Summer time reading

Again, for your perusing pleasure, an excerpt from Walter Russell Mead's outstanding essay, The Top Ten Lessons of the Global Economic Meltdown:

3. The rogue states are parasites.

It may seem unkind or gloating to say so, but the point needs to be made: the pathetic pretensions of regimes like the ones in Iran and Venezuela to some kind of world leadership have been cruelly exposed. The governments of these countries are parasites on the global economy and far from representing alternatives to the global model, they are entirely dependent on capitalist success. When the global capitalist system is booming, the price of oil goes up and Venezuela and Iran have the cash for subsidies at home and adventures abroad. When the hated global system goes bust, Venezuela and Iran go broke. The leadership of these countries are like adolescents criticizing the bourgeois habits of the parents they sponge off. Both Iran and Venezuela have immense potential to help shape world civilization and culture in the twenty first century, but to make that contribution they will have to use their oil wealth to join and help shape the world system, rather than using it to feed the egos and illusions of their leaders.

Oil isn't the only thing fueling that ego. Western useful idiots like Oliver Stone and Sean Penn do their part as Chavez seizes businesses and silences opposition press, TV and radio as his soup kitchen Socialist dream begins to crumble all around him.

Trailer for Stone's documentary on Chavez and other South American statists, here.

Quotes of the week

We were used as kind of a political football during the campaign. We obviously would cover these negotiations. The only time we’ve been allowed to cover the White House part of it is one hour inside the East Room, which was just a show-horse type of thing…

The American people pay for all of this that goes on in this town. It’s always been my contention…that if we pay for something, and it’s the public’s business, we ought to be able to see how it’s done. It’s just that simple, it has nothing to do with this particular fight right now.

- C-SPAN'S Brian Lamb on the "transparency" of the healthcare debate.

“Of course, nobody can see the managers’ amendment. It is composed of over 40 amendments. How could anyone vote for a piece of legislation such as that — a managers’ amendment with 42 separate amendments? Now, these amendments were not put in a conference committee. People complain about that. But at least in a conference committee, you have people working together, sticking things in…Here, you have one person making a decision as to what is going to be in the managers’ amendment. There is no way to know what is in it.”

- Harry Reid in 2006 railing against informal deal-making that circumvented the committee process and attacking the use of manager's amendments to avoid public scrutiny.

"President Obama continues to totally ignore one of the important thrusts of our 9/11 recommendations, which is that you have to approach counterterrorism as a multiagency intelligence issue, and not as a law-enforcement issue. He's made a lot of commission's members angry for dismissing our report and ignoring key recommendations."

- 9/11 Commission member and former Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, on the mirandizing of counter-terrorism.

"Stalin, Hitler, Mao, McCarthy -- these people have been vilified pretty thoroughly by history," Stone told reporters at the Television Critics Association's semi-annual press tour in Pasadena.

"Stalin has a complete other story," Stone said. "Not to paint him as a hero, but to tell a more factual representation. He fought the German war machine more than any single person. We can't judge people as only 'bad' or 'good.' Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and its been used cheaply. He's the product of a series of actions. It's cause and effect ... People in America don't know the connection between WWI and WWII ... I've been able to walk in Stalin's shoes and Hitler's shoes to understand their point of view. We're going to educate our minds and liberalize them and broaden them. We want to move beyond opinions ... Go into the funding of the Nazi party. How many American corporations were involved, from GM through IBM. Hitler is just a man who could have easily been assassinated."

- Castro and Chavez-coddler, Oliver Stone, on his upcoming Showtime miniseries documentary "Secret History of America". What could possibly go wrong?

What's missing from this picture? (UPDATED)

U.S. director Oliver Stone fears his documentary about Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a fierce critic of American foreign policy, will struggle to find a distributor at home.

"South of the Border," which had its world premiere at the Venice film festival this week, portrays Chavez as a champion of the poor, and includes interviews with the leaders of Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay, Ecuador and Cuba.
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Stone, 62, told Reuters in an interview that he anticipated a struggle getting the movie to a U.S. audience, noting how previous films made about Central or South America had shared the same fate.

The reason why you may not be able to see Stone’s movie is perhaps because Stone’s movies stink. Or perhaps because the American public, by and large, is not willing to shell-out $10 and endure the less-than-hospitable movie-going experience in order to suffer through two hours of shameless socialist boot-licking. We could be wrong but that’s just us.

And these overseas premieres and film festivals are curious affairs to say the least. They are a very picture of exclusive social stratification whereby anything less than the utmost beautiful people need not apply but which are attended in droves by the most committed Marxist class-warriors.

As it stands, then, it's a shame that the potential movie distributors refuse to look beyond their short term bottom line and instead, take one for the team by allowing us to view this certain masterpiece for free. Shoot, Hugo's own obscene Citgo profits, alone, could finance this baby.



(UPDATE #1): From the Venice film festival

Two prominent American pictures were shut out of the festival's official jury awards -- Michael Moore's attack on corporate greed, Capitalism: A Love Story, and The Weinstein Company's The Road, which John Hillcoat adapted from Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel. This will no doubt affect Harvey Weinstein' release plans for it. Moore's pic did receive the Leoncino d'oro Award from 26 local youths selected by the festival, but nothing from the official jury -- even though he personally came to Venice to premiere his documentary (see trailer here).

Again, the fawning adoration of 26 locals who've never worked a day in their lives aside, we fail to see how the lack of any apparent broader appeal should hinder distribution of these types of movies.



It's not as if Moore is charter member of any sort of "starving film-makers and pseudo-documentarians club" and his willingness to dig into those deep pockets of his would be a lesson in sacrifice and commitment to one's cause in these recessionary times.

What say ye, Mr. Moore?

Still having it their way.

"Immediate disqualification because of its involvement with the Big Chill."

- Jack Black’s character, Barry, from the 1990 movie High Fidelity.



We caught a little of “The Boomer Century: 1946-2046” (we’ve still got 38 more years to go?) on PBS last week. The largely self-congratulatory and self-gratifying nature of the program rendered “little” very operative in this context. We flipped over there 3 times and in two separate occasions we were treated to the following:

Noted filmmaker, Oliver Stone, giving us a look at his formative political sensibilities: “I was a conformist… I voted for Barry Goldwater.”

It would appear that some of the license that Ollie has taken with the facts in his movies applies as well to his own life as Stone, born in September of 1946 would’ve been 18 years old when he “voted” for Goldwater in 1964. Unfortunately, the voting age was not lowered to 18 (from 21) until 1971 and the passage of the 26 amendment. Bummer, dude.

And this notion of equating conformity with Goldwater is equally incongruous. Goldwater’s nomination to the Republican presidential candidacy represented a revolt within the G.O.P. that was a bold and risky gambit to wrest control of the party away from the gray fannel suit-wearing, Northeastern, Rockefeller establishment (read: “conformist”) base of the Party. There was nothing remotely conformist about this rebellion that paved the way for a confederacy of social conservatives, libertarians, anti-communist foreign policy hawks, etc. that would become the new identity of the Party.

And then we have this. The famous diner scene from Five Easy Pieces that was to illustrate the youthful anti-authoritarian attitude of the times in the face of the old-world establishment.



Can’t you feel it? Can’t you just feel the righteous indignation and the demand for justice in Nicholson’s character, Bobby DuPea, as he and his friends gang-up on and completely humiliate the poor short-order diner waitress, the symbol of the crushing oppression of authority and the establishment?

For us, the real message is at the end of the scene when Bobby acknowleges that despite all the theatrics, appeals to reason and generally boorish tactics, he didn’t get what he wanted, afterall.