SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
October 2005
Volume 12, Number 10
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> The Iowa Way
-> Snapshots (plus electronic Exclusives)
-> Publisher's Note
-> What Happened to Hitchens?
-> Dickens on Film
Nuggets (plus electronic Exclusives)
"Reactionary Utopian" Columns Reprinted in This Issue
FEATURES
The Iowa Way
(page 1)
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During Louis Farrakhan's "Millions More March" in
mid October, I happened to be reading Tom Wolfe's amazing
story of the explosion of Silicon Valley, "Two Young Men
Who Went West," in his collection HOOKING UP. Though it's
a fairly staid piece, {{ with little of Wolfe's riotous
humor and few of his orthographic pyrotechnics, it's the
most impressive display of his wide-ranging knowledge
I've ever read. But it's also inexpressibly more than
that. }} I was so engrossed in it that I found myself
reading until the dawn of the day of the march. And a
weird connection occurred to me.
Apart from his sophistication about the electronic
revolution, Wolfe connects the development of the
electronics industry to a few geniuses from the Midwest,
particularly Iowa. And one of the things that allowed
them to flourish was, surprisingly, their denominational
background. They were (mostly lapsed) Congregationalists,
like their legendary leader, Robert Noyce. The
informality of their church structures, Wolfe notes,
carried over into the nonhierarchical culture that
fostered their astounding creativity as they progressed
from primitive transistors to microchips,
microprocessors, and even more fantastic refinements, of
which one byproduct, a few years later, was the personal
computer.
These men had no use for the archaic corporate style
of the Northeast, with its business suits, chauffeurs,
and multi-martini lunches. Everything was informal, dress
was strictly casual, and lunch was a sandwich while they
talked shop. Not even parking spaces were assigned;
everything was first-come-first-served.
They were just a bunch of white boys, obsessed with
possibilities of new technologies. But they never thought
about things like ethnicity. Their minds were on what
they were =doing.=
The following day, as I caught radio reports of the
march, I was suddenly struck by the sheer =quaintness= of
Farrakhan, not to mention more conventional "civil rights
leaders." All of them, without knowing it, were basically
white supremacists.
These black "leaders" assumed that the reason blacks
still lag far behind whites in measurable things like
jobs and income is that whites are holding them back, and
they thought the gap could be closed by things like cash
reparations.
What a primitive superstition -- shared, of course,
by most white liberals. Silicon Valley owes absolutely
=nothing= to slavery or racial segregation. The microchip
wasn't built on the backs of black men. It was conceived
and created by people who weren't even thinking about
race, their own race or anyone else's.
But of course it never even occurs Farrakhan, much
less Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, to suggest that their
followers stop thinking about racial grievances, and
start thinking innovatively like Noyce and his ilk about
building a better microchip. They take it for granted
that the fate of blacks rests with whites and that the
lot of blacks can be improved only by appropriating the
"surplus wealth" of whites. {{ Like Marx, they can't get
beyond the misconceived categories of the exploited and
the exploiters, victims and victimizers. The same is true
of "organized labor." }}
In other words, blacks are still losing because
their alleged leaders keep them in the habit of thinking
like losers. Bill Gates makes tens of billions of
dollars, but he doesn't owe it to minimum-wage laws, any
more than he owes it to drawing the lucky lottery ticket.
Or for that matter, to "education."
Snapshots
(page 2)
The Harriet Miers farce exposed President Bush's
shortcomings even more starkly than the Iraq war. When he
said Iraq threatened the United States, it was possible
to shrug, "Well, with all that top-notch intelligence, he
may know something we don't." But when he told us that
Miss Miers had a firm grasp of the Constitution, you
could only laugh. The farce was compounded by the mutual
admiration of these two mediocrities, who are unable to
speak of each other without superlatives nobody else
would apply to either of them. In a sense I can almost
understand why he picked her for the Supreme Court; what
baffles me is why he'd hire her as his personal attorney.
* * *
The Iraqis who bothered to vote approved the
constitution drafted under the eyes of the American
occupation. That same week, Saddam Hussein finally went
on trial for "crimes against humanity," insisting that
that same occupation makes the proceedings illegitimate.
He has a point, of course, but it's not likely to stand
up in =this= court. He may as well ask clemency in
consideration of his long career in public service. My
son Mike has hit on his one chance for acquittal: get a
change of venue to California, where no jury has ever
convicted a celebrity.
* * *
Oh no! Not =another= threat! According to the
WASHINGTON TIMES, the Bush administration believes that
Venezuela's Castroite president Hugo Chavez is trying to
acquire nuclear weapons. Furthermore, Venezuela
"maintains increasingly close ties" with Iran, a member
of the Axis of Evil. So far, though, there seem to be no
specific plans for another pre-emptive war.
Exclusive to electronic media:
The most unjustly unsung observer of America today,
as far as I know, is E. Michael Jones, editor of the
Catholic monthly CULTURE WARS (most of which he writes
himself) and author of several wonderfully trenchant
books. Among the latter are LIBIDO DOMINANDI: SEXUAL
LIBERATION AND POLITICAL CONTROL (2000) and THE SLAUGHTER
OF CITIES: URBAN RENEWAL AS ETHNIC CLEANSING (2004), both
of which tell the story of the cultural subversion
practiced by America's elites, especially such seemingly
respectable institutions as the Ford and Rockefeller
Foundations. Jones is as profound as he is prolific. He's
also versatile, original, combative, and fearless, naming
names and drawing blood. If you think of liberals as
well-meaning bumblers, guilty of nothing worse than
"unintended consequences," you need to read Jones.
* * *
A new James Bond has been chosen to star in the
latest remake of CASINO ROYALE! This has to be the
biggest news in the world of entertainment since Katie
Holmes's pregnancy, or Jerry Lewis's hemorrhoids. Wait!
Don't you even want to know his name? It's Craig ...
Craig ... Craig =something.= Kind of an ugly fellow,
looks like a minor thug in one of the Roger Moore Bond
flicks. Daniel Craig! That's it! Maybe the best indicator
of how weary and formulaic the Bond films have become is
that roughly 150,000 rounds of ammunition have been fired
at 007 since his 1961 debut in DOCTOR NO, and he's never
even been nicked.
Publisher's Note
(page 2)
In the mailing for our September issue, the
printshop inadvertentedly omitted the reply form for our
upcoming Charter Subscribers' luncheon on December 3.
Both the invitation and reply are enclosed this time --
and we also mailed just the invitation and the reply form
in a separate envelope a few weeks ago.
[The brochure and the reply form are also available
on our website at www.sobran.com/2005dinner.shtml ---RNN]
This is our only fundraiser of the year and it helps
us keep the doors open and the editor writing. I hope you
will consider a donation to SOBRAN'S at this time.
And I hope you will consider becoming a
Charter/Benefactor to SOBRAN'S (or signing up a friend or
colleague) and joining us in Virginia on December 3!
-- Fran Griffin
P.S. The deadline to make a reservation for our Charter
Subscribers' luncheon has been extended to November 28.
Please contact us as soon as possible if you wish to
attend. See the reply form for more information.
What Happened to Hitchens?
(pages 3-4)
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I've had a mixed personal experience with
Christopher Hitchens. After forming a dislike of him from
his leftist writings some years ago, I found him
startlingly pleasant when I met him on the eve of a
debate we were scheduled to have in Williamsburg,
Virginia. In subsequent conversations he was always just
as opinionated as in his writings, but always engaging to
talk to. He once genially invited me into his apartment,
where I met his first wife and small son, enjoyed a nip
with him, and marveled at the range of his library.
{{ I was a little worried by his drinking. I'm not
violating any confidences here; his fondness for the
bottle has come up often in the polemical brawls he gets
into, and, far from denying it, he has written about it
himself. It didn't make him any less agreeable then, or
in a subsequent meeting we had, with his charming second
wife, in a bar. Nor did it noticeably impair the rapidity
of his mind or the remarkable facility of his speech. }}
On the other hand, he wiped the floor with me in our
Williamsburg debate. He thought so quickly and spoke so
well that I didn't have a prayer of besting him. He was
formidably well read and informed. Later, when he opposed
the 1991 Gulf War, he crushed Charlton Heston more
decisively, even cruelly, in a televised debate,
challenging him to locate Iraq on an unmarked map; and I
actually felt sorry for the befuddled Heston, though I
was rooting for Hitchens. Little did I suspect that
another Iraq war would find us on opposite sides. I
wonder: Does he now feel that Heston was essentially
right after all? I doubt it. Even at his most convivial,
Hitchens =has= to win every argument, and =never= backs
down.
Reading him in subsequent years, I've still found
him a challenge and a puzzle. Despite his assured tone
and his outspokenness, I often wonder what he's driving
at. Not that he hides it, exactly: he hates organized
religion, Catholicism in particular, Pope Pius XII, and
such associated manifestations as Mother Teresa and Mel
Gibson. He must be the only reviewer who complained, as
he did in his VANITY FAIR column, that THE PASSION OF THE
CHRIST wasn't graphic enough. He called it
"sadomasochistic," a silly charge, but then added the
observation that a crucified man would have been totally
naked and would have involuntarily discharged his bladder
and bowels. A hard man to satisfy, this Hitchens.
In fact I know of no writer, past or present, who
has been so versatile in his disapprovals. These have
included (to confine myself to the short list) Zionism,
Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Bill and Hillary Clinton,
Henry Kissinger, T.S. Eliot, and the entire royal family
of Britain. {{ Immediately after the deaths of Lady Diana
and her lover Dodi, he pitilessly observed, on
television, that they had asked for it by speeding
unconscionably through that Paris tunnel. }} His censures
are often arbitrary and personal; he often dismisses his
targets with that curt British epithet, "odious."
On the other hand, he has lately written admiring
little books about Orwell and Jefferson. The former
clearly implied his own claim to Orwell's mantle, though
he lacks Orwell's relaxed Dickensian affections. He has,
for better or worse, an intensity all his own.
For many years Hitchens was twinned with his friend
Alexander Cockburn; they were both Brit expatriate
leftists (though Hitchens, at least, is now a U.S.
citizen) who wrote columns in THE NATION. Both were
particularly noted for their slashing attacks on the
state of Israel, which helped get Cockburn fired from THE
VILLAGE VOICE; and after falling out with Cockburn,
Hitchens left THE NATION recently, as he became alienated
from the Left over the Iraq war, which he has supported
with all his characteristic vehemence and vituperation.
Has he converted from Left to Right? I wouldn't say
that, though he now writes for publications like NATIONAL
REVIEW, THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and the WALL STREET JOURNAL,
which once loathed him as he did them. His old neocon
enemies have forgiven him his attacks on Israel because
he backs the Iraq war. He's never retracted his hard
words for Israel, but he doesn't repeat them now. Instead
he inveighs against "Islamofascism," whatever that is.
The entire religion of Islam falls naturally under his
general loathing of religion. He explained his rejection
of Christ's teachings in reasonably polite tones for the
Catholic magazine CRISIS. (He's less inhibited in VANITY
FAIR, where he has accused the Church of murdering
millions, as if this were common knowledge for which no
footnotes are necessary.) If he has abandoned Marxism, he
disguises the fact with the uninterrupted indignation of
his style.
Last year, in THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, Hitchens wrote
of the "arrested development" of P.G. Wodehouse, whose
fiction is set in Edwardian England and is free of any
trace of adult sexual interest. Though he admitted that
Wodehouse can often be hilarious, he clearly deprecated
the prudery, all the more so because Wodehouse carried it
over into his real life.
Well, this time I felt that Hitchens had finally
gone too far. To accuse Wodehouse of arrested development
is not to say he didn't develop; it's only to say you
don't approve of the way he =did= develop. Some would say
his stories kept getting better as he aged (and I'm one
of them), even if they never got dirtier; his prudery, or
rather his affected innocence, was part of the whole joke
that was his fictional world of the past. It's a world
that admits drunkenness but not lechery. ("I felt so darn
sorry for poor Sippy that I hadn't the heart to finish my
breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself.") Or are
all writers supposed to develop in the same way?
Certainly Hitchens has changed in his own way, and I
wouldn't presume to call it arrested development; I don't
know if it's development at all. Maybe he has just
changed his mind in ways I find inexplicable, even
disappointing. But I still read him for his explosive
moments, just as I keep reading Wodehouse for his jokes.
He keeps me turning the page, which is all I ask of any
writer.
The puzzle of his quasi conversion remains. Nobody
can put a finger on any positive inconsistency between
the Old Hitchens and the New Hitchens, but he is now
taking positions which (1) nobody ever predicted, (2)
everyone is surprised by (whether in horror or delight),
and (3) have landed him in strange company. He has
written a small book, A LONG SHORT WAR, defending the
Iraq war, which I read in dizzy incomprehension -- he's
still too fast for me, even on the printed page (though
he carefully deflects the question of Zionist enthusiasm
for the war, as the Old Hitchens, surely, would =not=
have done); and lately he has compressed his argument
into a dense four-page article in THE WEEKLY STANDARD
titled "A War to Be Proud Of."
Nobody, but nobody, argues more aggressively than
Hitchens. His style, though literate and sophisticated,
isn't academic; it's vigorously personal and moralistic.
There is no abstract question of right and wrong to be
addressed philosophically, only the practical question of
which side one is on. His opponents -- or at least the
ones he chooses to focus on -- are "peaceniks," "plain
frauds and charlatans," "flippant," given to "humorless
and pseudo-legalistic literalism," {{ "heavy jokes about
Halliburton," }} a "strategy of deception," "fatuous
insinuation," "sob-sister tripe pumped out by the Cindy
Sheehan circus and its surrogates."
Hitchens deftly combines such rapid-fire invective
with confusing Bush-bashing. Bush was an "isolationist"
before 9/11 brought him to his senses; he and Tony Blair
then "made a hash of a good case," because they
"preferred to scare people rather than enlighten them or
reason with them." Even now, Bush falls back on
"platitude and hollowness."
Still, despite Hitchens's effort to sound unsparing
even toward his allies, you can't help noticing that all
the really nasty and dishonest people seem to be on the
side of peace and all the decent ones, by another
coincidence, on the side of war.
But Saddam's Iraq was a "permanent hell" and a
"permanent threat" -- in short, the eternal enemy:
"fascism." Which is never defined. It remains the primal
dirty word. (All bad things seem to be variants of
fascism.) "At once, one sees," declares Hitchens, "that
all the alternatives would have been infinitely worse."
All? Infinitely? Really? War on Saddam's Iraq was "a
responsibility ... that no decent person could shirk. The
only unthinkable policy was one of abstention."
And what has the war achieved? Hitchens lists a neat
but nebulous Ten Benefits, with no offsetting moral or
material costs. (Libya has renounced its nuclear
ambitions, for instance.) Like a good magician, he keeps
our eyes on what he wants us to watch, distracting us
from other, possibly relevant, even possibly crucial
things. How many innocent lives, for instance, has the
war claimed? For Hitchens this simple question never even
comes up.
Again, I can't help feeling that he has taken sides
arbitrarily. I can imagine him opposing the war with
equal agility -- and more conviction. Why didn't he?
Would that really have been "unthinkable"? He found it
quite thinkable in 1991.
A clue to the New Hitchens may lie in his rupture
with Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist who went to work for
the Clinton administration and whom Hitchens accused of
committing perjury for Clinton. Blumenthal retaliated by
accusing Hitchens of having, during a bibulous dinner,
=denied the Holocaust!=
I forget Hitchens's immediate rejoinder to this
deadly charge, but it wasn't long afterward that I
noticed that he hadn't written any anti-Zionist polemics
for a while, much less repeated his odd praise of David
Irving (in VANITY FAIR, years back) as "a great Fascist
historian." He now goes out of his way to mention his
discovery, after his mother's recent death, that she was
Jewish. And in a recent tribute to Saul Bellow in the
WALL STREET JOURNAL, he emphasized Bellow's Jewishness --
the very source, he implied, of his genius as a novelist.
(He said nothing of Bellow's Zionism.)
Are we getting any closer to the heart of the
mystery of the abrupt change in the fearless Christopher
Hitchens?
Dickens on Film
(pages 5-6)
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I've always felt slightly guilty at my inability to
love Dickens with all my heart. He's the most big-hearted
of authors, after all; and you can know his great
characters without reading his books. No novelist has
been so well served by the movies and television, and
those characters are so vivid that they seem to exist
independently of the medium through which you encounter
them. In that respect they have been justly called
mythical.
Among the most memorable are Sam Weller, Ebenezer
Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim, Oliver Twist, Mr.
Bumble, Fagin, Jack "the Artful Dodger" Dawkins, Nancy,
Bill Sikes, David Copperfield, Betsey Trotwood, Wilkins
Micawber, Mr. Murdstone, Pegotty, Barkis, Mr. Creakle,
Uriah Heep, Steerforth, Mr. Pecksniff, Mrs. Gamp, Madame
Defarge, Sydney Carton, Pip, Abel Magwitch, Mrs.
Havisham, Joe Gargery, Mr. and Mrs. Wackford Squeers,
Little Nell, Daniel Quilp, and Dick Swiveller. They might
be remembered for their colorful, evocative names alone.
The OXFORD READER'S COMPANION TO DICKENS takes 18 pages
to list his characters. Some of the books' settings are
also familiar: the Pickwick Club, Dotheboys Hall, the Old
Curiosity Shop, Bleak House, and Jarndyce and Jarndyce.
Dickens's critical reputation has had its ups and
downs. Even while he was alive and at the height of his
popularity and unparalleled celebrity, some readers found
his unabashed bathos embarrassing; the most famous
illustration being the fate of Little Nell. Thousands of
anxious New Yorkers crowded the piers waiting for the
latest installment of THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP to arrive
from England, calling out to the ship's crew, "Is Little
Nell dead?" Decades later Oscar Wilde spoke for refined
taste when he quipped, "One must have a heart of stone to
read the death of Little Nell without laughing."
But G.K. Chesterton defended Dickens's naive appeal
against this sophisticated reaction to it. We feel, he
says, that "Dickens is a great writer even if he is not a
good writer." "Great," he insists, is a word that is
indispensable precisely because it's indefinable. For
some men, no other word will do; and Dickens is one of
these. "There is a great man who makes every man feel
small. But the real great man is the man who makes every
man feel great." Compared with this quality of infinite
inventive power, Dickens's formal defects as a novelist
-- incredible plots and such -- hardly matter.
{{ "Dickens," he goes on, "did not write what the
people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted....
Dickens never talked down to the people. He talked up to
the people." For Chesterton, the essential Dickens
appears in his first great book, THE PICKWICK PAPERS, a
happily gigantic, formless, and inexhaustible work of
comic genius. To the charge that Dickens stole the
story's general plan from its illustrator, Seymour,
Chesterton wittily retorts, "Dickens not only did not
get the general plan from Seymour, he did not get it at
all." }}
Today Dickens's classic status is simply a fact
serious criticism must come to terms with as it can.
George Orwell's famous long essay makes a trenchant
survey of his undeniable defects, yet doesn't deny his
unique literary stature. Even his ferocious satire
somehow "succeeded in attacking everybody and
antagonizing nobody." The socialist Orwell complains that
he never comprehends the social evils he deplores, but
typically resolves all problems with the deus ex machina
of a kind-hearted rich man who comes to the rescue -- as
if, snorts Orwell, a man would devote his life to
amassing a fortune and then give it all away! For Dickens
there's nothing wrong with the capitalist system itself.
(It took Orwell himself quite a while to suspect any
essential flaw in socialism.)
Dickens fairly demands dramatization, and even in
his lifetime his works were quickly adapted for the
theater (often by the author himself, who also performed
them in hugely popular readings; audiences agreed that he
would have been a great actor); but they are trickier to
put on the modern movie or television screen. Their
uninhibited rhetoric can be too much for the close-up
camera, which is better suited to naturalism.
Roman Polanski's new film of OLIVER TWIST is superb
in many ways, but it has met the curious criticism that
it's too literally faithful to the novel, with no
independent life of its own. There is something in this,
but the real point is that mere fidelity to the letter of
Dickens misses his uproarious spirit. I found the film
very moving, but it also reduces myth to mere realism.
For example, the movie excises a typical Dickensian
plot device: the final revelation that Oliver is
Mr. Brownlow's grandson. Coincidental blood relations are
one of the novelist's favorite tricks for tying up a
story, but presumably this was too improbable for the
kind of movie Polanski aimed to make.
But it was exactly the kind of thing Dickens used
for the kind of story =he= wanted to tell, one in which
the design of a benign Providence is finally disclosed.
The orphan has a family after all. To the secular mind,
this seems mere outrageous coincidence; but in Dickens,
it's the sign of a universe ruled by a benevolent God.
Dickens's religious views are hard to specify beyond
approximation -- a nondenominational Christianity, more
emotional than doctrinal -- but his books are informed by
an ethic of charity, sympathy for the weak, and a fierce
hatred of cruelty, bullying, and priggishness. His
funniest villains are hypocrites like Squeers, Pecksniff,
and even Murdstone and his abominable sister. His most
beloved and emblematic works are his Christmas stories,
especially, of course, A CHRISTMAS CAROL.
The essence of Dickens's art -- and of all art,
Chesterton would say -- is exaggeration, even caricature.
This is what makes him embarrassing to modern taste.
Polanski's OLIVER TWIST is beautiful in many ways, but
David Lean's 1948 version, with Alec Guinness's hideous
Fagin, though less meticulous about social conditions of
nineteenth-century London, had more of the novel's wild
comedy, especially in its portrayal of the hilariously
self-important "porochial beadle," Mr. Bumble. (The film
avoids any mention that Fagin, played by Ben Kingsley, is
a Jew, or Polanski might have joined Mel Gibson in Abe
Foxman's Inferno.)
Six BBC adaptations of Dickens (now available in a
boxed set of DVDs for $49.99) suffer even worse from
undue fastidiousness. They are well done, in their way,
especially GREAT EXPECTATIONS; but their restraint and
sobriety would be more appropriate to, say, Jane Austen,
or maybe George Eliot, even Thomas Hardy.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS (along with the first half of
DAVID COPPERFIELD) is my own favorite of the Dickens
novels I've read. In 1946 Lean also made an excellent
film of it; the stellar cast included Bernard Miles, a
character actor now unfortunately forgotten, as the
blacksmith Joe Gargery, and I cannot choose but weep at
the crushing scene in which he visits Pip (John Mills) in
London, only to realize that his awkward presence
mortifies the nouveau riche Pip. Pip, for his part,
guiltily realizes that he has become not only a
gentleman, but a snob; and his uneasy maturation, unique
among Dickens's heroes, sets the stage for one of the
greatest plot twists in fiction, the shocking
self-disclosure of his mysterious benefactor.
Dickens's characters owe their magic to a quality
most of them share, a gigantic oddity; they are adults as
seen by a child's eyes, wondrous but bewildering. He
seldom analyzes them; he is struck by their surfaces,
their mannerisms, their repetitions, their
eccentricities, and of course their hypocrisies. Orwell
marveled at Dickens's ability "to stand both inside and
outside the child's mind." Dickens's children see the
world as in a dream, its objects luminously magnified,
but without proportion or perspective.
David Copperfield's stepfather, Mr. Murdstone, is a
terrifying figure, though he actually does little
"objective" harm; he thrashes David, confines him to his
room, and sends him to a dismal boarding school and to
degrading work in a blacking factory, but such things
don't begin to explain the impression of utter, devilish
cruelty he makes on us. It's amazing how Dickens makes
you feel you remember him from your own childhood. I
myself had as gentle and lovable a stepfather as a boy
ever had, but I have the extraordinary sense of
=recognizing= Murdstone as if he were part of my own
early experience. How to explain this? I suppose it's
Dickens's great gift to tap our deep memory of the age
when all grownups are essentially scary, even the kind
ones.
The most remarkable Dickens adaptation of recent
times was the Royal Shakespeare Company's nine-hour stage
production of NICHOLAS NICKLEBY in the early 1980s. After
a triumphant run at the Old Vic in London, it came to
Broadway, where I saw it with great enjoyment. It too is
now available on video (four DVDs for $79.99); it serves
Dickens well, toning down neither his sentiment nor his
flamboyance.
Slightly less fine, much shorter but still
satisfying, is the recent film with Christopher Plummer,
Jim Broadbent, Juliet Stevenson, Nathan Lane, Tom
Courtenay, Edward Fox, and Anne Hathaway, directed by
Douglas McGrath. Even at nine hours Dickens's rambling
story is much abridged, but this movie captures as much
of it as could be contained in two hours.
A generation ago, Dickens's literary immortality
seemed secure, and it also seemed likely that his novels
would keep finding their way onto film. Today the very
future of literature appears less certain, so we may
wonder how many more movies his books will inspire. Gone
are the days when Hollywood could make box-office hits of
DAVID COPPERFIELD (with W.C. Fields as Micawber!) and A
TALE OF TWO CITIES (starring Ronald Colman), as well as
other great novels like ANNA KARENINA, THE HUNCHBACK OF
NOTRE DAME, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE,
books that used to be read in high school. Things to come
can only be guessed at, but when was the last time you
heard of a high school student reading a Victorian novel?
NUGGETS
{{ EMPHASIS IS INDICATED BY THE PRESENCE OF "EQUALS"
SIGNS AROUND THE EMPHASIZED WORDS. }}
PRESIDENT FRANKEN: Comedian Al Franken, at his best the
funniest man on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE back when it was at
its best (remember his character Stuart Smalley?), is
said to be considering a run for the U.S. Senate (he's a
Minnesota native). If so, I hope he wins, and I dream
he'll eventually make it all the way to the White House.
On one condition: He must never, ever talk about
politics. (page 8)
FORGOTTEN, BUT NOT GONE: Harriet Miers has now -- oh,
wait. I should explain who she was. In case you'll have
forgotten by the time you read this: She was President
Bush's hapless nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court a while
back. Anyway, I was about to say she has joined Abe
Fortas, Clement Haynsworth, Harold Carswell, Robert Bork,
and Douglas Guinzburg among unsuccessful Court nominees
over the last generation. I still hope Guinzburg gets
renominated someday. (page 10)
OFFICIAL SECRETS: Notice what special prosecutor Patrick
Fitzgerald has =not= said. Neither Scooter Libby, nor
Dick Cheney, nor Karl Rove has been accused of leaking
the name of a single Mossad agent. (page 12)
Exclusive to electronic media:
IF YOU CAN'T FIND ANYTHING BAD TO SAY ... : Senate
Democrats reacted to Bush's new Court nomination by
objecting that Samuel Alito is no Sandra Day O'Connor.
True, but that's more like a recommendation than a
criticism. If O'Connor was fit for the job, how hard can
it be? If anything, Alito is severely overqualified for
the Court and should seek a way to make a living more
worthy of his talents.
POLITICS AND HUMILIATION: Bush should have seen not only
that Harriet Miers was "unqualified," even by the very
modest standards of the Federal judiciary, but that she
was bound to be defeated and, what's more, cruelly
humiliated. Sometimes politics really makes you cringe.
COUNTING TO 51: Democrats are threatening to bork Samuel
Alito, Bush's latest Court nominee. They'd better check
the odds. They seem to be forgetting that when they
borked the original Bork, they controlled the Senate (as
well as the House), they faced little opposition in the
media, and Ted Kennedy was still taken seriously.
NOMENCLATURE NOTES: We aren't supposed to call abortion
advocates "baby-killers." The baby is a "fetus," and the,
er, "procedure" is daintily referred to as "terminating a
pregnancy." Maybe we should describe them as
"fetus-terminators"?
REPRINTED COLUMNS ("The Reactionary Utopian")
(pages 7-12)
* Confessions of a Right-Wing Peacenik (October 6, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/051006.shtml
* Liberal "Neutrality" (October 13, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/051013.shtml
* Who Is to Say? (October 20, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/051020.shtml
* Body Counts (October 25, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/051025.shtml
* Bush versus Bush (October 27, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/051027.shtml
* The Scooter Saga (November 1, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/051101.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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[ENDS]