Inner Lives

In a recent article on C.S. Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia" stories, which will be made into movies starting this December, Frederica Mathewes Green hits on a theme that Washington Post movie reviewer Stephen Hunter made recently as well:

In contemporary entertainment we hear almost nothing about the character of the characters: Those who fill our movies, TV shows, and contemporary novels are expected to be simply entertaining, rather than kind or truthful or fair. Yet if you open the pages of Charles Dickens or Jane Austen or any writer from before our age, you find that the inner landscape of each individual is extremely important, and in fact, a vital thread in the plot. Much of Pride and Prejudice hinges on whether D'Arcy is too prideful to be a good husband. David Copperfield must mature from being intoxicated with a silly, childlike woman to loving a woman who is noble and wise.

Earlier generations knew what we have largely forgotten, that it matters what kind of person you are. It matters if you are trying to become more Christ-like every day – more fair, more kind, more honest. It matters whether you are growing into the "image and likeness" of God. It matters whether we are growing in light or darkness. "If the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!" (Matthew 6:23)

Hunter wrote a piece on Sept. 11 about the difference between books and movies:

Storytelling movie-style is different than storytelling prose-style. The primary issue in prose is motive: You have to understand why the people do what they do, or else the whole shebang falls apart as illusion. The minds of the characters have to be consistent to be believable; action has to flow from character. Fiction writing is about what happens internally, even if lots of guns come out and stuff blows up.

Movies don't have time for all that internal crap. They can't go inside, so what's the point? They can show only from a distance, and if people do things -- silly things, random things, violent things -- we still accept it because, well, we're seeing it. It's there, it's reality, we go with it. Then there are pressing commercial obligations: They have seven minutes to catch the attention of a 17-year-old boy whose brain has been fried by video games and who, when he's not lost in cyberspace, primarily wants to get high or laid, in no particular order. He is the key to their riches; he must be pandered to.

The Whole Moral Scene

"The good will is manifested in its active caring for particular goods that we can do something about, not in dreaming of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" or even of my own 'happiness' or of "duty for duty's sake." Generally speaking, thinking in high level abstractions will always defeat moral will. As Bradley and others before him clearly saw, "my station and its duties" is nearly, but not quite, the whole moral scene, and can never be simply bypassed on the way to "larger" things." -- Dallas Willard, from his essay, "The Good Person: A Matter of the Heart"

Solitude

"The problem with solitude is not being alone, it is convincing ourselves that we are unnecessary, that the world will not collapse if we go away. Solitude is the discipline of letting go of our self-importance, letting go of our belief that we are necessary for the world to continue." -- Dallas Willard

Capote

One of my favorite actors, Philip Seymor Hoffman, stars in the movie "Capote," which opens today. Here is Stephen Hunter's take:

Truman Capote was as corny as Kansas in November, which is to say not corny at all.

So what was the elfin, mincing, vicuna-wrapped, dowager-loving, gossip-mongering, gay, E.T.-looking writer doing in a small village in the western edges of the Jayhawk State in November 1959? (He probably didn't even know what a jayhawk was.) The answer is twofold, according to Gerald Clarke's great 1988 biography "Capote" and this terrific movie based on a substantial part of it: writing a great book and destroying himself.

..."Capote" gets at the writer's ethical dilemma: Real people and their lives are never as tidy as a good story, and they must be nudged, shoved, manipulated to get with the program. Every writer of long-form nonfiction faces this issue; he also needs the cooperation of people his book will be unkind to, and so the manipulations are creative, as are, in his interior life, his justifications.

...The point it makes, and almost as a dish of justice served hot, is that all this cost Capote everything. He did what he had to do, he wrote what he had to write, and he was left with fame and fortune -- and plenty of nothing. It ignores theories of alcoholism (the writer's clear problem, no matter what else may have afflicted him) as disease. Instead it treats alcoholism as a symptom of a deeper soul rot.

That last point reminded me of something I read the other day in a book I just picked up, called, "Our Culture, What's Left of It," by Theodore Dalrymple:

Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed).

This idea in turn implies that one's state of mind, or one's mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one's life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct.

A ridiculous pas de deux [dance] between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is willfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably caused his misery in the first place. I have therefore come to see that one of the most important tasks of the doctor today is disavowal of his own power and responsibility. The patient's notion that he is ill stands in the way of his understanding of the situation, without which moral change cannot take place. The doctor who pretends to treat is an obstacle to this change, blinding rather than enlightening.

If Stephen Hunter says that "Capote" treats such things as alcoholism within that kind of a moral framework, I am all the more excited to see it.

Tina Brown Decoder

Her column today in the Post is full of non sequiturs that feather the ear but bewilder the mind.

"The bleakest detail of Miers's résumé is that her decision to accept Jesus Christ as her savior took place at the office."

But if she had come to faith while eating sushi and reading the Dalai Lamai on a rainy day in the city.....? A ok?

Miers' "single-minded pursuit of career advancement" has "come at the cost of a swallowed self."

Did she swallow herself? Would that be self-actualization?

The president favors women like Rice, Miers and Hughes because he has the kind of combustible male ego that needs to be "handled" -- and they know it, Miers better than most.

So giving women authority and responsibility is a bad thing if you're a Republican?

Somebody hand poor Tina a towel, tell her to dry off and go take a breather.

Tina Doesn't Get It

Only a great writer would use a phrase like, "the muzzled nature of her striving."

Unfortunately, Tina Brown doesn't get that Harriet Miers is simply...humilde.

Bird Flu Reaches Europe

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A strain of bird flu that can be deadly for humans has spread from Asia to the fringes of Europe, the European Commission said on Thursday, warning countries to prepare for a potential pandemic.

EU Health and Consumer Protection chief Markos Kyprianou said a strain of bird flu found in Turkey had been identified as the same H5N1 virus that killed more than 60 people in Asia since 2003 and forced the slaughter of millions of birds.

Click here for the whole article.

Gradual Mutation

Read this story from today's Post for the history, and for the great reporting by David Brown that shows what an adventure and mystery scientific work can be. It's great stuff.

But here is the news:

The Spanish flu killed at least 50 million people around the world in slightly more than a year -- late winter 1918 into the spring of 1919. Researchers have never figured out what made the virus so lethal, in part because there were no samples to study. Although viruses had been discovered by 1918, the flu virus was not isolated until 1933.



With the genome of 13,600 nucleotides known and published in the journals Science and Nature, the 1918 virus is already shedding light on its own history. It was a bird virus that appears to have become a human virus through the slow accumulation of mutations, not through the sudden trading of genes with another flu strain.

It is also illuminating the possible future of viruses that are worrying flu experts now. Some of the H5N1 "bird flu" strains seen recently in 10 Asian countries carry a few of the mutations seen in the 1918 virus, suggesting that they, too, may be slowly adapting to human hosts.

Vetting Clooney

George Clooney has made a new movie on the McCarthy Hearings of the 1950's called "Good Night and Good Luck." It comes out today. It looks good.

Good thing I've got my boys Stephen Hunter and Scott Galupo to help me sort through the lies of omission and bias in Clooney's presentation.

I'll let the Washington Post's Hunter (who says the movie is fairly well done) expose all that needs to be said about the historical accuracy of Mr. Clooney's picture. Mr. Hunter points out that the centerpiece of Mr. Clooney's movie is broadcaster Edward R. Murrow going on the TV to denounce Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had so fiercely attacked many suspsected soviet spies in the government.

Clooney wants to paint Murrow as the hero, and McCarthy as the villain. But Hunter says it was not that simple.

One of the men McCarthy attacked was Laurence Duggan, a former State Department employee, who killed himself because of the McCarthy hearings.

That's sad. It's also not the whole picture.

Duggan, as it turned out, was a Soviet spy, code-named "19," then "Frank" and finally "Prince."

He was, moreover, one of many Soviet spies embedded in the U.S. government at the time.

That's not all Clooney leaves out in his account of the Murrow-McCarthy fight: He leaves out the Cold War, the hot war in Korea, the Venona decrypts that proved how sophisticated and exhaustive the Russian intelligence initiative against the American target was. He even leaves out McCarthy himself, relying on archival footage and sparing himself the ordeal of trying to imagine such a fellow as a human being. He also leaves out nuance, context, empathy, anything that suggests the larger truth that nothing is as simple as it seems. The film, therefore, is like a child's view of these events, untroubled by complexity, hungry for myth and simplicity.

Fundamentally, he refuses to acknowledge that, as Joseph Persico wrote in his New York Times review of the 1999 book that brought these realities out, Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev's "The Haunted Wood," "the hardest part of these revelations to accept, at least for those of us who deplored the over zealous Red-hunting of the late 40's and early 50's, is that the hunt rested on more substance than we cared to admit, the phony posturing of Senator Joseph McCarthy aside."

The result does a disservice to history: It suggests that McCarthy was an arbitrary sociopath disconnected from a larger issue. That he was just a bad Republican who liked to bully and destroy people out of his own pathology and he was smitten by the powerful moral force of a flawless crusader. Good whupped bad. Good hit bad upside the head. Good kicked butt. But nothing in real life is ever that simple, and to pretend that it is has to be a lie itself. That's the truth that should be spoken to the power that Clooney represents.

I LOVE that last line.

Clinton's boys back me up

In the post below, I argued that the Daily Kos was wrong to say that Bush nominated stealth candidates to the SCOTUS because the Republican values and ideology are out of the mainstream.

Today, the Washington Post published the results of a report by two of President Clinton's former advisers that backs me up.

The piece is called "Report Warns Democrats Not to Tilt Too Far Left." It was written by William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck, who both worked in the Clinton White House and are now a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, and a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, respectively.

Key quote:

In one of their more potentially controversial findings, the authors argue that the rising numbers and influence of well-educated, socially liberal voters in the Democratic Party are pulling the party further from most Americans.

On defense and social issues, "liberals espouse views diverging not only from those of other Democrats, but from Americans as a whole. To the extent that liberals now constitute both the largest bloc within the Democratic coalition and the public face of the party, Democratic candidates for national office will be running uphill."

So to all those left-liberals out there (remember, progressive conservatives are the true liberals now), your tactic of demonizing your opponents by calling them "out of the mainstream" because they believe in abstinence-affirming sex education, or are opposed to abortion, just took a big hit.

Kos's take is wrong, but insightful

The Daily Kos is right to say that John Roberts and Harriet Miers have been "stealth" nominations for the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). There's been a lot of discussion over why Bush didn't nominate someone who would draw a bloodbath of a fight.

Kos' analysis of why Bush avoided a fight is, I think, wrong:

This was supposed to be their "coming out" party, and yet Bush refuses to let them out of the closet. Republicans are losing ground with the American people, as the public becomes increasingly intimate with the side effects of Republican mis-governance. The last thing they need is the last fictions of the conservative agenda, masked by rhetorical devices and Friday-afternoon disclosures, trumpeted for all to see.

The conservative agenda is not a dominant ideology, otherwise they wouldn't be so loath to give it to us unvarnished. It is a minority ideology. Yet the conservative yahoos don't get it. They think they're in the majority and can't fathom why Bush won't let them party out in the open.

So therein is Bush's dilemma. Sabotage the conservative movement by announcing its principles with a bullhorn (precisely what a Prescilla Owens would've done), or suffer conservative discontent by keeping them locked up in the basement.

Bush chose the latter.

I think Kos makes an interesting point about the public becoming disenfranchised with Republican government, but it's an overly simplistic point. There is a debate within Republican circles on whether Bush's spending is healthy, and some conservatives think he's out of control. I'll leave that one, for the present, to the economists.

But most people vote on more basic issues, one of which is values/morality etc. And I think if you look at the fact that 11 states voted against same-sex marriage last november, and then three more have done the same afterward, that's just one sign that many people are realizing there must be limits on personal choice and freedoms. It's a self-evident truth: you can't be free to do whatever you want to do. Hopefully more people are figuring out every day that leftist elitists are trying to foist their own perspectives onto the populace through the courts or the legislature, which is the only way so far that same-sex marriage has been legally validated.

But I think there is something deeper that Kos exposes, but analyzes incorrectly. He is right that Bush chose not to expose conservative ideology to the public. But that is not because most people don't agree.

I think it is because in a debate on the law, most of the American people are not intelligent enough or well read enough to listen to facts and follow facts, but instead, they listen to emotionalism and rhetoric that might or might not be backed up by facts.

And in the age of media, in the United States of Entertainment, the Democrats, lacking any real ideas of their own, are masters of rhetoric that trumpets "rights" and "equality" and labels their opponents "extremists" or "bigots."

And Republicans are not quite as media savvy when it comes to public relations, or image-making, and never have been, going all the way back to Nixon vs. Kennedy.

So Bush chose to submit nominees who will uphold the law, who will judge in a way that the majority of Americans DO agree with, but Bush has submitted the nominees in a way that will not allow them to be subterfuged by dishonest, shallow, mean-spirited and unintelligent tactics from the left, which are all they have left.

But because we watch far too much television and our universities have become breeding grounds for the new religion of the left, which is secular humanism mixed with relativism.

And more serious

I haven't posted much lately, although I've wanted to.

But now this, from today's New York Times:

President Bush this week asked the leaders of the world's top vaccine manufacturers - Chiron, Sanofi-Aventis, Wyeth, GlaxoSmithKline and Merck - to come to the White House on Friday to discuss preparations for pandemic flu, said people with knowledge of the meeting who insisted on anonymity because the White House has not yet announced the meeting.