Courtesy of Steven Spielberg and, well, pretty much everybody.
Has John Cusack Ever Made a Bad Movie?
Kidding. Sort of.
I mean, look, the guy’s made almost 60 movies, in a career spanning more than 25 years (per his Wikipedia filmography, at least). It’s pretty much impossible to make that many films and have nary a stinker in the bunch.
Granted, I haven’t seen all or even most of those five dozen films. (Which surprised me, actually; I’d been prepared to open this post by flashing my Cusack credentials, daring anyone to challenge me.)
But I’ve seen a lot of them. And I honestly cannot think of a single film, even the ones he hasn’t “starred” in, which he has not boosted by a sly, assured performance.
Lord knows, there’s nothing conventionally movie-star about his looks — his soulful-hangdog looks (like in the above photo) or (as at left) his crazy looks or (as below right) affable, laughing, and apparently relaxed. (I’ve never seen Rachael Ray’s talk show, but I’ve seen her manic 30-Minute Meals routine. It’s hard to imagine anyone could ever really be relaxed around that person, but I remain open to the possibilities of an infinite universe.)
And Lord knows, in one of his profession’s true injustices, he doesn’t have shelves full of acting awards.
But damn, the guy is a pleasure to see on the screen.
Fact, Fiction, and the Gray In-Between
In a college linguistics course, I first encountered the work of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA), a pre-World War II organization — we’d probably call it a think tank, nowadays — which (per Wikipedia):
…formed with the general concern that increased amounts of propaganda were decreasing the public’s ability to develop their own critical thoughts. The purpose of the IPA was to spark rational thinking and provide a guide to help the public have well-informed discussions on current issues. “To teach people how to think rather than what to think.” The IPA focused on domestic propaganda issues that might become possible threats to the democratic ways of life.
I’m not going to use RAMH for political commentary, in one direction or the other. But in light of the political atmosphere in the US this year, I thought it might be useful to reiterate, briefly, the seven categories of propaganda techniques which the IPA identified:
- Name-calling
- Glittering generalities
- Transfer
- Testimonial
- Plain folks
- Card stacking
- Bandwagon
Each category is covered separately in links from the Wikipedia article. Another couple of excellent resources for further reading on this subject are:
- Dr. Ronald B. Sandler’s 2005 essay, “Propaganda and How to Recognize It”
- Aaron Delwiche’s propagandacritic Web site (which is where I found the image at the top of this post, “Glitter,” by Carol Lay)
For now, though, I wanted to highlight one specific tactic which politicians of all persuasions are especially fond of. It’s a sub-category of category 2, “glittering generalities,” and it’s summed up in a phrase which I still remember from that linguistics course: mere assertion.
Mere assertion is exactly what it says: the propagandist says that something is the case — is true — (that’s the “assertion” part) but does not offer any sort of substantive support for the claim (hence the “mere”). This tactic most often becomes useful when the politician is speaking under time constraints; the implication is, I could cite numerous pieces of evidence for that claim, but unfortunately I don’t have time.
I’m not going to quote mere-assertion examples from last night’s Vice-Presidential debate, although it wouldn’t be difficult. Instead, I’ll direct your attention to the transcript, available from numerous sources:
And, of course, don’t forget to visit the FactCheck.org site to help sort out the wheat of fact from the chaff of fiction and propaganda.
Edit to add: Bear in mind that FactCheck, and sites like it, seldom point out the true statements; they focus on the false, questionable, and/or fuzzy ones. So knowing that two debaters have a roughly equal number of bogus claims doesn’t mean much unless you account for the overall number of factual claims made by each of the two. (That is, for example, if both “teams” made 10 erroneous statements but one of them made a total of 50 factual claims while the other made only 10 — well, you see where this is going.) Also note that these sites don’t weight the importance of a false claim: someone who’s wrong on the average household income in Country X, but otherwise right, isn’t at nearly as much fault as someone who’s wrong on Country X’s ties to terrorism (and hence on its invasion-worthiness), but otherwise right.
Puzzlin’ Evidence… Done Hardened in Your Heart
Talking Heads was one of those bands which I probably never would have picked up on — not on my own, anyhow. Predictably, in retrospect, it took a nudge from my brother.
Or rather, a couple of different nudges. One of the later ones came in 1986, with the release of the musical film True Stories. Mike pointed me to a couple of reviews and then, somehow, he managed to corral a bunch of us to accompany him to Philadelphia to see it one night.
Nominally, it’s a Talking Heads film: the group released a not-quite-soundtrack album containing its versions of the songs. But in the film — written and directed by, and “starring,” the Heads’ lead singer, David Byrne — with few exceptions, the songs are performed by other people in the cast. For instance, a voodoo priest (played by gospel/R&B star Pops Staples) sings a song called “Papa Legba” to bring love and good fortune to Louis (The Dancing Bear) Fyne (played by John Goodman).
The general idea for the film came to him, Byrne has said, from tabloid stories — how they might represent people from a single town.
Department of Neighborhood Security
The Missus and I live in a smallish subdivision some distance away from downtown. Nonetheless, the area around the development is all within City limits — except for the development itself, which for whatever mysterious reason has never agreed to annexation. We (TM and I) refer to it, privately, as The Principality — because it’s so much like a Monaco situation, y’know?
Anyhow, recently The Principality’s governing body (a/k/a the neighborhood association) voted to establish one of those “neighborhood crime watch” programs. You know the deal: neighbors look out for each other, particularly alert to the possibility that miscreants of one kind or another might be breaking into homes or cars and so on.
Not that we personally know of any such incidents. (I’m not saying there have been none — just that we’ve never heard of any.) …Oh, wait, yes, I’m sorry: a neighboring subdivision had its entry sign stolen. Other than that, nada.
But as we all know in the post-9/11 era, unseen threats are everywhere. In fact, a given imaginable danger is magnified in direct proportion to its invisibility. Kind of If there’s no evidence of wrongdoing, you’re just not looking hard enough.
So we have the new crime-watch thing. One key element of which, apparently, is the appointment of “block captains” to coordinate the crime-watching efforts of neighbors who live along a specific stretch of roadway. Our own block captain recently mailed us a two-page flyer providing some details. The following is, I believe, a critical excerpt (emphasis in the original):
…As your block captain, I will be asking for you to provide phone numbers, and e-mail addresses, which will allow two-way communication between neighbors and the neighborhood crime watch program. The exchange of this information will allow members of the community to provide and receive timely information regarding suspicious events and observations that have occurred. As an example, we recently had neighbors report a suspicious vehicle parked in the area. Through our communication, we also learned that the County Sheriff’s office did locate the vehicle and identify the occupants. Although on this occasion, the occupants of the vehicle did not intend to commit a criminal activity, through the effective reporting and communication of our neighbors, the individuals most assuredly would have been apprehended, had they committed a crime.
Got that? “Had they committed a crime.”
And if they didn’t, in fact, commit a crime — well, it’s their own fault they got “located” and “identified.” After all, they were in a suspicious vehicle, the dumb bastards! I’ll tell ya, what’s this world coming to when everyone can’t afford a decent, respectable, non-suspicious car?
The Others Next Door
Stewart Neville (who participates as “Conduit” in the blogalogue at various writerly sites) is an Irishman with a hard-boiled fictional voice and a voice of sweet reason — or at least reason, period — when not constrained by a “Once upon a time… The End” frame.
His post yesterday offers up a case in point.
Here in the USA — which at least used to be an open-minded melting pot (maybe not in these days of fences and quotas and such) — we of course celebrate, for good or ill, a handful of ethnicity-inspired holidays: St. Patrick’s Day, Columbus Day, Kwaanza, Bastille Day. But the Twelfth of July? Here’s Stuart:
One day in the Northern Irish calendar is more divisive than any other. A few words of explanation for my American friends: The 12th of July is a national holiday in Northern Ireland that commemorates the victory of the Protestant King William of Orange over the Catholic forces of King James at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
Yep, more than three hundred years have passed, and we still haven’t let it go.
The day is marked by parades throughout Northern Ireland, organised by Orange Lodges, featuring marching bands, much flag waving, and general bluster. When I was a little boy, the Twelfth was one of the highlights of the year, bettered only by Christmas and Easter. It’s hard to describe the feeling of a big bass drum being hammered to within an inch of destruction, the way it pounds your chest, along with the crackle of side drums, and the piercing melodies of dozens of not-quite-in-tune flutes. If you’re walking along, you can’t help but fall into step with the music.
What I don’t know about Irish history could fit in a stadium. (Think about it.) But there was something very familiar to me in this description of parades from Stuart’s childhood.
When Language, Pop Culture, and Politics Collide
You know what driver’s-ed classes don’t teach you? They don’t teach you how complicated it is to make your way through a busy intersection of more than two streets, especially when there are no traffic signals.
I thought about this failure today, in connection with the 1972 film of the musical 1776.
Until last night, I’d never seen the movie and never (truth be told) had wanted to. No objection to musicals per se, you understand. But I’ve always had a hard time with light and frothy musical treatments of truly momentous historical subjects.
(Yet I very much like Cabaret, and agree with Pauline Kael’s assessment at the time it was released: “A great movie musical, satirical and diamond-hard.” Satire with an edge: good. But perkiness? Eh, well…)
But last night my resolve was weak. The Missus and I were both wiped out by planning, preparing, and executing a July-4th cookout for […counting…] ten people. While she escaped to her office, collapsing into a fog of online gaming, I just sat, stretched out, on the sofa, TV remote close to hand. And clicked. And clicked. And clicked…
For some reason probably having to do with the previous day’s power failure, when I first turned it on the channel was set at 2: the Home Shopping Network. (click) PBS had David McCullough on Charlie Rose, talking about John Adams. (click) Wonder what’s on Turner Classic Movies…? Hmm. William Daniels in colonial garb. Singing. Singing? Did William Daniels sing? What was this, anyhow?
By the time I realized what it must be, I’d been sucked in.
Real War
Courtesy of Steve King’s Today in Literature e-newsletter, I learned that today was the birthday (1831) of journalist Rebecca Harding Davis.
Without further comment, I offer you here an excerpt of Harding Davis’s writing, looking back on the Civil War.
I had just come up from the border where I had seen the actual war; the filthy spewings of it; the political jobbery in Union and Confederate camps; the malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and glutted by burning homes and outraged women; the chances in it, well improved on both sides, for brutish men to grow more brutish, and for honorable gentlemen to degenerate into thieves and sots. War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums. This would-be seer who was talking of it, and the real seer who listened, knew no more of war as it was, than I had done in my cherry-tree when I dreamed of bannered legions of crusaders debouching in the misty fields.
[…]Yet with all this fever of preparation we never quite believed that there was war until, one day, a rough wooden box was sent down from the mountains. A young officer had been killed by a sharpshooter, and his body was forwarded that it might be cared for and sent to his friends. He was a very handsome boy, and the men in the town went to look at him and at the little purple spot on his white breast, and came away dull and sick at heart. They did not ask whether he had been loyal or a rebel.
“He was so young! He might have done so much!” they said. “But this is war — war!”
I remember that in that same year I crossed the Pennsylvania mountains coming to Philadelphia. It was a dull, sunless day. The train halted at a little way station among the hills. Nobody was in sight but a poor, thin country girl, in a faded calico gown and sun-bonnet. She stood alone on the platform, waiting. A child was playing beside her.
When we stopped the men took out from the freight car a rough, unplaned pine box and laid it down, baring their heads for a minute. Then the train steamed away. She sat down on the ground and put her arms around the box and leaned her head on it. The child went on playing. So we left her. I never have seen so dramatic or significant a figure.
When we hear of thousands of men killed in battle it means nothing to us. We forget it in an hour. It is these little things that come home to us. When we remember them we say: —
“That is war!”
For more on Harding Davis, see the Wikipedia article linked above (as well as the various references cited therein). For more examples of her writing, check this page.
Forty Years On
From the NY Times, RFK’s kids remember him:
Kerry Kennedy
But most of all, he believed it imperative to question authority, and those who failed that lesson did so at their peril.
Joseph P. Kennedy II
Robert Kennedy had a wonderful way of allowing others to tell him how the world looked through their eyes.
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend
The long table was set with linen, silver and crystal. Painted portraits of my brothers and sisters hung on the walls. And suddenly, my father entered. He looked haunted and started talking to me, shaking his head in distress as he described the people he’d met in the Delta. “I was with a family who live in a shack the size of this dining room,” he told me.
And yeah, I know: ANYBODY’s kids tend to look at their parents in a manner that’s biased, one way or another. And yeah, I know: children of privilege, easy for them to say, etc. etc.
But there was no one like him. I bet his kids would have had these kinds of memories no matter what station in life he and they had been born to (or how he exited).
(Also from the Times, here’s the obituary (1.2MB PDF).)
