Category Archives: Political Commentary

More Hollywood Nitwittery

George, one of your progenitors in Hollywood once said, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.”

”The parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what we’re doing in Iraq now are unbelievable.

Yes, I’d say unbelievable is exactly the right word.

”On the personal level it was how does a good person turn into a bad person, and part of the observation of that is that most bad people think they are good people, they are doing it for the right reasons,” he added.

Of course, most lousy directors and hackneyed script writers think they’re brilliant, profound and insightful.

I’ll probably go see the movie, but only for the special effects, which is all that Lucas was ever really any good at.

The Academic Bestiary

Sara Townsley, a graduate student in biology (among other things–she should start a blog), offers a field guide to the Cornell University campus.

The Gray-Tufted Nostalgic Lamprey. Physically less imposing than their fearsome and often irreversibly tenured colleagues, comprising the bulk of the liberal arts faculty. These herbivorous throwbacks can be identified by their poor hygiene, old Volvos and apparent lack of vertebrae or testicles. As committed Marxists, a century of genocide poses a bothersome snag; thus, they’re prone to historical revisionism and faddish prejudices. These aging, conformist pseudo-radicals still regard themselves as courageous rebels, despite having built a habitat cleansed of all but lock-step sycophants. Found in organic markets, peace protests and pricey restaurants.

It sounds like a similar habitat to Ann Arbor, Madison and Berkeley.

Have A Dos Equis

Today is my first Cinco de Mayo since leaving southern California, and clearly the holiday is much less a part of the culture in southern Florida than it is there. It’s not a day that I’ve ever celebrated myself, and given the ongoing disaster that has been Mexican governments, alternating between feudalism and crony socialism, since Independence and up to the present day, I’m often puzzled that the Mexicans celebrate it, though I suppose they’re still better off than they were as a colony, given who the colonialists were. It wasn’t, of course, the day that they won their independence–that happened much earlier–but it was almost certainly the day that they cemented it.

But for Americans, there is one thing to celebrate today–it was a spectacular (which is to say, typical) military disaster for the French.