Month: December 2006

Quote for the Day

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From Leon Wieseltier:

Does all this pessimism warrant withdrawal? I will confess that I wish it did. Since I was a supporter of the war, I have its consequences also on my own conscience. I do not believe that American troops should die for some heartless Kissingerian notion of American credibility in the world, or the like. (Anyway, it is the war itself that is doing the most damage to American credibility. After terrorism, the most immediate problem for American foreign policy in the age of Bush is anti-Americanism.) Even if we withdraw from Iraq, we will be a spectacularly powerful country whose enemies should still beware. And moral reasoning about such matters should be efficient: in the lag between the conclusion that we should withdraw, if that is what we conclude, and our withdrawal, Americans will pointlessly perish.

For all these reasons, I am not inclined to dismiss all the antiwar voices in Congress and elsewhere as a depraved isolationism or another Peter, Paul, and Mary concert. This war has not been a glittering success, and its costs have been considerable. And I have never felt comfortable with the America in whose name this administration has conducted this war: in times of danger one tries to overlook differences about other issues and other challenges, but I do not agree that only a state preemptive of civil rights, treaty obligations, and international alliances – that only the preemptive state – can adequately defend itself.

Leon does not believe we should therefore up and leave. The rest is here.

(Photo: Yuri Kozyrev for Time.)

James Dobson’s Nightmare

Mary Cheney is pregnant and will have a child with her wife of almost twenty years, Heather Poe. Except they live in Virginia which, with the enthusiastic backing of the Republicans, has declared itself homorein, and so no legal protections for Cheney’s and Poe’s marriage or custody of their child will be available. There is surely coming a point at which the sheer dissonance between what the GOP base believes and the way even the most conservative vice-president in modern times deals with the reality of his own family must surely prompt some kind of Republican adjustment.

You cannot be a party that sees gay love, marriage and parenthood as the work of Satan and have a vice-presidential family that is busy building a lesbian family as an integral part of it. For my part, congratulations to the two moms and best wishes for a healthy, safe pregnancy and birth. And congrats to the lucky grandparents on both sides. Commiserations to James Dobson, Hugh Hewitt, George Allen, Rick Santorum, Sam Brownback, Mitt Romney, and, of course, George W. Bush, who backed a federal constitutional amendment to strip the daughter of his vice-president of dignity, family and civil rights.

Poseur Alert

Dern

"How Nikki and the other characters wind up in these rooms ‚Äî how, for instance, the pampered blonde ends up talking trash in a spooky, B-movie office ‚Äî is less important than what happens inside these spaces. In ‘Inland Empire,’ the classic hero’s journey has been supplanted by a series of jarringly discordant scenes, situations and setups that reflect one another much like the repeating images in the splintered hall of mirrors at the end of Orson Welles‚Äôs ‘Lady From Shanghai.’ The spaces in ‘Inland Empire’ function as way stations, holding pens, states of minds (Nikki’s, Susan’s, Mr. Lynch’s), sites of revelation and negotiation, of violence and intimacy. They are cinematic spaces in which images flower and fester, and stories are born.

Each new space also serves as a stage on which dramatic entrances and exits are continually being made. The theatricality of these entrances and exits underscores the mounting tension and frustrates any sense that the film is unfolding with the usual linear logic. Like characters rushing in and out of the same hallway doors in a slapstick comedy, Nikki/Susan keeps changing position, yet, for long stretches, doesn‚Äôt seem as if she were going anywhere new. For the most part, this strategy works (if nothing else, it’s truer to everyday life than most films), even if there are about 20 minutes in this admirably ambitious 179-minute film that feel superfluous. ‘Inland Empire’ has the power of nightmares and at times the more prosaic letdown of self-indulgence," – Manohla Dargis, on David Lynch’s new movie, New York Times. (Hat tip: JPod.)

Zarqawi’s Fruit

A reader writes:

Thanks for your provocative Gathering Storm post, which was scary and sad but a great assessment. An exhausting fight between Sunni and Shia thugs with their Al Qaeda and Iranian allies will set some of our enemies upon one another. The tragedy, of course, is that thousands more innocent Iraqis will die in the process, and we‚Äôll be partly culpable. 

Still, we have to recognize that Zarqawi (remember him?) succeeded in his goal of preventing our preferred outcome in Iraq, by provoking a civil war. And, we should take solace from the fact that this strategy came at a price for Al Qaeda. By bringing the sectarian schism within Islam to the forefront, Zarqawi demoted Al Qaeda from an almost mystical movement that stood up to the west in a fight for an idealized Islamic world, to just another brutal, sectarian faction killing Muslims in Iraq.  He’s also taken the Islamic jihadist focus off the United States and even made a Syrian-Iranian alliance more difficult over the long term.

Superman Returns

Chris Orr has a good review of the movie, now out on DVD. We watched it the other night, after Aaron had insisted I sit through the "Donner cut" of Superman II. (He’s a purist). I’ve never been a big fan of comic book movies, but if you’re going to do one, Bryan Singer is obviously the go-to guy. My only quibble with Chris is his assessment of Kate Bosworth’s Lois Lane as "a sprightly presence." She was bland and dreadful. But who can rival Margot Kidder? Or is that the gayest sentence I’ve written in a long while?

I splurged the book advance on a 46" LCD TV. So we’ve been slumped in front of it recently. Two DVD highlights: Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Ice Age: The Meltdown." Yes: vastly different. But technically both masterpieces, I think. Kubrick’s vision remains ravishing, untainted by the passage of time, the most spiritually absorbing movie I have seen in ages. I was a big fan of "A.I.", as well, but irritated by Spielberg’s sentimental meddling.

Oldest Priest Dies

He was 109. Here’s the Brit obit. Money quote:

At his 109th birthday celebrations, for which he said mass in the convent chapel where he spent his last years, Fuchs joked about his fragile start in life. "My mother told my father: ‘Let’s just give him your name ‚Äî he’s only going to die anyway’," he recalled. The baby was so tiny and frail his mother was convinced he could not survive…

On his last birthday, his eyesight failing, he expressed his sadness to the local newspaper that he was no longer able to read the Bible from beginning to end "one last time".