Monthly Archives: March 2009

The unspeakable horror

39 Replies

This was a terrible day for news about children.

The awful thing is that the front-page story about the boy shot and killed by his brother while they were idle on a "snow" day was not the worst, most appallingly horrific such news in the paper.

It was awful enough. In my long career in this business, I am often shocked at how unbelievably trivial the incidents leading to domestic homicides (the most common kind) can be. Although I can't remember whether this happened in Tennessee or Kansas or South Carolina (the three places I've worked), the archetype in my mind was a case in which two grown men who were related to each other (I want to say an uncle and his nephew) were drinking heavily, and one shot the other after the quarreled over what to watch on TV.

This case exceeds that one in sheer awfulness, and not only because it was children involved. These boys were arguing over who would sit where while they watched TV. The mind reels, this is so terribly sad and unnecessary.

And those words — "terribly sad and unnecessary" — are so pathetically inadequate. You have to be a better writer than I am to describe it adequately, and I mean a MUCH better writer. Conrad got at it with Kurtz' raw whisper, "The horror! The horror!" Obviously, you don't have to travel to deepest Africa to find the Heart of Darkness.

Then there's Dostoevsky, of whom I was reminded in reading the second, and even worse, item in today's paper. Ivan Karamazov, world-class cynic, told his idealistic brother, "You see, I am fond of collecting certain facts, and, would you believe, I even copy anecdotes of a certain sort from newspapers and books, and I've already got a fine collection." They tended to be of horrific incidents of unspeakably terrible things being done to children, and they confirmed him in his dim view of humanity.

This second story would have fit perfectly in his collection. Before I share it let me warn you that this is by far the most horrible, shocking, painful-to-read thing I have ever posted on this blog.

That said, here it is:

SUMTER, S.C. — The parents of five South Carolina children have been charged after their 1-year-old boy starved to death in a Sumter home crawling with rats and roaches, authorities said Tuesday.
    The toddler, who has not been named, was found unresponsive Monday at a home that Sumter County Coroner Harvin Bullock described as filthy and unsuitable for living.
    The child was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead, Sumter Police Chief Patty Patterson said.
    A police report listed the toddler's weight as 4 pounds.
    The boy's parents have been arrested and charged with homicide by child abuse and unlawful conduct. Kevin Dewayne Isaac, 25, and Marketta Sharnise McCray, 23, were in jail Tuesday awaiting a bond hearing, and it was not immediately clear if they had attorneys, police said.
    If convicted on the homicide by child abuse charge, Isaac and McCray could face life in prison, and Patterson said more charges could be forthcoming.
    The boy's twin sister, whose weight was listed as 9 pounds, has been hospitalized for malnutrition, and three other children in the home have been placed in state custody.
    Those children – ages 4, 6, and 9 – are being checked out by physicians, Patterson said.

As I read that in the paper this morning, it struck me as so massively tragic that the pages of a newspaper seemed far too frail and insubstantial to support it. The item — which is about a child who was a twin, and almost exactly the same age as my precious twin grandchildren — should have dropped through the page, through my breakfast table, and plunged straight into the netherworld before I could see it. Yet there it was.

Ironically, today was the same day that The New York Times editorialized, again, to this effect:

We were horrified to be reminded that the nation still has not plumbed the depths of the Bush administration’s abuses….

Remember when I wrote about that several months ago, about how easy it was to inspire "horror" in the eyes of the NYT editorial board? I even wrote a follow-up to provide a little perspective on things we should truly "watch with horror." I even included some pictures that were very painful to look at.

But you know what? This news about this poor child starved to death is harder to take than what I cited before. You see something like this, and you want to be distracted from it. You say, by all means let's talk instead about how filled with horror we are at that awful George W. Bush and the unspeakable things he did. Let's indict him. After all, the NYT accuses him of "mangling the Constitution." Let's have show trials, 24/7 on television. I promise to shout and wave a pitchfork. Anything to avoid thinking about that little item I read in the paper this morning.

Because I don't want to think about that any more.

une aide de 900 millions de dollars

13 Replies

One of the many, many groups that send me releases via e-mail every day — which I generally delete immediately, not because I'm not interested or the subject is unimportant, but because there's only so much time in the day — is one called The Israel Project.

Today's release from that group grabbed my attention, though, because — inexplicably — it was in French. Here's the headline and subhead:

Les États-Unis annoncent une aide de 900 millions de dollars pour la reconstruction de Gaza
L'argent aidera Gaza pour consolider l'Autorité palestinienne

… which reminds me: Night before last, I was downstairs working out for the first time this year (more about that later), when a report came on CNN about Hillary Clinton promising this aid to Gaza, with the stipulation that it had to be channeled through the Palestinian Authority.

Which of course raises the question, How on Earth do you get aid to Gaza through the Palestinian Authority when the Palestinian Authority doesn't control Gaza — where, in fact, being associated with the Palestinian Authority can get you shot by Hamas, the real power?

Wolf Blitzer didn't say, and I didn't think about it until I saw this headline. So merci for that.

And now a follow-up question occurs to me: What IS going to happen to this money, in reality?

And here's a follow-up to the follow-up: If this money isn't effectively going to go to relieve actual human suffering, or to further our interests in the region, either, aren't there a whole lot of better ways to spend this money in the world? I ask that because we have notoriously underfunded our diplomatic efforts around the world for years and years. What might this money — mere chump change by stimulus standards, but a respectable amount (I would think) if added on to the State Department budget — accomplish if we actually drew up a list of our international priorities, and funded them?

Down with team-building games

17 Replies

Count me among those who do NOT get worked up about city councils and other public bodies treating themselves to lunch. If you ask me whether taxpayers should have to pay for sandwiches for council members and staff during a meeting that stretches through meal time, I'll say no. But I'm not going to get worked up about it such petty-cash disbursements. It's the much larger spending decisions the elected officials make while they're chewing their pimento cheese sandwiches that matter.

I had to smile over Belinda Gergel's pot luck offering, and Mayor Bob's disclosure that he consumed two Life Savers, but paid for them himself. Mayor Bob can be a witty guy, in a dry sort of way.

But I DO get all worked up and indignant over learning that that same body, Columbia City Council, spent $3,000 on a "leadership seminar focused on team-building" at their retreat at the end of last week.

No, wait; I should clarify. It's not the $3,000 — excuse me, $2,950. It's the fact that they spent anything, including the precious time, on such an exercise. No offense to Juan Johnson, the H.R. whiz who led them through such vital activities as the one in which they had to "work their way through a maze without talking to each other," but what possible good did this do? I mean, pick an issue (say, homelessness), and the council members have already demonstrated amply that they can wander in a maze without talking to each other.

To confess, I have a deep-seated prejudice against team-building exercises. The senior staff here at the newspaper used to have to undergo these embarrassing ordeals. One year we went whitewater rafting in North Carolina. Oh, you think that's bad? Another time, we went to Frankie's Fun Park, where we — among other things — played laser tag. I was mortified at the thought that a reader would see and recognize me, and tell the world before I could zap him. Besides, my laser gun didn't work, and I kept getting killed, which did not help my morale a bit.

Now, I'll confess that I can get into a game as well as anybody, and after griping and moaning louder than anyone in the room, I might end up playing more enthusiastically than anyone. (My favorite team-building exercise ever, which I actually had to go to Miami for: We were shown the first part of "Twelve Angry Men." Then we had to guess in which order the 11 jurors would change their minds and agree with Henry Fonda. I got them all right except for like the eighth and ninth, which I had switched.) But I have never fooled myself into thinking I wasn't wasting time. I've always been aware that I had work that needed doing, and this foolishness was getting in the way.

We don't do these things any more. Why? Because we don't have the money to waste, that's why. If we DID have the money, though, and were bound to waste it, I'd vote that we spend it on paving our sidewalk in gold, or something — anything to avoid a team-building exercise. I'm not a curmudgeon about most things, but I am about this.

Do any of y'all have experience with these things? And have you, or your organization or its customers or anybody else EVER benefited from it? Maybe it's me; I've never had much trouble confronting people and telling them what I think, or working in teams, and have never seen any need for ice-breakers. Maybe they help some people. But I doubt it.

Congressman says he whacked the Denver paper

3 Replies

Boy, and they say the MSM can be guilty of hubris…

Some congressman out in Colorado who is apparently overimpressed with himself because he travels the Information Superhighway (golly, how futuristic!), is quoted as saying:

Who killed the Rocky Mountain News? We're
all part of it, for better or worse, and I argue it's mostly for the
better…The media is dead and long live the new media."

Here's what's really ironic about this: After this was brought to my attention, I tried following various links to find any sort of authoritative, original source as to what he actually said, and within what context, and found myself bouncing around among a number of poorly designed, unattractive Web pages that didn't tell me much.

Romenesko pointed me to The Denver Post, which pointed me to an alleged "digital recording of the event" at something called coloradopulse.org, which may be the ugliest (and least helpful) Web page I've seen this year. So I struck out on my own, via Google, and found this Denver magazine site (I think), which pointed me to this item from something called "Denver Young Democrats Examiner," which read like someone's very run-of-the-mill blog post written "from the Netroots Nation speaker series at the DoubleTree Hotel in Westminster," which actually told me less than The Denver Post did.

The congressman's own Web site didn't enlighten me. Finally, I went back to Romenesko, which provided a link to where I could listen to the guy's comments, but when it told me it would take 9 minutes to download (it's still downloading as I speak), I lost interest. (By the way, I did run across an entire site devoted to the question,
"Who killed the Rocky?" It's apparently done by one of the laid-off
journalists, and displays far more Web savvy and accessibility than
those other sites I was led to.)

Welcome to the brave new post-newspaper world, in which we all stagger around groping in the dark for information — and then, when we find it, wondering whom to hold accountable for whether it's right or not. (The answer: Nobody, sucker.)

By the way, as a sort of postscript — the Post says that on Monday, Rep. Polis was a little more "subdued" on the subject:

"It's not just 200 jobs that have been lost;
it's also the silencing of a voice," he said. "The rise of new media
and citizen journalism has hastened the demise of many newspapers, and
we, unfortunately, all share in the blame.

Remembering ‘Breaking the News’

6 Replies

Back in the first comment on this post, Lee mentioned James Fallows' excellent book, Breaking the News: The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy — which, as it happens, I actually reviewed for this newspaper when it came out.

Here's what I wrote, back in 1996:

THE STATE
MEDIA EXAMINES ITSELF<
Published on: 02/25/1996
Section: TEMPO
Edition: FINAL
Page: F6
Reviewed by Brad Warthen
Memo: Brad Warthen is an associate editor of The State's editorial page.

BREAKING THE NEWS: How the Media Undermine American Democracy

By James Fallows
Pantheon, 296 pages, $23

    So you think the news media are dragging the country down with their negativity and their failure to put things in perspective?
    So join the club. A lot of us on the inside of this alleged profession agree. James Fallows, Washington editor of The Atlantic Monthly, is one. Fallows' saving grace is that he's written this book explaining exactly what is wrong and why it matters.
    The problem has to do with perverse cognitive habits that journalists embrace as normal, but which cause them to portray public life in ways that make it hard for readers and viewers to engage it constructively.
    For instance: “Step by step, mainstream journalism has fallen into the habit of portraying public life as a race to the bottom, in which one group of conniving, insincere politicians ceaselessly tries to outmaneuver another.'' Among journalists, casting a jaded eye upon anything a politician does is seen as being “professional.'' We tend to think of it as healthy skepticism. But there is nothing healthy about it.
    In fact, “By choosing to present public life as a contest among scheming political leaders, all of whom the public should view with suspicion, the news media helps bring about that very result.''
    That's exactly what has happened. As a groundbreaking poll discovered last year, the public is now far more cynical about politics and government than are journalists, who are more likely to believe that our political system is sound, and that citizens can make a difference. In other words, the people believe the system is just as bad as we've painted it, and we know better.
    There are excellent examples in this book illustrating the profound disconnect between journalists and sensible people.
    One of the best-documented is the journalists' penchant for reducing everything — every issue, every speech, every policy initiative, every human gesture by a politician — to what it means in terms of the next election. If a politician tries to do something about starving children, we immediately wonder aloud what this means in terms of the way he's trying to position himself in New Hampshire.
    If Fallows didn't do anything else in this book, I would praise him to the skies for drawing so clearly the connection between the way we cover politics and the way we cover sports — which is to say, in virtually the same manner. Journalists tend to see everything as a contest, which one side must win and the other must lose. This, of course, leaves no room for the kind of consensus-building that solves problems in the real world.
    Politics and government matter, but modern journalism has done much to cause the public to despair of it ever meaning anything good.
    The sins that Fallows details in this book are examined in a manner that shows clearly “how they affect the future prospects of every American by distorting the processes by which we choose our leaders and resolve our public problems.''
    Unlike most modern journalism, this book does not merely wallow in unrelieved despair. The author writes encouragingly of such things as the “public journalism'' movement, through which a number of far-sighted, community-oriented journalists (you'll note that few of them are in Washington or New York) have started accepting responsibility for fixing the problem, starting with themselves.
    Fallows draws an interesting connection between the way the U.S. military examined and healed itself after Vietnam, and the way journalists can become their own best physicians. It won't be easy, but it can be done — we just have to unlearn about half of the nonsense that got crammed into our heads in journalism school.
    Fallows has correctly diagnosed what's wrong with American journalism. If you want to know why you ought to be mad at the media, read this book. If everybody would read it (journalists should read it twice), we might find ourselves on the way to a cure.

The awful irony is that this was just when things were starting to get much worse, what with 24/7 shouting heads on cable TV and the blogosphere yet to come. The pointless, yammering, conflict for its own sake is SO much worse now — and it's one of the things I struggle with constantly here on the blog, along with those of you who still hope for a civil town square in which to discuss issues — that when I look back on when that review was written, it's almost like a lost age of innocence….

Much ado about photo ID (column version)

29 Replies

    Yep, you already read this here, back on Friday. But I post it not for you blog regulars, but for folks who saw it first in the paper today, and decided to come here for the version with links.

    And if you did that, welcome to the blog…

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR

The photo ID bill that caused such a flap in the House Thursday is one of those classic issues that political partisans make a huge deal over, and that seems to me entirely undeserving of the fuss.
    It’s not so much an issue that generates conflict between Democrats and Republicans as it is an issue that is about conflict between the two parties, with little practical impact beyond that.
    The way I see it is this:

  • It’s ridiculous for Democrats to act like this is some kind of insupportable burden on voting, even to the point of walking out to dramatize their profound concern. Why shouldn’t you have to make the kind of basic demonstration of your identity that you have to make for pretty much any other kind of transaction?
  • It’s ridiculous for Republicans to insist that we have to have this safeguard, absent any sort of widespread abuse here in South Carolina in recent elections. Where’s the problem necessitating this big confrontation with the Democrats? I don’t see it.

    Some of my friends and acquaintances defend parties by telling me that they legitimately reflect different philosophies and value systems. Well, when you scratch the surface and get at the values that inform these two overwrought, pointedly partisan reactions, it doesn’t make me feel any better either way. In fact, it reminds me why I can’t subscribe to either party’s world view.
    Democrats believe at their core that it should be easier to vote. I look around me at the kinds of decisions that are sometimes made by voters, and it seems to me sometimes that far too many people who are already voting take the responsibility too lightly. Look at exit polls — or just go up to a few people on the street and ask them a few pointed questions about public affairs. Look at what people actually know about candidates and their positions and the issues, and look at the reasons they say they vote certain ways, and it can be alarming. Hey, I love this American self-government thing, but it’s not perfect, and one of the biggest imperfections is that some folks don’t take their electoral responsibility seriously enough. Why would I want to see the people who are so apathetic that they don’t vote now coming out and voting? Yet that seems to be what many Democrats are advocating, and it disturbs me.
    And beneath all that sanctimony from Republicans about the integrity of the voting process is, I’m sorry to say, something that looks very much like what Democrats are describing, although Democrats do so in overly cartoonish terms. There’s a bit of bourgeois disdain, a tendency among Republicans to think of themselves as the solid, hard-working citizens who play by the rules, and to be disdainful of those who don’t have their advantages — which they don’t see as advantages at all, but merely their due as a result of being so righteous and hard-working. There’s a tendency to see the disadvantaged as being to blame for their plight, as being too lazy or immoral or whatever to participate fully. The idea is that they wouldn’t have these problems if they would just try. What I’m trying to describe here is the thing that is making sincere Republicans’ blood pressure rise even as they’re reading these words. It’s a tendency to attach moral weight to middle-class status. Republicans seem to believe as an article of faith that there are all these shiftless, marginal people out there — relatives of Cadillac-driving welfare queens of the Reagan era, no doubt — wanting to commit voter fraud, and they’ve got to stop it, and if you don’t want to stop it as much as they do, then you don’t believe in having integrity in the process.
    Basically, I’m unimpressed by the holier-than-thou posturing from either side. And I get very tired at all the fuss over something that neither side can demonstrate is all that big a deal. Democrats can’t demonstrate that this is a great injustice, and Republicans can’t demonstrate that it’s needed.
    And yet, all this drama.
    While I’m at it, I might as well abuse a related idea: early voting.
    We’ve had a number of debates about that here on the editorial board, and I’ve been told that my reasons for opposing early voting are vague and sentimental. Perhaps they are, but I cling to them nonetheless.
    While Democrats and Republicans have their ideological reasons to fight over this idea, too, it’s a communitarian thing for me. I actually get all warm and fuzzy, a la Frank Capra, about the fact that on Election Day, my neighbors and I — sometimes folks I haven’t seen in years — take time out from our daily routine and get together and stand in line (actually allowing ourselves to be, gasp, inconvenienced) and act as citizens in a community to make important decisions.
    I’ve written columns celebrating that very experience, such as one in 1998 that quoted a recent naturalized citizen proudly standing in line at my polling place, who said, “On my way here this morning, I felt the solemnity of the occasion.”
    I believe in relating to my country, my state, my community as a citizen, not as a consumer. That calls for an entirely different sort of interaction. If you relate to public life as a consumer, well then by all means do it at your precious convenience. Mail or phone or text it in — what’s the difference? It’s all about you and your prerogatives, right? You as a consumer.
    Something different is required of a citizen, and that requirement is best satisfied by everyone getting out and voting on Election Day.
    With or without photo IDs.

This column is adapted from a post on my blog, which includes a lot of other commentary that did not make it into the paper. For the full experience, please go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

From Sanford’s clip file

56 Replies

A colleague calls my attention to Frank Rich's column over the weekend, which starts in on our governor about halfway down:

    At least the G.O.P.’s newfound racial sensitivity saved it from
choosing the white Southern governor often bracketed with Jindal as a
rising “star,” Mark Sanford of South Carolina. That would have been an
even bigger fiasco, for Sanford is from the same state as Ty’Sheoma
Bethea, the junior high school student who sat in Michelle Obama’s box on Tuesday night and whose impassioned letter to Congress was quoted by the president.

    In
her plea, the teenager begged for aid to her substandard rural school.
Without basic tools, she poignantly wrote, she and her peers cannot
“prove to the world” that they too might succeed at becoming “lawyers,
doctors, congressmen like yourself and one day president.”

    Her school is in Dillon, where the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, grew up. The school’s auditorium, now condemned, was the site of Bernanke’s high school graduation. Dillon is now so destitute that Bernanke’s middle-class childhood home was just auctioned off in a foreclosure sale. Unemployment is at 14.2 percent.

    Governor Sanford’s response to such hardship — his state over all has the nation’s third-highest unemployment rate — was not merely a threat to turn down federal funds but a trip to Washington to actively lobby against the stimulus bill. He accused
the three Republican senators who voted for it of sabotaging “the
future of our civilization.” In his mind the future of civilization has
little to do with the future of students like Ty’Sheoma Bethea.

    What
such G.O.P. “stars” as Sanford and Jindal have in common, besides their
callous neo-Hoover ideology, are their phony efforts to portray
themselves as populist heroes. Their role model is W., that
brush-clearing “rancher” by way of Andover, Yale and Harvard. Listening
to Jindal talk Tuesday night about his immigrant father’s inability to pay for an obstetrician, you’d never guess that at the time his father was an engineer and his mother an L.S.U. doctoral candidate in nuclear physics.
Sanford’s first political ad in 2002 told of how growing up on his
“family’s farm” taught him “about hard work and responsibility.” That
“farm,” the Charlotte Observer reported, was a historic plantation
appraised at $1.5 million in the early 1980s. From that hardscrabble
background, he struggled on to an internship at Goldman Sachs.

Of course, with enemies like Frank Rich, the governor's liable to get some sympathy from me. Never have liked that guy's work — he has all of Paul Krugman's objectionable characteristics as a mindless hateful partisan, without the saving grace of being a Nobel winner in economics.

Anyway, I'm less impressed with that sort of mention than I am the kind that our governor gets in his favorite journalistic habitat, the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, where they continue to try to construct an alternative universe in which Mark Sanford, possibly the least accomplished governor in the nation, is an actual contender for President of the United States sometime this century. (I don't know about you, but I found "Serenity" way more believable — I just can't see terraforming taking hold in this world the WSJ is trying to conjure into being. Do you think Sanford could get the Reaver vote?)

Which reminds me that I meant to pass on this piece by WSJ board member Kimberley A. Strassel about our gov, which ran 10 days ago:

    South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford is mooted as a GOP presidential contender. During the stimulus debate he told President Barack Obama, to his face, that the Palmetto State wanted no part of a spending blowout that would be harmful to the economy, to taxpayers, and to the dollar. He even traveled to Capitol Hill to stiffen Senate Republicans against the plan….
    The 48-year-old South Carolina governor is of the party wing that believes it failed in its core promise of fiscal responsibility, and in tackling the bread-and-butter issues (education, health care) that worry voters today. He's made his name partly by confronting his own party, which runs the legislature.

My very favorite part is when she strains to make it sound like Mark Sanford has actual achievements in S.C. to boast of:

    Nearly every year since he was elected in 2002, Mr. Sanford has proposed to cap spending at state population growth plus inflation. His state senate has ignored him. He's used his line-item veto more than 500 times, usually on pork projects. The legislature routinely overrides. Far from diminishing his standing, these lost battles have made him popular in the state.
    His policies have made South Carolina more competitive. In 2005, the state passed its first-ever cut in marginal tax rates for businesses, and in 2007 broader tax relief. He's shepherded tort reform, and crafted incentives to encourage property insurers to remain in the state after a spate of hurricanes. South Carolina still has problems (in particular, education), though since 2003 it has had the 16th fastest job growth in the nation. Its unemployment rate — the third highest in the country — has been exacerbated by record growth in the state's labor force.

Did you catch that? We have so much employment here because there are just to darned many of us! Mark Sanford has made S.C. into such a Nirvana that people are a-comin' here quicker'n we can find jobs for 'em!

Praying for some leadership in Columbia

8 Replies

We had various speakers today at Columbia Rotary talking about homelessness in our community, including Amos Disasa from Eastminster Presbyterian, speaking on behalf of the Midlands Interfaith Homelessness Action Council (which he acknowledged that, as organization names go, is a mouthful).

Saving me from taking a heap of notes, Rev. Disasa mentioned the group's Web site, at which you can read the following:

More than $9 million has been raised to build a Homeless Transition Center in downtown Columbia.  Yet this badly-needed facility is facing opposition from near downtown neighborhoods as well as some political leaders.

It is our prayer that the faith community will rally behind the Transition Center.  The starting point is to educate yourself on the need for the Center.  You will find valuable information and perspective in the slide show above.

Then we hope you will sign the petition below and that you will get others to sign it, as well.  We want our city leaders to understand that there are many more of us who support the center than those who oppose it.

When the MIHAC was formed 18 months ago, who could have dreamed that our community could have made so much progress?  But we are not there yet, which is why this petition campaign and your help are so crucial.  Read the petition that follows, please download it, sign it and encourage others to sign it.  With your help we can light the way to end homelessness.

By the way, as I mentioned in a comment a little while ago on my Sunday column post — after Rotary, Jack Van Loan mentioned that he'd received word that the mayor is mad at him over the subject of my column. Jack said his reaction was to tell the person who told him that to give the mayor his phone number…

Just another one of our little secrets

9 Replies

A colleague passes on this reader complaint, with the comment, "What planet does this person live on?":

I would like to know why we don't hear more from SC or Columbia's media about the Governor's inclination to refuse the stimulus monies when SC is in such desparate need. This state ranks about last economically,educationally, yet ranks high on crimes.  Shouldn't this money be extremely vital to SC… is the media bias… playing politics or what? 

Dang, and after all our efforts to keep the governor's position on this secret…

’25 Best Conservative Movies’

37 Replies

As y’all know, I am inordinately fond of movies, and also of Top Five Lists and their lesser cousins, Top Ten lists and other denominations.

So it was with interest that I perused this one put together by National Review, “the 25 best conservative movies of the last 25 years,” which are described as “great movies that offer compelling messages about freedom, families, patriotism, traditions, and more.” It’s not a list it would have occurred to me to compile, since I don’t think in those left-vs.-right terms. And in some cases NR has to put an odd spin on them to make them “conservative,” but in others I see the point, to the extent that it matters. Who cares? A good movie is a good movie. But I perused it with interest, as I do all such lists. Here I add a little of my own commentary on each (for the magazine’s commentary, follow the link):

The Best Conservative Movies
1. The Lives of Others (2007): This WAS wonderful, and if you haven’t seen it, order it from Netflix or whatever. It’s in German, with subtitles — so Herb should especially like it. I think maybe it made No. 1 on this list because it was one of the last movies William F. Buckley saw, and he raved about it. Well, the man always had good taste.
2. The Incredibles (2004): This was good, but would not make any kind of “best 25” list I would compile.
3. Metropolitan (1990): Never saw it.
4. Forrest Gump (1994): OK, fine.
5. 300 (2007): Didn’t like it all that much. Too artificial.
6. Groundhog Day (1993): Definitely a Top 25 on any list, but this is one where the “conservatives” are missing the point, although they’re certainly right to say, “Theologians and philosophers across the ideological spectrum have embraced it.” You know where I first heard about it? In a homily at St. Peter’s. Msgr. Lehocky was impressed by it because the entire point of the movie is that the only way Murray’s character can escape the pointless treadmill of his existence is to live one day that is perfectly lived for other people, NOT for himself. “Conservatives” of the über-selfish, modern libertarian variety have to overlook that obvious message to like this flick. Again, it’s not about the value of “the permanent things,” but about living for OTHERS. But I’m glad for them to like it anyway. Everyone should.
7. The Pursuit of Happyness (2006): Haven’t seen it.
8. Juno (2007): Yes, it was wonderful. And yeah, it had a “conservative” message in that if affirmed life. Although I’m still, after all these years, trying to figure out how affirming life got to be “conservative.” Yet another way that Roe has distorted the way we think, and even the way we think about thinking, in this country.
9. Blast from the Past (1999): Very enjoyable, and yeah, it spoke up for traditional values.
10. Ghostbusters (1984): Bet you didn’t know that this one was political. Neither did I. The justification for this call is pretty thin. It seems mostly based on the bad guy being from the EPA, and Akroyd’s hilarious line: “I don’t know about that. I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results!”
11. The Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, 2003): Yeah, OK — I can see that.
12. The Dark Knight (2008): Again, seems odd on this list. And while it might be one of the best 25 new movies I’ve seen in the past year, I wouldn’t elevate it above that.
13. Braveheart (1995): Saw it. Hated it. The first sign of Mel Gibson’s obsession with characters who are gruesomely tortured to death, which is all I remember of it.
14. A Simple Plan (1998): Never saw it.
15. Red Dawn (1984): Well, of course. And I enjoyed it for what it was, minus the political preaching. I enjoyed it on this level — there were times as a high school student I would have welcomed the fantasy of paratroopers suddenly landing in the schoolyard and shooting up the school, so that I’d have a good excuse to grab some friends (including girls) and some guns and run up into the mountains for an extended adventure. Didn’t you think thoughts like that in school? OK, never mind…
16. Master and Commander (2003): Yes, folks, this is why I posted this entire item. As y’all know, I’m always bringing up O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin books here on the blog, and nobody ever engages the subject, which is a big disappointment. This offers me another excuse. And yes, if you’re reaching for it, I guess this movie extols conservative virtues. (I guess it didn’t strike me because, having grown up in the navy, the conservative values it portrays are ones that I, and John McCain, take for granted.) As NR says, the H.M.S Surprise is “a coherent society in which stability is underwritten by custom and every man knows his duty and his place.” Granted. And Jack Aubrey is as Tory as they come. But then the stories are equally about Stephen Maturin, who is after all a former Irish republican, who detests authority from that practiced by naval officers to that assumed by Buonoparte. But Stephen is no modern, milksop liberal — although strangely, in the movie version, he is portrayed that way (right up until the moment he boards the enemy ship sword in hand, which the movie makers really didn’t prepare the viewer for, since at every moment up to that point you were given the impression he was a pacifist or something). Yeah, the movie was great, but the books are a thousand times better — whatever your political orientation. Some of y’all go read them, so we can discuss them here.
17. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (2005): Didn’t see it; never particularly wanted to. I’m guessing you had to read these books as a kid to be interested.
18. The Edge (1997): Never saw it.
19. We Were Soldiers (2002): This was OK, but not any kind of top 25. An ironic choice for NR, since it was written by Joe Galloway, who was there. If you’ve read Joe’s columns, you know what I mean. He doesn’t see the world their way (or mine, either).
20. Gattaca (1997): Yeah, it was OK. Worth seeing. Not that great, though.
21. Heartbreak Ridge (1986): This movie stunk up the place! I can’t get past the first 10 or 15 minutes. Awful acting. Cartoonish depiction of the Corps. Yeah, I was hoping this movie would be what NR seems to think it was. But it wasn’t. Not one of Eastwood’s better efforts.
22. Brazil (1985): Hated it. Yeah, it had its cool parts — DeNiro’s guerrilla repairman, for instance — but on the whole a bummer. I hate these nihilistic, hopeless tales that go to such lengths to conjure a world in which life is useless and meaningless. Isn’t life depressing enough?
23. United 93 (2006): A fine film, a fine tribute. Not a Top 25, though.
24. Team America: World Police (2004): Never saw it; never wanted to. (You get the idea that they included this one for ironic effect or something?)
25. Gran Torino (2008): Just saw it SUNDAY NIGHT, and it was great. My wife and I had a rare night out. It surprised me that she wanted to see it, and one of my daughters almost talked her out of it (we considered going to see “Slumdog Millionaire” instead, which would have been OK, but I really wanted to see this one). Well, we both loved it. The reviews that rave about it are not exaggerating. Clint Eastwood just gets better and better at his craft.

The magazine then listed 25 “Also-Rans,” as follows:

Air Force One, Amazing Grace, An American Carol, Barcelona, Bella, Cinderella Man, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Hamburger Hill, The Hanoi Hilton, The Hunt for Red October, The Island, Knocked Up, The Last Days of Disco, The Lost City, Miracle, The Patriot, Rocky Balboa, Serenity, Stand and Deliver, Tears of the Sun, Thank You for Smoking, Three Kings, Tin Men, The Truman Show, Witness

Of those, several should have made the Top 25, being way better than most on the list that made it, specifically:

Air Force One — Nothing like a president who kicks terrorist butt personally. He’d have my vote. Aside from that, just a well-done action flick, as only Wolfgang Peterson can make ’em. (Although you know what I liked better? “In the Line of Fire.” Not for its conservatism, but for its communitarianism. What? You don’t remember Eastwood saying repeatedly how much he loved public transportation?)
Bella — Beautiful flick, although the parts that flash back to the terrible thing that happened are hard to take. It helps to understand Spanish (the movie’s sort of bilingual), but it’s not necessary.
Knocked Up — A real hoot, and of course we know about how it’s an unconventional evocation of traditional values. It’s still a hoot.
Serenity — A little preachier than the original series on the whole anti-Nanny State thing, but the characters and the action make it easy to ignore. Why did “Firefly” not last? Because it was too good, I guess.
Witness — Another of Harrison Ford’s best. Excellent fish-out-of-water drama.

Heck, even “The Island” was better than most of those that made the list…

Oh, just to finish the job. If I were to pick a Top Five List from among the above 50 — just Top Five, regardless of political “message” — I’d go with:

  1. Groundhog Day
  2. The Lives of Others
  3. Master and Commander
  4. Air Force One
  5. Serenity

Mind you, if I were compiling a list of Top 25 from the past 25 years without restrictions, it would include a lot of flicks not among the 50 above. Such as “Almost Famous,” “American History X” and “Apollo 13,” and that’s just the A’s. How about you?

The blessing of a potential candidate

37 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
On a brilliant, warm February afternoon, I was holed up in a darkened booth in an Irish-themed pub talking local politics. Not exactly James Joyce’s “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” but a reasonable Columbia facsimile.
    Jack Van Loan was holding court at his “office” in a booth at Delaney’s in Five Points — files and organizer on the table before him next to his coffee, his briefcase opened on a nearby bench. From such locations Jack makes and takes his multiple calls getting ready for the big St. Patrick’s Day event March 14, and talks Five Points politics.
    Last year, he was blessing Belinda Gergel for the 3rd district City Council contest that she eventually won. This time, he was pushing someone for mayor.
    It was Steve Benjamin, whom I’ve known for years; we endorsed him for state attorney general in 2002. But Jack wanted to “introduce” him as his candidate for mayor, and I wanted to hear what Jack — a force in the Five Points Association since 1991 — had to say about him.
    Jack says the necessary ingredient in leadership is courage — something he knows about, having been imprisoned at the “Hanoi Hilton” with John McCain. He says Steve Benjamin’s got it. “He’s not a Goldwater conservative,” which would be more to Jack’s liking. But “This is my guy.” If he runs.
    Mr. Benjamin says he’ll decide whether to take on Mayor Bob Coble “in the next couple of months.” No later, because he will need the full year running up to the April 2010 election. Jack agrees: “A year’s nothing.”
    What this would mean is that Bob Coble would face something other than the “usual suspects” opposition that has tended to characterize his re-elections. Last election, Kevin Fisher mounted the most serious race in a while, but that was weak compared to what Steve Benjamin would do. He wouldn’t just be a focal point for the discontented. He has the name, connections and credibility to challenge the mayor in the very heart of his political support.
    And now, confidence in Columbia’s leadership is at a low ebb. City finances are an inexcusable mess; the police department is reeling from a string of problems. The city manager has quit, after the council couldn’t get its act together to evaluate him. The seven elected political leaders seem incapable of summoning the will to cope with anything, from homelessness to closing a deal to provide more parking spaces in Five Points (a very sore point for Jack).
    “I have a great relationship with Bob Coble,” says Mr. Benjamin. “On my worst day, he’s been a great acquaintance.” Further, he says he doesn’t doubt the mayor’s dedication to the city.
    So, as he says the mayor himself asked him, why consider running against his friend Bob? While he still hasn’t made up his mind, “reasons become clearer every day — every morning after I read your paper.”
    If he runs, the campaign will be positive, and “aspirational.” He wants to grow old here. He wants his children to raise their children here.
    To hear his wife or law partners tell it, he’s already involved in “too many things:” Among them, he’s chairman-elect of the Greater Columbia Chamber of Commerce, and vice chairman of the Columbia City Center Partnership. I don’t find it unusual to run into him twice in the same day, at unrelated community events.
    “I think we lack a clear and cohesive vision about where this city needs to go,” he says. More than that, he understands that the city lacks the means for translating any such vision into effective action.
    In other words, he advocates replacing Columbia’s unaccountable, failed council-manager government with a strong-mayor system. A full-time mayor with responsibility for, rather than politically diffused detachment from, the day-to-day executive functions of the government is necessary “for a city trying to make the next leap — from good to great,” he says. “Some say it’s a third rail,” but “it’s hard to look somebody in the eye and say I want to run the city, and then say you don’t really want to run the city.” Under the current setup, not a lot of people would want the job — at least, not a lot of people a reasonable person would want to want the job.
    He mentions several important issues the city has yet to cope with — transportation, clean air and water. But it is on homelessness that he draws a sharp contrast. He says the proposal of the Midlands Housing Alliance to establish a multi-purpose center to fight homelessness at the Salvation Army site “is sound, is 95 percent of the way towards being funded, looks like a certainty and certainly fills a void.” As a former resident of the Elmwood neighborhood, he understands concerns, but believes “some strong, good neighborhood agreements” could reassure folks such a center would not be a detriment.
    Mr. Benjamin is a veteran of the last failed effort to establish such a center, which was undermined by the City Council. That experience “put us on notice that if something’s going to happen, it may have to happen in spite of elected city leadership.” Various stakeholders, from business leaders to service providers, came together in the Housing Alliance to provide that missing direction, and now Mr. Benjamin says the city should step up and do its part, which would include providing operating funds.
    “I don’t get the impression that the city leadership thinks it’s a problem,” says Jack Van Loan. Referring to Cathy Novinger of the Housing Alliance, he adds, “That gal would have made a damned fine general officer in the Air Force. She can make a decision without stuttering.”
    It’s a quality that the former fighter pilot values, and one he suggests that he sees in Steve Benjamin.
And while it’s far too soon to say wh
o should win, if Mr. Benjamin gets into the race, Columbia will have its clearest chance in a long while to pick a new direction.

For links and more, please go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.