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David Cronenberg: Film-maker with a history of violence

[On the remote chance that you’ve heard of this movie without learning about its plot tricks, be warned that there are major spoilers in what follows.]

“It was evident to me from the beginning that this was a very American story set in middle America, almost a garden of Eden, perfect American town. Of course that made it perfect to be shot completely in Canada,” quipped director David Cronenberg at an interview during the Cannes Film Festival last May, following the première of his new movie A History of Violence.

He got the round of knowing chuckles he was looking for from the press, and accomplished two things with this one glib little swipe. First he gave the requisite nod to an assumed superiority of Canada over the United States, and the former’s greater likelihood of yielding up an idyllic environment for shooting his film. But he also hinted at the more pertinent point that this idealized “American-dream” setting is itself a fantasy and does not really exist anywhere, certainly not in America—the aura of peace and happiness is a veneer over dark secrets and darkened natures.

None of that will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the Cronenberg portfolio. My own familiarity is limited to the few of his films that I have managed to sit all the way through, plus a couple of others from which I have seen clips that generally made me wish to see no more (Rabid and Scanners come to mind). Together these were enough to illustrate what I understand to be a continuing Cronenbergian theme of the corrosive power of inner demons.

In their crudest rendering, the inner demons are manifested in physical form, in microbial and parasitical critters that transform, devour, and issue forth from their hosts in some creepy and disgusting way. Cronenberg’s later films, while carrying on with as much of his favored sex’n’gore combo as he can paste in, treat the inner demons as more psychological in origin, though still connected to the physical.

When he’s serious, as in The Fly, he can use out-of-control physiological manifestations to ferry talented actors into the realm of real suffering and tragedy. But mostly the actors seem to get there in spite of the visuals rather than by means of them— Cronenberg is known for going for the gross-out shot that is gratuitous and intrusive, and the actor is lucky if he can transcend it.

I have never been able to shake the sense that even if Cronenberg is on to something regarding human frailty, he is handicapped by a modern secularism which fetters the expression of his ideas to the material realm—everything determinative resides in the body, and where destiny is dark (as it usually is), the body is a vessel for all that is vile and repulsive.

He makes the shopworn claim that an exploration of ideas and human behaviors is incomplete without the physical and sexual (implying that there is something daring or unconventional about his insistence on including this stuff--- yawn, snore, blah, blah…), but one can detect in his work a curiously conventional, almost Puritanical hostility or revulsion towards the body. From within the secularist’s frame of reference— that we are thralls at the mercy of our material selves—he appears to believe that our “master” is one cruel and twisted overseer.

Maybe this is just Cronenberg’s particular version of a Canadian “thing” about which Margaret Atwood has written in her lit-crit works [such as Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature and Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature] – her theory being that the wild and forbidding Canadian landscape shapes its inhabitants into people with an eye for the dark and violent. (If it sounds like I’ve read these works, confession time: I haven’t. I didn’t grow up in Canada, and was thus never force-fed “Can-lit” in school. Everyone I know who was, has urged me not to invest precious reading time in the works of Atwood and company, so I seldom do. I’ve read more about Miss Peggy than by her.)

As to the Canadian thing: I don’t think this year’s Cannes Film Festival made quite as much ado about the duelling Canadian directors, Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan, as was made of them back here at home. Egoyan has been less commercially successful and recognizable outside the cinéaste cocoon than fellow-countryman Cronenberg, since his work is usually “edgier”—that’s a film-speak code-word for “contains more graphic deviant sex than most people care to see.” I can’t recall ever seeing an Egoyan film all the way through—about ten minutes of Exotica, his “study” of lap-dancing catering to paedophilic fantasy via the packaging of pre-teen looks in a school uniform, satisfied what little curiosity I might have had about his work. His entry this year is Where the Truth Lies, which will probably tank at the box office owing to the NC-17 rating it received in the United States, about which he has complained bitterly but declined to shave any frames off the artistically important three-way sodomy scene. Cronenberg came away from Cannes with big “buzz”—Egoyan, not so much.

I read a few post-Cannes reviews of A History of Violence (written up in magazines about film as ART with a capital A), and they left me wondering if another of my favorite actors (Viggo Mortensen) was going to be permanently “Cronenberged” for me the way Jeremy Irons was after starring in Dead Ringers, a revolting and pointless tale about twin gynecologists sharing mutual kinks for a woman with a deformed uterus. (It was every bit the gutter-ball it sounds—double yuck.) Up until that point I had been ready to see just about anything Irons was in, but since then I find I can barely look at him—even revisiting his younger self’s tour-de-force in my beloved Brideshead Revisited began to carry a little residual gyne-goo on it.

Worse, doing Dead Ringers seemed to provoke some appetite in Irons for “edgy" stuff (see above definition) and he spiraled into M. Butterfly, Damage, and Lolita. It would be a shame to see Mortensen swirl down that same plug-hole, since he’s already misspent much of his movie career in the bilge tank, in such forgettable efforts as The Prophecy (an incoherent, fall-off-your-chair-laughing religio-horror flick— Mortensen actually does a respectable job as Lucifer, the one well-drawn character in the entire script), or Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (self-explanatory).

The reviews of A History of Violence in magazines about film as ART, written by people who frequent festivals of film as ART, described in clinical detail its explosive gore, jarring comedy, and unconventional sexual acts, and prepared me for something disturbing and a bit sleazy. But that’s not the film I saw. It made me wonder if maybe the Cannes screening was a director’s cut with frames that didn’t make it into general distribution— but I’m more inclined to think it’s a difference in the viewers’ moral universe: skewed and cynical agnostics saw one thing, those of us with faith in humanity and God saw something else.

I had the advantage of watching the film on a Saturday afternoon with only a couple of dozen people in the audience (on its opening weekend—this does not augur well), most of them older than the target movie demographic of 15-25. As a result I was not subjected to the sort of contagious teenage-dumbass over-reaction which apparently has produced gales of laughter at many a screening of the film. (I gather this was the case at Cannes, so now we know that all those European sophisticates are operating at the level of teenage-dumbass.)

Cronenberg gets off on the idea that he is duping his audience into complicity with what is truly horrible by manipulating them into reflexive laughter or cheering at the first sight of it, thereby proving his cynical social Darwinist view of humanity. But I think he has unwittingly undermined his own objective, thanks to the hole in his own moral universe.

Ostensibly Cronenberg presents the audience with two possible scenarios—is the central character what he appears to be, or something entirely different?— and they must puzzle over which one to accept as the reality of the story. But the two competing scenarios prove to be a lopsided mis-match, because the storyteller himself (Cronenberg) does not accept that either version could be equally plausible, for Tom Stall or any other man. He believes that one of them (the happy family in the peaceful town) is universally a myth, and the other (dark secrets and darkened natures) is universal reality.

Still, for the sake of the drama one would think that Cronenberg would at least set the scene for the myth by constructing a credible façade of normalcy, even if he intends to bring it crashing down later.

However, this director’s personal cynicism is telegraphed immediately when the viewer meets the family at the centre of the story. In the opening scene the four family characters come together around a child’s nightmare, and form a portrait more oozingly cloying than the Brady Bunch’s worst TV moments. As the story advances they do ease up a bit on the cloy-o-meter, and eventually the two principal actors (Mortensen and Maria Bello, as Tom and Edie Stall) sink their teeth into superb performances that vastly out-class the unworthy material they have been given, raising it to the level of tragedy.

If Cronenberg has any real genius it may lie in his casting (with one glaring exception: the young daughter, Sarah, played so obnoxiously badly that, as her family is increasingly threatened, concern for her welfare barely registers with the audience). Young newcomer Ashton Holmes, as the Stalls’ teenaged son Jack, does his best with a weirdly-drawn character, much of whose dialogue sounds like unused scraps left over from Seth Cohen in television’s The O.C. That’s not necessarily fatal to his believability—kids in rural Indiana watch cable like everybody else.

However, with a mother who has been to law school, and an intact supportive family, he would be unlikely to envision for himself the kind of bleak future where kids “get jobs, have affairs, and become alcoholics,” as he describes to his high school friend while smoking a joint and loitering on a Saturday night streetcorner. Anyone familiar with the place of college in American culture (like me, for instance, having put three kids through small American colleges) would be aware of the heightened sense of life’s possibilities felt by most American youth, compared to the tell-me-what-hoops-to-jump-through-so-I-can-get-a-job attitude typical of too many university-bound Canadians. The film attributes to Jack Stall a “trailer-trash” hopelessness which is a staple of anti-American stereotypes, but it is a poor fit for this particular boy.

Cronenberg has said he had no idea when he first read the script that it came from a graphic novel, yet the story and characters are baldly cartoonish. The dramatic complications are built on a mound of clichés, with dialogue suited to one-dimensional good and bad guys; the parallel to “old-style westerns,” which the director himself has invoked, is an apt one. There are plot holes** you can drive a truck through (speaking of clichés…), which one might be able to ignore if the rest of the film were similarly flimsy—but the painful unraveling of the two main characters’ relationship is being played out so convincingly that the film’s weak spots are magnified.

Cronenberg’s basic operating premise is that the happy family and the peaceful town are cartoon myths that need deconstructing (a point of view which is itself a modern intellectual cartoon); the audience is supposed to go “hmmm” about the age-old nature-versus-nurture debate (snooze), as various characters whose heretofore peaceable existences are shattered not just by tooth-rattling incidents of violence, but by an apparently deep-seated appetite for it.

“Violence is inevitable,” Mortensen said in a post-première interview. “It exists—it will always exist. But we have free will. We can choose.”

I’m not sure that is Cronenberg’s message in this film—there is a distinct whiff of determinism about it. Yes, Tom Stall made a free choice to put his violent past behind him, but when it is summoned up by circumstance, we are supposed to see not just impulse, but genuine killer instinct. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone buys right into this (with the appropriate anti-American twist): “Cronenberg knows Americans have a history of violence,” he writes. “It's wired into our DNA. Without a hint of sermonizing, he shows how we secretly crave what we publicly condemn, and how we even make peace with it.”

Other critics get on board with this bromide. Desson Thomson [Washington Post]: “A History of Violence forces us to confront our Pavlovian conditioning to violence.” Jonathan Rosenbaum [Chicago Reader]: “Whether violence begets violence, whether perception is reality, whether a destructive animal instinct for combat really is lodged in the peaceful heart of every man—these are the themes that entertain Cronenberg…” (and put the rest of us to sleep?!!)

Allison Benedikt at the Chicago Tribune sees through the pretensions: “Cronenberg squeezes in his requisite social commentary, but the criticism feels detached and tends to lean toward the obvious, with Tom’s cross always hanging out of his shirt after he gives someone a serious beating.” Yes, the cross is a symbolic truncheon, reminiscent of the red surgical scrubs featured in Dead Ringers, fashioned to look like the robes of a Catholic Cardinal, suggesting (wham, wham goes the hammer) how doctors are the modern high priesthood of science—ooh, insight! (Costumes by Cronenberg’s sister Denise, for both films.)

[Sidebar: “ Cusack”, Tom Stall’s alter ego, is an Irish name— so just to make things juicy, one can speculate that the killer-for-hire and his mobster brother were brought up Catholic! (Thanks a lot.) This may explain the cross, since Protestant men are not much given to wearing them. Tom hears a “See ya in Church” from a diner customer, more commonly a born-again Protestant expression than a Catholic one.

One thing is certain: don’t waste any time wondering if the references to Christianity reveal any ambivalence or nuance about religion on Cronenberg’s part—feel free to read the signs as the tiresome clichés about religious hypocrisy that they are. As he told the New York Times, "I'm an atheist, and so I have a philosophical problem with … God and heaven and hell and all that stuff. I'm not just a nonbeliever, I'm an antibeliever—I think it's a destructive philosophy."]

Peter Travers fleetingly detects something rather more important about the story, at least as it has been delivered by the two lead performances: “The family tableau that ends the film is as chilling and redemptive as anything Cronenberg has ever crafted.”

Does Cronenberg ever craft things that are “redemptive”? I haven’t seen enough of his work to pronounce definitively on that, but it would surprise me if that were his conscious aim.

My feeling, however, is that Cronenberg has indeed grappled with the Big O— that is, Original Sin, a largely misunderstood and wholly Christian concept—the one Christian belief, according to G.K. Chesterton, whose existence is absolutely self-evident.

[Sidebar: as defined by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Original Sin is a state of deprivation of original holiness and justice… a human nature wounded (but not totally corrupted), subject to ignorance, suffering, and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin.]

David Cronenberg doesn’t accept any of this, of course. So he nibbles at the edges of the real story, and never pursues it down its own logical path. When you refuse to buy into the primacy of the spiritual, yet you still want to explain the persistence of evil in the same world where there is love and beauty and goodness, you will inevitably be trapped inside the memory of blood and shattered bone, degenerative disease and deformity, and the split-second passage between the person and the corpse. You will also be trapped in the hyper-significance of that other split-second Big O, the orgasm.

There, in the materialist shadowlands, sits David Cronenberg, film-maker: aspiring artist trapped in a low-rent ghoul.

Believers in Original Sin watch a film like A History of Violence with more seriousness, but less despair, than those who don’t believe.

For the life of me I don’t understand how people could roar with laughter at any point in this film. There are certainly some light moments— Tom’s explanation of how he came up with his alias is genuinely funny (“It was available”), but only mildly so, a very human vapidity in a moment of huge crisis, as he sputters, desperately and lamely, to hold his house of cards together.

The much-vaunted exchange between father and son— (Tom) “In this family we do not solve problems by hitting people.” (Jack) “No, in this family we shoot them!”—is ironic and absurd,but hardly guffaw material, considering the context. I was most struck by the way Mortensen delivered his half of it, flat and unconvincing because his character knows what an empty platitude it is.

More than one reviewer found the two sex scenes funny—I’m afraid the comedy eludes me. The first one is a warm and playful romp that could only happen between long-time lovers. Despite its involving a position that would probably cause Pat Robertson’s ears to stick out even further and flap with alarm, it is nevertheless (in my view) so intimate and affectionate that watching it made me feel more like an intruding voyeur than any cinematic sex ever has before— this was a real invasion of privacy.

The second sex scene, by contrast, is nearly a rape, and is deeply disturbing to watch, not just for its violence but for its incongruity within the story. Maybe we can swallow the idea that Tom could, for an instant, blindly lash out at his wife when she rejects his gesture of conciliation. But when he forces her down with a chokehold it’s plausibility that takes the beating, despite the fact that once she is flattened he regains his senses and begins to release her.

That’s when things get really unpalatable and unbelievable, for it is Edie who pulls Tom back toward her and begins to devour him, having found herself sexually charged up by his violent assault. What follows is rough and desperate sex, not wholly devoid of the remnants of their bond, but still too huge a stretch for the story.

It is quite astonishing that a film-maker in the 21^st century has the gall to offer his audience the repugnant and misogynist myth that women get turned on by being beaten. And it is discouraging that a modern young actress acquiesced to this director’s proposition. Cronenberg says of the scene:

Edie’s dealing with someone she doesn’t know—a Tom/Joey hybrid creature, and she finds that repulsive and exciting at the same time. Joey’s violence does have an erotic component… It’s the best sex she’s ever had, and also the most terrifying. Does she want more of it or not?

Elsewhere he says:

Sex and violence have always got on very well together, like bacon and eggs. I think there is always a sexual component in violence and a violent component in sexuality, to me that’s just a natural thing to explore. As George Bernard Shaw said, ‘Conflict is the essence of drama.’

Very symmetrically put, but no, not deep, not clever, not natural, and not true—and what does Shaw have to do with it? That bit is just a non sequitur.

Sorry, I’m not buying. Maria Bello has done too good a job of creating a realistic loving wife for us to graft this hackneyed grotesquerie on to it.

The actress commented shortly after the film wrapped that for the period when this scene was being shot she felt ill at the prospect of going in to work in the morning; she also noted that the large scab shown on her back in the film was a real injury incurred during the shooting. Well, she should have listened to her inner rumblings and told her director to stuff it— that scene was a violation of her character as well as her personal dignity.

Sure, Edie experiences the feeling of being simultaneously attracted and repelled by the husband she thought she knew—drawn to his obvious suffering, as he clings like a drowning man to shards of the refuge he had constructed for himself; yet horrified by the capacity for efficient mayhem he has suppressed for nearly 20 years.

But I don’t believe for a minute that this woman could give herself over to orgasm after being slapped and choked— and I really don’t accept the notion that the man who has known nothing but tenderness with her all those years could give himself over to choking and thumping her in a sustained assault. Cronenberg added both the sex scenes to the script (surprise, surprise). While one was at least a believable character study, both were unnecessary and disruptive in their way— the first gave “too much information!” as the saying goes, and the second violated the logic of both characters.

Graphic sex has a way of taking the audience out of the story and into the reality of the actors’ personal selves, which does neither the story nor the performers any favours. As actors these two have more than enough talent to have communicated in their eyes and faces every emotional nuance that either sex scene served, unimpeded by the intrusive realities of, for instance, yet another cinematic flash of Viggo Mortensen’s photogenic buttocks. (Ditto the later frontal flash from Bello.) How much nuance was communicated by that unexpected moonrise?

[Sidebar: It is no great compliment to Mortensen that his star-turn in Lord of the Rings has taken him from being a B or C-list actor in the front ranks of every director’s rolodex under the category “Willing To Get Naked And Have Sex On Screen” – to now being an A-list actor, still in the front ranks of the rolodex under "W.T.G.N.A.H.S.O.S.". I’ve never seen Maria Bello in anything else, but apparently her name is in that same part of the rolodex. (As one reviewer put it, “She’s never heard the words “No Nudity clause.”) What a sad way to get work— neither of them will ever know if that’s a deciding factor in their being cast in anything.]

Bottom line (as it were) — even if we pretend for the moment that the sex scenes contribute to the story, where and how they struck anyone as “funny” is quite beyond me.

The only places I can imagine spontaneous laughter breaking out are the aftermath shots of the gun battles, but these are not “funny ha-ha” or even “funny peculiar”—they’re just ludicrous. The flesh-blasting and bone-crunching always seem to exceed the credible capacities of the weapons and fisticuffs which produce them, and the prosthetic and technically-generated enhancements are glaringly obvious. Allison Benedikt nails it again:

Cronenberg may want to say something important about violence, but he’s also head over heels for it, ending each gunfight and neck-breaking with a close-up on the victim, blood either pooling behind his head or brains spilling from his face. Big laughs.

There were no big laughs either time I saw the film, though on my second viewing there were persistent titters during the final shoot-out— these, however, issued from a trio of teenagers skipping school, who talked steadily throughout the film (perhaps made twitchy by the array of small metal objects perforating their lips, chins, and eyebrows beneath greasy dyed bangs). This was teenage-dumbass at work, and not to be taken too seriously.

It’s worth mentioning, however, that it is a huge challenge not to elicit laughs when the bodies pile up in any sort of drama — I’m thinking particularly of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. It takes a fairly able director to pull off the domino-of-death climax without getting hoots from his audience. That doesn’t mean we’re all ghouls— it just means that some scenes don’t work with modern audiences or perhaps were not even very well-written to begin with. How many theatre companies even bother to do Titus Andronicus these days?

One can’t be blamed for suspecting that Cronenberg’s subconscious aim is to make the audience complicit not so much in society’s dark side as in his own— as in, “Hey, I’m not a kinky weirdo if everybody else is just like me.” The gore-fests in this film are fast and forgettable, and the fact that they didn’t set me or my fellow adult movie-goers giggling is probably due to our having dismissed them as silly distractions, preferring to move on and focus on the good acting work.

So, what about the Big Themes as I see them, Original Sin and redemption? I’m not going to claim that this is what the film is really about, or what it ought to be about. Merely that this is what the film could have been about. I doubt these themes interest the graphic novelists, I know David Cronenberg doesn’t believe in their existence, but I do think that the lead actors were working with them, whether they knew it or not. (I’m not sure actors ever know intellectually what they’re working with, but instead draw on instincts and a reservoir of unarticulated observations collected by osmosis.)

Tom Stall used to be Joey Cusack, and apparently (although back-story details about everybody in the film are a little sketchy) he used to kill for a living. He was good at it, having lightning reactions, overwhelming martial arts skills, and deadly accurate aim. At some point he lost his taste for that life, went out into the desert for three years, and remade himself. (Very John the Baptist, very Jesus, very St. Anthony of Egypt—or so it resonates with me.) Somehow he ended up in Millbrook, Indiana, met and married a local beauty with brains, and settled down into peaceful anonymity.

What happened out there in the desert? Did Joey transform himself into the consummate con artist, out of total self-interest? Or did he undergo a genuine conversion? I’m willing to wrestle with those questions because I believe that either possibility could actually happen. David Cronenberg stacks the deck against Tom because he doesn’t buy into conversion—real conversion, real fundamental change in human self-understanding, real exercise of self-mastery. When violence re-asserts itself in Tom’s life, we are given to understand that the nature of Joey Cusack has merely lain dormant and is instinctively unleashed to repeat its familiar patterns. We are expected to blur the distinctions between murder-for-hire and legitimate self-defense or protection of the defenseless.

It’s not so surprising that an artistic collaboration— issuing as it does from a community of people predominantly wedded to the socially irresponsible principle of mindless pacifism— asks us to see no difference between self-defense and deliberate homicide. These are the same sort of folk who cast the word “murder” as a net to include police shootings (where the target is a racial minority), war (where death is inflicted by Americans in uniform—avoiding the term when referring to terrorists in street-clothes), and moral prohibitions of condom-use (where the source is the Catholic Church).

Cronenberg wants to impute guilt to the audience that takes satisfaction in the deaths of the first set of hoodlums, as if there is no difference between Tom shooting them and them shooting the hotel staff and their child, or (as they intended to do) the diner waitress. But there is a difference-- spare us the "moral equivalence" stuff. Tom is not free to choose to do nothing to stop them. It is his duty to intervene, with "extreme prejudice” if necessary.

It is traumatizing to be the agent of violent death, but Tom’s response is not excessive just because it is professionally effective; nor is there excess in his son’s later decision to pick up the shotgun and save his father. Cheering at these deaths is a kind of childish release of tension, but any viewer whose sense of justice feels satisfied is “complicit” in nothing, and need not apologize. Sometimes you do end up solving your problems by hitting or shooting because you’ve run out of options and innocent lives are at stake. Mario Bello is less reticent than her director on this subject regarding her own child:

I don't think you understand what levels or what fears [sic] until you have a child of your own. I mean, I've never loved someone so much and I've never been so afraid in my life. And the truth is I would kill someone, whoever tried to hurt him. I would. I have no doubt about it.

There are, by my count, ten shootings (or deaths by other skull-cracking means—it all happens too fast to enable a coroner’s report on the spot) in A History of Violence, all of which are unambiguously done in self-defense or defense of others in extreme jeopardy. (One could argue that Richie Cusack’s death is nearly an execution, but he has a gun tucked under his arm and has made his intention to kill Joey/Tom abundantly clear.)

Roger Ebert makes the persuasive argument that, “If Tom Stall had truly been the cheerful small-town guy he pretended to be, he would have died in that diner. It was Joey who saved him.” However, we have all heard of ordinary folk who have done extraordinarily heroic things in an emergency, made possible by nothing more than a flood of adrenalin released by their sense of duty and concern for others in need. It is possible that Tom Stall’s reflexes are stimulated by at least a mixture of altruism, fear, and an expertise at survival—it is not necessary to believe that old appetites play a part in the action.

Is Joey Cusack capable of conversion and redemption? Real, permanent redemption? The quick answer to that is the Catholic one, which holds that any and all human beings are capable of redemption, but that no conversion should ever be assumed to be permanent while we are still alive—we (Catholics) do not believe that one is ever “saved” on earth (as the Evangelicals express it in the past tense, tying it to one transformative temporal instant), but we must strive for continuous conversion all the time, every day. (St. Thomas Aquinas is quoted in the Catechism: “There is nothing to prevent human nature’s being raised up to something greater, even after sin." And St. Paul: “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.”)

Genuine, unsalvageable psychopaths do exist, but they are rare. On the evidence at hand (in particular his changed way of life), Joey/Tom is afflicted by no deeper defect than that which we all carry, a vision clouded by Original Sin. Like all other men, Joey need not be fated to be a slave to his past if he chooses another path. He can “put on the new man” as St. Paul exhorts us, and even, like Paul, and Peter, and Abraham before them, enshrine his new life in a new name. (A more clever writer might have called this character “Paul [Saul] Thomas” instead of “Thomas Stall,” layering on the symbolism of faltering doubt and conversion. But a more clever writer would not have written this particular screenplay at all. Clever actors improved upon it.)

Joey/Tom journeys to sue for truce with his criminal brother, and perhaps bring closure to his own criminal past. He enters the house unarmed, so there is no question of premeditation. Later, having fought savagely and killed to save himself, he slinks home and tries to take his place at the family table, sitting down to face the wreckage of what he once had. There is clearly a desire to rebuild, expressed in tentative, tortured looks and gestures on the part of all of them, but everything that once held them together is gravely damaged.

The believer in sin and redemption also believes in forgiveness, a Herculean task for this family. If they inhabit a universe where there are no moral distinctions between homicide and self-defense, they will be overpowered by the fatalistic belief that violence is in the blood, from generation to generation. But if they believe in free will, they will know that forgiveness and conversion are possible.

The one completely unsettled issue at the end of this story is that of justice and restitution. The “born-again” Tom will never have peace when he has never answered for his earlier crimes. And if he is re-admitted to the family circle, their peace will likely always be at the mercy of the next shadow from his past. This is a dilemma with no conceivable resolution (except perhaps, ironically, the Witness Protection Program the sheriff imagines Tom is already in!)— a dilemma which the Stalls around the dinner table are nowhere close to confronting yet. The best you can say about the final tableau is that it offers a glimmer of hope.

Rounding off the corners of A History of Violence are the performances of Ed Harris and William Hurt, who are winning heaps of praise from most quarters for, in my view, taking an expert ride astride the broken-down horses which are their tired gangster roles. High opinion of Harris’s skillful characterization seems universal, but critics either love or despise Hurt’s hammy cameo.

The film score works well, as underplayed Copland-like Americana, contributed by Howard Shore of Lord of the Rings fame. The lighting is noticeable, which is a bad thing—everything is under-illuminated, sometimes as if in tunnel-vision. (Again, all the subtlety of wham, wham goes the hammer.)

The setting successfully evokes the little bite of Eden that some of us know is real. David Cronenberg needs to join those of us who have actually passed some time in Franklin, (Tennessee), Phelps (Wisconsin), Marietta (Georgia), Randolph (Vermont ), Crystal Falls (Michigan), Mineola (Texas), Bardstown (Kentucky), Jacksonville (Oregon), Sackett’s Harbor (New York), and Epping (New Hampshire) before he pontificates to us that the peaceful American town is a fool’s fantasy. He don’t know squat about it.

Joshua Tyler at Cinemablend.com writes one of the better “emperor has no clothes” reviews of this film, making precisely the point that Cronenberg just doesn’t know “normal”:

I don’t think Cronenberg has any concept of what normal people are like… The movie feels like he’s been stuck in a filmmaking vacuum for so long he’s no longer properly able to differentiate between fantasy and what the world is like out here for the rest of us… There’s a gripping, intense experience buried in History of Violence, but Cronenberg’s embarrassing and awkward unfamiliarity with normalcy degrades it.

On a personal note from the world of us normal folks, I couldn’t write a word about this movie without mentioning my young friend April Mullen, the girl who gives great scream over her hot fudge sundae when the first round of bad guys rolls into Stall’s Diner. She's already had a bigger audience, I think, than she’ll get with this movie: the millions upon millions who watched her portray Mary Magdalene in the unsurpassed Toronto Way of the Cross for World Youth Day 2002. But now she’s been seen (and heard!) at Cannes, and good things may well be in store for her. I wish her the best of luck (and pray she steers clear of that rolodex).

Thanks to the skewed agnostic critics of film as ART, I was fully prepared to hate A History of Violence, but found that I couldn’t. Some of it is just too well done. It’s a shame that on the whole it is so much less than it might have been. It’s a chuckle to hear the cast of this film lauding their director (chacun a son ghoul, I guess) for giving them the freedom to play their parts as they saw them. The truth is, they left him eating their dust.

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Heads up, look out for **plot holes! Just for starters:
The Baddies --
The two drifting bad guys who set the plot in motion are obviously on the lam from some previous crime. (Oh so obviously-- their expository dialogue is clumsier than the cloying family portrait that follows it. "Keep heading east, huh? Avoid the big cities, right?") Their strategy is to make slow progress over thousands of miles, through backwoods locations where everyone will know that they are strangers as they commit needlessly savage acts in pursuit of piddling amounts of money, thereby bringing maximum attention to themselves and leaving a messy trail of evidence where it can be easily detected. Blowing people away in the diner on the main street of a small town in broad daylight for the contents of the cash register is just another brilliant move. These guys are suicidal idiots. How could they possibly have eluded capture anywhere in the last five hundred miles, long before they hit Indiana??!!!!

The Goody --
Tom Stall pops up in Indiana and lives for the better part of two decades without ever having contact with any family member or friend from his past, and managing never to reveal a single chink in the armor of his adopted identity. He has been married for 17 years to a woman smart enough to finish law school who has been content to see no evidence whatsoever of his life before he met her, yet professes shock when she learns he's not who she thought he was. Having successfully maintained his cover story all these years, when the jig is finally up Tom's attempts to cover his tracks couldn't be more unprepared or lame. ("What do you think you heard?" he transparently asks Edie from his hospital bed.) How did he manage to get married, buy a house and a diner, and file his income taxes, while sharing his life with a lawyer, and never have a past?

The Wifey --
Tom's situation has clearly been eased by his having an incurious wife who is clueless to the fact that his background is full of holes. But hey! How much do we really know about Edie? Presumably she has a family, maybe living right in Millbrook-- did they never want to know anything about her husband? Why does no one in this close-knit family ever mention Grandma or Uncle Howie? What is Edie trying to hide? Who is this woman? Hmmmmmm.....

Favourite critical comment about the director:
"As a filmmaker whose roots are in horror films, Cronenberg has mutated over the last few decades as a true original filmmaker."
[Brian Eggert, film guide on Amazon.com)

How cheesy is Canada?

I was actually having a couple of second thoughts about having referred to Canada as "an insect nation" in a previous post, because I have many good friends who want to be good Canadians, with no desire to be anything else or live in some other place. They suffer tremendous frustration that a majority of their fellow-countrymen don't care to hold their government and their culture to higher standards.

No doubt their frustration continued when they saw that Canada, which hoovers up its citizens' money at such a rate that there are constant budget surpluses, made an initial offer of aid in response to the devastating earthquake in Pakistan of two planeloads of blankets and $300,000.

That's right-- this endlessly self-righteous nation, burdened with neither natural disasters nor international responsibilities, could only see its way to cough up about half the income tax bill for a single NHL hockey player. Speaking for Her Majesty's Loyal (if fumbling) Opposition, British Columbia MP Stockwell Day summed it up: "It's a very disappointing response when the federal government is in a surplus position. It shows that Canadian foreign policy is based on, if people get angry enough with us, we do something. Otherwise, we do nothing."

That was the situation as of press time on Monday October 11. Later in the day, we were pleased to hear, Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister, Pierre Pettigrew, had "monitored" the developments sufficiently to up the ante to $20 million. Yee-ha! The updated version of the Globe and Mail coverage this morning (Tuesday) still reports only the initial U.S. pledge of helicopters and $100,000 quick cash, which perhaps makes the Globulites feel better but fails to note the wire service reports that by October 9 the U.S. aid pledge was established at $50 million. Oh, whatever.

Meanwhile back in the phantom world of Canada's hapless military, a spokesman for natty but intrepid Minister of Defense Bill Graham gave the comforting news that "the government is considering other measures, such as sending the military's Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART), but that no decisions have been made... Canadian Forces staff are working with their counterparts at Foreign Affairs and the Canadian International Development Agency to determine if there is a need for additional Canadian Forces assets..."

Gosh, do you think? An earthquake kills 30,000 people and leaves 2.5 million homeless, and we have to determine if there's a need for the one unit of the Canadian military which is actually supposed to be fully equipped and ready to roll at any given moment? (Providing the "rolling" devices are offered by some other country, of course, since Canada possesses no discernible troop transport capacity.) A need for the unit whose sole purpose is disaster relief? Was there some point in giving this unit the "DART" acronym if we didn't intend for it to be deployed at some speed in excess of a tricycle in the mud?

Maybe "insect nation" wasn't so harsh after all.


More Cheesy Canadian News:
The cheese stands alone-- but where?

In the "you can't make this stuff up" department, the Globe and Mail's prize-winning story for Monday had to be Sunken cheddar defeats divers, the sad tale of a failed experiment in cheese-aging carried out by the proprietor of La Fromagerie Boivin in La Baie, Québèc. It seems that a fisherman had once reeled in a piece of cheese identified as a Boivin product, ate it, and pronounced it the best he'd ever had. Luc Boivin decided to see if he could produce the same results on 2000 pounds of cheddar in weighted barrels, which he dropped into the Saguenay fjord last year.

Regrettably, the experimental cheese trove seems to have disappeared. Boivin has spent most of the summer, and $50,000 in professional divers and sophisticated equipment rental, hunting for his sunken treasure without success. (Somewhere there's a giant sea-mouse smiling like a Cheshire cat?)

Undeterred, Boivin plans to sink another cheese-ball for phase two of the experiment, this time contained in stainless steel, with a tracking device. It will be dropped into the same body of water, in an area known, appropriately, as Baie des Ha! Ha!.

I'm not kidding. You can't make this stuff up.

Judicial Quagmiers-- or --
Curious George hears a "WHO?"

One of my husband's lawyer colleagues, of the flaming lefty type as only Canada can produce them, passed him in the office corridor yesterday and said (with no small satisfaction), "Well, the Bush era ended today."

Somewhere out there is an optimist or two who will say, "Nah-- he's got three more years-- just watch." It is definitely too early for the end of an era, but Mr. Bush seems determined to start rushing for the exits anyway. Many seem to think that Katrina blew the stuffings out of him, but I suspect his tone-deafness to the need to appear instantly engaged during that crisis is the signal that his stuffings were already in disarray. Anyone who is closely following the progress of the War on Terrorism has been looking in vain for those stuffings for quite some time.

The appointment of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, where she is likely to sit doing whatever it is she will do for at least another ten or fifteen years, is precisely what David Frum described as an "unforced error."

In John Roberts, Bush managed to pick someone who was impermeable to the slings and arrows of Democratic carping (the best they could manage was something on the order of Monty Python's "I fart in your general direction"), and there were well-deserved high-fives all 'round.

That was all the necessary proof that it can be done. All we needed was another hand-picked all-American jam-packed lawyer-brain and with an unflappable temperament, and there's no reason to think that John Roberts is unique in all the world for these qualities. The Democrats could promise a fight, and strategize to save it for the second nominee, but pick the right person and they would be as helpless as they were in the face of Roberts.

Probably the most revealing aspect of this development is that so many Democrats urged the nomination of Ms. Miers, and have openly claimed to be favorable towards her. This signals one of two things: either the Dems themselves have lost the stomach for another fight (since they so badly embarrass themselves in front of all sensible segments of the electorate when they get a head of steam going), or they are setting the world's biggest bear-trap for the President by appearing conciliatory at this stage, holding their fire till they see the whites of Harriet's eyes. (And considering how much the radical fringe of the left has been pulling the Democrats' strings in recent times, one has to question the authenticity of the sudden spirit of compromise. Will their Moveon.org base really permit them to give Ms. Miers a pass without a fight?)

If the Dems are tiring of the partisan battle, what better time to put another sterling conservative nominee before them? If they are plotting a sneak attack, what has been gained by not putting another sterling conservative before them? Either way, this nomination was a waste.

The President blinked. Usually that's the act of one party to a stand-off. But in the arena of judicial nominations, the administration has been in something much stronger than a stand-off position -- it wasn't time for anyone to blink yet. There was the scent of a fight, and the President ran from it before it started. Not an acceptable strategy for war, whether it be in the hunt for terrorists or the battle for the culture. This is the guy who looked into the lens and addressed Al Qaeda, saying, "Bring it on." If he can't look into the wide, vacant eyes of Nancy Pelosi and say the same thing, somebody needs to bring in the paddles and yell "Clear!"

President Bush's stature is now in free fall. He has been a punching bag for the most vile and extremist charges for five years, and he has never really understood either the need or the technique for effective counter-measures. Now he is under well-deserved fire from those who have bent over backwards to persevere in their support for him through every crisis. He is on the ropes.

The wacko protestors who got themselves photographed on September 24 (complete with fudging) hold the fundamental belief that George W. Bush is evil. This is not only manifestly untrue, it is illogical -- true evil breeds boldness, and feeds on self-interest. No one with his own self-interest uppermost in mind would be piling up the political miscalculations this president has since that day, shortly after the 2004 election, when he announced, with much naïveté and very little class, that he had earned some political capital and he intended to spend it. Like darn near everything else in the federal treasury, it's spent.

Mr. President, you be Nicholas Cage and I'll be Cher (Moonstruck, her best work ever) -- here we go:

[WHACK!!!!] "Snap out of it!"

Postscript on the house-painters

Subsequent conversations have revealed that the non-Iraqi half of my painting team (the Sal and Sam Show) is Iranian ("Persian" as he specified). I cheekily congratulated them on getting along so well.

They are, in fact, the Type for the future of the Middle East: two working guys with children in school, who have sought refuge where they are free to function without fear, and to chatter together about how defective the Canadian school system is. I suspect they would not be here at all if life offered them any prospects in the places they left-- they just want what everybody wants, and you can't yet get it there.

Today's exchange yielded Sam's assessment that elections in Iran are a farce since there is no real freedom, and Sal's repeated endorsement of George Bush, especially of his belief that the Middle East must learn the ways of modern democracy if its people are to survive. When Sam from Iran asked me about my children, and I told him the eldest is in the Marine Corps, Sam said, "God bless him."

Amen to that, my friend. Bless 'em all.

Hugh Hewitt sets us all straight on the subject of excellence in journalism. (Excellence, thy name is Mark Steyn.) :

... [M]ost of the people at CBS appear not to have heard of Steyn. I rest my case. It is like a physicist not hearing of Einstein.

Iraq, DeLay, Ambassador McKenna, etc. --
As exciting as watching paint dry?

Complete chaos domestically-- nearly the whole interior of the house is being painted, some of it covering that original coat of Builder's Beige from 16 years ago. The computer has been swathed in plastic for days, accessible only by sitting sideways and squinting.

One of the painters, interestingly, is an Iraqi immigrant, with family still back there and elsewhere in the Middle East. We've had one long conversation during which he expressed an understandable distress at the level of danger still present in some areas, and recited the litany of propaganda he has absorbed about Dick Cheney and oil money. Nevertheless-- bottom line-- he thinks Geroge Bush is great, and has given Iraq a better future.

Speaking of which--
I find myself on the elite email list of those who get to review the incendiary draft-thoughts of David Warren before he cleans them up for general consumption in various papers. His September 11 column, however, retained its flammability in print, and has been exciting tremendous response as it is volleyed around the American blogosphere. Kudos to the Hermit of Parkdale, who is inexplicably hesitant to take up recent offers of a guest-slot on a Dallas radio call-in show.

One of David's recent unfiltered circulations forwarded the following item of interest [possibly from the Ripley's Believe It Or Not section of Items Buried On Page Twenty-Three of the Tumbleweed Daily Herald Express Mail Tribune]:

DID YOU KNOW THIS?

Did you know that 47 countries have reestablished their embassies in Iraq?

Did you know that the Iraqi government currently employs 1.2 million Iraqi people?

Did you know that 3100 schools have been renovated, 364 schools are under rehabilitation, 263 schools are now under construction and 38 new schools have been built in Iraq?

Did you know that Iraq 's higher educational structure consists of 20 Universities, 46 Institutes or colleges and 4 research centers, all currently operating?

Did you know that 25 Iraq students departed for the United States in January 2005 for the reestablished Fulbright program?

Did you know that the Iraqi Navy is operational?! They have 5- 100-foot patrol craft, 34 smaller vessels and a naval infantry regiment.

Did you know that Iraq 's Air Force consists of three operational squadrons, which includes 9 reconnaissance and 3 US C-130 transport aircraft (under Iraqi operational control) which operate day and night, and will soon add 16 UH-1 helicopters and 4 Bell Jet Rangers?

Did you know that Iraq has a counter-terrorist unit and a Commando Battalion?

Did you know that the Iraqi Police Service has over 55,000 fully trained and equipped police officers?

Did you know that there are 5 Police Academies in Iraq that produce over 3500 new officers each 8 weeks?

Did you know there are more than 1100 building projects going on in Iraq ? They include 364 schools, 67 public clinics, 15 hospitals, 83 railroad stations, 22 oil facilities, 93 water facilities and 69 electrical
facilities.

Did you know that 96% of Iraqi children under the age of 5 have received the first 2 series of polio vaccinations?

Did you know that 4.3 million Iraqi children were enrolled in primary school by mid October?

Did you know that there are 1,192,000 cell phone subscribers in Iraq and phone use has gone up 158%?

Did you know that Iraq has an independent media that consists of 75 radio stations, 180 newspapers and 10 television stations?

Did you know that the Baghdad Stock Exchange opened in June of 2004?

Did you know that 2 candidates in the Iraqi presidential election had a televised debate recently?

OF COURSE WE DIDN'T KNOW! WHY DIDN'T WE KNOW? OUR MEDIA WOULDN'T TELL US!

Instead of reflecting our love for our country, we get photos of flag burning incidents at Abu Ghraib and people throwing snowballs at the presidential motorcades. The lack of accentuating the positive in Iraq serves two purposes.

It is intended to undermine the world's perception of the United States -- thus minimizing consequent support.

And it is intended to discourage American citizens.

'Nuff said.

DeLayed Reaction--
Austin TX prosecutor Ron Earle has finally completed his prolonged quest to the top of Mt. Doom in hopes of throwing House Majority Leader Tom DeLay into the belly of the lava lamp. This is apparently a fairly regular outing for Earle, who has made similar attempts to dispose of various Texas politicians (mostly conservative Democrats) and corporations (which he spared, providing they coughed up donations to Earle's favorite causes).

Many months ago a prominent member of the Houston contingent of my family had this to say on the DeLay question: "He's one of those politicians who is such a sleazy operator that you're glad he's on your side because you'd be scared to have him working for the other team."

Kind of makes you feel warm all over. Smarter people than me have concluded that this prosecution is roadkill from the get-go, and that salivating Democrats who are busy piling on have merely taken up one of them unregistered Texas firearms and shot themselves in the other foot (the first having been winged in the Great Katrina Massacre).

And from the Northern Kingdom: Frank McKenna, Ambassador to the United States from Ottawa Junior High--
Speaking at a business luncheon which was also attended by the American Ambassador to Canada (David Wilkins), Canadian Ambassador McKenna made pleasant coffee-and-dessert chit-chat by announcing that, "The government of the United States is, in large measure, dysfunctional." Among his clarifications of this charge was the criticism that American elected legislators have "so much independence of political party loyalty... that everybody in their own way is a freelancer, going off in different directions."

Ah yes, much better to have the Canadian system where the electorate casts its ballot and then evaporates from the consciousness of its representatives. Americans will be shocked to discover that a member of Parliament may only vote according to his, or his constituents', personal and political convictions when officially given leave by the party leader to cast a "free vote"-- usually reserved for issues of conscience like gay marriage or abortion (at least that's how it used to be-- the present Liberal government has denied even this exercise to its hapless caucus).

Ex-squeeeeze me? asks the incredulous American. You mean an elected legislator can't necessarily cast a vote that represents what he actually believes and supports unless given permission by the party leader? You mean a "free vote" is an exception, and not the rule of every day and every moment of a representative's political life? This is democracy?

Yes, dear, Canadian style. As is a government where holders of the highest offices spend years lining the pockets of their supporters with millions of tax-payer dollars buying votes and favors that will appease its first-class citizens (of Québec), at the expense of its second-class citizens (everybody else) [a scandal many Canadians had to find out about from the American blogosphere because there was a gag order on the most damning evidence about suitcases full of cash, backroom payments to thugs, and other such grisly details]; a government that is running a surplus because it has confiscated ever-increasing amounts of tax from its worker-bees, money apparently not needed but collected because the habit of annual shake-down is so hard to break; a government that has allowed over 100 known war criminals to live within its borders and escape prosecution, not to mention the tens of thousands of known immigration-law violators who have simply disappeared when released on their own recognizance while awaiting a pro forma hearing.

The hypocrisy is irritating. The sheer bad manners and adolescent need to boast is embarrassing. U.S. Ambassador Wilkins, possessed of that particle of class so lacking in his Canadian counterpart, flicked away the gratuitous insults like they were gnats at his ear-- the appropriate flick-off to an insect nation.

Pardon me-- it's the paint fumes, shurely.

Returned for Re-Grooving
(I have just dated myself by making a Firesign Theatre reference)

There can't be any better recommendation for spending time in Newfoundland than how COMPLETELY OUT OF IT I was for five days. Later today I should be ready for some photo-blogging on that subject (at present I am experiencing total failure at uploading images), though the exact location will go unnamed, lest the next thing we know Kurt and Goldie will discover it, mow down the trees and build a mansion and an air-strip, and head up yet another rape-by-multi-millionnaries of yet another Canadian natural wonder. (See Muskoka.)

Lots of catching up to do. The follow-up on the Anti-War/Bush/America/capitalism rally, twinned with the Pro-troops/America/freedom/general-sanity rally in Washington, D.C. over the weekend was best expressed in photographs, here and here vs. here. The Peace and Make-Love-Not-War crowd wins hands down in the Most Vulgar, Hateful, Ignorant, Incoherent, Factually-challenged sweepstakes, with special awards for cruelty to troops in the field and their families. And kudos to the support-the-troops crowd who flooded the Walter Reed Hospital neighborhood to outnumber the Code Pink Kooks who have been harassing wounded soldiers there over the past few weeks.

Apparently the anti-everything bunch thought it would be clever to taunt those who opposed them by chanting "GO SIGN UP!"-- like that's something no real people would ever do. When they encountered many of their opposite numbers holding up their military ID cards (and one veteran holding up his artificial leg) there seemed to be no other counter-measure than to scream and point and make phenomenally nasty faces. Well, that wins elections doesn't it? Such a long way from their stated goal of "taking back their country." They are welcome to attempt to prove proprietary rights-- they just need 50%+plus of the voters behind them. We're waiting.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the Houston branch of my family (plus an entourage of colleagues) made a 16-hour drive to east Texas (normally four) and took refuge in the woods-- apparently all was successful, and no doubt there was good wine even if showers were scarce. There was no telephone there (I think that's intentional), so the next few days will reveal if the Houston digs are still intact.

It was great to have been on such a complete mental vacation for five days on the Rock that I stopped fretting about what-the-hell's-up with the Corridors of Power. Diane West at Jewish World Review has the business covered for me on the subject of Presidential leadership then and now. OFFICIALLY LISTED AS MISSING AFTER TWO HURRICANES AND A COUPLA YEARS OF WAR: this guy doing this. It's been raining like a maniac for weeks now-- think if we pour enough water on the President he'll grow a pair....?

Further OCCUPATION for your weekend:
Why Iraq?

Robert Kagan at the Washington Post reminds us why it seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact, it had seemed like a good idea for a LONG time.

Some ex-presidents seem to have forgotten, though (scroll down to Uncharted Territory)-- especially the one who is most responsible for developing the notion that it was a really good idea in the first place. (Cue "The Arkansas Traveller" maestro.)

The doctor is...OUT.

It's off to the new/old digs in Newfoundland for about five days, where we take possession of the good doctor's (my husband's grandfather) old house and re-establish the family claim. No online service there as yet, so, true to Newfoundland, I'll be swathed in fog till next Monday.

If you lack entertainment, tune in to the Christopher Hitchens/George "Ad Hominem" Galloway debate [Be it resolved: The war in Iraq was both necessary and just] which took place in New York last Friday. A textbook study in demagogery, duplicity, diversionary tactics, rhetorical fallacy, name-calling, bloviating, and the Big Lie. [And that was just the audience....] Galloway swells to Hitlerian heights of volume, gesture, and wind velocity, while Hitchens undermines himself by finding contempt of his audience irresistible (for good reason).

Galloway had just returned from a photo-op suck-fest with Bashar Assad, and will soon join Cindy Sheehan at the anti-war counter rally in Washington D.C. this weekend-- thereby covering all his bases, as Hitchens so handily pointed out during the debate: offering Assad his congratulations on successful "operations" into Iraq, headwaters of the river of terrorists who killed Casey Sheehan; and then basking in the borrowed glow of Casey's mother's grief and anger.

Our team, wearing the white hats, will be meeting here and here -- wish I could join them. Semper Fi. (At least I'll be out in one of the last bastions of independent thinking in Canada-- and maybe the first to secede?!)

Cindy Sheehan's Mind: Unoccupied Territory

To the mob of supporters who clustered around her for her few weeks of fame, Cindy Sheehan had one purpose: she was a club to beat up George Bush. She was useful for awhile but began to become a liability when she started embroidering on the talking points, and revealed in the process how fundamentally unintelligent she is. (And for that to disconcert the movers of Moveon.org, we're talking REALLY unintelligent.)

Then, just as the handlers were groping around for a new strategy and a better club (would it be Jane Fonda and George Galloway?), a big honkin' three-wood with sleek titanium shaft came along-- Hurricane Katrina-- and club Cindy got dumped back in the old plaid golf bag with the duct tape and the scuffed balls.

But Cindy soldiers on. It's no skin off Michael Moore's or Arianna Huffenpuff's noses to let her bulk up the blog with her latest ravings, even if way fewer people are listening. Friday's (September 16) Michael Moore posting served up her latest gem (my take on it inserted in italics):

Amid the Miserable Failures on the Same Planet
A Message from Cindy Sheehan

...One thing that truly troubled me about my visit to Louisiana was the level of the military presence there. [Funny-- I thought everybody's big complaint was that the military presence was too little, too late. A lie, by the way.]

I imagined before that if the military had to be used in a CONUS (Continental US) operations that they would be there to help the citizens: Clothe them, feed them, shelter them, and protect them. But what I saw was a city that is occupied. [No moreso than if police are on patrol in an emergency in any city in the country-- half of the New Orleans force disappeared, so it's the military. Here on planet Earth, most people think that's a good idea.]

I saw soldiers walking around in patrols of 7 with their weapons slung on their backs. I wanted to ask one of them what it would take for one of them to shoot me. [Fortunately it takes more than being a fool and obstructing their operations with stupid and provocative questions.]

Sand bags were removed from private property to make machine gun nests. ['Splain to me how machine gun nests assist people on patrol. There's moving, and then there's sitting still. One of these things does not belong....]

...I don't care if a human being is black, brown, white, yellow or pink. I don't care if a human being is Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, or pagan. I don't care what flag a person salutes: if a human being is hungry, then it is up to another human being to feed him/her. George Bush needs to stop talking, admit the mistakes of his all around failed administration, pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans and Iraq, and excuse his self from power.

["Condi-- I think I may need a power break? Is this possible?" But seriously, folks-- which of the following actions will have the direct effect of feeding a him/her?: Bush stops talking (nope); Bush withdraws military from New Orleans (nope, nope, nope, not even a little bit); Bush excuses his (sic) self from power (nope, no feeding accomplished here].

Back on planet Earth again: "occupied New Orleans"?!!!!

Well, there is at least a certain consistency about Mrs. Sheehan's agenda. People who demand the withdrawal of our military from their work in Iraq and New Orleans (and, heck, throw in Afghanistan-- Cindy always does) do not discriminate between the citizens of all three places. About all three groups it can be said that Cindy Sheehan and her allies:

(a) do not see those citizens as real people but as a faceless mass and a convenient rhetorical tool
(b) are not interested in their opinion of their own situation;
(c) don't care what happens to them;
(d) would gladly sacrifice any benefits to them for the larger goal of bringing down George Bush.

Exactly the same thing can be said about Cindy's and her allies' attitude towards American troops.

If the Cirque de Cindy were to achieve its goals-- bringing down George Bush (a political impossibility, children-- try focusing on winning the next election instead) and withdrawing American troops from both combat and humanitarian roles-- two groups of people would top the list of those who would loathe and despise them for it: the American troops, and the people they are helping in Iraq and New Orleans.

But who cares? A small price to pay for the toppling of Chimpy McHitler.

All this does not change my basic view of Cindy Sheehan as a woman broken by indescribable loss, who is ill-served by those who stoked her rage in Texas, and who have now taken their gnat-like attention spans and moved on to Campaign Katrina, which is itself already on the fizzle because it is so demonstrably bogus.

Anyone who actually cared about Cindy, and about her son, would urge her to do the one thing that will start her on the genuine road to peace of mind, and some degree of usefulness to the world-- that is, to reconcile with her family. Everything else will flow from that. If she were to transform a real healing into positive action-- to put Hillary Clinton in the White House, for instance-- I would groan and roll my eyes and go work for the other team, but I would congratulate her on putting her interior house in order and bringing some meaning to the rest of her life. As it is, she is fully absorbed in actions and people who can do her no lasting good-- even now they are abandoning her, and she has lost way too much already.

Roberts rules

Have watched only a few minutes of the Judge Roberts confirmation hearings-- just enough to know one thing I already knew (Joe Biden is an ass) and one thing I hadn't known (Roberts is mopping the floor with these people).

Re: Biden
I guess he didn't get that memo that says if you want to run for President you need to be likeable. What you don't need is to look like a contemptuous, boorish, nasty, rude, unreasonable, wannabe-schoolyard-bully who is more like a delusional little yippy-dog than a genuine pit-bull.

But why should I try to diss Biden when others are doing it so much better?
Hugh Hewitt:

I confess, I am addicted to Slow Joe Biden. If he comes on the tube, I have to stop and stare, like every driver crawling past an overturned semi with ambulances and firetrucks and stretchers everywhere. Biden is quite simply the only cartoon with flesh I have ever seen, a wholly ridiculous fellow, but one who is completely unaware of his own absurdity. When I learned yesterday of his extraordinary record in law school, the picture grew even more complete. Smarmy. Obsequious. Thin-skinned.

Please, please, please run for president Joe.

Schumer is a close second --far, far smarter than Biden, and if anything his superior in ego as well. Schumer is nearly as compelling a small town political dinner theater show as Biden, but Biden is the champ

And nobody beats Jonah Goldberg:

The man loves his voice so much, you'd expect him to be following it around in a grey Buick, in defiance of restraining order, as it walks home from school. He seems to think his teeth are some kind of hypnotic punctuation marks which can momentarily disorient the listener and absolve him from any of Western civilization's usual imperatives to stop talking.

Listening to him speechify is like playing an intellectual game of whack-a-mole where every now and then the fuzzy head of a good point pops up from the tundra but before you can pin it down, he starts talking about how he went to the store and saw a squirrel on the way and it was brown which brings to mind Brown V. Board of Ed which most people don't understand because [TEETH FLASH] he taught Brown in his law school course and [TEETH FLASH] Mr. Chairman I'm going to get right to it and besides these aren't the droids you're looking for....

Amen. As Hugh said, Please, please run for President, Joe. Now is the time for all good teeth to come to the aid of their party.

The headline you thought you'd never see:
Peggy Noonan nails the President

You never know which mode of Noonan is going to roll out-- she's as capable of writing with intense emotion (Why They Ran) as she is of wielding the pundit's sledgehammer.

Today, with a little bit of both, she nails President Bush perfectly-- short, sharp analysis of what's ailing his presidency, where he blew it when Katrina blew in, and a hint of where he ought to go from here if he's smart. I would only add to her comment about how the Republican party is torn, that among what's on the table that needs to be addressed is a general recollection of how to fight a war-- more specifically, how to fight this war and in what ways it's unlike other wars, either of history or of Donald Rumsfeld's imagination. The fact that a Bush favorite has fallen over at FEMA is a whole new world for the President of "Loyalty"-- dares one hope that other positions in the administration are no longer assumed to be unassailably secure?

Noonan detects the scent of renewal in the air-- I hope she's right.

Hurricane relief from one of our allies

This just in from James Taranto at Opinion Journal:

Iraqi soldiers serving at Taji military base collected 1,000,000 Iraqi dinars for victims of Hurricane Katrina. Iraqi Col. Abbas Fadhil, Iraqi base commander, presented the money to U.S. Col. Paul D. Linkenhoker, Taji Coalition base commander, at a Sept. 5 staff meeting. "We are all brothers," said Abbas. "When one suffers tragedy, we all suffer their pain."

A million dinars isn't a lot of money; the U.S. equivalent is about $680. But this act of charity should chasten those who think that somehow Katrina shows that Iraqis are unworthy of America's humanitarian attentions.

FILM FEST FLASH!!
Exclusive Katrina dish from savvy star!!

Well-known sex expert Liam Neeson (naturally I refer to his role as infamous child-diddler Alfred Kinsey, not to Neeson's pre-marital rep as one of Hollywood's hottest "horizontal mambo" kings) has weighed in on matters political regarding his adopted home country.

"I don't think the United States has experienced such a level of embarrassment in recent history as it has with [Katrina]." Cigars and genitalia, anyone? "The so-called leaders of the country are not leading. And now, there's this question of corruption. Of the millions in donations, how much money is really going to go to the people who need it?"

Excuse me? What "question of corruption?" Has anyone, in politics, in the media, in the refugee shelters, made a whisper of a suggestion that donations are being skimmed, diverted, or otherwise misused? Are we supposed to believe now that the Red Cross and the Sally Ann, and the literally hundreds of other charitable organizations and community outreach efforts that are doing the hard work on the ground, are somehow part of the Vast Rovian Right-Wing Conspiracy which robs all decent people of justice and prosperity?

Up here, from within the totally outer-space pampered elitist materialist psychedelic swirl of star-sucking sycophancy that is this and every other international film festival, comes the voice of one pretentious resident of the Hollywood cocoon, casting aspersions on the thousands of good Americans who have come to the aid of their neighbors in need, either because they have made a career in one of the organizations devoted full-time to social/medical care and support, or because they have temporarily laid aside their own private needs and concerns to lend a hand to those who have lost everything.

I'm reminded of that line from Dr. Zhivago uttered by the formidable Bolshevik house-matron in the wrecked mansion that Yuri enters upon his return to Moscow after the Revolution has begun. She sneers at him, as he is met by his wife, at what used to be the front door of Tonya's private residence, now overrun with the newly-housed proletariat-- and says, "There was room for twenty families in this house."

Wonder how many homeless families from New Orleans could fit into the Neeson/Richardson New York estate? Or how many could sleep comfortably in one of those absurd block-long white stretch limousines that cruised around us as we waited in line for the film première last night?

Nobody's suggesting that Neeson needs to take in refugees before he can have an opinion about the Katrina snafus. Nor is the federal government above criticism on this (though it is well down the list of villains after the state and municipal authorities, by any sane reckoning).

But Neeson has taken a baseless, vicious, irresponsible, cheap and lazy shot at those who are handling the generous private gifts of millions of Americans and others. The likelihood of corruption on the part of those taking in donations is, in fact, far less than it would be if that money were being parcelled out by the UN or the federal bureaucracy, precisely because it is flowing through smaller independent charitable organizations, the largest of which (probably the Red Cross) is still more compact and focused than any government body.

It is bad enough that someone totally uninvolved with the effort is spreading calumnies about those doing the job on the Gulf Coast. It is the more repugnant, though, when such drivel is issuing from a member of the pampered coterie at the eye of the hurricane of meaningless, rarified hot air that makes landfall in Toronto for a couple of weeks every September-- no wonder there is such a widespread reflex wish that these people would just shut up.

Of course they have as much right to an opinion as anybody else. But the microphone that affords them a public hearing is made accessible for reasons totally unrelated to expertise or the worth of their opinions. The rest of us are jealous, no doubt about it-- even if we're smarter than they are, few of us ordinary folk get to sound off in the newspapers or on television. If they could just keep their sanctimoniousness under wraps, the editorializing stars might be more tolerable, but if they're left-leaning (as most are) being sanctimonious is just part of the platform.

Not all of Hollywood is left. But it's interesting that the left is where all the preaching seems to come from, as well as the grandstanding photo-op charity, like Sean Penn's assinine attempt to bail out the "drowning" in New Orleans, only to be seen bailing out his sinking boat with a plastic cup. The Hollywood Right is small but gaining ground. Some of its reticence is a product of fear (for loss of livelihood in a dominant left-wing culture), but some of it comes from genuine humility.

Witness the low-profile but increasingly successful effort of Gary Sinise, who co-founded Operation Iraqi Children after visiting Iraq with the USO, and now devotes much of his time to fundraising (via concerts by the Lieutenant Dan Band) to bring school supplies and other necessaries to kids in Iraq. In the past week he mobilized his organization to raise money for kids displaced by Katrina. He doesn't waste his breath dumping on, or lavishing praise upon, the Bush administration-- he just sees a need and does actual work to try and fix it.

Right-wing radio babe Laura Ingraham wrote a book castigating the pretentious Hollywood preachers, called Shut Up and Sing. Gary Sinise does both, and needy kids are the beneficiaries (as are the American military, for whom he and his band perform regularly). Hey Liam-- know any Elvis Costello? Can you do Van Morrison covers? Give Gary a call. Maybe there's a way to make a USEFUL contribution.

And now for something completely different:
Gwyneth and I catch a movie together

We're in the the thick of the 30th annual Toronto International Film Festival. (I can't believe I've actually lived here so long that I attended the very first one. I think that may also have been the last one I went to.) The town is positively stinking with stars, and trendy Yorkville is nearly impassable for the fans who wander around looking for ANYBODY, to see them eating at the hottest bistros or coming out of stores with multiple pairs of $800 shoes. ("Wow! She's carrying her own bags! Just like you and me!")

So one of my husband's partners is married to a woman who worked for the Festival for over ten years, and she was offered some tickets, so six of us made an evening of it. Had a nice dinner at a wine bar just a little too far from the action to have attracted much of a crowd on a Monday. (Damn-- I was counting on seeing SOMEBODY.) Then we cabbed it to Roy Thompson Hall, home of the Toronto Symphony, but not such a bad place to watch a film as it turned out.

There was a huge line-up because the 6:30 premiere had started late. (The "talent", we were informed, had not been on time: Charlize Theron, Frances McDormand, Sean Bean, Woody Harrelson, Sissy Spacek, and several other people who are probably famous-- hence all the screaming as they departed out the front-- but I never heard of them.) We joined the line of the ticketed at the half-a-block mark (too far from the red carpet to see who was being screamed for), but our hostess was convinced she could find some old associate to get us through the door without the wait. So she walked around, phoned, blackberried in all directions, and eventually an escort arrived to take us to the door.

Just outside the velvet ropes, where the red carpet turned left under the canopy, we were handed over to another escort, who held us back for a moment. Cameras were flashing, groupies were screaming, and there, paused at the door and looking sultry for the hoards of photographers, was Gwyneth Paltrow, a vision in black satin-- some kind of blouse with trailing bits, and two long tubes of pant-leg that would have been skin tight on anyone not quite so anorexic down there. (She actually has arms that don't look like Lara Flynn Boyle's, but her legs are like toothpicks-- she needs to eat a little something.) As soon as she was through the door, the rope was pulled aside and the next people on the carpet were us.

Who the hell?!

Well, our hostess did in fact know people among the paparazzi and there were a few hugs and kisses as we went down the line. (For her, not for us.) Inside we were handed to another handler, and then escorted all around Robin Hood's barn to our spot in the not-so-fashionable section on the far right. (Just one barrier away from the mere public.) The auditorium never did fill up, which made me wonder whether they had been trying to pad the hall when our tickets were offered.

We got started a good 45 minutes late, what with all the intro speeches (one particularly lame money-backer got the hook) and presentation of the cast and director.

The film: PROOF
The story of a sensitive young math wizard, Catherine, (my good friend Gwyneth) who had cared for her genius math-prof father (Anthony Hopkins) through several years of mental illness and dementia until his death. The day before the funeral she lets one of her father's protegés, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, go through some of his many notebooks made during his last years to see if there's anything lucid in them. Then her sister Claire (Hope Davis-- I know I'm out of it, but who is Hope Davis?) arrives, a nattering nagging living proof that insanity might just run in the family. She's all prepped to sell the house, drag the possibly unstable Catherine to live with her in New York (so Claire can "take care of her"), and generally be an annoying drip-torture in pink for the rest of her days.

My review: (IMHO, as the text messagers say)
This was an entertaining yarn. Always refreshing to see a film with a premise built on something different from most other films-- mathematics. We've been there before, with Matt Damon (Good Will Hunting) and Russell Crowe (A Beautiful Mind). (I use the term "we" loosely-- I haven't seen either of those films.) Lots of flashbacks, not always perfectly clear when they started (the change of seasons was helpful) but eventually came into focus, and a good technique for stepping inside of a fragile mind (Catherine's).

The film --I think it's supposed to be a "film" rather than a "movie" (an old film-buff friend of ours made this distinction without entirely explaining it, tongue firmly planted in cheek, but making a valid point anyway) -- is based on an American play in which Gwyneth Paltrow also starred in London, where the actress got better reviews than the play.

I would have to agree with that assessment. I know less than nothing about higher mathematics so I have to take it on faith there's any authenticity to the significance of the material which is the catalyst of this whole drama (but I think I heard some math experts chortling at it as we left). There was a time when total fabrication of countries, diseases, and mysterious formulae could pass without anyone caring whether they were real, but that was back when you would watch anything just to see Cary Grant or Ingrid Bergman in it. The reviewer in Britain's Independent felt that "the play patronises the audience by running a mile from any real discussion of the eponymous discovery," which is a fair criticism of the film as well.

The London Times went further, calling it "a glib exercise in political correctness, as lacking in depth as in mystery. Still, parts of it might have been composed by Neil Simon in one of his more rueful, less hilarious moods. It's a deftly written, skilfully constructed play, and it contains moments that might catch fire if not exactly blaze. " I think that's a bit harsh, but not totally off the mark.

The reason I think reviews of the play are directly relevant to the film version is that I was painfully aware while watching it that it was an adaptation of something meant for the stage. The dialogue is often anything but naturalistic-- glib indeed, with repartee too clever by half. When it's at its thickest, Gyllenhaal does a slightly better job of delivering it naturally than Paltrow does, but then Anthony Hopkins gets on the screen and you realize how a truly fine actor can work with just about anything and make it believable.

The Times was also harsh about Paltrow, opining that for the play to have "blazed" the actress would have to "expand what, on the evidence here, is her rather limited range..." Well, maybe so. I've only seen about five of her movies, and she certainly has enough magnetism to hold her own on screen with some heavyweights. (She does serious work in A Perfect Murder.) However, I often found her knuckle-nibbling potential Ophelia in "Proof" more stagey than deep, and certainly nothing new -- overall a hot-and-cold performance. Gyllenhaal was very believable and a good face for the dissheveled nerdily hip math geek, although I had trouble seeing him as a professor. He's supposed to have completed the Ph.D. and be on the University of Chicago faculty, but I would have bought him more as a grad student TA.

The London reviewers compared the play Proof to its filmic antecedent A Beautiful Mind ("execrable") and to a British play Copenhagen (all about physicists!), and found it better than the former but paltry next to the latter. Then again, finding things American to be paltry is a big hobby across the pond-- I suppose some of it comes from England having produced so darned many citizens who have a decent basic education in math, science, and the humanities. (They're so annoying that way.) The Independent summed it up as "hokum-on-stilts. Less than the sum of its derivative parts, it is Broadway's mistaken idea of a truly penetrating play." Ouch. But possibly true.

It was a nice evening out. Movies cost $13.50 here. I wouldn't feel cheated to have paid it.

But last night it was free. And I crossed the red-carpet threshhold just behind my good friend Gwyneth. Won't be happening at my local Cineplex anytime soon. So, two thumbs up. (I get to use both of mine.)

Back in the real world

George Will dares to write down a so-far-unmentionable truth about the victims of the floods in New Orleans. Well, I mentioned it-- but only to a friend (David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen etc.) in an email, as follows:

Also a timely piece on illegitimacy at Opinion Journal, a subject on my mind as I watched the hurricane coverage, in which it became ever more clear that most of the women with children had no man around to help them, and didn't appear to be in search of one. There seemed to be thousands of mother-child combinations, sticking together but not apparently missing a specific father component-- not crying for lost husbands or telling that story when interviewed by newsies. I'm thinkin' maybe more of them would have left if they'd been part of a normal family unit, in which a protector would have taken charge and got them moving in time.

George Will takes this phenomenon head-on, as part of a look at the whole question of Louisianna and federal money. Of the well-established link between illegitimacy and poverty, he reminds us of "three not-at-all recondite rules for avoiding poverty: Graduate from high school, don't have a baby until you are married, don't marry while you are a teenager. Among people who obey those rules, poverty is minimal." Rules, it bears repeating, which do not discriminate on the basis of race.

New Orleans had a lengthy and specific disaster plan in place, which would have eased the crisis in the Big Easy considerably had the mayor held up his end. But New Orleans is not alone as a place that would have benefited had American society in general faced up to the red-alert disaster plan for the disintegrating nuclear family advocated by the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in March of 1965. Forty years later we are no further ahead, and the socio-economic profile of New Orleans is the textbook example of how it all turned out.

Not the whole problem, not the whole solution, to the crises of the past few weeks. But a good part of the explanation of what they call the "optics" of the situation.

Random personal notes on Katrina fallout:

My sister reports from Houston that she and her daughter volunteered for several days on the rescue efforts. My niece and namesake was at the Astrodome, and my sister worked with Catholic Charities helping to sort out some of New Orleans' other displaced minorities: Vietnamese Catholics. The report from the dome is that Houston is running like a well-oiled machine and its citizens are bursting with merited pride.

The highest official in the area (more power than the mayor of Houston) is Harris County Judge Robert Eckels, who ran all the Astrodome preparation, and he is one cool and competent dude. He has already lined up 10,000 vacant apartments in the city, and told the landlords that they're not going to wait for emergency funding-- open up, and the money will be found, guaranteed. (Remember that Houston had about two days to pull this act together, whereas New Orleans had the better part of a week before landfall.)

Houstonians also have a window on the massive and massively effective assistance being given to thousands of people by small church groups who are taking reponsibility for people in the dozens and hundreds-- all material needs are being provided for, homes being opened, jobs being sought, children being registered in schools. My niece (of Astrodome fame) teaches in a small Catholic parish school which has accepted 70 extra children during its opening week of classes.

Closer to home (Toronto) a friend of mine tells of his colleague whose mother was evacuated via helicopter from her flooded New Orleans home. She was in a Wal-Mart in whichever city of refuge she reached, when another woman initiated conversation with her, the upshot of which was that Mom received an invitation to come and live with the woman, and that's where she is today.

Across the pond, where good fiction has always been popular:

This just in from Britain's biggest paper, that rag, the Sun, by that wag, Jeremy Clarkson:

Hollywood has taught America that the military can solve anything. It's full of chisel-jawed heroes who never leave a man on the field and never fail to get the job done. So they'd have New Orleans sorted out in a jiffy.

Unfortunately, on the street you've got some poor, starving souls helping themselves to a packet of food from a ruined, deserted supermarket. And as a result, finding themselves being blown to pieces by a helicopter gunship. With the none-too-bright soldiers urged on by their illiterate political masters, the poor and needy never stood a chance. It's easier and much more fun to shoot someone than make them a cup of tea. Especially if they're black.

(Hat tip: Kathryn Jean Lopez at http://corner.nationalreview.com/ )

Can anyone explain how Anderson Cooper, Shepard Smith, Geraldo Rivera, and Sean Penn managed to miss this story? I believe I said something below about European anti-Americanism.... but this is downright sick. As they say in Parliament, "Shame! Shame!"

If a picture paints a thousand words, most people should keep their mouths shut

Here is an amazing slide show link from a resident of New Orleans who waited out the storm, and then fled on about day 5. Look at it carefully, especially conditions as they were on day 2 and day 3; read the captions; and then think again about where in the chronology all the Bush-bashers have been saying he should have sent the cavalry in.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=17460_Five_Days_with_Katrina&only
(Hat tip: Little Green Footballs)

And then read what Michael Kinsley (no friend of the Bush administration) writes about the fog and hot air of hindsight.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/09/AR2005090901829.html
(Hat tip: my kid at
http://semperflyboyandtheonering.blogs.friendster.com/ )


And then I'll shut up because these people said it better.


And, oh yes.

Remember.

Look at that destruction, that massive, senseless, cruel loss of human life ... and then I ask you to look in your hearts and recognize that there is no room for neutrality on the issue of terrorism. You're either with civilization or with terrorists.

On one side is democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human life; on the other is tyranny, arbitrary executions, and mass murder.

We're right and they're wrong. It's as simple as that.

-- Rudy Giulani, October 1, 2001

Let me make myself perfectly clear...

Just in case the posts below don't spell it out, regardless of the scope of the Katrina disaster as it appeared in the early hours afterward, President Bush should have reported there personally ASAP-- like Tuesday afternoon, maybe. Some people would find a reason to criticize him no matter when he showed up, so he wasn't going to "win" politically in any case. But he should have gone, pronto.

For one thing, his mere presence would have put some pressure on the unfortunately-named Governor Blanco to make a decision about something, so that maybe the Guard, or FEMA, or the Red Cross, could have been permitted to enter. But it also would have been the right thing for Bush to do as a human being, and that is what most ordinary American people feel they can count on from him-- not eloquence, not even wisdom at every turn, but common decency.

By the way, the evidence is all over now that FEMA is actually doing a better job on this crisis than they normally do (never mind Senator Clinton's preposterous claim that things were better under her hubby). They have been tardier in Florida, but truly outdid themselves in Charleston, South Carolina. When Hurricane Hugo hit in 1989 FEMA arrived a month late, and then (as I learned from my friend whose family has lived there since the 18th century, and whose antebellum home was reduced to a pile of kindling) high-tailed it out of town to attend to the San Francisco World Series earthquake later that year-- and even two years later there were people out on the islands or deep in the woods who were still living in tents and never received any assistance at all. (Maybe some FEMA guys went to Charleston, West Virginia instead!!)

I am also reminded of my visit to my parents near Dallas just after the Shuttle Columbia crashed in 2003. When I landed at DFW airport there were busloads of firemen who had been brought in from out of state to help comb the area for debris. They numbered in "busloads" but they had no buses, and had been marooned at the airport for more than 24 hours-- no showers, no beds, and, until airport personnel took pity on them, no access to food because they had proceeded out to the baggage claim area (expecting transportation to be waiting), which is outside the security gates. Another FEMA triumph.

Maybe our expectations of FEMA are ridiculously high (especially when so few people who ought to know better seem to be aware of the restrictions placed on them by state law), but their performance has been quite consistent-- fumble, stumble, oh yeah, head 'em up/move 'em out! All things considered, maybe FEMA in Lousianna hasn't been half bad!

I stand corrected! -- and salute one "Old World" partner

He may be "over there" but this Old World (see Price of Independence below) denizen has the political hurricane all figured out -- no anti-Americanism here, just healthy anti-B.S. in high gear.
With thanks to Slugger O'Toole at http://www.sluggerotoole.com/archives/2005/09/ill_wind_may_no.php/

we have an excellent (and suitably sarcastic) Northern Irish take on the fallout from Katrina's ill winds, as written by Newton Emerson at the Irish Times.
Hat tip: the keen eye of Glenn Reynolds at http://www.instapundit.com/

The price of independence -- the price of chaos

Dontcha just hate it when Americans, good intentions aside, fulfill other people's worst nightmares?

According to many scholars, anti-Americanism from the "Old World" (that's basically Europe, Russia, and their poodle, Canada) is older than the American nation itself. (http://hudsonreview.com/BawerSp04print.html, http://www.ces.fas.harvard.edu/publications/Markovits.pdf)

It's galling at the best of times-- wounding, infuriating, laughable. But if there's anything more galling than the contempt, and hostility, and the superiority complex in full flower, it's the presumption that when the Old World looks at America it actually knows and comprehends what it's looking at. It's bad enough to be disdained for aspects of American character or custom that are real-- but it's maddening to be mocked or attacked because our institutions are simply different, and misunderstood.

The events of the past ten days-- that is, the spectacle of New Orleans in chaos -- comprise the second magnificent debacle of the past five years which has given any and all non-Americans reason to shake their heads and throw up their hands in bafflement-- followed closely by disdain, mockery, and contempt, of course.

The first of these two debacles was not, as one might suspect, being caught flat-footed on September 11, nor does it refer to the ups and downs of war in Iraq. (Although the echoes of passivity in the face of looting are fairly striking). It refers, rather, to the 2000 Presidential election, with its butterfly ballot ballet, its chad divining, its duelling lawyers, and its camera-ready partisans wielding their blame-throwers.Both of these bizarre spectacles have fed every stereotype and have buoyed every bigotry in the anti-American arsenal, and we can feel the global smirk as the last great superpower flounders around looking like a badly-run asylum picnic.

Lord knows, the smirk comes not entirely without reason. Just not for the reason most of these foreign persons are thinking. There was genuine chaos on both occasions, but it didn't reside in the most notorious aspects of either event.

The 2000 election will be remembered for the fact that George W. Bush won it even though he fell short of the national popular vote. Some people will remember it because they think he didn't win it at all, that recounts would have changed the Florida results, and that a biased court chose the President through an improper and perverted intrusion into the election-- they will remember these things even though none of them ever happened: the decisions to halt the recount, to appeal the halt, to engage in prolonged litigation, to challenge absentee ballots, and to declare the results final in the nation's highest court, are all actions which have been anticipated and provided for within American constitutional and electoral law, and, although rarely invoked, their operations are actually one of the great marvels of the most successful system of government ever devised by man.

The ultimate compliment to that system was that when the dust had settled, the disputed ballots were openly examined every which way but loose by outside parties, free to reach and to publish whatever result they found, even though there was no prospect of changing the outcome. Though Michael Moore and Paul Krugman are still fabricating from the depths of denial, the media-overseen recounts went solidly in Bush's favor, but had they not done so we all know that riots, insurrection and death squads would not likely have ensued (Moveon.org isn't big enough to manage it)-- we sometimes forget that most of the world's people could expect nothing like the smoothness with which we do "move on" in these situations (Nixon's resignation was another), and are awed by it.

The genuine chaos of the 2000 Florida election spectacle was predominantly a product of deliberate choices about American electoral politics and the system of governance. This is also precisely the source of the chaos in New Orleans.In its ideal form it is called the "Principle of Subsidiarity," an organizational principle by which a government or other body places decision-making power at the lowest possible level that can manage it. It is one of the pillars of the 1991 Maastricht Treaty which laid out the workings of the European Union (both the principle and the terminology borrowed directly from Catholic social teaching of the late 19th century-- an interesting factoid to contemplate considering Europe's refusal a dozen years later to acknowledge, in the deservedly-failed constitution, any of its primary historical debt to Christianity for the formation of all its most cherished institutions and values).

Americans don't tend to think in terms of this highfalutin' Principle of SubCityDairyQueen, but merely cherish the most local control possible of their personal lives, with the least interference from higher levels of government, especially those Feds. It is for this reason that there were butterfly ballots, and old-style data cards with chads, and part-time county election officers who mostly teach or sell real estate, thrown suddenly into a national spotlight. Some counties have their act together, some don't, and that's nobody's fault but the neighborhood voters, whose demographics vary wildly from place to place. Local control and local decision-making means innumerable small inefficiencies and crevices of incompetence.

Most of the time, in the grand scheme of things, these little failures make no great difference. There were undoubtedly many states that had hundreds or thousands of fouled-up ballots that went into the Dubious drawer and stayed there (in Arizona, for instance, where my parents then lived and voted and forgot about the ballots they had received in the mail-- so that they, like many of their fellow senior citizens, saw their second ballot put aside to be checked for duplication, and probably never counted)-- when the winner's margin is large enough that awarding the loser every single dubious vote wouldn't change anything, nobody ever bothers to sift through the screw-ups. It's a situation we accept, a price we are willing to pay, in return for keeping our affairs safely out of the giant maw of the federal bureaucracy. Outsiders are free to smirk, but these were choices made at the birth of the American experiment, by a people who had endured a brutal fight to shake off the whole world history of monarchical tyranny, and on the whole they were wise.

When, as in Florida 2000, the winner's margin is small and shifting, every small incompetency shows itself huge and all the scuzziest rocks are turned over in search of the last grain of truth. In that instance, the price of independence-- the lack of uniform standards, the power-plays and turf-tiffs among minor officials-- seemed too high. Some level of standardization is much easier to achieve now than it was when these systems were first put in place. So reforms have been enacted-- but even these have been according to the choices made at the local level, and despite much hue and cry from the lovers of putting the federal finger in every pie, the Principle of Subsidiarity continued to operate.

In New Orleans, 2005, the subsidiarity most fundamental to the American system-- that of the conditions wherein the jurisdiction of the several states trumps the power of the federal government-- was played out according to the very worst case scenario. There seems to be general agreement that federal response was somewhat sluggish, but history will probably show that this was most true on the level of symbolism-- the apparent disengagement of the President for a day or so (who nevertheless made all the right moves in the few days preceding the storm)-- rather than in the particulars of placing personnel and materiel at the ready.

As the days pass, however, it becomes ever clearer that state and city officials failed their citizens completely, needlessly, and persistently, both before and after the storm. Disaster scenarios and emergency planning had been developed in abundance, but were forgotten or ignored when the crunch came-- quite literally, the rubber never hit the road.

The purpose of the Principle of Subsidiarity is that we want important decisions about our lives to be made by those who live among us, and know us and our needs. Statistics that have been floating around this past week-- that New Orleans has a crime rate 4 times the national average, a murder rate 10 times the national average, 50,000 households (representing probably 100 to 200 thousand people) with no personal means of transportation, and a quarter of the city's population living in poverty -- are first and foremost the business of the mayor and the governor.

Even if the President had some general knowledge of life in New Orleans, these facts could not possibly be as real to him as they are to the people who govern locally. We have learned that part of the reason the Superdome was underequipped was to discourage people from staying in the city-- a condescending and imperious attitude to take about those, especially the disadvanged, whose security and well-being are the immediate charge of their city and state officials. Like the sludge through which the guard and police are now wading, at great personal risk, to bring out the stubborn living and the rotting dead, the stink of local incompetence is only going to get worse as the story is told, no matter how devotedly the Pelosi Brigade tries to splash it on the President.

It may be-- it's hard to imagine not-- that some federal heads should roll, especially because of the wider implications for homeland security brought into focus by this worst case scenario. Unfortunately, the Bush White House has demonstrated a consistent unwillingness to even find a few fall guys, much less to initiate major purges. But the American public appears to be exercising its customary common sense in the wake of this mess. Despite the Democrats' best efforts, very few people blame the President for the toll of human misery that has filled the TV screens for more than a week.

The forces of the left have done everything they can to paint presidential adviser Karl Rove as the all-powerful anti-Christ, and they have been remarkably successful. But it was an odd strategy for them to then try and paint the President as Christ himself-- "What manner of man is this, for he commandeth even the winds and water, and they obey him!" (Luke 8:25) They aimed a little high trying to tell us that Bush more or less caused the hurricane, and nobody bought it. Now they are trying to tell us that this magnificent rescue effort being carried out by more than 50,000 military personnel we just happened to have lying around not in Iraq, is the product of confusion and indifference at the federal level-- and we're not buying that hogwash either.

True to our American traditions, when heads start rolling it will probably be the work of the ballot box at the local level. The political future of Mayor Nagin is probably in doubt, especially because those who do come back to New Orleans will be the entrepreneurs and self-starters who have no time for short-sighted air-bags with no management talent. The mayor appears to have merely been overwhelmed by circumstance, whereas Governor Blanco appears to have been playing some kind of partisan Calvin-ball, whose rules and objectives are a mystery to the rest of the universe. Subsidiarity, among other things, exacted a heavy toll on the people of New Orleans, but it will probably be the most important ingredient in the coming corrective measures.

Memo to the smirkers: Thanks for your (somewhat sluggish) offers of assistance. For our next "American Civics for Foreigners" lesson we will try to explain the ELECTORAL COLLEGE system. (!) The essay question for the test will be: "How would a similar system empower the all-but-disenfranchised residents of the Canadian prairie provinces, so that the country would not continue to be run entirely by the population-heavy urban regions of southern Ontario?"

Night-time on the City of New Orleans... and all the towns and people seem to fade into a bad dream... Good mornin', America-- how are ya?

FOX NEWS COMES TO CANADA!
It's fair! It's balanced! It's just so darned annoying!

That was the opening I had planned for this little comment. I finally got my satellite dish a few months ago and settled down to the whole new world that was FoxNews. Was it a welcome antidote to the other networks, both American and Canadian? Oh Yes. But it was also brash, noisy, smarmy (Shep Smith), snotty (John Gibson), smug (O'Reilly at his worst), and as inane as anyone else (the morning crew). On the other hand, it has Brit Hume, Tony Snow, the Beltway Boys, and the Newswatch group (who are proof positive that being conservative is not required)-- all refreshingly unlike anyone else on the airwaves. I had lots of catty comments to make about Smith, who seems to me to have had his eyes "done" and is just too bottle-tan Ken-doll for words, plus the endless supply of "news-babes" with haystack hair, ... and numerous other deprecations of the network that was supposedly going to yank complacent Canada by the ears.

The yanking has probably been accomplished, and that's a good thing. But before I had a chance to get my licks in about its flaws, Hurricane Katrina came barrelling in and changed the whole complexion of my view of Fox. I've been watching PBS and NBC as well as CNN, and there is genuine passion to be seen in their delivery of the story (Anderson Cooper once again winning the "Dammit, there's snakes in here!" reality tv award-- can't help it-- I like him).

But Fox, and Smith in particular, have truly amazed. Anyone who enjoyed assuming that a Republican administration had FoxNews in its pocket can think again-- no other network has so outspokenly held the authorities' feet to the fire on the ill-prepared and so far less than competent government response to this escalating crisis. And no one has been more passionate, more outraged, and more blunt about the racial and social demographic of New Orleans' abandoned refugees than Shepard Smith-- on the scene from Day One, disheveled, bag-eyed, and angry. Fox takes second place to no one on asking the tough and embarrassing questions of a bumbling state government and the tardy feds.

It's been no end of fun waiting for Fox to arrive in the Great White North, especially watching the local pundits trying to trash it before it even got here, and getting into public feuds with Bill O'Reilly. It hasn't cured all our bent broadcasting ills, but many of us are grateful for the new kid on the block anyway. And now, while it's still a new face, Fox is wading full-force into the murky mess of an unprecedented news event, and proving it can make a serious and valuable contribution to the long debate that has only just begun.