One Volk! One Reich! One Euro!
Terror by Land and Sea: My Greek Vacation
The New York Times Embraces the Dark Side
DESPITE ITS HORRORS, the 9-11 attack had a bright side. It temporarily transformed New York into a city so wholesome and normal, it almost seemed to have become part of America. Stars and stripes festooned every street and storefront. Hillary Clinton was booed off the stage at Madison Square Garden. Cops and firemen were lionized as heroes.
But it was too good to last. New York’s cultural elite have struck back. Once more, New Yorkers have given our countrymen reason to pity, hate and despise us. Once more, we have defecated in America’s proverbial livingroom.
I refer to the perverse and inexplicable hostility with which New York film critics have greeted George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones.
“It is not really much of a movie at all,” snorts critic A.O. Scott, in the May 10 New York Times. “Mr. Lucas seems to have lost his boyish glee. As the [special] effects have grown more intricate and realistic, their ability to yield pleasure and astonishment has diminished.” Scott continues:
“Mr. Lucas… is, at best, a haphazard storyteller… Yes, the battle scenes and the monster rallies are superior to anything in The Mummy, The Mummy Returns or The Scorpion King, but that lowbrow franchise at least has the good sense to acknowledge its silliness. Attack of the Clones, in contrast… lumbers along in the confining armor of bogus wisdom.”
At this point, most readers who have seen Attack of the Clones are probably wondering if Mr. Scott watched the same movie. It appears that he did. But New York intellectuals are not like the rest of us.
The key to Scott’s perverse analysis lies in the word “lowbrow.” Among New York’s cultural elite, “lowbrow” is synonymous with “popular,” “entertaining,” “engrossing,” “brilliant,” “cathartic” and “beautiful.” Attack of the Clones is all of these things. Therefore it is “lowbrow.”
Had Scott lived in Elizabethan London, he might have called William Shakespeare a “lowbrow.” After all, Shakespeare’s plays reached a mass audience. They made money too.
Homer composed his Iliad not to glean praise from The New York Review of Books, but to perform — for pay — before crowds of lusty, half-literate warlords in wine-soaked banquet halls.
Like George Lucas, Homer worked with simple themes that his audience could understand. In the Iliad, he managed to compose 15,673 dactylic hexameter verses about a pair of jealous warlords brawling over who gets to sleep with the slave-girl Briseis.
It was lowbrow material, to be sure. But Homer reached deep into his soul and charged his simple tale with magic.
George Lucas has done the same.
In 1964, my parents took me to see Michelangelo’s Pietá at the New York World’s Fair. I was five years old. Before that somber mass of stone, I felt as if I had stepped into the living presence of the Mother of God.
Michelangelo did not carve the Pietá to tickle the jaded tastes of New York art critics. He carved it for the masses, so simply and frankly that even a five-year-old could grasp it.
Attack of the Clones is filled with memorable scenes, but one stands out with special grandeur, as powerful, in its way, as my first glimpse of the Pietá.
Our heroes are brought in chains to a vast, hive-like coliseum, a structure as weirdly imagined as a Gaudi cathedral. What happens next cannot be described. Suffice it to say that an epic, digitized battle breaks out between Jedi knights, battle droids and a menagerie of beasts so hideous they can evoke only the laughter of the damned.
In the midst of this carnage, along comes poor C-3P0, his head accidentally welded onto the body of a battle droid.
“Die, Jedi dogs!” he cries, in his faux British butler accent, as he blasts away at the good guys.
I laughed so hard, I thought my ribs would crack and my eyeballs would pop from my skull. It wasn’t just the joke about C-3PO. It was the sheer hallucinogenic splendor of so much beauty, terror, shock and absurdity crammed into so small a mental space — an outpouring of insanity as mind-bending as a thousand Dali canvasses sprung to life.
That is art, Mr. Scott. It doesn’t get any better than that.
Scott says that the film “lumbers along.” Well, it held me spellbound for two hours and twelve minutes straight. When the final credits flashed on the screen, I could hardly believe it had ended so soon.
I guess I’m just one of those lowbrows.
Cross-posted from NewsMax.com 05.31.02
Thor Heyerdahl and the Pyramids of Greece
The End of Christendom
The “Third Way” Plan for Gun Abolition
The UN Should Stay Out of Our Election
SHOULD THE United Nations intervene in our election? Some Americans think so. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, for instance, has proposed holding a “run-off” election, supervised by UN secretary general Kofi Annan.
“There’s nothing in the Constitution about any of this,” Wilentz admits. But that doesn’t seem to worry him. Wilentz says we should go ahead and do it anyway. (1)
If Wilentz’s proposal represents some sort of trial balloon from the Clinton-Gore camp, it points to serious trouble ahead.
Americans have long meddled freely in other people’s elections. Now we may learn how it feels to have other people meddling in ours.
“Unless and until [the Democrats] are convinced that Bush won Florida fair and square… it won’t be a legitimate election,” Wilentz warns.
Think about what he’s saying. Wilentz claims that, in order for the election to be “legitimate,” the Paul Begala and Rosie O’Donnell types must concede that Bush won “fair and square.” We all know that’s about as likely to happen as Johnnie Cochrane admitting OJ was guilty. So where does that leave us? Wilentz explains: “Peace in the country requires that this not just be a done election, but that it be a legitimate election.”
I see. So “peace” depends on the Democrats accepting a Bush presidency as “legitimate.” Since they obviously never will, Wilentz is clearly warning us that what lies ahead is, well, something other than “peace.” I guess he’s talking about war.
Slowly but surely, it becomes clear how the case for UN intervention can be made.
ITAR-TASS reported on October 24 that a group of Russian lawmakers had proposed monitoring the U.S. election, to ensure compliance with “universal democratic norms.” Perhaps the Russians knew something we didn’t.(2)
“The presidential election in the United States cannot be exclusively an internal affair of that country,” they argued in a draft resolution, “as it directly concerns the vital interests of other countries.” Their proposal was voted down. But if Gore calls for international mediation, then the next vote of the Russian Duma — or of the UN Security Council — might just go the other way.
Imagine turning on the TV and seeing Paul Begala and Alan Dershowitz arguing, “Okay, it’s no fun letting foreigners dictate who our next president is going to be. But isn’t it better than civil war?”
Well, is it? A hundred forty years ago, Americans faced the same question. We answered with a resounding, “No!”
France and England both offered to mediate between North and South, during the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln turned them down flat. He understood that there is no such thing as an impartial mediator. Lincoln knew that France and England were up to no good.
America’s Monroe Doctrine had long frustrated European monarchs eager to expand in the New World. The French Emperor Louis Napoleon Bonaparte dreamed of annexing Mexico, and was rumored to have his eye on Florida and Louisiana as well. Britain wanted greater control over North American markets. A divided America would be too weak to resist these schemes. France and Britain therefore favored southern independence. (3)
Had Lincoln given in, France and England would have “mediated” the United States right out of existence.
They almost succeeded, even without Lincoln’s cooperation. A series of Union defeats in 1862 and 1863 emboldened France and England. Napoleon III landed troops in Mexico and installed a puppet government, in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine. (4) French and British diplomats maneuvered behind the scenes to build a European coalition strong enough to force mediation on Lincoln. (5)
Two miracles thwarted the conspirators. The first was Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg. The second was an event far less familiar to Civil War buffs, but perhaps equally decisive.
Lincoln had been courting the Russian Tsar, Alexander II, since the war began. Now his diplomacy paid off. Two Russian war fleets docked in New York and San Francisco, in September and October 1863 respectively. They remained in U.S. waters for seven months. (6)
The reason for this deployment was complicated. But its effects were not. Whatever his motive, the Tsar’s audacity in sending his fleet to America discouraged French and British interventionists. By the time the Russians withdrew, the war had turned decisively in Lincoln’s favor. (7)
Union diplomacy saved us from foreign intervention. Thanks to Lincoln’s firmness, Americans were left alone to settle their differences among themselves.
Those of us tempted to echo Wilentz’s cry should remember the lessons of our forefathers. War is a hard thing. But the men who built this nation preferred it to foreign meddling.
FOOTNOTES
1. Compiled by Salon Staff, “We’re in a Constitutional Crisis,” Salon.com, November 8, 2000
2. ITAR-TASS, October 24, 2000
3. Albert A. Woldman, Lincoln and the Russians (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1952), pp. 84-103; Alexandre Tarsaïdzé, Czars and Presidents: The Story of a Forgotten Friendship (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1958), page 184
4.
5. Woldman, Lincoln and the Russians (1952), pp. 84-103
6. ibid., pp. 140-149
7.
Cross-posted from FrontPage 11.20.00
Cross-posted from NewsMax.com 11.20.00
