“Perhaps the Republican Party needs to hit rock bottom and Liz Cheney is the last shot of rail tequila before the conservative movement blacks out, wakes up and heads to a meeting,” – Jon Lovett.
Author: Andrew Sullivan
And The Greatest American Novel Film Is …
A reader writes:
I have read The Godfather. Once. While I agree with some of Mr. Ferraro’s points on the substance of the story, it is the writing that should instantly disqualify it from being anyone’s candidate for “greatest American novel.” Sloppy, juvenile, repetitive, rambling, indulgent, oblivious to the ghosts of Shakespeare and Proust face-palming their way through every page. I boggled at the number of times Mario Puzo went out of his way to describe the unclenching anal sphincter of a mobster in the throes of death, like it was his favorite bit of trivia (I feel for his party guests). And not even the film adaptation – a classic, indeed – could make any damn sense of what Michael was up to during his year in Sicily. This trash makes Stephanie Meyer’s oeuvre seem downright tolerable. If we’re going to nominate it for anything, how about the next eight or nine Poseur Awards?
Another piles on:
I found Prof. Ferraro’s pick LUDICROUS. Aesthetically speaking, The Godfather is a disaster. Terrible prose, rioting metaphors, ham-fisted plotting. It’s my go-to example of a terrible book that made a wonderful movie. Here’s a typical passage:
Luca Brasi was indeed a man to frighten the devil in hell himself. Short, squat, massive-skulled, his presence sent out alarm bells of danger. His face was stamped into a mask of fury. The eyes were brown but with none of the warmth of that color, more a deadly tan. The mouth was not so much cruel as lifeless; thin, rubbery and the color of veal.
There’s more where that came from – so much more. I feel that either Prof. Ferraro was deliberately provocative, or has somehow confused the book and the movie. He offered this as something to sit next to Lolita, for God’s sake!
And another:
By happy coincidence, I picked up the novel and read it a couple of months ago. I love the movies (I and II). I can’t pass one up when I’m flipping channels. But the book is really awful. Coppola took the good parts, transcribed them literally, and made them much better with that fabulous cast and magnificent ambience. But the stuff that didn’t make his script (subplots about Johnny Fontaine’s drunken Dino-like sidekick and the size of Sonny’s girlfriend’s vagina) are preposterous and wretchedly written.
I’m glad Mario Puzo developed the myth, but even more glad that Francis Coppola turned it into something magic.
Readers are also listing their picks for the greatest American novel on our Facebook page.
Should We Ditch The DHS?
Charles Kenny wants to:
[The Department of Homeland Security] has helped create institutional inertia: Its very existence suggests the domestic response to the threat of terror is of equal weight with defense, transport, health, labor, or foreign affairs. It heaps largesse on a range of contractors, all of whom have an interest in hyping the threat of terror to ensure the money keeps flowing.
That’s unfortunate. Beyond the waste of money and the overregulation, the expansion of the homeland security state has created unnecessary fear among a population that should be able to trust its government to send accurate signals about risk. So let’s start sending the right signals. Shut down the DHS, and redistribute the agencies under its umbrella back to other departments, including the justice, transportation, and energy departments. Then start bringing their budgets into some sort of alignment with the benefit they provide.
Reihan isn’t onboard:
[T]hough Kenny’s case against security theater is well-taken, it’s not clear to me that we would yield significant dividends from a deconsolidation of DHS. Though there is a compelling case that we should never have created the agency in the first place, striking a symbolic blow against a culture of fear is not quite enough to merit the expense of yet another reorg.
Chart Of The Day
Mark Lee illustrates the increase of Hollywood movies portraying government in a negative light, linking it with Americans’ rising distrust of Washington in the real world:
The theory is that, in the years since 9/11, America has grown increasing disillusioned with its government due to its repeated shortcomings–Afghanistan, Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the Great Recession, Congressional gridlock–and that Hollywood movies have reflected this disillusionment with more and more stories that involve rogue heroes operating outside of, or in some cases, directly against, the authority of the US government.
Both of these trends feel right on a gut level. Who among us isn’t more cynical and distrusting of the United States government now, compared to 12 years ago? And doesn’t Independence Day, in which the US government unequivocally saves the day, feel dated and corny compared to movies like The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers, in which non-state actors rise above the pettiness of governments to get the job done?
Recent Dish on the appeal of anti-government cinema here.
Who Will Replace Jesse Jackson And Al Sharpton?
PHOTO: @RevJJackson told us #Zimmerman‘s verdict shows civil rights not where they need to be #NAACP104 #ZimmermanOn9 pic.twitter.com/I2wX84CPhm
— WFTV Eyewitness News (@WFTV) July 17, 2013
[T]here are not, and never have been, any new versions of the old Jesse and Al. Not a single young preacher or politician has even started to acquire national influence by taking a page from their old playbooks. The times have changed. If the more pessimistic strains in black America can be slow to fully acknowledge progress, we can take heart from the fact that Al Sharpton will be 60 next year, and a young version of his young self is now inconceivable as a national figure.
A Family-Friendly Glass Ceiling
After moving to France with her child and confronting a brutal job market for mothers, Claire Lundberg asks how “a country that is so outwardly progressive [is] still plagued with such basic workplace inequalities”:
While France has a wonderful safety net for women, much of it is designed to promote the growth of families as a way of boosting the birthrate. Indeed, families in France receive numerous supports and subsidies the more children they have. A family with two children is eligible for an automatic monthly stipend of 125 euros, regardless of income. With three children, a family is designated a “Famille Nombreuse,” which includes a raise in the automatic stipend, a possible further subsidy of up to 500 euros a month for the mother if she chooses not to return to work, and even reduced admission for transportation, museums, and amusement parks. And, at four children, a woman becomes eligible for the “medaille de la famille,” an honorary medal from the French government.
Douthat responds:
Family-friendly socialism, [scholar Kay Hymowitz] notes, does seem to encourage more women to stay in the workforce after they have children. But it also helps explain the persistence of “the glass ceilings, as well as stubbornly large wage gaps in more progressive countries,” because working women tend to be shunted more decisively onto a mommy track than they are in the United States. And it shunts them in other ways as well: To borrow an insight Neil Gilbert, the author of one of the must-read books on this topic, the social-democratic combination of high tax rates and a large state-run caregiving apparatus creates a strong economic incentive for mothers to leave their children with professional caregivers while taking a job … as a professional caregiver. This boosts workforce participation and G.D.P. — but whether it boosts actual female welfare seems at least somewhat debatable.
Map Of The Day
Odra Noel’s “Map of Health,” on display at the Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition in London, illustrates the diseased tissues that most affect each part of the world:
Robert Gonzalez calls the piece “a weirdly beautiful combination of epidemiology and microscopy”:
North America, plagued by its obesity epidemic, is depicted as adipose tissue (fat). Central and South America are represented with pulmonary tissue, reflecting the lethal impact of smoking and respiratory illness in the region. Europe and Russia, their aging populations more susceptible to neurodegenerative diseases, are depicted with brain tissue; East Asia and the Pacific are represented with pancreatic tissue, which is affected keenly by diabetes. Much of the Middle East and central Asia, where cardiovascular diseases are on the rise, are painted with microscopic representations of heart muscle. Africa, where transmittable infections like malaria and HIV pose enormous challenges to public health, is depicted with blood cells. All data was taken from statistics gathered by the World Health Organization.
More here.
Where Dictatorships Are Vulnerable
Their urban centers:
Cities are problems for authoritarian control, the traditional narrative goes, because by concentrating large masses of people, they improve communication networks, allowing anti-establishment sentiment to spread. In physical terms, dense neighborhoods are also ideal centers of resistance, easily blocked by barricades and featuring plenty of hiding places. To counter this, the wide boulevards of capitals like Washington, Paris, and Beijing have a practical as well as aesthetic purpose: allowing easy movement of police or the military in times of civil disturbance.
[Ohio State Professor Jeremy] Wallace argues that authoritarian regimes typically lavish attention on big cities over rural areas, knowing that this is where resistance is likely to take root first. But, he says, these efforts can ultimately be counterproductive as they encourage more people to move to cities. This is likely to be an issue in coming years for rapidly urbanizing China, which has typically taken the thousands of rural village protests that take place each year far less seriously than any sign of organized opposition in major cities.
The Best Of The Dish Today
We published the suicide note of Kurt Cobain and readers added several last words on the shooting of Trayvon Martin. Maybe Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom doesn’t suck quite as much the second time around, and maybe Dune is worth re-reading and Pacific Rim’s massive monsters are worth going to see. I got meep-meeped by Obama on Syria, much to my relief. And what strange beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Wyoming?
Turkey’s red-blue implosion hasn’t gone away – but the red hinterland is winning. And Ken Mehlman agreed to answer some of your questions.
The most read post of the day was on Richard Cohen’s exhausted career; the second most read was a link to Jon Hamm’s junk as I dreamed about him in shorts. Keep it classy, Dishheads.
See you in the morning.
When Will The GOP Remake Itself?
Cassidy wonders:
Could the party really remain in thrall to the God, guns, and anti-government brigade until Ronald Reagan returns to save us all from eternal damnation? That’s doubtful. Clearly, though, the adjustment process is going to take more time. How much more? At this stage, it is looking like at least another four years—time enough for the party to suffer a third straight crushing defeat at the Presidential level. Based on history and common sense, that will probably be enough to give the reformers the upper hand. With today’s G.O.P., though, you never can be sure.
Larison doubts that three defeats will be enough:
[I]nstead of grappling with what Bush did wrong, they have spent a lot of their time inventing a mostly fictional Obama record to run against. Making some changes on foreign policy–even superficial and rhetorical ones–seems an obvious way to address one of the party’s serious weaknesses, but there has been no movement on this except among a handful of members of Congress. The point here isn’t that foreign policy reform would be a panacea for the GOP or that it would remedy that many of the party’s electoral weaknesses, but that it is one of the more glaringly obvious opportunities for reform and a relatively easy way to break with the disasters of the Bush years. Despite that, there seems to be very little interest in it.
Kilgore explains such lack of interest, noting that the Republican coalition includes many people who don’t agree with the conventional wisdom “on how to win elections, don’t care about short-term political implications, or don’t care about anything other than expressing their opinion about the hellwards direction of the Republic and perhaps of the human race”:
Mix in another significant number of people with a large pecuniary interest in reactionary politics, and you have a movement that’s not going to turn from its current trajectory with any great speed. You can stamp your feet or call them crazy people or deplore their impact on the level of discourse all you want, but they just aren’t going away, and we might as well get used to it instead of marveling about it as though it came out of nowhere and will soon disappear.
