself carry a political cost.”

--Margaret Talbot, in her post, “On Gay Marriage, It's OK to Waffle,” on the New Yorker website

“In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance. And [Michele] Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.”

--Matt Taibbi, “Michele Bachmann's Holy War,” in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine

“In [Ayman al-]Zawahiri's hands, al-Jihad had splintered into angry and homeless gangs. ... His disillusioned followers often reflected on the pronouncement, made during the prison years by the man Zawahiri betrayed, Major Essam al-Qamari, that some vital quality was missing in Zawahiri. Qamari was the one who had told him, 'If you are the member of any group, you cannot be the leader.' that now sounded like a prophecy.”

—from page 246 of Lawrence Wright's much-recommended book, “The Looming Tower,” on one of the low points for Ayman al-Zawahri, the former leader of al-Jihad, and current leader of al-Qaeda. The Christian Science Monitor agrees about his lack of charisma.

This Wright paragraph, by the way, follows a horrific story of Egyptian intelligence drugging and sodomizing the thirteen-year-old son of a senior member of al-Jihad, then blackmailing him to spy on his father, then recruiting another boy, a friend, for the same purpose. When the two boys were discovered, Zawahiri convened a Sharia court, forced the boys to strip to determine if they had attained puberty, and, since they had, and so were officially men, had them convicted of sodomy, treason and attempted murder. “Zawahiri had the boys shot,” Wright writes. “To make sure he got his point across, he videotaped their confessions and their executions, and distributed the tapes as an example to others who might betray the organization.”

“You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything isn't black and white, good and bad, and you try to do the right thing.

”You might not like that. You might be very cynical about that. Well, fuck it, I don't care what you think. I'm trying to do the right thing.

“I'm tired of Republican-Democrat politics. They can take the job and shove it. I come from a blue-collar background. I'm trying to do the right thing, and that's where I'm going with this.”

--State Sen. Roy McDonald (R-Saratoga), in The New York Daily News, on why he'll vote to legalize gay marriage in New York.

Ross: Face it, every Derek Jeter hit from now until the end of his career will be a major production.
Me: I think it'll die down after 3,000. Besides, even NY can only get so excited about singles...
Ross: They're not just singles, they're LEADERSHIP.

--Back and forth between me and fellow editor Ross Pfund after I posted a link to Roger Angell's New Yorker article on Jeter and 3,000 hits. (Read all the way through for a great quote from Lou Brock...)

“I don't believe you can trust a man who doesn't have a little twinkle in his eye.”

--Wendy Burden, author of “Dead End Gene Pool,” and long-time friend of Patricia's, Tuesday night during dinner at Meriwether's in Portland, Or.