Conservative pundits often say mean things, but seldom do they go so far as to say what they really mean.
At rare moments, however, the mask of civility slips off, and the public is offered a glimpse of the ghastly, pock-marked face that lies beneath the smooth surface of the conservative movement.
Then the mask is quickly put back in place, and followed up with countless photo-ops and explanations of what the pundit really meant to say.
That is exactly what happened a few days ago, when former Republican Education Secretary Bill Bennett suggested on his radio show that America would be a safer place if all black babies in this country were aborted. And I quote:
I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.
Who ever said conservatives weren’t compassionate?
Bennett’s statement, which he now says was hypothetical (or, to use his own language, “a thought experiment about public policy”), is so clear, and so forthright, that it needs no parsing.
That, at least, is what I thought when I first read it. But I see that my new friends on The Corner would disagree with me — Jonah Goldberg calls this “a silly, manufactured, attack on Bennett. Maybe he could have phrased it differently, but the point he made is rational . . .”
Of course, the rationality of the point depends on what your definition of “rational” is. Personally, I don’t think that conducting involuntary mass abortions on the basis of race is a very rational solution to the problem of crime in this country, but what do I know — I’m just one of those kooky bloggers, not a former U.S. Secretary of Education with a nationally syndicated radio show and a “philosophy professor’s hat.”
At any rate, though the import of Bennett’s words are clear to most of us, the spin he uncorked after a controversy broke out is a little bit harder to follow.
In fact, it is so convoluted that it has sparked the return of the hottest craze sweeping the nation. Yes, my friends, I speak of Parse This!™, an exciting game of literary exegesis in which contestants attempt to unpack the opaque utterances of public figures.
Now, before I reveal today’s quote, allow me to set the stage: Bill Bennett has just been accused of uttering bizarre and racist statements. The President’s spokesperson has said that George W. Bush “believes the comments were not appropriate.” But Fox News gives Bennett a chance to appear on Hannity and Colmes in order to explain himself and put his words “in context.”
Well, the context was a radio show that I was doing yesterday, and the topic was abortion and we were talking about bad arguments in regard to abortion. A caller suggested he was opposed to abortion because he said if there were more babies there would be, eventually, more tax payers and a larger GNP, a smaller deficit. I said you want to be careful with that kind of argument because someone could postulate a situation where child’s not likely to be a productive taxpayer. I said, arguments in which you take something that’s far out, like the GNP and try to connect it up with abortion are tricky. I said make the case of abortion on the basis of life and protecting life. I said abortion is invoked in another way; you could make an argument that if you wanted to lower the crime rate, you saw the quote; you could practice abortion in very large numbers. You could do it in the black community; you could do it in other places. This is, by the way, the subject of a book for economics by a professor at Yale.
I feel like Bennett is saying something here, but I have no idea what it is. Can you help out? Please, Parse This™!
A few weeks ago, The National Enquirer printed a story which claimed that President Bush had begun drinking again. I declined to report on that story at the time, only partly because I was concerned about its source.
While most of the blogs that helped publicize the story were careful to point out that it was only rumor (and that the NE has a history of picking up on true stories before the MSM would touch them), there was something about it that bothered me.
I realized what it was when I got the following message from a friend, who was responding to this article. He has given me permission to post it here:
I can appreciate a joke about almost anything — including alcoholism — but this isn’t funny, it’s just vicious. There’s much that the Left can learn from the Right about organizing to advance its agenda, from the grassroots right on up to creating an effective infrastructure to promote its message (if it ever comes up with a coherent one). But the politics of personal destruction is one area the Right has perfected that the Left should not emulate — unless we’re so nihilistic that we want to participate in destroying what’s left of our democracy.
In the interest of full disclosure, I admit this issue strikes close to home. I went through alcoholism treatment back in 1979. After more than 20 years of abstinence I relapsed, at what turned out to be a most inconvenient time. For an alcoholic, there are no reasons or excuses for a relapse, just precipitating circumstances. As Roseanne Roseannadanna would say, “If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.”
Mine coincided with events that were outside my control, but I made a number of bad decisions while I was drinking that both contributed to bringing about those events and made my response to them less effective than it otherwise would have been. Eighteen months after finally pulling myself together, I’m still sorting through the ruins of what used to be my life.
I’m lucky, though, because I still have a life to rebuild — including the health, energy, and positive outlook to do so. My partner, who went through all of this with me, hasn’t been so lucky: one consequence of his relapse was to inflict further damage to a heart that was already damaged; he’s still in the hospital as I write (a charity case). Another is a depression that he can’t seem to pull out of.
It may turn out to be true that Bush has relapsed, but I for one won’t go to the mat on the basis of anonymous sources published in the National Inquirer (let alone a psychiatrist who likes to diagnose from afar). If he has, I hope he’s able to stop drinking on his own, because he sure as hell won’t get the real treatment he needs (he’s never had treatment of any kind) — that wouldn’t be politically expedient.
I hope he stops not only for himself, but for all of us. Contrary to what this writer thinks, a drinking Bush is a lot more dangerous to the country than Nixon ever was. Between Cheney’s heart problems and Rove’s legal problems, there’s no one in the West Wing with enough influence over Bush to control him. The last thing we need is a drunk Bush wanting to go “mano a mano” with the world, like he famously did with his father when he was young.
Most of all, I would never wish on anyone the experience of going down the tubes the way a drinking alcoholic does. That’s something I can’t bring myself to even attempt to describe.
I’ve wished, many times, that President Bush could feel a tenth of the suffering that his political choices have inflicted on soldiers injured in this misguided war of choice; on the parents and families of soldiers killed in action; on the men, women, and children left stranded at the New Orleans Convention Center after Hurricane Katrina; or on countless others, at home and abroad.
But I think that the message above makes an important point: while it’s fine to wish political destruction on President Bush, personal destruction is an entirely different story — especially while he’s still behind the figurative wheel of the nation.
My question for you is this: should there be limits on the ills we wish on our political enemies? Can a political leader do so much damage to other lives that wishing the same on them can be justified? Has political dialogue in this country deteriorated to the point that the answers to those questions no longer matter?
I would ask these questions of both liberals and conservatives — as Bush himself or his Swift-Boat friends could testify, this type of mud-slinging is not at all limited to the left side of the aisle.
Update: Something tells me that Hunter would not agree with this post.
To play: put your digital music player on shuffle, click play, and list the first ten songs that show up. You must resist the temptation to click past the bad or embarrassing songs. Leave your list in comments or trackbacks.
Favorite Song: “Dinosaur Act” Least Favorite Song: “What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 3) Favorite Album: so hard to pick — but I’ll go with Things We Lost in the Fire
So, under the strain of some big links that brought as much traffic to this blog in one day as it normally receives in a week, the server crashed. I think that a link from The Corner, of all places, sent it over the edge.
Yes, the The Corner broke my blog; and to my amazement, they weren’t even criticizing me at the time.
It was a crazy couple of hours — it’s extremely frustrating to know that thousands of people are coming to your site and getting “Site Not Found” errors. I contacted my server administrator, only to be told that this was “the worst possible moment” for a crash — he was right in the middle of moving out of his Brooklyn apartment. But he graciously stopped what he was doing and began to remedy the situation.
Things are calmer now, so I’ll return the sidebar to its former glory as quickly as possible.
My day, as hectic as it seemed, was nothing compared to what Shakespeare’s Sister experienced this morning. Please help her out if you can — she is one of our brightest lights.
The AP reports that a U.S. District Judge has ordered the release of photos taken at Abu Ghraib that the military tried desperately to withhold on the grounds that releasing them could aid al-Queda recruitment.
The judge opined that terrorists have proven that they “do not need pretexts for their barbarism.” He also said that “My task is not to defer to our worst fears, but to interpret and apply the law, in this case, the Freedom of Information Act, which advances values important to our society, transparency and accountability in government.”
The article refers only to photographs; I don’t know whether the videos will be released as well.
Daily Kos has a partial transcription of a July speech by New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh, who described some of the immensely disturbing photos and videos that he has seen (a video of Hersh’s speech can be found here; it starts at 1:07):
Some of the worst that happened that you don’t know about, ok. Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read they were passing letters, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib which is 30 miles from Baghdad […]
The women were passing messages saying “Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened”. Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it’s going to come out.
It’s impossible [not] to say to yourself how [did] we get there? who are we? Who are these people that sent us there?
Get ready for a shitstorm of major proportions.
Just as I thought that it was important for Americans to look at photographs of the New Orleans dead, I think it is imperative that our nation take a sober look at this material, no matter how disturbing it is. After all, the abuse was done in our name.
And as a nation, we must be willing to come to terms with the fact that the deranged abuse at Abu Ghraib was not simply the product of a few “bad apples,” but rather was the direct result of the decision, made by those at the highest pinnacles of U.S. power, to abandon the Geneva conventions for detainees in this war — a decision that ultimately puts our troops in the gravest possible danger.
At her trial, the lawyers for Lyndie England were not allowed to present evidence that her actions were the result of systemic problems in the military chain of command:
Late Monday, [Judge] Pohl rejected a request by Crisp to allow testimony during the sentencing phase by an Army captain who has reported similar prisoner abuse by other U.S. soldiers at a camp near Fallujah around the same time as the Abu Ghraib incidents.
Crisp said testimony by Capt. Ian Fishback would provide evidence of a command breakdown in Iraq that might have led England and other soldiers to think detainee mistreatment was condoned by military leaders.
But the judge ruled that he saw no proof that the two abuse situations were related, or that abuse elsewhere would in any way lessen the blame England might deserve for Abu Ghraib.
Her lawyers were forced instead to argue that England had “an overly compliant personality.”
The open question is how compliant the U.S. public will be as the Administration attempts to pin this outrage on grunts at the bottom of the chain-of-command.
As Reed Brody, special counsel for The Human Rights Watch, has argued, there is only one way for our nation to absolve itself:
“If the United States is to wipe away the stain of Abu Ghraib, it needs to investigate those at the top who ordered or condoned abuse and come clean on what the president has authorized,” said Brody. “Washington must repudiate, once and for all, the mistreatment of detainees in the name of the war on terror.”
I had to rewrite that Calla review a bit — it was just too stilted and awkward to let stand.
I don’t think I’ve ever written a music review before. Writing about music is harder than I thought. When all one wants to do is grab someone by the collar and say, “listen to this — isn’t it great?”, it’s very tough to try to pin down the sound with words. It’s doubly tough when one doesn’t have the technical vocabulary or historical knowledge needed to convey the subtleties of what one is hearing. I have newfound respect for my friend Rod, who has written for Pitchfork, and who has turned me on to many a fine band in his time.
But I guess that’s why some people get paid to review music, while others simply rant away for free on a blog.
At any rate, I hope that the revised review better conveys what I was trying to say, which is: listen to this album — it’s fucking great.
A post-production house organized a competition where assistant editors ‘re-cut’ trailers for famous movies to try and make them seem like different movies . . . . this is the one that won.
I’m trying to track down further details about both the trailer and the contest. I’ve contacted its creator, but haven’t heard back from him yet.
If you have any futher information, please post it in the comments.
Thanks for visiting, and feel free to poke around the Coat. It’s what Jack would want you to do.
Update #2:NRO’s The Corner also linked to this post. And crashed the blog when it did.
Update #3: I think that the source of the original email that reached me saw the link on the blog of Dustin Stephens, who is friends with Rob, the creator of the Shining trailer (the original link is in the middle of this post). Dustin has links to a few other contest entries — his own recut of Titanic, and a recut of West Side Story.
Dustin writes that Rob has gotten a call “from the Vice Prez of Production from Warner Bros. asking him what else he does.” Through an email I received, I know that this won’t be the last time Hollywood gets in touch.
Update #4: As Ben notes in the comments below, the third place finisher in the contest was a recut of David Swift’s The Parent Trap (1961) as a coming-of-age lesbian love story. To see it, go to Moondog, click on Paul Lacalandra’s name, and click on the image with “ordinary girls” written on it.
Update #5:
Jim Macdonald has posted a great series of updates about Shining on Making Light.
Among them is the news that The New York Times has now covered the story:
Robert Ryang, 25, a film editor’s assistant in Manhattan, graduated from Columbia three years ago with a double major in film studies and psychology. This week, he got an eye-opening lesson in both.
Since 2002, Mr. Ryang has worked for one of the owners of P.S. 260, a commercial postproduction house, cutting commercials for the likes of Citizens Bank, Cingular and the TriBeCa Film Festival.
A few weeks back, he said, he entered a contest for editors’ assistants sponsored by the New York chapter of the Association of Independent Creative Editors. The challenge? Take any movie and cut a new trailer for it – but in an entirely different genre. Only the sound and dialogue could be modified, not the visuals, he said.
Mr. Ryang won the contest, and about 10 days ago, he said, he sent three friends a link to a “secret site” on his company’s Web site where they could watch his entry.
One of them, Mr. Ryang said, posted it on his little-watched blog. And that was that. Until this week, when he was hit by a tsunami of Internet interest.
On Wednesday, Mr. Ryang said, his secret site got 12,000 hits. By Thursday the numbers were even higher, his film was being downloaded and linked to on countless other sites, it had cracked the top 10 most popular spoofs on www.ifilm.com, and a vice president at a major Hollywood studio had called up his office, scouting for new talent.
Now I know why Robert hasn'’t had time to respond to my interview request.
Robert deserves every bit of attention he gets from this. As Jim MacDonald writes, “Thus is virtue rewarded.”
For the record (and in case anyone is interested in the evolution of a viral phenomenon), I want to note that I hadn'’t seen Dustin’’s site before I posted about this clip. Someone forwarded an email message about the clip to my friend Mikhail, who sent it on to me. I posted about it; Waxy.org took note (how, I'’m not sure), and linked to it; and then things really began to take off. Metafilter, Screenhead, Defective Yeti, The Corner, and iFilm helped send it into the stratosphere from there.
What’s amazing to me, at least, is how quickly this moved — it all happened in a matter of hours after Waxy picked up on it. That’’s a testament to both the quality of Robert’’s trailer and the speed with which information moves today.
I know I'’m not the only one looking forward to seeing more of Robert’’s work in the future.
Kathryn Hempel, who came up with the idea for Trailer Park, writes:
Early in 2001, I conceived the idea of having an editing festival for the assistant editors in hopes of generating grassroots involvement and awareness of AICE. With the generous support and encouragement of the other Chicago board members, I asked some fellow editors to join a festival planning committee. Our mission was to give our hard working assistants an opportunity to showcase their editing talent and creative storytelling capabilities. Trailer Park was born.
The first Trailer Park required each entrant to cut a :90 second trailer for the film that won the Academy Award for Best Editing that year. The assistant had to be the sole author of the trailer, and had to do all the editing, effects, sound design and finishing. Other chapters have adopted slightly different requirements since, but the principle remains the same: edit a creative, compelling trailer for an existing feature film.
Next summer marks Chicago’’s 5th Trailer Park Anniversary. Over the last four years we have had enthusiastic involvement from the many panels of judges, and fun–sometimes trashy and sometimes mighty impressive–prizes. We'’ve received letters of encouragement from Academy Award winning editors. We'’ve seriously critiqued the work and fostered the growth of our dedicated assistants, and have announced with pride at each festival new chapters across the country and in Canada that have latched on to the Trailer Park idea and run with it. Clearly there have been many volunteers and contributors over the years, for Trailer Park takes a village to pull off, and it’’s been a heartening ride.
I think it’’s safe to say that Trailer Park has helped raise awareness of AICE.
Update #7: I'’ll be posting a short interview with Robert tomorrow (Oct. 3).
Update #8: Still waiting to hear back from Robert about a few follow-up questions. In the meantime, here is another recut trailer, along with a link to an entire website about movie trailers.
Update #11: (10/22/05) A few more remixed trailers:
Holy Cow (login required: username: holy / password: cow), by Nellie Phillips — This one re-imagines Ben Kingsley’’s Gandhi as a stand-up comic; it was part of the 2004 AICE Trailer Park Festival
The PS 260 blog tells us about a recut trailer of Cabin Fever (Lo Res / Hi Res) made by Tom, who created the West Side Story trailer above.
This one was made by request:
Tom was uncontent to let sleeping dogs lie, so he just had to work it one more time. Actually, he was contacted by the director of Cabin Fever, who saw that his music was used on the West Side Redux, who wanted a spoof of his own.
Update #12: (3/29/06) Rob Ryang writes in:
After “Shining”, I was approached by the Independent Spirit Awards to turn an independent film into a Hollywood one:
and vice versa:
IFC didn'’t broadcast them, because David Lynch and Universal refused to clear the rights, respectively. I also threw this together at the last minute:
Update #13: (9/15/06) This year’s winners of the Trailer Park Competition have just been announced, and AICE gave me access to the winning video. It’s a remix of “Cocktail” — Click here to see it
A Texas grand jury on Wednesday charged Rep. Tom DeLay and two political associates with conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme, an indictment that could force him to step down as House majority leader.DeLay attorney Steve Brittain said DeLay was accused of a criminal conspiracy along with two associates, John Colyandro, former executive director of a Texas political action committee formed by DeLay, and Jim Ellis, who heads DeLay’s national political committee.
The indictment against the second-ranking, and most assertive Republican leader came on the final day of the grand jury’s term. It followed earlier indictments of a state political action committee founded by DeLay and three of his political associates.
The grand jury action is expected to have immediate consequences in the House, where DeLay is largely responsible for winning passage of the Republican legislative program. House Republican Party rules require leaders who are indicted to temporarily step aside from their leadership posts.
The chickens finally came home to roost.
Note that the “House Republican Party rules requir[ing] leaders who are indicted to temporarily step aside from their leadership posts,” of which the article speaks so proudly (as if it showed that Republicans took strong stands on ethics issues) are exactly the rules that the Republicans changed earlier in the year:
The vote planned for later this week will mark the second time in four months that House Republicans have changed a rule but then changed it back under public pressure because the changes were perceived as designed to protect DeLay.Last November, Republicans rewrote an 11-year-old party rule that required a party leader to step aside if indicted, and instead made it possible for such a leader to maintain the party position. A grand jury in Austin was investigating the campaign finances of a political action committee created by DeLay and his political associates. After public objections to the maneuver, DeLay asked his party colleagues to rescind that change when they returned to Washington on Jan. 3 for the 109th Congress, and they did.
The next day, the full House approved — on a largely party-line vote of 220 to 195 — changes that Democrats contended would make it harder to launch investigations and would undermine their effectiveness.
A congressional aide said that changing the rules will mean “a couple of great days for Democrats” but that Republicans have calculated this will deny them long-term use of the ethics issue heading into next year’s midterm elections.
What a bunch of crooks.
This is only the first in what promises to be a series of indictments of Republican leaders — we’ve got Abramoff, Norquist, Frist, Rove, Libby, and others still to go.
As justification for altering party rules in the House of Representatives in order to allow Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) to retain his leadership position if indicted by a Texas grand jury on political corruption charges, Republicans have claimed that Travis County, Texas, District Attorney Ronnie Earle, who is investigating DeLay, is doing so for purely partisan reasons. This charge was dutifully echoed on FOX News Channel, and most other news outlets have reported it — without noting that Earle has, in fact, prosecuted more Democratic politicians than Republican politicians.While Earle is an elected Democrat, as Media Matters for America has previously noted, a June 17 editorial in the Houston Chronicle commended his work: “During his long tenure, Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle has prosecuted many more Democratic officials than Republicans. The record does not support allegations that Earle is prone to partisan witch hunts.” This assertion supports Earle’s own claim about his record; a March 6 article in the El Paso Times reported: “Earle says local prosecution is fundamental and points out that 11 of the 15 politicians he has prosecuted over the years were Democrats.”
Update #2:Think Progress has even more evidence that Earle is not a partisan Democrat.
Update #4: In a controversial ruling, the OED announced that though “indicted” is properly pronounced “in-DITE-ted,” it’s perfectly acceptable, in DeLay’s case, to say it just the way it looks, with emphasis on the middle syllable.
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George W. Bush and Bill Bennett in happier times
