As I'm sure I've noted before: Mrs. Salad's Netflix picks tend to the
offbeat and bizarre. Sometimes based on nothing more than (in this
case): "I like Jake Gyllenhaal". Downside: you wind up watching
movies like this sometimes. It was named "Best Canadian Film of the
Year"
at the Toronto Film Critics Association Awards, but truth be told,
it might have been a slow year for movies up there.
Spoilers ahead, probably. Adam is a college history prof, who
tells his bored students about Hegel's historicism, which
Marx abbreviated to "first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
(He's shown saying this twice—heh!). But while watching
an obscure DVD movie, Adam notes a bit-part actor who is
literally his double. It's Anthony, who's shown to be a dissolute,
disagreeable jerk and pervert. Adam and Anthony eventually
meet, and before you can say:
"nothing good can come of this", it doesn't.
Keep your eye on the spiders, folks.
Problem: like many pretentiously arty movies, this one has endless
(but pointless) shots of scenery (especially the ugly Brutalist
architecture of Adam's school), Gyllenhaal-as-Adam wandering around looking
lost and moody, tricky lighting,
and the like. Cut those out, trim some of the gratuitous
nudity, and you've got a pretty good 60-minute episode of Night
Gallery with room for commercials.
I got this as a freebie for renewing my subscription to National
Review awhile back. (You can only have so many NR t-shirts
or coffee mugs.) And it finally percolated to the top of my to-be-read
pile. Written by David B. Frisk,
it is a hefty tome, 438 pages of text, over 60 pages of endnotes.
And what's it about?
It is a biography of William A. Rusher (1923-2011), the publisher of
National Review for about thirty of those years, from 1957 until
his retirement in 1988. In addition to his work at the magazine, Rusher
was also a political activist, heavily involved in an effort
to steer the Republican Party to a more consistently
conservative direction. Although his early GOP efforts were in
support of Dewey and Ike, he came around to a solid conservatism
after being disillusioned with the Eisenhower presidency.
Rusher was considerably different
from NR's famous editor, William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley was
born rich, comfortable moving in sophisticated society, totally
charming. Rusher was from a modest background, working his way into
Harvard Law, very much the practical politician, obsessed with
devising winning strategies. WFB was the golden
retriever in the limo, Rusher
the pitbull in the street.
It's surprising things worked as well as they did at the magazine.
Frisk does a good job of describing the inner wangling factions
at NR, often setting Rusher at odds not only with WFB, but
also with such eminences as James Burnham. There were disagreements
aplenty: what the overall tone of the magazine should be; which
political candidates should be supported, which dumped; just how
dismissive should the magazine be toward conspiracy theorists,
antisemites, and other fringe-dwellers. (Shrinking the tent of
acceptability is fine in theory, but once you start factoring
in the loss of subscribers, contributors, and advertisers, it
gets more difficult.)
Rusher was a huge Goldwater fan in the early 1960s, a major force
pushing him into his 1964 presidential candidacy. Frisk reminds
us that, like any sane person would be, Goldwater was unenthusiastic about
running. He seems only to have embraced the process when it was clear
he wouldn't win.
But the Goldwater campaign was successful at beating the liberal
Republicans, and it hatched the political career of conservatism's
most shining success, Ronald Reagan. Rusher was an active participant
there too. He never liked Nixon much, and wanted Reagan to be the
nominee in 1968.
Outside of politics, well… there wasn't much there to Rusher.
Never married, a few close friends. Obviously his choice, but somewhat
sad.
I can't recommend this book to anyone who isn't really interested
in the history of the US conservative political movement. At times it
seems that there's no memo so inconsequential, no squabble so trivial,
that Frisk doesn't describe it. Still, it's readable, and will act
as a lasting memory to someone who undoubtedly had a major effect
on his times.
That turned out to be News from Planet Rachel.
On Planet Earth, Jeb was visiting the Carolina Pregnancy
Center, which (indeed) does not perform abortions.
Is the Carolina Pregnancy Center, as Rachel claimed, falsely "designed to look
like they provide abortions to patients"? Well, you have to be
pretty oblivious to get that impression.
In fact, if you can't figure it out from their
home page,
you have to travel one
mere mouseclick from there
to learn that they "do not offer, recommend, or refer for abortions."
Some people out there get their news from Rachel. Pity them.
“I’m very proud of the fact that he speaks Brooklyn, because he’s not a
phony, and that shows,” said Marty Alpert, who used to cheer for Mr.
Sanders when he was on the track team at James Madison High School,
where she is now on the alumni board.
As a matter of fact, on a bunch of recent issues, Paul has been very
close to other, more-consciously conservative Republican candidates than
to any vision of libertarianism. His response to the murder of a San
Francisco woman by an illegal immigrant, for instance, was to denounce
"Sanctuary
Cities" and support an onerous
surveillance program. He's against the Iran
deal. While he was quick to call for yanking the Confederate battle
flag from public grounds, he was slow-to-never in challenging Donald
Trump's moronic view of Mexican immigrants as mostly criminal or to
issue a statement about the Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage (he
eventually said he wants to privatize marriage). Earlier in the year, he
supported more defense spending than a couple of GOP hawks (albeit, Paul
wanted to pay for the increases with offsets elsewhere in the
budget).
Big surprise: when you blur your branding enough to blend in with the
other candidates, you don't give anyone any special reason to vote
for you.
Huckabee said that Trump has “struck a nerve with people,” and “I’ll be
honest with you, a lot of the things that he’s saying, those are things
that, in many ways, I’ve been saying those for eight years, before he
was a Republican. Things like talking about how China has cheated.
Talking about how there is this Wall Street-to-Washington axis of power
that grinds out jobs against Americans. I mean, these are themes that
I’ve been talking about. But, let me say this, if you put as much air in
my balloon, not just you, but if all the media, will pump the air in my
balloon, as has been pumped into Donald Trump’s balloon, I’ll be leading
the pack as well.”
Thanks be to Huck for reminding us that there's more than one know-nothing
demagogic populist on the GOP side.
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