Maverick Philosopher

Dinesh D'Souza on our Incipient Police State

Here, with a link to a trailer of his new movie.

............................

'Terrorist' is experiencing semantic spread. 

It emerged in the Congressional FBI whistleblower hearings that the abbreviation '2A' is a "terrorist marker." That came as news to me. (But see here.) I have been using '2A' from time to time as an innocuous abbreviation of 'Second Amendment.'  The context, of course, is the Bill of Rights which are the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution.

I have written sentences like this:

2A does not confer, but protects, the citizen's right to keep and bear arms.

My use of the harmless abbreviation makes me a terrorist, a white supremacist, and what all else in the eyes of the regime.  What does it make the regime? A police state.

So I suppose it is a good thing that it has been a very long time since I attended a Latin mass. These masses, as is now well-known, are notorious gathering points for insurrectionists, militiamen, and other violent extremists out to overthrow 'democracy.'  Much less known, however, is that these masses are conducted, not in old Church Latin, but in coded Latin.  Thus hoc est corpus meum is code for create mayhem. De mortuis resurrexit means: he rose up and committed insurrection.  There really are very few threats to the powers that be stronger and more insidious than the Latin mass, which is why Pope Francis, that faithful custodian of the depositum fidei, is such a staunch defender of the old mass against the forces of reform.

Sarcasm aside, part of understanding  the destructive Left is understanding their commitment to the hermeneutics of suspicion.  You can learn about said hermeneutics, and cognate topics, from my essay From Democrat to Dissident section 16.4. It is published in Hillman and Borland, eds., Dissident Philosophers: Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy, Rowman and Littlefield, 2021.  Available via Amazon where you can read some editorial reviews.

UPDATE (10/19). Serious punch-back against demento-totalitarian police-state scumbaggery may be coming Spartacus style:

Something intriguing is happening with bitcoin.  What started as a series of perplexing data “inscriptions” containing classified files from the U.S. government has now been confirmed by Bitcoin Magazine as an ongoing effort to cement information in the public record beyond the reach of government censorship.

An anonymous guardian of free speech has begun using bitcoin to republish all of the information originally published by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks back in 2010.  Codenamed “Project Spartacus,” the operation seeks to take advantage of several inherent bitcoin attributes:

[. . .]

Project Spartacus is just the beginning.  Imagine new social media networks built from decentralized blockchains of information.  Imagine an entirely new internet operating beyond the reach of corporate search engines, regulated addresses, and government permissions.  With no corporation in control of the networks or in singular possession of communicated data on privately held servers, the problem of State-directed censorship disappears.  No longer could corporate oligarchs operate in concert with government dictators to silence public dissent and magnify government propaganda.  No longer would it matter what the Marxist Globalists at Facebook or Google think is true — or what they think should be falsely presented as truth — once ordinary people have a dependable workaround technology that allows them to share information free from Big Brother’s menacing intervention.

Discreetly shared samizdat has returned.  It will soon run on decentralized blockchain.

Roberto Rossellini's Socrates

Substack latest.

The philosopher at the hour of death.

"Not Hung Up on the Completion Thing"

In grad school  I knew people who fit the above description. I used to joke about them ending up graduate student emeriti.  Desultory and undisciplined, and allowed to take incompletes in their courses, they took them in spades. And so the above line from The Big Chill (1983) stuck with me.

William Hurt has died at age 71. Here he is in a memorable scene from that memorable movie.

The Enigmatic B. Traven and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Substack latest.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Seder Scene in "Crimes and Misdemeanors"

"Crimes and Misdemeanors" is Woody Allen's masterpiece. Here is the Seder scene.

Addendum 8/26

The scene ends with Saul saying "If necessary, I will always choose God over the truth."  It works cinematically, but it is a philosophically lame response to the atheist Aunt May. It is lame because Saul portrays the theist as one who self-deceivingly embraces consolatory fictions despite his knowledge that they are fictions. Saul might have plausibly replied along one or both of the following lines.

1) It cannot be true that there is no God, since without God there is no truth.  The existence of truth presupposes the existence of God. Truth is the state of a mind in contact with reality. No minds, no truth. But there are infinitely many truths, including infinitely many necessary truths. The infinity of truths and the necessity of some them require for their ultimate support and repository an  infinite and necessary mind. "And this all men call God." So if there is no God, then there is no truth, in which case one cannot prefer truth over God in the manner of Aunt May.

Nietzsche understood this very well. He saw that the death of God is the death of truth. He concluded that there is no truth, but only  the competing perspectives of mutually antagonistic power-centers.

Now the above is a mere bloggity-blog sketch. Here is a more rigorous treatment.

2) Saul might also have challenged Aunt May as follows:

You say that it is true that there is no God, that there is no moral world-order, that might makes right, and so on. You obviously think that it is important that we face up to these truths and stop fooling ourselves.  You obviously think that there is something morally disreputable about cultivating illusions and stuffing the heads of the young with them, that morally one ought not do these things.  But what grounds this moral ought that you plainly think binds all of us and not just you?  Does it just hang in the air, so to speak? And if it does, whence its objective bindingness or 'deontic tug'?  Can you ultimately make sense of objective moral oughts and ought-nots on the naturalistic scheme you seem to be presupposing?  Won't you have to make at least a Platonic ascent in the direction of the Good?  If so, how will you stop the further ascent to the Good as self-existent and thus as  God?

Or look at this way, May. You think it is a value that we face reality, a reality that for you is Godless, even if  facing what you call reality does not contribute to our flourishing but in fact contributes to the opposite.  But how could something be a value for us if it impedes our flourishing? Is it not ingredient in the concept of value that a value to be what it is must be a value for the valuer? So even if it is true that there is no God, no higher destiny for humans, that life is in the end absurd, how could it be a value for us to admit these truths if truths they be?  So what are you getting so worked up over, sister? I have just pulled the rug out from under your moral enthusiasm!

Ted Kennedy's Car

In this Age of Feeling, fact-based cogent arguments have little effect on the febrile pates of liberals. So one needs to supplement calm reasoning with bumperstickers, invective, and contumely, not that 'contumely' is a word one could expect a liberal to understand. And so, for your viewing enjoyment, I present:

Of course, cars don't kill people; people kill people with cars. Ergo, etc. Therein lies the brilliance of the bumpersticker.

If you are not aware of the backstory, see the movie Chappaquiddick. It is supposed to come out in April.

Read the lovable and avuncular Howie Carr's Boston Herald review.

And another thing. Liberals who are presently 'storming' over Trump's sexual excesses ought to look in the mirror and take responsibility for their 'normalizing' of such behavior by their complaisance over the sexual predation of the Kennedy brothers, not to mention that of Bill Clinton with the acquiescence of his hilarious enabler.

Liberals who have made our trash culture should not be surprised by the Trump phenomenon.

Addenda

1. I said above that cars don't kill people. Qualification: unless they are self-driving.  A recent case in Tempe, Arizona.
2. I forgot to protest the restriction and demonetization of Prager U videos by Google and YouTube.  If you watch these vidoes and find them in any way offensive or worthy of censure, then you are intellectually obtuse, morally defective, liberal-left filth. 

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Double Indemnity, 1944

I took a welcome break from the cable shout shows and the gun 'conversation' the other night to watch the 1944 film noir Double Indemnity, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson.  The Stanwyck character talks an insurance agent played by MacMurray into murdering her husband in order to collect on a double indemnity policy. 

The husband is strangled mafia-style, murderer in back seat, victim in front.  But the act is not shown.  The viewer is shown enough to 'get the picture.'  These old films had sex and violence but one's nose wasn't rubbed in them.  Sex and violence were  part of the story line.  If Bogie was shown taking the leading lady into a bedroom, one knew what was about to transpire, but one was spared the raw hydraulics of it.

But thanks to 'progressives' we've made 'progress.'  Much of what passes as 'entertainment' today is meant to demean, dehumanize, degrade, and undermine whatever moral sense is left in people.  I leave it to you to decide whether Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook . . . Parkland and like atrocities are more appropriately charged to the account  of liberal culture rather than to that of gun culture.

You know my answer.

We ought to demand of Hollywood dreckmeisters that they clean up their act and curtail their cultural pollution.  Not that these scumbags would ever show any social responsibility.

Did I Watch the Oscars?

Of course not. I don't watch garbage like that. Part of my motive, I suspect, is that I do not want to be reminded of how sick we are collectively becoming.

I now hand off to Rod Dreher, Triumph of the Freaks.

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The Case for Christ

As cinema and story-telling, The Case for Christ  leaves something to be desired. But if ideas are your thing, then this movie may hold your attention as it held mine.  It will help if you are at least open to the possibility that Christ rose from the dead. 

The review in Christianity Today is worth reading, but the anti-intellectual tenor of the following bit stuck in my craw:

Alas, all that goes out the window when it comes time for the portions of the film that actually make the case for Christ. It is beyond the scope of a film review to evaluate the specific arguments and assumptions articulated by the people whom Strobel interviews, but regardless of their rhetorical and historical merits, the apologetics sequences make for bad cinema and bad storytelling. Periodically, the domestic melodrama and character development come to a screeching halt, superseded by enormous chunks of exposition that work better on a page than on a screen.

Gunn does his best to stage the interviews in an interesting way, but the results are nonetheless stilted, sometimes comically so. (A conversation with a medical professional, for example, is set in a laboratory with lots of doctors milling about, doing vaguely science-y things while ignoring the reporter who is distracting their boss with questions about the Crucifixion.) The audience is left with little to do other than twiddle their thumbs while they wait for the story to start rolling again.

Twiddle their thumbs? Are you serious?  That part of the flick raised in a graphic way the issue of whether the Swoon Hypothesis holds any water, and to my mind, showed that it doesn't.  To hell with story-telling.  The best parts of the movie were the apologetics sequences.

But if you are looking for entertainment, or think that a man's relation with his wife is of more importance that the question of the Resurrection, then you should stay away from this movie. 

Scorsese's Silence

A review by Brad Miner. Excerpt:

As the book reaches its climax, Rodrigues feels the sand giving way beneath him:

From the deepest core of my being yet another voice made itself heard in a whisper. Supposing God does not exist. . . .

This was a frightening fancy. . . .What an absurd drama become the lives of [the martyrs] Mokichi and Ichizo, bound to the stake and washed by the waves. And the missionaries who spent three years crossing the sea to arrive at this country – what an illusion was theirs. Myself, too, wandering here over the desolate mountains – what an absurd situation!

Scorsese’s Silence is not a Christian film by a Catholic filmmaker, but a justification of faithlessness: apostasy becomes an act of Christian charity when it saves lives, just as martyrdom becomes almost satanic when it increases persecution. “Christ would have apostatized for the sake of love,” Ferreira tells Rodrigues, and, obviously, Scorsese agrees.

................

Related: John Paul Meenan, Martyrs Know that Apostasy Cannot be Justified

Meenan quotes an amazing passage from Newman's Apologia which is highly relevant to my thoughts in War, Torture, and the Aporetics of Moral Rigorism. Here is the passage:

The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful [sic] untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.

UPDATE (12/28).

Tully Borland points us to The Sinister Theology of Endo's SILENCE.  A good article, but a bit smug and pat for my taste.  The author seems not to appreciate the moral bind Rodrigues is in. A topic to be explored in a separate entry.

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Not everything in the NYT is leftist crap.  The new Scorsese effort is based on the novel “Silence,” by Shusaku Endo.

My copy should be arriving today.  A tip of the hat to Karl White for informing me of it.

“The novel poses a very profound theological question,” Peter C. Phan, a Jesuit theologian at Georgetown who was born in Vietnam, told me. “The question is this: Are we allowed to do an essentially evil act to obtain a good result?

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Robert De Niro . . .

. . . must be getting some 'Mean Tweets' along about now over his attack on Donald Trump.

I've admired De Niro as an actor ever since Martin Scorsese's 1973 Mean Streets.  

Now actors and actresses have a right to their political opinions, but I can't see that most of them have a right to their high opinion of their political opinions.  I wrote the following in June of 2013:

The encomia continue to pour in on the occasion of the passing of James Gandolfini.  'Tony Soprano' died young at 51, apparently of a heart attack, while vacationing in Italy.  Given the subtlety of The Sopranos it would be unfair to say that Gandolfini wasted his talent portraying  a scumbag  and glorifying criminality, and leave it at that.    But I wonder if people like him and De Niro and so many others give any thought to the proper use of their brief time on earth. 

It's at least a question: if you have the talents of an actor or a novelist or a screen writer or a musician, should you have any moral scruples about playing to the basest sides of human nature?  Are we so corrupted now that this is the only way to turn a buck in the arts?

Related:  

Advice for Hollywood Liberals

Why are Actors and Actresses Held in Such Low Esteem?

Robert De Niro Calls Jon Voight 'Delusional' Over Support for Trump

Has political disagreement ever been worse in these United States?  Well, yes, during the Civil War.  So it could be worse.  But keep your powder dry.

The Enigmatic B. Traven and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Do you know who he is? I found out only recently, which I suppose is fitting given the man's Pynchon- and Salinger-like desire for obscurity. A while back, I caught the last half-hour of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, classic celluloid from 1948 starring Humphrey Bogart and John Huston. The Wikipedia article on The Treasure sent me to an entry on B. Traven who wrote the German novel, Der Schatz der Sierra Madre, on which the movie is based. Now you know the rest of the story.

They don't make movies like this any more. HollyWeird liberals don't know how. They'll snow you with meaningless special effects and gratuitous sex and violence in every possible permutation, but they are well-nigh incapable of delivering decent dialog, or stories of human interest, let alone stories that illustrate philosophical themes or raise philosophical or moral questions.  The exceptions prove the rule.

One issue raised by The Treasure of the Sierra Madre concerns the status of moral conscience. Is it merely a social construct whose validity evaporates in the wilderness? Or is it a source of trans-cultural moral insight? In one scene, Dobbs, the Bogie character, tells his young partner, Curtin, that he "sounds foolish out in this wilderness" airing his Sunday-School scruples about cheating the old man (the Huston character) of his supplies and gold. Later, after shooting Curtin and leaving him for dead, Dobbs wrestles with his conscience while trying to fall asleep. "If you believe you have a conscience, then it will pester you to death. If you don't believe you have a conscience, what can it do to you?"

The issue, of course, is not whether one believes one has a conscience, for one can believe that one does without believing that conscience is a source of moral knowledge.  One might hold that the conscience one has is merely a product of acculturation and that its 'deliverances' don't deliver any objective truths about the moral order, but merely reflect upbringing.  The line should go like this, "If you believe conscience is a source of objective moral insight, then it will pester you to death.  If you don't believe that it is such a source, what can it do to  you?"  Unfortunately, screen writers, even back in the '40s didn't write like this.  Too philosophical!

There is a nihilistic streak in far too many liberals and leftists which makes them want to pander to the basest instincts in people. So if a HollyWeird liberal were to re-make this film, Dobb's shooting of Curtin would be probably shown in gory detail so as to incite blood lust. In the actual film, the shooting is not shown; only the upshot is: we see a wounded man in the dirt. For only the latter is needed for the story. This was the way things were done until about the time of Peckinpah in the '60s. But the nihilists of the Left are not interested in a human story, they are interested in degrading people in order to line their own pockets. Of course, they will hide behind their right to 'free expression' as if this justified anything and everything.

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Ron Radosh on Trumbo

Here.  Excerpts:

The film presents [Dalton] Trumbo as a hero and martyr for free speech, a principled rich Communist who nevertheless stands firm, sells his beautiful ranch for a “modest” new house in Los Angeles, and survives by writing film scripts -- most run of the mill but some major films (such as the Academy Award-winning Roman Holiday) -- using a “front” who pretended to be the writer.

[. . .]

While Trumbo was an interesting and colorful character, the film gives us the story of the Communists and the blacklist in the mold of the Ten’s own propaganda book published after their HUAC appearances. The book is Hollywood on Trial, which portrayed them as advocates of free speech who were defending the American Constitution, civil liberties, and American freedom itself.

[. . .]

In presenting this rosy picture, Trumbo avoids dealing with the actual nature of Communism and the role played by the CPUSA in Hollywood in the 1940s. It shows Trumbo and the others of the Ten who invoked the First Amendment as unadulterated heroes, and contrasts them with a group of nasty and brutish anti-Communist villains, including Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, Roy Brewer, two conservative groups that supported a blacklist and opposed the Communists, and virtually all those in Hollywood who opposed Communism.

[. . .]

Trumbo was no defender of free speech. He was a serious Communist and a defender of Stalin and the Soviet Union.

[. . .]

He could not have claimed innocence of Stalin’s crimes. In 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev’s speech about Stalin to a Party Congress, he told an old friend of his that he was not surprised, because he had read George Orwell, Koestler, James Burnham, Eugene Lyons and Isaac Don Levine, authors who told the truth about Soviet totalitarianism. In other words, Trumbo supported Stalin while knowing at the time that “Uncle Joe” was a monster and murderer.

[. . .]

Moreover, as the blacklist came to an end, Trumbo had time to reevaluate much of what he believed that led him to join the Communist Party. When my wife and I were doing research for our book Red Star Over Hollywood, we came across an article Trumbo had written but never published.

In this 1958 article, Trumbo told some frank truths about the Party -- truths which eventually led him to quit. You would never suspect this from Roach’s film. There is nothing about the Party accusing him of “white chauvinism” -- in today’s terms, racism. The CP, he told one old comrade, threw “a bucket of filth over me.” Moreover, he wrote that the Ten did not “perform historic deeds,” but took part “in a circus orchestrated by CP lawyers, all to save [ourselves] from punishment.”

He concluded that the blacklist took place not only because of the Committee, but because of the antics of the CP itself. In this article, he wrote that “the question of a secret Communist Party lies at the very heart of the Hollywood blacklist,” which is why Americans believed the Communists had something to hide. They lived in the United States, not Stalin’s U.S.S.R., and should have openly proclaimed their views and membership so that the American people could judge them for what they believed. Instead, they formed secret Leninist cells. The CPUSA should have been open and its members all known, he wrote, or the Communists in Hollywood should “not have been members at all.”

A Pawn Sacrifice

Despite the lukewarm reviews, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie.  But then I am a chess player who lived through the Fischer era and who remembers that far-off summer of '72 when Caissa and Mars colluded to give a chess match geopolitical significance.

Boris Spassky had the support of the Soviet state; Fischer stood alone, his sole state support consisting in a phone call from Nixon's Secretary of State Henry Kissinger urging him to play.  In some Cold War calculus there is perhaps a computation of the contribution of Fischer's victory to the ultimate demise of the Evil Empire.  

Who is Caissa, you ask?

Caissa is the "patron goddess" of chess players.

She was created in a poem called Caïssa written in 1763 by English poet and philologist Sir William Jones.

In the poem, the god Mars falls in love with the goddess Caissa, portrayed as a Thracian dryad. Caissa rebuffs his advances and suggests he take solace in the company of the god Euphron—the god of sport. After hearing Mars' laments, Euphron

...fram'd a tablet of celestial mold,
Inlay'd with squares of silver and of gold; 
Then of two metals form'd the warlike band, 
That here compact in show of battle stand; 
He taught the rules that guide the pensive game, 
And call'd it Caissa from the dryad's name: 
(Whence Albion's sons, who most its praise confess, 
Approv'd the play, and nam'd it thoughtful Chess.)

Mars then presents the game of chess to Caissa in an attempt to win her affection.

Jones' work was inspired by the poem Scacchia ludus ("The game of Chess"), written by Italian poet Marco Girolamo Vida in 1510.

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American Sniper

It's a movie I haven't seen.  I have no strong desire see it.  I understand the principle; why do I need to rub my nose in the details?  I know what a sniper is and I know what he does.  It is an awful world in which snipers are needed, but they are, and they do a job that few of us could do. Could you put a high-powered round through the head of a child who was about to be sent on a suicide mission?  I am not referring primarily to the mechanics of getting off a good clean shot that hits its target from a great distance after you have been lying in the weeds for hours in a war zone.  I am talking about bearing the psychological burden.  

There are two extremes to avoid: the bellicose jingoism of the my-country-right-or-wrong types and the knee-jerk, hate-America mentality of moral equivalentists and blame-America-firsters.  If the brunt of my scorn in these pages is aimed at the latter, it is because they are in the ascendancy and need it more.Think of it as akin to a quasi-Kierkegaardian 'corrective' to quasi-Hegelian excesses.

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A Most Wanted Man

A Most Wanted Man, based on the John le Carre novel and starring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, was well worth the two hours I invested in it this morning. Some critics called it slow-moving.  Why? Because it is thoughtful and thought-provoking with no unnecessary action or gratuitous sex and violence or mindless special effects?  Most movies are garbage made for the consumption of morons, like the trailers I had to sit through; but not all.

Here is a good review by John Kass.

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Friday Cat Blogging: Inside Llewyn Davis

To Scottsdale this drizzly dreary dark December morning to see the Coen Bros. latest on its opening hereabouts, Inside Llewyn Davis.    A tale of two kitties is a sub-motif that symbolizes the self-destructive folksinger's troubles, but it would take a couple more viewings for me to figure it out.

The film gripped me and held me its entire running length, but then I lived through that era and I know the music and its major and minor players.  Figuring out the the cinematic references and allusions is part of the fun.  Tom Paxton, Albert Grossmann, Jim and Jean, The Clancy Brothers, Bob Dylan . . . they are all there -- or are they?  

A distinction is made between purely fictional objects (native objects) and immigrant objects: historical individuals that have been imported into fiction from reality.   Many of the characters in the Coen Bros. film seem to belong to a third category.  They are not wholly unreal like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or lightly fictionalized individuals like many of the characters in Kerouac's novels, but fictional surrogates of real-life individuals.  For example, there is a character who suggests Tom Paxton, but could not be said unambiguously to represent him, pace Dave van Ronk's ex-wife who writes, in a critical review, "The character who represents Tom Paxton has a pasted-on smile and is a smug person who doesn't at all resemble the smart, funny, witty Tom Paxton who was our best man when we married." 

Ann Hornaday's Washington Post review ends brilliantly:

In many ways, “Inside Llewyn Davis” plays like a waking nightmare of creeping anxiety and dread, as the era’s grandmaster of brazen self-invention arrives unseen in New York while Llewyn’s self-defeating near-misses pile up like so much street-sullied snow. But this soulful, unabashedly lyrical film is best enjoyed by sinking into it like a sweet, sad dream. When you wake up, a mythical place and time will have disappeared forever. But you’ll know that attention — briefly, beautifully — has been paid.

The era's grandmaster of brazen self-invention is of course Bob Dylan, who blew into town that bitter winter of '61 and who in a few short years brought about a sort of Hegelian Aufhebung of the folk era: its simultaneous cancellation, preservation, and transmogrification into the heart of the '60s as represented by the trilogy of Dylan at his most incandescent: Bringing it It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited,  Blonde on Blonde.

It's all Over Now, Baby Blue from the the first-mentioned album perhaps sounds the theme of cultural shift.

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Big Sur, the Movie

It debuted hereabouts in Scottsdale this morning at 11:00 AM at Harkins 14.  There were exactly three souls in attendance, mine included.  Beautifully done and especially moving for this native Californian Kerouac aficionado who knows the book and the road and the bridge and the views and has had his own remarkable experiences at Big Sur.  Gazing out at the Pacific  over 40 years ago I felt as if locked into the same nunc stans that I had glimpsed a few months before at Playa del Rey on the southern California coast.  Nature in the extremity of her beauty has the power to unhinge the soul from the doorjambs of what passes for sanity.

The NYT review is well done.

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Beethoven, Billy Bob, and Peggy Lee

The Man Who Wasn't There is one of my favorite movies, and the best of Ludwig van Beethoven is as good as classical music gets.  So enjoy the First Movement of the Moonlight Sonata to the masterful cinematography of the Coen Brothers.

Here is the final scene of the movie.  Ed Crane's last words:

I don't know where I'm being taken.  I don't know what I'll find beyond the earth and sky.  But I am not afraid to go.  Maybe the things I don't understand will be clearer there, like when a fog blows away.  Maybe Doris will be there. And maybe there I can tell her all those things they don't have words for here.

That is the way I see death, as an adventure into a dimension in which we might come to understand what we cannot understand here, a movement from night and fog into the clear light of day.  It is a strange idea, I admit, the idea that only by dying can one come into possession of essential knowledge. But no more strange  than the idea that  death leaves the apparent absurdity of our existence unredeemed, a sentiment expressed in Peggy Lee's 1969 Is That All There Is?

Perhaps no other popular song achieves the depth of this Leiber and Stoller composition inspired by the 1896 story Disillusionment (Enttäuschung) by Thomas Mann.

Hannah Arendt

I saw the movie Hannah Arendt this afternoon. I thought it well worth my time despite the bad reviews it received.  Critics complained about the clunky portrayal of New York intellectuals and the hagiographic depiction of Arendt, but those faults and others escaped me immersed as I was in the ideas.  The movie is about Arendt's coverage for The New Yorker of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and the bitter controversy that erupted among the magazine's readership upon the publication of an article series by Arendt on the trial.

The Tikkun review and the one in The Paris Review are very well done.  Here is a trailer.  And here is an hour-long interview with Arendt in German with English subtitles. 

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Roberto Rosselini's Socrates

It was my good fortune to happen across  Rosselini's Socrates the night before last, Good Friday night, on Turner Classic Movies.  From 1971, in Italian with English subtitles.  I tuned in about 15 minutes late, but it riveted my attention until the end.  It is full of excellent, accurate dialog based on the texts of Plato that record Socrates' last sayings and doings.  I was easily able to recognize material from the Platonic dialogues Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and the immortal Phaedo.  The dialog moves fast, especially in Italian, and near the end it was difficult to read the fast moving subtitles through  eyes filled with tears.

One ought to meditate on the fact that the two greatest teachers of the West, and two great teachers of humanity, Socrates and Jesus, were unjustly executed by the State.  This is something contemporary  liberals, uncritical in their belief in the benevolence of government, ought especially to consider. 

 

My eyes glued to the TV, I was struck by how Socratic my own attitude toward life and death is.  Death is not to be feared, but is to be prepared for and embraced as a portal to knowledge.  It is the ultimate adventure for the truth seeker. It is not unreasonable to suppose that it is such a portal even though we cannot know it to be so in this life.  There is no dogmatism in the Socratic wisdom: its incarnation does not claim to know here what can only be known, if it will be known, there.  He is an inquirer, not an ideologue defending an institutional status quo. The point of the arguments recorded in the Phaedo, and partially rehearsed in the movie, is to persuade sincere truth seekers of the reasonableness of the philosopher's faith, not to prove what cannot be proven, and especially not to benighted worldlings who care little about truth, smug worldlings whose hearts and minds have been suborned by their love of power and money and the pleasures of the flesh.

His friends want the seventy-year-old philosopher to escape and have made preparations. But what could be the point of prolonging one's bodily life after  one has done one's best and one's duty in a world of shadows and ignorance that can offer us really nothing in the end but more of the same?  This vale of soul-making is for making souls: it cannot possibly be our permanent home.  (Hence the moral absurdity of transhumanism which is absurd technologically as well.) Once the soul has exhausted the possibilties of life behind the veil of ignorance and has reached the end of the via dolorosa through this vale of tears then it is time to move on, to nothingness or to something better.

Or perchance to something worse?  Here is where the care of the soul here and now comes in.  Since the soul may live on, one must care for it: one must live justly and strive for the good.  One must seek the knowledge of true being while there is still time lest death catch us unworthy, or worthy only of annihilation or worse.

Socrates' life was his best argument: he taught from his Existenz.  He taught best while the hemlock was being poured and his back was to the wall.  His dialectic was rooted in his life.  His dialectic was not cleverness for the classroom but wisdom for the death chamber.

Whether his life speaks to you or not depends on the kind of person you are,  in keeping with Fichte's famous remark to the effect that the philosophy one chooses depends on the sort of person one is.

Does it matter whether Socrates existed and did the things attributed to him in the Platonic writings?  I don't see that it does.  What alone matters is whether a person here and now can watch a movie like Rossellini's and be moved by it sufficiently to change his own life.  What matters is the Idea and the Ideal.

What matters is whether one can appropriate the Socratic message for oneself as Johann Gottlieb Fichte did in this very Socratic passage from The Vocation of Man (LLA, 150):

Should I be visited by corporeal suffering, pain, or disease, I cannot avoid feeling them, for they are accidents of my nature ; and as long as I remain here below, I am a part of Nature. But they shall not grieve me. They can only touch the nature with which, in a wonderful manner, I am united, not my self, the being exalted above all Nature. The sure end of all pain, and of all sensibility to pain, is death; and of all things which the mere natural man is wont to regard as evils, this is to me the least. I shall not die to myself, but only to others ; to those who remain behind, from whose fellowship I am torn: for myself the hour of Death is the hour of Birth to a new, more excellent life.

 

Related articles

Socrates

To Doctor Empiric

Socrates - Defeater of Chronological Snobbery

Double Indemnity, 1944

I took a welcome break from the cable shout shows and the gun 'conversation' the other night to watch the 1944 film noir Double Indemnity, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson.  The Stanwyck character talks an insurance agent played by MacMurray into murdering her husband in order to collect on a double indemnity policy.  The husband is strangled mafia-style, murderer in back seat, victim in front.  But the act is not shown.  The viewer is shown enough to 'get the picture.'  These old films had sex and violence but one's nose wasn't rubbed in them.  Sex and violence were  part of the story line.  If Bogie was shown taking the leading lady into a bedroom, one knew what was about to transpire, but one was spared the raw hydraulics of it.

But thanks to 'progressives' we've made 'progress.'  Much of what passes as 'entertainment' today is meant to demean, dehumanize, degrade and undermine whatever moral sense is left in people.  I leave it to you to decide whether Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook and like atrocities are more appropriately charged to the account  of liberal culture rather than to that of gun culture.

2016: Obama's America is a Must-See

Even-handed and extremely well-produced, 2016 exposes the anti-colonialist ideology that animates Obama's policy decisions.

According to NPR, "so far, 2016 has made more than nine million dollars. It's already the sixth highest grossing political documentary of all time."  It is even doing well in liberal New York City.  I saw it at 1:30 PM today, Monday, in a Mesa, Arizona, theater that was almost full.  That give me hope that change will come.

Here is a review.

The Obama Movie, 2016

I'll be seeing  it soon.  Here are some remarks on the movie by Thomas Sowell. Excerpts:

It was refreshing to see how addressing adults as adults could be effective, in an age when so many parts of the media address the public as if they were children who need a constant whirlwind of sounds and movements to keep them interested.

That is one of my main objections to the destructive HollyWeird libruls who produce the mindless crap that fill our screens.  I continue in this vein, in only slightly more measured terms, in What I Look For in a Movie: A Rant.

The story of Barack Obama, however, is not just the story of how one man came to be the way he is. It is a much larger story about how millions of Americans came to vote for, and some to idolize, a man whose fundamental beliefs and values are so different from their own.

For every person who sees Obama as somehow foreign there are many others who see him as a mainstream American political figure -- and an inspiring one.

This D'Souza attributes to Barack Obama's great talents in rhetoric, and his ability to project an image that resonates with most Americans, however much that image may differ from, or even flatly contradict, the reality of Obama's own ideological view of the world.

What is that ideological view?

The Third World, or anti-colonial, view is that the rich nations have gotten rich by taking wealth from the poor nations. It is part of a much larger vision, in which the rich in general have gotten rich by taking from the poor, whether in their own country or elsewhere.

Whatever its factual weaknesses, it is an emotionally powerful vision, to which many people have dedicated their lives, and for which some have even risked their lives. Some of these people appear in this documentary movie, as they have appeared throughout the formative phases of Barack Obama's life.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright is just the most visible and vocal of a long line of such people who played crucial roles in Obama's evolution. When Jeremiah Wright thundered about how "white folks' greed runs a world in need," he captured the essence of the Third World or anti-colonial vision.

But many of the other mentors, allies, family and friends of Barack Obama over the years were of the same mindset, as this documentary demonstrates.

More important, the movie "2016" demonstrates how so many of Obama's actions as President of the United States, which D'Souza had predicted on the basis of his study of Obama's background, are perfectly consistent with that ideology, however inconsistent it is with the rhetoric that gained him the highest office in the land.

 

Movie Notes: The History Boys

From the old blog, originally posted 29 December 2006:

Most movies are trash, but not all, as witness The History Boys. It was well worth the drive to Scottsdale yesterday. Anyone serious about the humanities, from either side of the lectern, should enjoy it. It  has much of what I look for in a movie: plenty of wit and intelligence; good dialogue; subtlety and the sort of ambiguity of which real life is replete; little 'action': no race & chase, smash & crash (except for a small bit near the end that had a reason for being there); no special effects of the sort that the crapsters of HollyWeird serve up to satisfy the adolescent needs of the sensation-addicted and stupefied; no gratuitous sex and violence, though there is sex, mainly of the homosexual sort; and perhaps most important, no attempt to manipulate the thoughts and emotions of the viewer. Instead, an entertaining raising of questions and posing of problems.

My favorite line was a quotation from A. E. Housman: "All human knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human  use."

Near the end there is the reasonably pessimistic suggestion that the humanities are dead, at least at the universities. But Hector the humanist's call to "Pass it on!" also comes through. It brought a tear
to this curmudgeon's eye, and a thought to his head: if the universities become inhospitable to the transmission of high culture, then the job will have to be done in venues like this.

Ebeneezer Scrooge and the Limits of Doxastic Voluntarism

Here is my favorite scene from my favorite movie version of Dickens' Christmas Carol.  "There is more of gravy than of grave about you. Humbug!"

Of Gods and Men

This appears to be a movie worth seeing.  Discussion by Rod Dreher in The Gethsemane of the Monks.  Resist not the evildoer and let yourself be slaughtered?

"I Swear, If You Existed, I'd Divorce You."

If the recipient of this insult had been a philosophy professor instead of a mere history  professor, he might have responded as follows.  "Darling, by the Existence Symmetry of Relations, if a relation R holds, then either all of its relata exist or none of them do. Now one cannot divorce a person to whom one is not married.  So you and I stand in the marital relation.  It follows that if I don't exist, then you don't either."

The Man Who Wasn't There

A film of great depth and beauty by the Coen Brothers.  And funny too.

What Do We Have to Teach the Muslim World? Reflections Occasioned by the Death of Maria Schneider

I was one of those who saw "Last Tango in Paris" when it was first released, in 1972.  I haven't seen it since and I don't remember anything specific about it except one scene, the scene you remember too, the 'butter scene,' in which the Marlon Brando character sodomizes the Maria Schneider character.  Maria Schneider died last week at 58 and indications are that her exploitation by Brando and Bertolucci scarred her for life.

Islamic culture is in many ways benighted and backward, fanatical and anti-Enlightenment, but our trash culture is not much better. Suppose you are a Muslim and you look to the West.  What do you see? Decadence.  And an opportunity to bury the West. 

If Muslims think that our decadent culture is what Western values are all about, and something we are trying to impose on them, then we are in trouble.  They do and we are.

Militant Islam's deadly hatred of us should not be discounted as the ravings of lunatics or psychologized away as a reflex of envy at our fabulous success. For there is a kernel of insight in it that we do well to heed. Sayyid Qutb , theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood, who visited the USA at the end of the '40s, writes in Milestones (1965):

     Humanity today is living in a large brothel! One has only to glance
     at its press, films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms,
     wine bars and broadcasting stations! Or observe its mad lust for
     naked flesh, provocative pictures, and sick, suggestive statements
     in literature, the arts, and mass media! And add to all this the
     system of usury which fuels man's voracity for money and engenders
     vile methods for its accumulation and investment, in addition to
     fraud, trickery, and blackmail dressed up in the garb of law.

A wild exaggeration in 1965, the above statement is much less of an exaggeration today. But setting aside the hyperbole, we are in several  ways a sick and decadent society getting worse day by day. On this score, if on no other, we can learn something from our Islamist critics. The fact that a man wants to chop your head off does not mean that he has nothing to teach you.  We often learn more from our enemies than from our friends.  Our friends often will spare us hard truths.

Companion post: What Ever Happened to Linda Lovelace?

George C. Scott as Ebeneezer Scrooge

The best portrayal for my money. My favorite scene: the confrontation with Marley's ghost. "You are bit of undigested beef, a piece of underdone potato. There is more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are." The rattling of Marley's chains puts an end to Ebeneezer's doxastic voluntarism.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: My Darling Clementine

Saw this 1946 movie once again last night.  A heavily fictionalized version of the shootout at the O. K. Corral, it stars Victor Mature as Doc Holliday, Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp and Walter Brennan as Old Man Clanton.  The Mexican cutie's name is 'Chihuahua.'  They don't make 'em like this anymore.

Now enjoy the song from 1884 in both of its versions together with the lyrics.  The second version features the oft-omitted last verse in which the singer, having lost his Clementine to a drowning, finds solace with her little sister.

A Note on Into the Wild, the Movie

Into the Wild, the movie, impressed me and held my attention for its two and a half hours. But I'm understating: it moved me and ought to  be added to my list of most memorable movies, there to rub shoulders with the likes of Zorba the Greek and La Strada. Not that I would rate it as high as those two classics. Here is a reviewer who didn't get it:

Krakauer and Penn see themselves as kindred spirits to McCandless, rugged individualists seeking the fullness of life in nature. And that probably explains why they both attribute McCandless' reckless adventures to a philosophical quest rather than to what appears to be an obvious act of youthful rebellion.

No doubt McCandless was reckless, and his recklessness got him killed. But only someone who is spiritually dead could dismiss McCandless' quest as a mere act of youthful rebellion. The jaded, the security-obsessed, and those devoid of all idealism will find it easy to mock as hyperromantic and melodramatic the posturings of "Alexander Supertramp." But unlike them, the living dead, he was searching for something more, for the Real, for the truth of his existence. Life without a quest for the Real beyond the sham taken-for-real of one's society is just not worth living. Either you see that or you are spiritually blind.

Only someone who, like Krakauer, sees a bit of himself in McCandless will be able to appreciate what was genuine and worthwhile in him. That is one reason why Krakauer's book is so good. I was pleased to see that the movie stays very close to the book.

Most Memorable Movies

Here are my selections. But before I begin, I'll relate a retort of Michael Medved's. Hearing that Roger Ebert had awarded "two thumbs up" to some piece of trash, Medved quipped, "Two thumbs up what?"

1. Casablanca
2. The Seventh Seal
3. La Strada
4. Zorba the Greek
5. Lawrence of Arabia
6. Dr. Zhivago
7. Persona
8. Closely Watched Trains
9. Triumph des Willens
10. Crimes and Misdemeanors
11. Aguirre the Wrath of God
12. The Man Who Wasn't There
13. Blue Velvet
14. Barton Fink
15. Mulholland Drive

How many can you identify by dates, actors, directors?

Superman: The Moral of the Story

George Reeves (1914-1959) was the original 'Superman.' You know the character: "Faster than a speeding bullet . . . ." Reeves was murdered (or was it suicide?) in June of 1959. I remember a comment of my Uncle Ray at the time of Reeves' death: "He could stop other people's bullets, but not his own."

I hope Reeves won't mind it too much if I take moral instruction from the mistakes that killed him. It has long been my policy to let others pay my tuition at the School of Hard Knocks.

Reeves succumbed to sex, booze, and career-identification. It is hard enough to get the sex monkey off your back, but if you allow him to form a tag-team with the booze monkey you have double trouble. But of course I would never say that he was 'addicted' to these two 'monkeys': I believe in free will, self-discipline, self-reliance, and in strengthening one's will by exercising it. With respect to temptations, a good maxim is this: Resistance strengthens; indulgence weakens. And if you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal.

After his first wife left him, he became involved with two women, sequentially, both of whom had it in them to kill him because of jealousy vis-à-vis  the other. The Bard hath said it well, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." Reeves left the first for the second, but near the end was about to return to the first. Both were loose-living, hard-drinking, party animals, especially the second to whom he was drawn like a moth to the flame.

Alcohol fueled the fires of his delusion. Near the end he had become a full-time boozer. Hopelessly type-cast, his career was at an end.

The moral of the story: sex, booze, and worldly ambition are of the devil. But how attractive they are! And how seemingly flat, stale, and boring the life of 'moral virtue.'  And as every leftist 'knows,' morality is but bourgeois ideology and all moral striving but hypocritical posturing.

Evil appears warm and inviting; good, cold and forbidding. Evil seems fascinating and lively; good, boring and dead. Such is the world — in which reality is illusion and illusion reality.

Why Are Actors and Actresses Held in Such Low Esteem?

According to an August 4, 2009 Harris poll, the most prestigious occupation is that of firefighter, while near the bottom of the ranking falls that of actor.  62% of the Americans polled voted for firefighters while only 15% voted for actors.  At the very bottom of the ranking, however, were realtors, who garnered a measly 5% of the vote.

I don't understand why acting should be held in such low esteem.  After all, acting is is not easy to do well, and most of those likely to be polled are familiar with only the very best.  Good acting is not only difficult, but also very enriching to all our lives.  Consider Martin Landau's work in Woody Allen's masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanors or Meryl Streep's performance in Sophie's Choice. Those are great movies and the actors in such movies make a profound contribution to the quality of our lives.   This is not to deny that most movies are worthless and that many great actors such as Robert De Niro waste their talents on worthless roles in worthless movies. 

So why should acting be held in low esteem?  But perhaps it is not acting but actors who are held in low esteem.  Perhaps it is not actors qua actors who are held in low esteem, but the people who act.  What I am suggesting, as a possible explanation of the fact of acting's low rating relative to other professions, is that the people polled conflate actors qua actors with the people who are actors, and project their dislike for these people onto their occupational role.

And why should the people likely to be polled dislike the people who are actors?  Because they are most of them flaming liberals who maintain views that are deeply offensive to ordinary Americans.  To take an example from a while back, Mike Farrell defended the the vicious murderer 'Tookie' Williams.  A very recent example is provided by that profound intellect, Janeane Garofalo, who maintains that the 'tea-baggers,' led by Limbaugh, are a white power movement motivated by 'racism.'  Read the the whole of her screed to get a sense of the level of lunacy to which HollyWeird liberals are ever inclined to succumb.  I shall not sully my site by quoting it.

Should one take polls seriously?  I rather doubt it.  Much depends on how exactly the questions are formulated.  The Harris 'result' that acting is held in low esteem may reflect only the low esteem in which average Americans hold the people who fill the occupational role.

Advice for Hollywood Liberals

Robert M. Thornton, ed., Cogitations from Albert Jay Nock (Irvington-on-Hudson: The Nockian Society, 1970), p. 59:

If realism means the representation of life as it is actually lived, I do not see why lives which are actually lived on a higher emotional plane are not so eligible for representation as those lived on a lower plane. (Memoirs, 200)

Exactly. If the aim is to depict reality as it is, why select only the most worthless and uninspiring portions of reality for portrayal? Why waste brilliant actors on worthless roles, Paul Newman in The Color of Money, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in The War of the Roses, to take two examples off the top of my head from a potential list of thousands. The Grifters is another example. An excellent film in any number of respects. But imagine a film of the same cinematic quality which portrays in a subtle and intelligent manner a way of life — I avoid 'lifestyle' — that has some chance of being worth living. Notice I said "subtle and intelligent." I am not advocating Sunday School moralizing or hokey platitudinizing. And note that I am not opposing the above mentioned, but pointing out that a constant diet of dreck is both boring and unhealthy.

But I don't expect the folks in HollyWeird (Michael Medved's expression) to comprehend the simple point I have just made. They are too mesmerized by the color of money for that. Nor do I expect most liberals to be able to wrap their minds around it. So I'm preaching to the choir and to a few fence-sitters. But that has value: Maybe a fence-sitter or two will slide off to the Right Side; and perhaps the choirboys and girls are in need of a little extra ammo.

A deeper question concerns the purpose of art. To depict reality? That is not obvious. A good topic for someone else to take up. Conservative bloggers, get to it.

Some Things I Look For in a Movie: A Rant

1. No mindless 'action.' No race and chase, crash and burn. I am not a robot, so I don't want to watch a movie made by  robots about robots for robots.

2.  No gratuitous sex, violence, and offensive language. I have no objection to sex, violence, and bad language as such. There is a time and place for each.  I would have no problem, for example, with blowing a home invader to Kingdom Come where he is more likely to receive justice than here below from a criminal justice system lousy with tolerate-anything liberals.  But sex, violence and bad language  ought not be thrown in for no reason or just to titillate or offend in the manner of the adolescent (whatever his age) who thinks it cool to append the F-ing qualifier to every F-ing word.   Example: the opening scenes of Titanic.

I'm as much into Posterior Analytics as the next guy, but what was that female derriere doing on the screen at the beginning of Lost in Translation? The female tail is a thing of beauty whose display can rise to the genuinely erotic as in The Unbearable Lighness of Being and Blue Velvet. But to insert it any old place, for no reason, is the mark of an impoverished cinematic bonehead.

When Bogie took one of the leading ladies into the bedroom, you knew what was about to transpire. But your nose wasn't rubbed into the raw hydraulics of it.

In a 'fifties movie, if a man was about to be hanged, you say a shot of the scaffold and perhaps a shot of him lying in a pine box; but you didn't see him twisting in the wind. Violence was part of a story and not presented to demean and debase the audience by a nihilistic leftist out to trash people's aesthetic and moral sensibilities.

Harry and Tonto

I saw the movie Harry and Tonto (1974) a while back. Starring Art Carney as Harry, it is the story of an elderly man who travels across the USA with his cat Tonto. Tonto’s aversion to riding in buses prompts Harry to buy a clunker in which they continue their journey. Various adventures ensue until they arrive at land’s end in Venice, California. There Tonto dies and Harry begins a new life.

It is a movie of real humanity unlike so much of the robotic crap cranked out by Hollywood. No race and chase, no explosions, no gratuitous sex and violence, no special effects.

Whenever I hear a movie praised for its special effects, I suspect the praiser to be a lunkhead capable of being roused from his stupor only by rude assaults upon his senses. What were the special effects in Fellini’s classic La Strada (1954), or in that other cinematic immortal, Zorba the Greek (1964) based on the great Kazantzakis novel of the same name? How about a story? How about some human meaning? How about some decent dialogue?