Up to no good

The Wall Street Journal celebrates "Alfred Hitchcock at 125: Still a Cinematic Titan" by posting links to reviews about some of his films and related materials. Hitchcock ranks very high among my favorite directors. From an essay about Shadow of a Doubt (1943):

...Hitchcock always claimed to hold in special regard his 1943 drama of small-town life threatened by the presence of a killer, Shadow of a Doubt. Joseph Cotten starred as Uncle Charlie, a murderer whose preferred victims are affluent widows but who, like so many Hitchcock villains, manages to charmingly conceal his villainy—especially to his worshipful family.

“Shadow of a Doubt was a most satisfying picture for me—one of my favorite films—because for once there was time to get characters into it,” Hitchcock told Peter Bogdanovich in an interview.

Hitchcock efficiently establishes the character of Uncle Charlie, whose natural habitat is presented in the film’s opening: Under a false name, he occupies a run-down rented room in an ugly, uninviting urban environment. Charlie is first seen lying in bed, a cigar in his hand and cash by his side while brooding over his next move. After learning that two men are on his tail, he makes a hasty exit and seeks refuge in the bosom of his adoring relations in Santa Rosa, Calif. We do not yet know the specifics of Charlie’s criminality, but we know he is up to no good. ....

This psychological drama is set against the richest sociological portrait Hitchcock ever attempted. Hitchcock uses the splendid setting of Santa Rosa—its tranquil neighborhoods, gracious front porches, patient policeman monitoring a street crossing—not just as atmosphere but to render Uncle Charlie a stranger in a strange land. He not only hails from a place geographically distant from Santa Rosa, but proves to be far slicker and more sardonic than his homespun kith and kin. Intuitively, Young Charlie says at one point that her uncle conceals an enigmatic inner self....

The picture is preoccupied with ideas of normality and ordinariness, and Hitchcock, making the film amid World War II, makes clear that he sees such all-American qualities as worth defending. In a series of speeches, Uncle Charlie offers a cynical view of life—“The world’s a hell,” he says. “What does it matter what happens in it?”—with which he justifies his actions. ....

Peter Tonguette, "‘Shadow of a Doubt’: Hitchcock’s Tale of Small-Town Evil," The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 24, 2023.

"Dust to dust"

Re-posted because it is so right:

Jonathan Aigner ponders "How To Choose Music For A Funeral." I agree with much (not all) that he writes but very much agree with the following and have made my preference clear to my pastor, relatives, and friends:

One of the things the baby boomer generation has introduced into the liturgical sphere is the “celebration of life” service. That’s quite unfortunate.

A “celebration of life” points to a dead person. A funeral points to the cross.

A “celebration of life” sidesteps grief. A funeral confronts grief head-on.

A “celebration of life” ignores resurrection. A funeral depends on resurrection.

Funerals aren’t celebrations of human life. Funerals are proclamations of another life, a life that ended in a death that ended in a life.

That is the life worth celebrating. The music you choose must point to Jesus, not to the casket. ....

Death sucks. It just sucks. And when we lose someone we love, we remember how badly it sucks. And we helplessly face the fact that we can’t do a damn thing about it.

It’s not supposed to be that way.

But Jesus lives, and so shall we.

And that makes all the difference.

How To Choose Music For A Funeral

“I enjoy monotony”

I'm tempted, but it seems rather expensive. From a review, "Of mice and men and Magdalen: C.S. Lewis’s Oxford by Simon Horobin":

The life of a dedicated Oxford don and literary figure is bound to contain few opportunities for drama, glamour, or adventure. “I enjoy monotony,” C.S. Lewis once admitted to a questioner, and that was surely a fortunate trait, given that he spent 30 years teaching at Oxford, mainly in undergraduate tutorials, before he finally moved to a non-teaching post at Cambridge.

Yet such is the fascination that many have with the author of the Screwtape Letters (1942), the Narnia Chronicles (1949-54), and the autobiographical Surprised by Joy (1955), that many readers will relish the details of his Oxford life revealed in this sympathetic and atmospheric biography.

Simon Horobin records that Lewis typically taught 24 hours of tutorials a week, a huge burden over the three Oxford terms, which then as now consisted of eight intense weeks (the standard stint of a teaching fellow in Classics today, which tutors find taxing enough, is eight hours a week). When he was finally appointed to a chair at Cambridge in 1954, Lewis commented in a letter: “29 years of pupils’ essays is enough, bless ’em” and some years later wrote delightedly to his lifelong friend Arthur Greeves, “I’ve never been so under-worked since I first went to school.” ....

“Friendship was key to Lewis’s life,” writes Horobin. “His ideal evening was staying up late in a friend’s college room, ‘talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea, and pipes’.” Lewis was eventually persuaded by his old friend J.R.R. Tolkien that he would still be able to live at The Kilns if he took the chair. By the time he arrived in Cambridge he was already a literary celebrity (his relationship with other literary stars such as Tolkien, T.S. Eliot and particularly John Betjeman was not entirely happy).

He correctly recognised that a large part of the success of the Narnia books was due to the marvelous illustrations by Pauline Baynes. When she wrote to congratulate him on the award of the Carnegie Medal for The Last Battle, Lewis generously responded saying that it was “our medal”: the pictures were bound to have been a factor. He was similarly generous in his letters to Dorothy Sayers, though the statement that “Lewis’s long friendship with Dorothy L. Sayers contradicts the suggestion that he sought out only members of his own sex” strikes an unduly defensive note. .... (more)

8/21/2024  I'm not very good at resisting temptation. My copy arrived today. 

Armand D’Angour, "Of mice and men and Magdalen," The Critic, July 2024.

“The age of the storytellers.”

Dirda again, this from a 2012 essay titled "Armchair Adventures":

Why is it that I so seldom want to read what everyone else wants to read? A season’s blockbuster will come out—whether Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall or Stephen King’s 11/22/63—and the world will hurry off to the bookstores. More often than not, though, I dawdle, maybe stop for a coffee on the way. Sometimes I never get round to the book at all. ....

...I taught a course at the University of Maryland entitled “The Classic Adventure Novel: 1885-1915,” covering 10 books. Given those dates, you can probably guess half the titles on the reading list: H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines; Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped; H.G. Wells, The Time Machine; Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel; E. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet; G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday; Rudyard Kipling, Kim; A. Conan Doyle, The Lost World; Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes; and John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps.

If one were to characterize all these disparate works, one might settle for the phrase “comfort books.” Other descriptive clichés come to mind: ripping yarns, action-packed swashbucklers, escapist fantasies, boys’ books. All accurate designations, but I will make the case that such stories are as important to our imaginations as the more canonical classics.

To my delight, the class proved immensely popular. Students said that it reminded them of why they had majored in English: not because they could hardly wait to read the latest in literary theory, but because they loved stories. ....

This spring...I’m back discussing “The Modern Adventure Novel: 1917-1973.” Our reading list picks up where the previous one left off and includes: Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars; Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood; Georgette Heyer, These Old Shades; Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest; H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness; Eric Ambler, A Coffin for Dimitrios; Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination; Chester Himes, The Real Cool Killers; Charles Portis, True Grit; and William Goldman, The Princess Bride. ....

I could easily have doubled the number of books in both classes. And I still kick myself for forgetting about Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock. ....

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers. At a dramatic moment in Sabatini’s piratical masterpiece, the evil buccaneer Levasseur snarls: “You do not take her while I live!” To which Captain Blood coolly replies, as his blade flashes in the sunlight: “Then I’ll take her when you’re dead.” Writing—or reading, for that matter—doesn’t get any better than that.

Michael Dirda, "Armchair Adventures," The American Scholar," Feb 24, 2012.

Blind faith?

Greg Koukl argues that "It’s Time to Forget 'Faith'," not the thing, the word:

I have a suggestion. I want you to forget talking about faith—your faith, others’ faith, even the Christian faith. Here’s why you should take my advice.

Sometimes a word outlives its usefulness to communicate accurately. ....

It’s virtually impossible nowadays to use the word without people subconsciously adding “blind” or “leap of” as modifiers. Indeed, some find it impossible to understand faith in any other way since, in their minds, irrationality is central to any definition of religious faith. ....

That’s what they mean when they talk about religious faith. Is this what you mean when you use that word? I hope not, since that isn’t what the biblical authors meant. Pistis, the Greek word for faith, means active trust, and the biblical context reveals over and over again that this trust is based on evidence like reliable witnesses, rational reflection, and convincing proofs. ....

When talking about your own act of faith, use the word “trust.” When talking about the content of your beliefs, use the word “convictions”—e.g., you put your trust (not faith) in Christ based on your confidence in your Christian convictions (not faith).

Instead of saying that you believe in the resurrection (“belief” words have the same liability), say, rather, “I’m convinced Jesus rose from the dead,” or just, “Jesus rose from the dead.” These statements invite a request for reasons, which you can then give. ....

Greg Koukl, "It’s Time to Forget 'Faith'" Stand to Reason, August 1, 2024

"No new thing under the sun"

From Anecdotal Evidence yesterday:

“The past has always been more interesting to me than the future, just as I have found pessimists more amusing than optimists and failures more attractive than successes. I do not say that my preferences are based upon universal principles or that everyone should share them; in any case I should not want to live in a world of mental clones of myself, even if it were possible. I merely describe my own preferences as they happen to be.”

What Theodore Dalrymple describes is neither an ironclad law of existence, a wallow in sentimentality nor an affliction of the elderly. It’s common sense, a recognition of reality. The future is fiction. It is the home turf of utopians and other schemers, whose visions have the solidity of steam; that is, hot air. The past is where we come from. It made us. As a corollary to Ecclesiastes 1:9, C.H. Sisson writes in his essay “Natural History”: “It is an absurdity to try to be original. You might as well try to be beautiful or intelligent.

Patrick Kurp, "More Interesting to Me Than the Future," Anecdotal Evidence, July 29, 2014.

Anglophilia

I've been enjoying reading Michael Dirda's old essays at The American Scholar, mainly because I enjoy so many of the books he likes. I just came across his "Anglophilia." If you were to visit my apartment, you would probably note that the posters and pictures on my walls are largely related to England, with some reference to other parts of the UK. So, also the books on my shelves. I am a bit of an Anglophile, although perhaps not of England as it actually exists now, or perhaps ever did. I enjoyed this:

.... I certainly spend enough time daydreaming about wax cotton jackets from Barbour, Harrods picnic hampers, box seats at the Grand National and the Henley Regatta, and pub lunches of shepherd’s pie and bitters, not to overlook pheasant hunting near Balmoral with my trusty Purdey shotgun, rainy Saturday afternoons at the Tate studying the Turners, cold evenings spent sipping single-malt Scotch whiskey, long autumn tramps through the Lake District or along the fells, and, of course, riotous weekends at Oxford or Chatsworth with Evelyn, Cyril, Paddy, and all the Mitford sisters (even Jessica). To me at least, it really does seem a crying shame that I never attended university at Cambridge or Edinburgh. As P.G. Wodehouse once said of Lord Ickenham, even now I retain the bright enthusiasms and the fresh, unspoiled mental outlook of a slightly inebriated undergraduate.

For the most part, though, my actual Anglophilia is restricted to a couple of Harris Tweed sport coats, some Turnbull & Asser dress shirts, and a Burberry raincoat—all of them acquired at Amvets Value Village. Sometimes I do watch aging VHS tapes of British television’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries, less to guess the identity of the murderer than to look at the wonderful clothes and the idyllic Cotswoldian village of St. Mary Mead. My wife tells me I should check out Downton Abbey, but I gather that series might be almost too intense for my temperate nature.

In truth, my Anglophilia is fundamentally bookish: I yearn for one of those country house libraries, lined on three walls with mahogany bookshelves, their serried splendor interrupted only by enough space to display, above the fireplace, a pair of crossed swords or sculling oars and perhaps a portrait of some great English worthy. ....

Michael Dirda, "Anglophilia," The American Scholar, June 1, 2012.

A catalogue of crime

Jacques Barzun, described by Michael Dirda as "the distinguished cultural historian, teacher, and man of letters" died in 2012, aged 104. I only posess one of his many works, a first edition, purchased in 1971 from Moseley's Book Store—long gone—on Madison's Capitol Square. If you enjoy mysteries it is a wonderful reference. Dirda:

...I’ve always thought that A Catalogue of Crime, written with his lifelong friend Wendell Hertig Taylor, could be his most lasting masterpiece. I keep it by my bedside, along with a handful of similarly wide-ranging and often idiosyncratic reference books.... Barzun and Taylor definitely prefer classic whodunits, especially those written with wit, panache, and, above all, cleverness. The Catalogue lists more than 5,000 novel-length mysteries, collections of detective stories, true-crime books, and assorted volumes celebrating the delights of detection. Every entry is annotated, and a succinct critical judgment given. For instance, John Dickson Carr’s historical reconstruction The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey is summed up as “a classic in the best sense—i.e., rereadable indefinitely.” The brief account of Murder Plain and Fanciful, edited by James Sandoe, opens: “This virtually perfect anthology seems never to have been reprinted, which is a disgrace as well as a deprivation to the reading public.” Dorothy L. Sayers’ Strong Poison reads in as follows in its entirety:

JB puts this highest among the masterpieces. It has the strongest possible element of suspense—curiosity and the feeling one shares with Wimsey for Harriet Vane. The clues, the enigma, the free-love question, and the order of telling could not be improved upon. As for the somber opening, with the judge’s comments on how to make an omelet, it is sheer genius.

I like to think of Barzun spending the first decade of the 21st century, reading and rereading his favorite authors, in particular, Conan Doyle, Rex Stout, and Agatha Christie. He once wrote that Archie Goodwin, the legman for Stout’s fat detective Nero Wolfe, was a modern avatar of Huck Finn and one of the most memorable characters in American literature. ....

The book's contents, as described on the back of its jacket:

Michael Dirda, "Jacques Barzun—and Others," The American Scholar, Nov.2, 2012.

All part of a plan

On "The philosophical genius of P.G. Wodehouse":

What runs through Wodehouse’s books like a seam of gold is the idea that everything will come right in the end. His stories are defined by an inexhaustible optimism that is not only comforting, but intelligent and thoughtful. Beneath the japes, scrapes, pig-stealing, and aunt-dodging, there’s a genuine attention to the texture of human existence.

The Jeeves stories, for instance, contemplate serious philosophical questions around human agency, fate, and the existence of free will. The joy of these stories is their predictability, and this is deliberate. No matter how difficult a fix Bertie gets into, the reader knows that the hidden hand of Jeeves will always be there, quietly directing events towards a satisfactory conclusion.

Bertie meanwhile remains oblivious, labouring under the delusion that he is free to decide the course of his life. This inevitably backfires. It’s often only at the end of each story that Bertie understands that his attempts at independent action have actually been part of a far grander plan envisioned by Jeeves. In this sense, the Jeeves stories are an allegory for real life: we go along believing we are masters of our own fate, but we do so unaware of the hidden forces directing our path. ....

It’d be obtuse to argue that P.G. Wodehouse should be remembered as a philosopher. He’d have no doubt thought that preposterous. But his reputation as a master of the English comic novel – though apt – obscures the brilliance of his writing. It should be remembered that although his books were comical, they were far from frivolous. They contain a resilient optimism that will comfort, cheer and entertain readers for generations. .... (more)

William Fear, "The philosophical genius of P.G. Wodehouse," Engelsberg Ideas, July 22, 2024.

"Attercop! Attercop! Down you drop..."

I just finished an application of Miss Muffet's Revenge, a very effective spider killer/repellent that lasts for three or four months. I usually spray every surface a spider might cross getting onto my balcony. But this year I decided to wait for my replacement awning to be installed. That hasn't yet happened. So, after walking through a cobweb as I went outside, I decided to at least spray around windows and doors.

I readily admit that spiders are generally beneficial, consuming insects and themselves providing food for birds. But I prefer they don't occupy the same living space I do.

Beneath the shadow of the British oak

A favorite Burke quotation from his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

.... Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number, or that, after all, they are other than the little, shriveled, meager, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour. ....

Old-fashioned truths

In September 1947, the cover of Time, perhaps then the most important American weekly magazine, portrayed C.S. Lewis. The cover article, uncredited, but in fact by Whittaker Chambers, former Communist spy, now a Christian witness against that ideology, described Lewis to Time's readers. (Lewis didn't much like this portrayal):

The lecturer, a short, thickset man with a ruddy face and a big voice, was coming to the end of his talk. Gathering up his notes and books, he tucked his horn rimmed spectacles into the pocket of his tweed jacket and picked up his mortarboard. Still talking—to the accompaniment of occasional appreciative laughs and squeals from his audience—he leaned over to return the watch he had borrowed from a student in the front row. As he ended his final sentence, he stepped off the platform.

The maneuver gained him a head start on the rush of students down the center aisle. Once in the street, he strode rapidly —his black gown billowing behind his grey flannel trousers—to the nearest pub for a pint of ale.

Clive Staples Lewis was engaged in his full-time and favorite job—the job of being an Oxford don in the Honour School of English Language & Literature, a Fellow and tutor of Magdalen College and the most popular lecturer in the University. To watch him downing his pint at the Eastgate (his favorite pub), or striding, pipe in mouth, across the deer park, a stranger would not be likely to guess that C.S. Lewis is also a best-selling author and one of the most influential spokesmen for Christianity in the English-speaking world.

Since 1941, when Lewis published a witty collection of infernal correspondence called The Screwtape Letters, this middle-aged (49) bachelor professor who lives a mildly humdrum life (“I like monotony”) has sold something over a million copies of his 15 books. He has made 29 radio broadcasts on religious subjects, each to an average of 600,000 listeners. Any fully ordained minister or priest might envy this Christian layman his audience.

That audience is the result of Lewis’ special gift for dramatizing Christian dogma. He would be the last to claim that what he says is new; but, like another eloquent and witty popularizer of Christianity, the late G.K. Chesterton, he has a talent for putting old-fashioned truths into a modern idiom. .... (more)

Whittaker Chambers, "Don v. Devil," Time, September 8, 1947.

"The bullet is in me now"

I taught US History for many years, so no surprise that a 1912 event described by a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article came to mind:

It was 99 years ago Oct. 14 that former president Theodore Roosevelt survived an assassination attempt near what is now the Hyatt Regency Milwaukee at W. Kilbourn Ave. and N. 4th St. He was campaigning in Milwaukee as the Progressive (or Bull Moose) Party presidential nominee. His shirt bloodied by a bullet still lodged in his chest, T.R. insisted on delivering an hour-and-a-half long speech anyway at the Milwaukee Auditorium, notable for this declaration:

“Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet — there is where the bullet went through — and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.”

The assassin was John Schrank, an opponent of Presidential third terms who had followed TR for thousands of miles, finally finding his opportunity in Milwaukee. Shrank wrote that the ghost of William McKinley had advised him in a dream to avenge his [McKinley's] death by killing Roosevelt.

A description of the event:

.... He [TR] stopped for the afternoon at the Hotel Gilpatrick, and after dining with local dignitaries, readied to leave for the Milwaukee Auditorium (now the Milwaukee Theatre) to give a campaign speech.

As he was getting into his vehicle, Roosevelt paused on the floorboards to turn and wave goodbye to well-wishers. Unfortunately, this moment cleared the way for would-be assassin, John Schrank, to take the shot he had been plotting for more than three weeks as he followed Roosevelt's campaign across eight states. Schrank fired his .38 revolver from close range, hitting Roosevelt in the chest.

In the ensuing melee, in which Schrank was immediately caught, Roosevelt's car left, but it was supposedly several moments before Roosevelt fully comprehended that he had been hit. The tenacious Roosevelt insisted, however, on continuing on to his speech anyway. (It could be that he felt he owed the speech its day — it was the speech's thick manuscript, folded in his breast pocket along with a metal glasses case, that absorbed most of the bullet's force.)

Upon entrance to the Milwaukee Auditorium, Roosevelt announced to the stunned audience that he had been shot, proclaiming: "It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!" He then proceeded to speak for 80 minutes before reluctantly going to a Milwaukee hospital for treatment.

Only after the speech did Roosevelt permit himself to be taken to the hospital  The bullet was not removed and remained in his body for the rest of his life. A transcript of the eighty-minute (!) speech is here.

Schrank was arrested at the scene and Milwaukee officers had to protect him from the crowd. On November 12, 1912 Schrank pled guilty to assault with intent to commit murder. He was found insane by the court and sent to Northern Hospital for the Insane located in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Shrank died not long after FDR was elected to his third term as President.

TR's bloody shirt - JSOnline

The most absurd, offensive blather

A wise reminder from Peter Savodnik, "Don’t Fall for the Partisan Trap":

An hour and a half after Donald Trump was nearly killed at a rural Pennsylvania campaign rally, Dmitri Mehlhorn, a Democratic strategist in northern Virginia who advises Democratic mega-donor Reid Hoffman, emailed journalists, suggesting the shooting might have been “staged.” ....

By this late date, there’s nothing especially surprising about a partisan, on either side, floating nutty conspiracy theories. Recall that two years ago, Republican influencers like Donald Trump Jr. and Dinesh D’Souza pushed the totally uncorroborated theory that the intruder who attacked Paul Pelosi, husband of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was his gay lover.

We have come to expect those engaged in electoral battles to say and tweet and post the most absurd, offensive blather. Their job is not to seek out the truth, but to fight relentlessly—blindly.

The problem, of course, is that they forget that the rest of us—the vast majority of us—are not partisans, that we are capable of something more generous and ecumenical. That we are able to disagree passionately with our fellow Americans about the border or the climate or TikTok or whatever and still, somehow, not fall for the most insidious lies about them. That we can make basic moral distinctions. For example, Trump is not Vladimir Putin. Nor is he Adolf Hitler. He’s just the presumptive Republican nominee. ....

There are, to be sure, millions of Americans who fear that President Trump, given a second term, won’t defend and uphold the Constitution. That he endangers our democracy. There are also millions of Americans who believe that President Biden has been a disaster—and that he’s the one endangering democracy with his lies about his mental acuity.

So be it. But we need not succumb to the partisan trap. The partisan stupidity. Because that is exactly what this is. A myopia and mindlessness so blinding that it conjures up scenarios that go beyond the fiercest partisanship into the realm of insanity. That’s what happens when one views one’s political foe not as a human being with human failings, but as Satan himself. Donald Trump, his innumerable foibles notwithstanding, is not Satan. .... (more)

Peter Savodnik, "Don’t Fall for the Partisan Trap," The Free Press, July 15, 2024.

Enlightened critics and the unwashed masses

I continue to be a big fan of The Free Press because it is invariably interesting, tolerant of diverse political and cultural opinion, and intolerant of intolerance. Inevitably I sometimes disagree, but only sometimes. Kat Rosenfield has joined them as a regular "columnist on all things culture." Her first column in that capacity, "How Culture Got Stupid," published today:

Critics used to agree that the purpose of art is to explore what is true, not to model what is proper. But...a new breed of cultural commentator was gestating—one for whom art was understood less as a truth-seeking enterprise than as a vehicle for moral instruction. ....

The tenets of the new cultural criticism were as follows:

• All art was political, and always had been;
• Art with the wrong politics caused harm, especially to women and people of color;
• And all art must be analyzed through the lens of power, privilege, and progressive pieties.

The whole thing had a frantically performative vibe that bordered on the evangelical—with journalists in the role of the youth pastor palpably desperate to keep you going to church. ....

It was inevitable that a rift would emerge between the enlightened critics and the unwashed masses who, as it turned out, would rather not undergo mandatory DEI training every time they turn on the television. The one-two punches of #MeToo followed by BLM only widened it.

Today, there’s often a hilarious mismatch between how normie audiences receive a film versus how it’s reviewed by critics, one most clearly visible on the site Rotten Tomatoes. ....

...[T]he media’s offense-takers enjoy outsize influence—so Hollywood, always a liberal bastion, has increasingly come to see itself as a moral authority. The result is observable, as the complex and provocative stories of the peak TV era have given way to something far more pious, dutiful, dull, and shrill. ....

But don’t we want more? To laugh, to cry, to be thrilled, to be moved? To lose ourselves in a story we haven’t heard before, and to decide for ourselves what it means? .... Despite the strange takeover of my chosen field by tasteless scolds, I still believe there’s nothing better than a story that grabs you and won’t let go. So from now on, you’ll find me writing about all things culture regularly here at The Free Press. ....

Kat Rosenfield, "How Culture Got Stupid," The Free Press, July 13, 2024.

"I will not fail thee nor forsake thee"

In a post at Commentary, Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik quotes from a speech President Reagan delivered at Arlington National Cemetery on on Veterans Day in 1985:

The living have a responsibility to remember the conditions that led to the wars in which our heroes died. Perhaps we can start by remembering this: that all of those who died for us and our country were, in one way or another, victims of a peace process that failed; victims of a decision to forget certain things; to forget, for instance, that the surest way to keep a peace going is to stay strong. Weakness, after all, is a temptation—it tempts the pugnacious to assert themselves—but strength is a declaration that cannot be misunderstood. Strength is a condition that declares actions have consequences. Strength is a prudent warning to the belligerent that aggression need not go unanswered. ....

Peace also fails when we forget to bring to the bargaining table God’s first gift to man: common sense. Common sense gives us a realistic knowledge of human beings and how they think, how they live in the world, what motivates them. Common sense tells us that man has magic in him, but also clay. Common sense can tell the difference between right and wrong. Common sense forgives error, but it always recognizes it to be error first. ....

Peace fails when we forget to pray to the source of all peace and life and happiness. I think sometimes of General Matthew Ridgeway, who, the night before D-day, tossed sleepless on his cot and talked to the Lord and listened for the promise that God made to Joshua: “I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.”… Let us make a compact today with the dead, a promise in the words for which General Ridgeway listened, “I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.”

Meir Y. Soloveichik, "I Will Not Fail Thee Nor Forsake Thee," Commentary, July/August, 2024.

No further left

Joseph Epstein, reviewing Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism:

By the end of the 1920s, the various organizations had coalesced into the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). What would entice one to join this American communist party? Idealism expressing itself as a yearning for the best of all good societies. A hatred of capitalism, viewed as a brutally exploitative economic system. Or, perhaps, an incident in the wider culture, such as the 1921 Sacco and Vanzetti murder trial, which roused many to the defense of the two Italian-immigrant political anarchists charged with killing a factory guard and a paymaster during the robbery of a Massachusetts shoe factory. Then there is the general challenge, first noted by George Orwell, that those on the political left often feel from people to the left of them: that they are too timid in their views, are not really on the bus, are themselves part of the problem. Communism provided the comfort that one couldn’t go any further left.

For that slender minority of Americans who did go over to Communism (the membership of the CPUSA peaked at around 75,000 in 1947), it was a rocky ride. .... “If the history of American Communism is a narrative of conversion and faith,” he writes, “it is also one of disenchantment and apostasy.” People wandered in and out of the party, others hovered just outside—so-called fellow travelers—but never actually joined. “Communism was an adopted and embattled faith,” the author observes, “and, as such, often precariously held.” ....

The Communist Party of America was never more than a branch office of Soviet Communism, and rather a minor branch office at that. (Both the French and Italian Communist parties were more potent than the American party in the sense of affecting their countries’ mainstream politics.) The chief problem that Soviet communism presented to American communists was the requirement to toe the line—and a most jagged, not to say crooked, line it often turned out to be.

There was the Soviet Union’s break with, and eventual assassination of, Leon Trotsky, a figure much admired by many American Communists. There was the Nazi-Soviet pact on the eve of World War II, through which Stalin promised nonaggression while Hitler invaded his European neighbors and the two dictators fatefully (and secretly) agreed to divvy up Poland. There were the Moscow Trials, during which once-revered old-line Russian Communists were put on trial by Stalin’s secret police, found guilty and executed for treason. There was Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret speech,” during which Stalin’s successor as Soviet leader seemed to do an about-face, describing and acknowledging the monstrous crimes of the recently deceased Stalin. Then there was the brutal Soviet suppression of a rebellion in Hungary later that year, and (12 years later) a similar attack against restive Czechoslovakians. Through all this and more, members of the American Communist Party had to adjust to sudden ideological shifts if they were to remain in the party. ....

More interesting than the party’s leaders are those peripheral figures, some party members, others fellow travelers—Paul Robeson, the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Whittaker Chambers, I.F. Stone, Clancy Sigal, Angela Davis and many others—extollers and victims of communism alike. ....

Joseph Epstein, "‘Reds’ Review: Communism in the U.S.A.," Wall Street Journal, July 5, 2024.

Independence Day

 

A solemn and perilous circumstance

On Independence Day in 1862 Frederick Douglass delivered an address in Himrod, New York. This is only a small selection of passages from that rather long speech:

FELLOW CITIZENS: Eighty-six years ago the fourth of July was consecrated and distinguished among all the days of the year as the birthday, of American liberty and Independence. The fathers of the Republic recommended that this day be celebrated with joy and gladness by the whole American people, to their latest posterity. Probably not one of those fathers ever dreamed that this hallowed day could possibly be made to witness the strange and portentous Events now transpiring before our eyes, and which even now cast a cloud of more than midnight blackness over the face of the whole country. We are the observers of strange and fearful transactions. ....

Never was this national anniversary celebrated in circumstances more trying, more momentous, more solemn and perilous, than those by which this nation is now so strongly environed. We present to the world at this moment, the painful spectacle of a great nation, undergoing all the bitter pangs of a gigantic and bloody revolution. We are torn and rent asunder, we are desolated by large and powerful armies of our own kith and kin, converted into desperate and infuriated rebels and traitors, more savage, more fierce and brutal in their modes of warfare, than any recognized barbarians making no pretensions to civilization. ....

Men have strange notions now[a]days as to the manner of showing their respect for the heroes of the past. They everywhere prefer the form to the substance, the seeming to the real. .... Nevertheless, I would not even in words do violence to the grand events, and thrilling associations, that gloriously cluster around the birth of our national Independence. There is no need of any such violence. The thought of today and the work of today, are alike linked, and interlinked with the thought and work of the past. The conflict between liberty and slavery, between civilization and barbarism, between enlightened progress and stolid indifference and inactivity is the same in all countries, in all ages, and among all peoples. Your fathers drew the sword for free and independent Government, Republican in its form, Democratic in its spirit, to be administered by officers duly elected by the free and unbought suffrages of the people; and the war of today on the part of the loyal north, the east and the west, is waged for the same grand and all commanding objects. We are only continuing the tremendous struggle, which your fathers, and my fathers began eighty-six years ago. ....

FELLOW CITIZENS: let me say in conclusion. This slavery begotten and slavery sustained, and slavery animated war. has now cost this nation more than a hundred thousand lives, and more than five hundred millions of treasure. It has weighed down the national heart with sorrow and heaviness, such as no speech can portray. It has cast a doubt upon the possibility of liberty and self Government which it will require a century to remove. .... I have told you of great national Opportunities in the past; a greater [one] than any in the past is the opportunity of the present. If now we omit the duty it imposes, steel our hearts against its teachings, or shrink in cowardice from the work of today, your fathers will have fought and bled in vain to establish free Institutions, and American Republicanism will become a hissing and a by-word to a mocking earth. (the entire address)

Frederick Douglass, "The Slaveholders’ Rebellion: An Address Delivered in Himrod’s, New York, on July 4, 1862"

A favorite mystery

A post at the Facebook group "Golden Age Detection" (a private group, you would have to join to read) enthuses about one of my favorite mysteries:

...[I]gnore the movie read the book.

Anthony Gethryn, MacDonald's sleuth is typical and old school but still fascinates. He is English in the way that I like to think of the English of that era. He suits my imagination. I love how he thinks, how he reacts, how he adores his wife, how he is always the smartest person in the room, and how he's filthy rich enough to indulge whatever whim he has but doesn't overdo it. I also love that he can be brave and ruthless. He has no fault. My kind of guy. ....

(Gethryn shows up in my second favorite mystery thriller too, by the way. MacDonald's The Nursemaid Who Disappeared aka Warrant For X.)

Don't know how else to say it: the plot of The List of Adrian Messenger (and has there ever been a better title for a thriller? Well, besides The 39 Steps, that is.) is brilliant. ....

Behind the scenes mass murder on the grandest of scales. A pitiless killer who almost gets away with a cunningly contrived plan if not for a small list of names handed over to a friend by a researching writer who never realizes his own danger — I think he regards the thing as an intellectual exercise. The dreadful audacity of the killer is dazzling if not mind-numbing.

The ending is as ruthlessly efficient as it has to be. ....

My enthusiasm for Philip MacDonald knows no boundaries. Give his work a look, and see what you think. ....

I agree. I also agree that Warrant for X is almost as good. The illustration is of my copy.