Brother, Can you Spare Some Chicken Noodle?

According to news reports, the only stock to rise after Wall Street collapsed yesterday was Campbell's Soup.

Is this a harbinger of things to come?

White Candidate, Dead Pubs

My little corner of the publishing empire where I work rests uncomfortably close to a non-descript reference shelf marked "Dead Pubs." This is the place where we keep bound copies of newsletters and books that, for one reason or another, didn't make it. It is, to coin a phrase, the place where publications go to die.

I was staring out at the shelf from my cubicle the other day, noting the array of blue binders, all tagged with four letter acronyms the company uses to name its many compliance publications. One row in particular stood out. Side by side were binders labeled "SPEC," "TMAN," "TRAN" "TRAD," and my favorite, "TOOL".

Then it hit me: Don't these all sound like names of Palin children?

I did a little research and discovered that most of you, as usual, are way ahead of me. Scroll down a little bit to find the "Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator."

For the record, I am Stinger Assassin Palin. I can live with that.

Yes I Can!

When I go to my girlfriend's place, I tend to leak coins onto the couch. By the time I leave, there's usually a big pile of quarters, nickels and dimes in the corner, sometimes on the floor. It occurred to me the other day that maybe someday I could be president. I, too, have a proven track record of making change.

Election

Today is primary day in DC, Virginia and Maryland. I offer this...just because I think its funny.

Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days

The first thing to say is that this movie shook me to the core. It is one of the most well made and well acted movies I've seen in a long time. The second thing to say is that I don't think I will see it again for a long time...maybe ever. That's because, in addition to all of it's well deserved accolades -- including the top prize at Cannes last year -- it is also one of the most disturbing films I have ever seen.

Briefly, "Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days" takes place during one harrowing day in Romania and tells the story of a woman and her friend attempting to get an illegal abortion during the last days of the Communist dictatorship there. In many ways, it echoes my favorite movie of last year, "The Lives of Others," in that it powerfully evokes the brutalization of the Communist system. But this movie, while not quite as good as "Lives," nonetheless speaks more to our political and cultural circumstances in this country, especially in an election year where abortion once again is likely to be the subject of much polarizing rhetoric, division and grandstanding.

When I said the movie was disturbing earlier, I meant that in the best possible sense, in that it is genuinely thought-provoking and that it's images and themes will haunt you and spark conversation long after you leave the theater. Director Cristian Mungiu deserves much credit for his ability to drain every ounce of tension from this situation, and I couldn't keep my eyes off of Anamaria Marinca, who was so believable and sympathetic in her portrayal of the friend whose story anchors the film.

In tone and its sense of lingering claustrophobia and doom, the movie also reminded me a lot of the Hitchcock thriller "Rear Window." But the movie's ability to disturb never rests on cheap thrills, rather from its brutal depiction of a nightmarish scenario that many of us argue about, philosophize on and sometimes even vote on, but (thankfully) seldom experience.

What makes this movie closer to art is that it eschews the easy polarities and arch rhetoric that constitute much of the abortion debate in this country ("pro-life" "pro-choice," "the lives of the unborn," "a woman's right to her own body," "partial birth," "back allies"...and so on) and instead depicts a situation in which everyone involved is brought down by a culture that devalues life in all its forms.

When my sister and I discussed the movie later, we were certain that the director, while offering fodder for all sides of the abortion question, was pro-life. It says something about the subtlety of his approach that I learned later we were wrong: He is adamantly pro-choice. And,just to prove once again that I truly have my finger on the pulse of nothing in this country, I was equally surprised to learn that many pro-life groups were highly critical of the film. There are some people in this world who can forgive anything but subtlety, I guess.

I do find it heartening that this year has brought two movies that have treated the notion of unwanted pregnancy with thoughtfulness, compassion and, yes, subtlety. I absolutely loved "Juno," which delved into roughly the same subject matter. But where "Juno" is acidly funny, light and ultimately heartwarming, "Four Months" is it's mirror opposite: brutal, unsparing and dark, dark, dark.

Anyhow, if you've thought at all about this subject, I urge you to go see this movie. Go see it, and then talk to me later. I'll be thinking about it for a long time.

It depends on what the meaning of ism is

Anyone who declares him- or herself to have libertarian sympathies is usually hit with one of two knee jerk responses: the first, and most common, is that by virtue of wanting to dramatically shrink the size and influence of the welfare state, you must have no sympathy for the poor, minorities and disadvantaged among us. The second is some variation of: "Without a giant federal bureaucracy, anything is permitted." Or, to paraphrase libertarian Dave Barry, laissez faire is just a slippery slope to dog marriage.


So, it was with considerable dismay that I read the latest troubling revelations concerning presidential candidate Ron Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican. Earlier on this site, while indicating some differences I have with Paul, I generally noted that the popularity of his campaign was a welcome sign that libertarian ideas were taking a foothold in this country.

The other day, I was alerted to a very well-done (albeit troubling) article in Reason magazine that detailed a slew of bigoted rhetoric that appeared in Paul's newsletters during the 80's and 90's. And this isn't just "crying racism," as in the recent flap between Clinton and Obama over the legacy of Martin Luther King. This is vile stuff, including claims that King "seduced underage girls and boys," that black protesters should gather "at a food stamp bureau or a crack house" rather than the Statue of Liberty, and that AIDs sufferers "enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick."

Even worse than the substance is the notion that the bashing of gays and blacks was part of a conscious political strategy among confidantes of Paul to form a coalition with people holding "older conservative values." One essay outlining the strategy called it -- and I'm not making this up -- "Outreach to Rednecks."

This is wrong on so many levels that it's hard to know where to start. In addition to the obvious bigotry and bile inherent in such comments, there's the fact that they feed into people's worst misconceptions about libertarians, namely that we're a bunch of wingnuts who don't care about the poor and whose opposition to state interference is really just nothing more than a thinly-veiled racism. Finally, if you agree that the two-party system has been compromised by relentless pandering (elements of the Republican Party being beholden to Christian mullahs, for instance, or the obeisance of many Democrats to the teacher's unions), libertarians lose moral authority when they make such naked political comprises to achieve power.

Paul has distanced himself from the controversy, calling it "old news" and saying that discussion of the newsletters' content were "hysterical smears aimed at political enemies."

I'm sorry, that doesn't cut it. Reason put it best:

Ron Paul may not be a racist, but he became complicit in a strategy of pandering to racists -- and taking "moral responsibility" for that now means more than just uttering the phrase. It means openly grappling with his own past -- acknowledging who said what, and why. Otherwise he risks damaging not only his own reputation, but that of the philosophy to which he has committed his life.

Ominous Parallels

I am not a big fan of the architecture of the Washington Mall. There are exceptions, of course. I love the stark, cold beauty of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial and the spare elegance of the Jefferson, offset by the tidal basin, so lovely in the Spring when the cherry blossoms bloom. But for the most part, it feels wrong. First of all, it's busy. There are now memorials popping up every year -- after the World War II Memorial, I stopped keeping track -- and they all seem to have been thought up by a committee of political hacks: a little bit of this and a little bit of that, thrown together in an attempt to please the most people while causing the least amount of offense (A cynic might say that's the definition of democracy.)But beyond that, there's an overwhelming Roman triumphalism to the place -- all these huge slabs of marble and giant, outsize statues and pagan symbols that would not have seemed out of place when Julius Caesar returned home from crossing Rubicon more than 2,000 years ago.

The architecture of a nation's capital should say something about its guiding spirit. And at a time when we are slogging through a hugely unpopular war far from home and are regularly accused of wanting to police the world, the buildings around town do little to dispel the notion that we're a giant, hungry Empire.

I was thinking about this when I was driving to Virginia one night and was once again struck by the latest addition to our skyline: The U.S. Air Force Memorial. I mean no offense to our brave men and women in uniform, who deserve our undying gratitude, but this memorial is more than tacky. It's downright scary, especially at night. Unlike the Roman-inspired architecture elsewhere on the mall, this piece is raw, almost bestial. To me, it resembles nothing less than a bony, grasping claw reaching out into the heavens. I was trying to remember what it made me think of, and then it hit me: The Dark Tower, Barad Dur, also known as the home of Sauron, the namesake of the Lord of the Rings.

I don't think these pictures do justice to just how creepy this image is at night -- the memorial, I mean. So, I went online, which I do when I need to confirm that I am not, in fact, crazy, and found the following testimonial. And I quote:

i was driving by washington yesterday night, and this was my first time seeing the memorial live, it scared the hell out of me, it is soo huge and i had my 2 yrs son that when he looked at of the window he started crying...but seriously is it just me or it scares others, it looked to me as a monster claws rising from the earth, something like that.

There you have it. This memorial makes little kids cry. I ask you: Is that the spirit that made America beautiful?

A Welcome Political Development

A famous quote that is sometimes attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, but more often to Winston Churchill, says: “If you are not a liberal at 20, you have no heart.” “If you are not a conservative at 40, you have no brains.”

By that calculus, I guess I haven't grown up much. Reading this piece in the Washington Post on Sunday, I was reminded that Ron Paul was the first person I voted for when I was 18, in the 1988 election that ushered in the Bush Dynasty. I don't know how enamored I am of Ron Paul. I don't agree with everything he says, but I find him to be an honorable politician -- a rarity in Washington, those two words going together -- and moreover, I like what he stands for. At a time of enormous disconnect and disaffection in American politics, where everyone hates the powers that be but we seem unable to rid ourselves of a miserable choice between two nincompoops, I like the idea that libertarianism is catching.

Besides, it represents the rare time that I was actually ahead of a trend.

Also, Dave Barry likes it. So how bad can it be?