My first thought when hearing how Bin Laden was killed was that it sounded like the plot out of an action adventure movie (only without a heroine). There are also a number of parallels with Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather.
Are there other way in which Rebel without a Cause applies to the budget battle? Maybe Jim Boehner is the weak father, unable to stand up to his Tea Party fantatics and failing to teach them that governing requires compromise. Maybe President Obama is the man in the apron, failing to robustly address a future deficit that will be unsustainable, thereby letting radicals step into the vacuum.
“Nature, be thou my goddess,” exclaims Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester in King Lear as he prepares to embark on a course of action that, before he is stopped, results in the disinheritance of his legitimate brother, the blinding and banishment of his father, the poisoning of one sister by another, and the execution […]
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” Franklin Roosevelt memorably told a nation in the midst of its greatest economic crisis. As I look at America today, I see a lot of our politics dictated by fear. It is as though the unscrupulous and the irresponsible are stampeding us into extreme positions. Some want […]
Is it just because I’m an Obama supporter or has political rhetoric reached new levels of inanity? And the rhetoric I have in mind is not that of Tea Party supporters, which is not new. I saw such self-indulgent calls for revolution coming from the left in the early 1970’s. No, I’m thinking of the […]
Film Friday I found myself fuming at a film that I showed to my American Film class this past week. My reaction caught me by surprise because the movie is almost a hundred years old and I have screened it many times before. Why did D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) get under my […]
At the end of yesterday’s memorial service remembering those who died in the tragic Tucson shooting, the president of the University of Arizona read a poem by W. S. Merwin, recently named our poet laureate. I found a copy of it on the University’s Poetry Center website, along with the following wonderful quotation by Merwin […]
2010 in Review There was an interesting dust-up last week amongst conservative intellectuals following the release of some more Richard Nixon tapes. Henry Kissinger can be heard making the following cold-blooded remark about Soviet Jews in 1973: “Let’s face it: The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign […]
Saturday’s New York Times had a column by African American novelist Ishmael Reed attacking those leftists that are excoriating President Obama for his willingness to extend the Bush tax cuts in return for a second stimulus package. What particularly galls Reed is that many of these critics refer to themselves as Obama’s base (as in, […]
