While I was away in New Jersey for the past week and a half, several books came in for review. I’ll get to some of these in more detail in the coming weeks and months, but in the meantime, and to be fair to the authors and publishers, I thought I’d do a Glenn Reynolds-style “In the Mail” style post with Amazon links to at least help get these titles into (further) circulation:

• Peace, They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Most Famous and Controversial Prize in the World, by Jay Nordlinger.
• The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, by Jonah Goldberg.
• Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, by Charles Murray.
• American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen.

The last title dovetails nicely with my recent interview with Thomas Hibbs, the author of the newly updated Shows About Nothing, set at the corner of Hollywood and Nietzsche.

The books by Jonah and Jay Nordlinger are due out in the spring. The titles by Hibbs, Murray and Ratner-Rosenhagen have been out for a bit. If you’ve read them, please post your thoughts in the comments.

(Cross-posted at the Tatler.)

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Richard Rushfield of Ricochet paints a damning portrait of a news channel twenty-odd (very odd) years past its prime, and riding on fumes. “Tonight, in its coverage of the death of Whitney Houston, CNN gave its viewers a horrible glimpse into the hollowness at its core:”

As the very young Saturday anchor on duty scrambled to fill the air time, viewers and Houston fans were treated, on top of the usual grasping at straws inanities to the following:

• A parade of America’s leading ghouls and vultures fighting for their a bit of air time in the wake of the death including Al Sharpton, Dr. Drew and Hollywood publicist Howard Bragman – the latter a regular presence on Breaking News Hollywood death broadcasts, this time appearing with the stunning report that the Grammy Party of Clive Davis, Houston’s mentor, was likely to be affected by the news.
• A reporter stopping people on the street to gleefully break the news of Houston’s death and capture their stunned reactions, like some sort of Letterman prank.
• The only “news” the Cable News Network provided in these first hours has thus far been reading of celebrity tweets responding to the death.  The fun began in the first hour of the coverage when the anchor suddenly announced that Malcolm Jamal Warner had tweeted his condolences. The 140 character regrets of Kim Kardashian among others soon followed.

This seems to be what we need a major news organization for these days: to read celebrity tweets to us.  Because apparently they think 140 characters are more than we could get through on our own.

Because Twitter has been so kind to the network’s on-air “talent.”

Related: Another recent look at the MSM bungling a celebrity’s obit: “Joe Paterno, 1926-2012; CBS Jumps the Gun Reporting Obit.”

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Stunning news atop the Drudge Report, though this florid obit from AP is anything but objective:

Whitney Houston, who reigned as pop music’s queen until her majestic voice and regal image were ravaged by drug use, erratic behavior and a tumultuous marriage to singer Bobby Brown, has died. She was 48.

Publicist Kristen Foster said Saturday that the singer had died, but the cause and the location of her death were unknown.

At her peak, Houston the golden girl of the music industry. From the middle 1980s to the late 1990s, she was one of the world’s best-selling artists. She wowed audiences with effortless, powerful, and peerless vocals that were rooted in the black church but made palatable to the masses with a pop sheen.

Her success carried her beyond music to movies, where she starred in hits like “The Bodyguard” and “Waiting to Exhale.”

She had the he perfect voice, and the perfect image: a gorgeous singer who had sex appeal but was never overtly sexual, who maintained perfect poise.

She influenced a generation of younger singers, from Christina Aguilera to Mariah Carey, who when she first came out sounded so much like Houston that many thought it was Houston.

But by the end of her career, Houston became a stunning cautionary tale of the toll of drug use. Her album sales plummeted and the hits stopped coming; her once serene image was shattered by a wild demeanor and bizarre public appearances. She confessed to abusing cocaine, marijuana and pills, and her once pristine voice became raspy and hoarse, unable to hit the high notes as she had during her prime.

Not surprisingly, Houston’s Wikipedia page already has been updated to reflect her death.

Update: TMZ reports, “According to our sources, Houston died at the Beverly Hilton hotel. A police crime lab vehicle was seen outside the hotel just moments ago.

Related: “Whitney Houston’s Tragic Death Takes CNN to New Lows.”

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Deadline Hollywood reports that AMC Entertainment had a rough 2011:

The exhibition chain reports this morning in an SEC filing that it had a $72.8M loss in the last three months of 2011 — more than double its $32.8M loss in the quarter a year ago — on revenues of $557.3M, down 7.6%.  Attendance fell 8.7%. With a decline in the number of 3D and Imax films which come with higher ticket prices, patrons on average paid 1.4% less to get in than they did a year ago.

From Hollywood and the White House’s perspective, that’s nothing but good news, right? If, as President Obama said last fall, America has “gotten a little soft,” less movie watching should help ameliorate some of the national flab he perceives, right? Robert Redford is anti-energy, and less movie attendance should help reduce our energy consumption a little bit. Less toilet paper being consumed in the restrooms should make Laurie David and Sheryl Crow happy.  Then there’s the main consumer product that movie theaters distribute. If, as James Cameron said in 2010, “DVDs are wasteful…It’s a consumer product like any consumer product.” If DVD are a wasteful consumer product, isn’t movie watching as well? It sets the Hollywood cycle of selling consumer products in motion — and sells plenty of non-Michelle Obama-approved junk food in the process.

And speaking of eco-puritans at the intersection of DC and LA, “Al Gore’s Current TV Could Go Belly-Up If Keith F’n’ Olbermann Doesn’t Start Delivering Big Ratings,” Ace writes.

If, as Al claims, we have less than four years left to save the planet, shouldn’t he eliminate his channel voluntarily to help reduce his carbon footprint?

Flashback: “Prominent Environmentalist Finally Discovers His Religion’s Catch-22.”

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“There’s nothing better than being able to do the right thing and the politically savvy thing,” Kurt Schlichter  writes at Big Hollywood, “ while simultaneously paying back a long-time abuser in spades:”

And that’s just what the Republicans in Congress did to Hollywood when it abandoned the rush to pass SOPA and regulate the Internet for the benefit of Tinseltown. Astonishingly, considering its usual inability to perform competently at even the most basic level, the GOP not only managed to embrace good policy but drove a wedge into the Democratic coalition that may well have dramatic consequences down the road. And, best of all, it provided a bit of long overdue payback to the smug oligarchs of LA’s West Side who have spent the last couple decades treating Republicans like something you’d hasten to flush.

Hey, suckers, how do ya like us now?

Read the whole thing.

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Over at the Lifestyle blog, I have a really fascinating interview with frequent National Review contributor Thomas Hibbs about the latest version of his book, Shows About Nothing:

• How post-WWII Hollywood originally explicitly rejected Nietzsche and nihilism, before ultimately embracing him with open arms.
• Why horror movies eventually eradicated God for charming nihilists who fashion their morality as “beyond good and evil,” such as Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
• Seinfeld: the sunny side of nihilism.
• How man successfully threw off the encumbrances of authority and tradition only to find himself subject to new, more devious, and more intractable forms of tyranny.
• How aesthetics came to usurp morality.
• Mad Men’s Don Draper: the man in the gray nihilistic suit.
• Can Hollywood move beyond nihilism?

Click here to listen to the interview.

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“There’s Hawkeye and Trapper John back in Korea. I never did like those guys. They fancied themselves super-decent and super-tolerant, but actually had no use for anyone who was not exactly like them. What they were was super-pleased with themselves. In truth, they were the real bigots, and phony at that. I always preferred Frank Burns, the stuffy, unpopular doc, a sincere bigot.”

– Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome, via Terry Teachout.

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“ABC unaccountably excludes Bill Clinton from lineup of pols who led ‘double lives,’” W. Joseph Campbell writes at his Media Myth Blog:

ABC News offered yesterday a risible lineup of two-timing politicians that omitted Bill Clinton, the philandering 42nd president, but included Thomas Jefferson, about whom the evidence of sexual dalliance is thin at best.

ABC’s roster of “the top eight politicians who led double lives” was posted online and promised “a look at some … tawdry affairs and public scandals” — and how the politicians implicated “weathered the storm.”

In addition to Jefferson, ABC included Grover Cleveland, the U.S. president in the 1880s and 1890s who fathered a child out of wedlock, and Eliot Spitzer, who as governor of New York consorted with a high-priced call girl.

The ABC roster also included an obscure and mostly forgotten former politician, Vito Fossella, a five-term New York congressman who in 2008 acknowledged fathering a child in an extramarital affair.

Given that the likes of Fossella made the list, it’s inexplicable that Clinton was omitted.

No, it’s pretty much SOP at ABC, which both heavily edited 2006′s The Path to 9/11 to tone down the Clinton administration’s decision to not assassinate Osama bin Laden in 1998, and then has blocked the video’s release onto DVD since. (Recall whom the presumptive Democrat presidential frontrunner was in 2006.)

I’m not sure how environmentally friendly this sort of giant airbrush operation is, but no one should expect ABC to turn off the compressors anytime soon. And as I noted earlier this week, perhaps it’s entirely coincidental, but ABC had back-to-back hits on GOP presidential candidates, even as its favored presidential candidate was occupying some of its parent company’s prime real estate.

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Today marks the 70th anniversary of the infamous Wannsee Conference, in which Nazi Germany put the mechanisms into play that created what they euphemistically called the Final Solution. The Daily Mail reports:

The surroundings were utterly civilised – a villa overlooking a popular beach in Berlin.

The participants, enjoying gourmet cuisine and fine wines and discussing art and culture during breaks from business, appeared as ordinary and harmless as councillors at an average town hall meeting.

But the outcome of the infamous Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942 – 70 years ago today – was previously unimagined barbarity.

In just two hours, 15 politicians and administrators of the Nazi state sealed the fate of more than 10 million people.

Here “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe” was determined.

These men, under the direction of SS General Reinhard Heydrich and his Jewish affairs expert Adolf Eichmann, decided how to exterminate all of Europe’s Jews.

This systematic, industrialised genocide ran alongside the slaughter of gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled, prisoners of war and other enemies of the Nazis.

Today the victims will be remembered at ceremonies around the world – from the USA, to Israel and, of course, in Germany.

Back in 2000, HBO produced a superb — and appropriately chilling — TV movie recreating the conference, starring Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci, and a dozen or so mostly British character actors. I reviewed it a couple of years later at Blogcritics. If you ever get a chance, don’t miss it; it’s also worth watching to see where half the cast of Tom Cruise’s recent WWII potboiler Valkyrie originally appeared. (The other half came from here), along with an early appearance from Colin Firth in a supporting role, who would star a decade later in The King’s Speech.

It’s worth placing the conference into some perspective, however. It wasn’t a debate at all, so much as a fait accompli, as Heydrich and Eichmann presented their marching orders to all assembled. And it built on nearly a decade of earlier murders, as this recent New York Times article on “The First Killings of the Holocaust” notes:

The extermination of European Jews may have been formally outlined seven decades ago this month, but it began nearly nine years earlier, during Easter Week 1933, a few minutes after five o’clock in the afternoon on Wednesday, April 12, when four Jews — Arthur Kahn, Ernst Goldmann, Rudolf Benario and Erwin Kahn — were executed in precisely that order at a Nazi camp in the obscure Bavarian hamlet of Prittlbach.

These four killings framed the constituent parts of the genocidal process formalized at the Wannsee Conference: intentionality, chain-of-command, selection, execution. In the years to come, the process was refined, the numbers expanded monstrously, but the essential elements remained.

Even Prittlbach retained its central role. The hamlet was so small that the Nazis named their camp after the neighboring town of Dachau, which had access to a rail line. The boxcars rolled into Dachau, but the victims were marched to Prittlbach.

The Konzentrationslager Dachau in Prittlbach became the prototype for Nazi atrocity. It boasted the first crematory oven, the first gas chamber, and, on that sun-splashed spring day in April 1933, the first Jewish victims.

A Holocaust survivor once told me, and repeated to many others with equal conviction, that the trail of blood that began in Dachau ultimately led to Auschwitz. But it also almost ended there before it barely began.

Read the whole thing.

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Mission Accomplished!

In October of 2007, Barack Obama told his loyal early followers, “We’re going to keep on praising together. I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth.”

And lo, today, the Kingdom has risen.

The Magic Kingdom:

Disney says the president will be at the Magic Kingdom, which means guests can plan for heavy security. Main Street USA will be closed for the duration of the president’s time there. Guests will be re-routed to other parts of the park. Disney is also cancelling extra magic hours for the Magic Kingdom, and pushing back the “Celebrate a Dream Come True” parade.

As Robin Williams once said, don’t ever visit Pluto, it’s a Mickey Mouse planet. And presidents with a reputation for magical thinking (shared with his most rabid followers) probably shouldn’t visit Disney World in an election year. The optics of this aren’t quite John Kerry swimming through the Fallopian tubes bad, but as BuzzFeed notes, “13 Photos Of Barack Obama At Disney That Will Probably Turn Up In Attack Ads.” (Gentlemen, start your downloads.)

Mediaite carps, “They really couldn’t find any other land in Disney World to do this in, like Fantasyland, or maybe Adventureland? On the other hand, at least they avoided shutting down Liberty Square.”

Liberty Square has been permanently shut down since November of 2008; Adventureland is far too jingoistic sounding for our postmodern anti-colonial president, and really — doesn’t he already own a permanent condo in Fantasyland?

Also note the duality — or perhaps the karma — of the timing: Disney is welcoming Obama onto its grounds for a photo-op, even as its news division is delivering questionable crackback hits to his current two chief opponents.

Related: Caption contest!

(Thumbnail on PJM homepage by ExJon, formerly of the Exurban League.)

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Boardwalk Empire is out on DVD, and I have a review over at the PJ Lifestyle blog. While I was away in November, first on the NR Cruise, and then visiting relatives in South Jersey, I found myself getting sucked into the recent HBO series, almost against my will. It seemed to be running in a continuous loop on the channel, which was available everywhere I was staying. And it didn’t hurt that I took plenty of trips to a far more clapped version of Atlantic City when I was kid, not to mention that in November, I was back in my old stomping grounds, an hour and a half away, while I was watching it. If you’ve seen the series yourself, or if you’re interested in the 1920s in general (or Hollywood’s often fanciful interpretation of the era at least), check out my review here.

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For George Lucas, Star Wars becoming The Film That Changed Hollywood was the equivalent of winning the lottery, only with much, much more money involved than what a state typically pays out from a ticket bought at the convenience store. While he was shooting Star Wars, he thought he was producing the equivalent of the live action family movies that Disney was producing in the years between Walt’s death and the launch of Touchstone Pictures, their more adult division. Given a budget of ten million dollars by 20^th Century Fox, Lucas thought he’d be lucky if his film made $20 million back.

Once Star Wars hit movie screens in the summer of 1977 and quickly became the highest grossing film Hollywood had, up to then, seen, it officially had to be all things to all people. It was analyzed over its religious message and mysticism. The implications of its technology. And of course, Lucas began being routinely castigated for the film’s all-white casting, with the exception of James Earl Jones’ iconic voice-over work, which was added in post-production. But while he was prepping the film, Lucas had briefly considered casting legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune to play the wizened Samurai-like Obi-Wan Kenobi, and black actor Glynn Turman to play Han Solo. Regarding the latter casting choice, Lucas told one interviewer, “I didn’t want to make Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner at that point, so I sort of backed off.”

When Star Wars began to print money, complaints began to appear from time to time from blacks calling Lucas’s movie racist. It was around that time that Richard Pryor had a stand-up routine about Logan’s Run, another science fiction film released only a couple of years earlier, with an all-white cast. (Again, except for a character – a robot this time, rather than a masked man – overdubbed in post-production by another black actor, the mellifluous Roscoe Lee Browne.) Pryor quipped:

They had a movie of the future called Logan’s Run. There ain’t no n*****s in it.

I said, “Well, white folks ain’t planning for us to be here. That’s why we got to make movies.

It was easy to transfer Pryor’s riff to a much more successful science fiction film, and as I recall at the time, a few critics did just that. In 1983, Lucas’s early biographer Dale Pollock wrote Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas. It hit the streets  when Lucas was at the height of his powers – coming off an amazing run of hits of films he directed or produced — American Graffiti, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Raiders of the Lost Ark — and just before taint of the Ewoks began to slowly tarnish his image as a monster hitmaker. As a result of such complaints from critics about the lack of black roles in Star Wars, Pollock wrote of Lucas:

The most sensitive part to cast in Empire was Lando. Still smarting from criticism that Star Wars was racist, George conceived of Lando as “a suave, dashing black man in his thirties” and specified in his script that half of the Cloud City residents and troops were to be black (in the actual film, only a few blacks are visible). Lucas sought Billy Dee Williams for the role from the outset, after seeing him in Lady Sings the Blues. Williams was reluctant to play what he thought was a token black, but soon realized that Lando could be portrayed by a black or white actor. “The part requires a universal, international quality, which I have,” Williams says. “Lando is an alternative to the usual WASP hero.”

Lucas says he uses aliens and robots to make (however subtly) a point about discrimination—at one point, R2-D2 and C-3P0 are barred from entering the space cantina. “Chewbacca’s nonhuman and nonwhite,” Lucas says. “I realize it seems rather obscure and abstract, but it was intended to be a statement.” Lucas claims to be a fervent believer in equality. “I get upset over injustice and inequality,” he says. The robots and Chewbacca were there to demonstrate that no matter how odd or different people seem, they can still be true and faithful friends. This is an unusual form of humanism, to be sure, but Lucas says he was trying to make a point. “A lot of problems could diminish if we realized we’re all the same underneath our costumes,” he says.

Lucas also insists that he didn’t cast James Earl Jones as Darth Vader because he saw the character as a black villain—he simply thought Jones had the best voice for the role. “We got attacked in Star Wars because there were no Puerto Ricans in it,” Lucas complains. “I mean, come on — you can’t win.”

And of course, back in 1999 and 2000, numerous film critics called Lucas racist when the character of Jar-Jar Binks debuted in The Phantom Menace, including this author in Salon:

He seemed extraordinarily defensive. I thought I’d phrased the question carefully enough. I went through the checklist in my head. Did I call him Mr. Lucas? Check. Did I studiously avoid suggesting that I thought the film was racist? Check. Did I phrase it in such a way that he wouldn’t feel attacked? Not according to him.

“You hurt my feelings,” he told me privately after the discussion ended. And I suppose that’s a possibility. But Lucas, as he had shown, isn’t willing to extend his viewers the same courtesy.

I assume that he felt attacked. Maybe it was the setting: There were dozens of university students seated before him in rapt attention, eager to learn from him, the George Lucas. And I had burst his bubble — again. Back when “The Phantom Menace” came out last summer, several critics accused Lucas of perpetuating racist stereotypes, particularly with the Gungan character Jar Jar Binks. Joe Morgenstern, writing for the Wall Street Journal, called Binks a “Rastafarian Stepin Fetchit on platform hoofs, crossed annoyingly with Butterfly McQueen.”

Lucas stubbornly dismissed the idea that Jar Jar could be linked to stereotypes of African-American slaves or minstrel characters. “How, in any credible way, could you take an orange amphibian and say that this was a racial stereotype for African-Americans?” he asked.

When I mentioned Jar Jar’s Caribbean patois he simply cut me off. “Just because somebody has an accent doesn’t make them a stereotype of a particular kind of thing.”

And he was right. Accents in and of themselves may not be stereotypical. But it’s the overall image of Jar Jar that smacks of racism. His buffoonery, gait, appearance (one journalist thought his ears were reminiscent of dreadlocks) and word choice all combine to make him offensive. Lucas refused to even entertain the possibility his work might contain such stereotypes.

As Lucas said in the early 1980s, you can’t win.

You still can’t in 2012 — not when studios receive comments like this from Lucas himself, promoting his new film Red Tails:

For those not familiar, the Tuskegee Airmen were a group of black pilots that fought in WWII segregated from white forces.

“It was designed to [look like it was shot] during the war,” Lucas said. “It’s very patriotic, very jingoistic, very old-fashioned, corny, just exactly like Flying Leathernecks, only this one was held up for release from 1942 when it was shot, and I’ve been trying to get it released ever since.”

Lucas told Stewart he’s been working on the film for 23 years. Although paying for it himself, he went to the studios to create the prints, ads, and be responsible for distribution.

“I showed it to all of them and they said, ‘No. We don’t know how to market a movie like this.’”

When Stewart asked why, Lucas first responded, “Because it’s not green enough. They only release green movies.”

The filmmaker clarified, “It’s because it’s an all black movie. There’s no major white roles in it at all. It’s one of the first all black action pictures ever made.”

You would think Lucas would be sensitive enough to say something like, “Look, I know Hollywood isn’t intentionally racist. I received those same sorts of complaints about my casting choices when I made Star Wars. And I know that HBO already did a small screen version of this story costarring Cuba Gooding, Jr., back in 1995. And I was fortunate to get Cuba for my movie, as well. But this is a story with universal appeal that deserves both a big screen to fully appreciate the flying sequences and the quality of special effects that my crew at Industrial Light & Magic are capable of. So yes, you may have seen this story before. But you haven’t seen it like this.”

But no, because that would relegate Lucas back to the standing he’s maintained with the industry and its critics since Star Wars: a brilliant technician, but not exactly an artiste. So Lucas is left having to play the race card against an industry that’s as exquisitely politically correct as Hollywood. But then, whenever a new film is released, so does at least one newspaper critic it seems. Not to mention dropping the F-Bomb on the few movies made over the past decade designed to appeal to Red State audiences. (And occasionally both within the same review.)

If Hollywood is wondering why it’s seeing headlines along the lines of “Box Office Shocker: Movie Attendance Falls to Lowest Level in 16 Years,” between what the industry itself is saying about its audiences, and what critics are saying about the industry, it need only look at itself. Perhaps when the circular firing squad runs out of bullets, moviegoers will return.

Or not. But if that’s the case, then the industry and those who should be its most fervent supporters have only themselves to blame.

Update: Related thoughts from Jehuda (aka the Rhetorican) at the PJ Lifestyle blog.

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As spotted by Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters:

At a screening of Asghar Farhadi’s critically lauded “A Separation” at Sony’s screening room, the Iranian director spotted the “Fahrenheit 9/11” filmmaker in the audience. Farhadi quipped, “Michael Moore is the most famous director in Iran,” and said everyone knows his movies because they’re shown on national TV there.

Iran’s legendary army of distaff cinematic auteurs that HSBC bank keeps mentioning must be fuming right now.

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Over at the Libertas film blog, David Ross reviews the recent documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times, which is now available on DVD at Amazon, and in streaming format at both Amazon and Netflix. I haven’t watched the film yet though, for reasons that Ross explains in his bracing and lengthy (at least for a blog post) review. After taking a blowtorch to Thomas Friedman, Gail Collins, Alessandra Stanley, Michiko Kakutani, Paul Krugman, and other high priests of the very secular Times cult, Ross writes:

Whole books have been written about the Times‘ political biases (here), and the Times‘ own public editor has succinctly enough answered the question as to whether the Times is a liberal newspaper: “Of course it is” (here).  In recent years, however, the Times’ biases have ever more blatantly trumped its journalistic ethics, a state of affairs unthinkable in the days of Abe Rosenthal.

“We don’t do hit jobs,” one editor assures a source while the cameras of Page One roll. “That’s not the business we’re in.” It is the business you’re in, at least these days. Exhibit A is the assassin’s bullet of a piece the Times published during the 2008 election in which it suggested, without anything you’d call evidence, that John McCain had been romantically involved with a lobbyist (here). The article is a slimy stew of anonymous rumor and innuendo. Even liberal stalwarts like The New Republic and The Washington Post derided its malice and irresponsibility. The article was all the more outrageous given the Times‘ refusal to investigate John Edwards’ very real affair at a time when he was a frontrunner for the Democratic VP slot. The female victim of the Times‘ smear filed a $27 million lawsuit, and the Times eventually issued a groveling apology (here). What was most remarkable about the article was that it appeared in the paper at all.

This story, and a similar recent attack on Rep. Darrell Issa (here), are far more damning than the more notorious Blair or Miller scandals, in my opinion. The latter represent institutional mistakes; the attacks on McCain and Issa represent institutional policy: a deliberate suspension of the usual journalistic ethics to further a partisan objective. As an amateur student of journalism, I can’t guess what motivates the Times‘ self-destructive tilting at windmills that have the capacity to tilt right back. Has the Times become a raving and delusional Quixote or is there some underlying financial logic to its self-repositioning as a rag of the left? The answer is unclear.

Page One has literally nothing to say about any of this. It admits that the Times, like nearly every other newspaper in contemporary America, is teetering on the edge of the abyss. It details plunging stock prices, newsroom layoffs, and stumbling attempts to devise new revenue models in the age of the Internet. These technological and macroeconomic challenges are very real, but Page One ignores the fact that Times has maximized its own vulnerability by systematically alienating more than 50% of its potential market (conservative and Red State types) and by producing a newspaper that’s so hard to enjoy at the sentence level, whatever one’s politics.

At the start of the 20^th century, H. L. Mencken discovered Friedrich Nietzsche, assigned himself to the steno pool of Nietzsche’s übermensch army, and promptly went to war against the conservative bourgeoisie of America. As with the recently deceased Christopher Hitchens, it was fun watching a man armed with writing chops the level of Mencken’s fight a one-man battle with the heart of American conventional wisdom. In the first half of the 20th century, Mencken’s prose and its widespread influence helped to revitalize his profession.

But when everyone in his profession decides he’s the second coming of Mencken, the result is a uniformly punitive corporate snark that’s exhausting for the readers. (See also: disastrous results of an entire society drinking Nietzsche’s Kool-Aid. And no, that last sentence isn’t referring to what you think it is, but actually, this.) Today, it’s essentially the entire industry of Old Media that’s at war with half of America — with the Times’ HQ serving as the Bobo equivalent of Dr. Strangelove’s War Room — even as newspapers keep wondering why their readership and stock prices have crumbled.

That’s the Big Story here, and because the filmmakers share the same uber-elitist PC ideology as the journalists who make the inedible sausage at the Gray Lady, they’re either completely unaware of it, or simply look the other way. Ross’s review makes Page One sound like the equivalent of  The September Issue, the documentary filmed inside Vogue magazine at the height of its fashion industry influence and gigantic self-importance in mid-2007. Similarly, if it serves any purpose other than to inflate the egos of its subject, Page One may very well survive primarily as a time capsule photograph of the swells parading the deck of the Titanic as the icebergs move that much closer into view.

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When you stare into the TV ratings abyss, the abyss doesn’t stare back at you — because it’s already changed the channel:

Countdown is the highest-rated show on Current by far. On Dec. 15, the program averaged 52,000 viewers among news’ target demographic of viewers ages 25-54. The network’s two-hour post-Iowa GOP debate analysis on the same night had 4,000 viewers in the demo, while the 2 a.m. rebroadcast of Countdown pulled in 11,000.

As Tim Groseclose writes at Ricochet, “Only 52,000 viewers?  And it’s the highest-rated show on Current ‘by far’?”

Which is something to keep in mind as “Rift Between Olbermann and Current TV Deepens: ‘Everybody Is Replaceable,’” The Wrap reports:

Keith Olbermann returned to the airwaves Wednesday night, but the rift between the bad boy anchor and his superiors at Current TV has not dissipated a day after he refused to lead the network’s coverage of the Iowa caucus, TheWrap has learned.

The newsman has tapped high-powered lawyer Patricia Glaser to “determine his rights” in his five-year contract, an individual close to him told TheWrap.

Meanwhile, executives at Current TV said that relations – especially those with Current CEO Joel Hyatt – were at a breaking point after deteriorating over the past several months.

“I hope Keith is part of our future, but it’s up to Keith,” an executive with Current who declined to be identified told TheWrap. “Keith set us in the right direction and we’re on that path now … and as I’ve learned over the years, everybody is replaceable.”

Several years ago at the original incarnation of the Libertas film blog, there was a post that used the phrase “Assholing your way out of show business,” which is what happens when an actor or actress’s ego gets so big and their treatment of everyone on the set becomes so painful to deal with, he or she becomes too toxic for most directors to work with, no matter what the actual performance looks like on screen. Having gone through ESPN, Fox Sports, MSNBC and now lowly Current TV, where does Olbermann go next? (Allahpundit suggests that CNN might be desperate enough to hire him, but would they really do so knowing how much baggage he brings to the gig?)

Related: Elsewhere in the world of old media, “Newspaper shares plunged 27% in 2011:”

If you take the increase in News Corp.’s stock price out of the mix, the average plunge in newspaper share value last year was 30.1%. This compares with a 5.5% increase in the Dow Jones average of 30 industrial stocks and the flat performance of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, which gained a meager 0.04% after a year of dramatic market swings.

Minus the $45 billion market capitalization of News Corp., the total value of the shares of the 10 other publishers at year’s end was a bit over $10 billion, or less than three-quarters of the $13.9 billion that Gannett alone was worth at the end of 2005, the year the industry set a record for the most advertising sales in history.

Well, it’s not like the newspaper industry has a Nobel Prize-winning economist it can turn to, to help them navigate today’s treacherous business conditions.

Oh wait.

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Over at the Lifestyle blog, John Hawkins rounds up “The 10 Biggest Failures Of 2011.” But as Jonah Goldberg writes in his own year-end round-up, 2011 was the year that everybody blew it:

The Occupy movement’s meager tangible accomplishments (We recycled our own urine!) are inversely correlated with their lavish press coverage. The protesters were named Time magazine’s person of the year. Though in fairness, Time diluted its sycophancy by including the Arab Spring protesters who’ve (so far) ushered in a glorious new era of Islamism in places such as Egypt. Winning!

(Though perhaps not as clear cut a “win” as President Obama’s decision to declare political victory and pull our troops out of Iraq prematurely, so we can lose a war we sacrificed so much to win.)

Back home, tea-party politicians who truly won historic midterm-election victories are cast as dangerous losers. The Occupiers lost their bongs and yurts to bulldozers in cities across America, but museums around the country are nonetheless desperate to acquire authentic Occupy-movement artifacts to commemorate their glorious but unspecified successes. Unfortunately, the tea parties cannot work the refs of history this way, because they clean up their mess after they get together.

No word if the Smithsonian collected some genuine Occupier scat to be preserved next to the alleged specimens from the Yeti and Sasquatch. Lord knows they left enough behind for others to scoop.

And so it goes. The economy continued to languish while the president declared victory over a Depression that never was and touted himself as the most legislatively successful president ever — with the “possible exceptions” of FDR, LBJ, and Lincoln.

Meanwhile, we are approaching the third year of the long winter Obama once celebrated as a “recovery summer.” Its chief selling points are an unemployment rate statistically lowered by more Americans giving up hope of finding a job, and the claim that millions of jobs have been “created or saved.” This bogus locution allows Obama to claim every job he doesn’t destroy as a win.

And let us not forget the Republicans, whose feckless squad of A-Team candidates stayed on the bench for fear of joining the mosh pit of cannibalism the primary has become, setting the stage for a potential loss in 2012 that not even Charlie Sheen will be able to spin as a victory.

Speaking of attempting to spin a disaster, at Big Government, in a lengthy read-the-whole-thing article which sums up the key events of the past several months, Andrew Breitbart notes how badly the MSM attempted to spin like a dreidel over Occupy Wall Street for numerous reasons, not the least of which was because they were so deeply in the (septic) tank with the movement:

From the beginning, Occupy Wall Street was a huge progressive political Lollapalooza, an operation supported by unions and Democrats, planned and coordinated by career anarchists, and populated by students and fellow travelers. It quickly descended into a circus, a freak show, and a crime scene. The Breitbart sites actively chose to do what the mainstream media refused to do: hyper-focus on what was really going on. In so doing, we stumbled upon proof that key members of the media—including the New York Times, MSNBC, and Rolling Stone—were acting as public relations strategists and provocateurs on behalf of the Occupy movement.

There’s your “Story of the Year,” Time Magazine.

The Obama campaign, the Democratic Party, and the media colluded in an attempt to create class war in America in the pursuit of getting President Obama re-elected and ending the momentum of limited government conservatism as embodied in the Tea Party. Occupy’s crimes were committed by members of a movement whose goal was to neutralize the power of the Tea Party. And killing the Tea Party to keep the Democrats and President Obama afloat is now the mainstream media’s number one objective—by any means necessary.

The first proof of media coordination emerged in an email archive obtained by the Breitbart sites. It showed that MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan and Rolling Stone political editor Matt Taibbi had participated in a private group email chain with Occupy’s behind-the-scenes organizers—the bulk of whom are anarchists, socialists, communists, and anti-Israel activists, along with sundry international rabble-rousers of all stripes. Ratigan and Taibbi advised the nascent movement on its message and how to grow the group effectively to be a left-wing version of the Tea Party.

The email chain revealed the involvement of the usual suspects behind many international socialist and anarchist driven protests, including anti-WTO, anti-G8, and anti-G15 events; the people behind the manufactured Cindy Sheehan “Camp Casey” occupation outside of President George W. Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch; and even the “GOP Welcoming Committee” group that rioted against the 2008 Republican convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. The latter featured the arrests of key participants tied to Occupy organizer Lisa Fithian, who are now in federal prison for a botched plan to use Molotov cocktails on the GOP delegates and the police protecting them.

The mainstream media, which are promoting Occupy in their year-end wrap-ups, will not connect these basic dots. Instead they choose to ignore the dots and attack those who point them out. The key struggle in America today is over the narrative: on one side the old media (New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, Washington Post, CNN, Time, Newsweek), and on the other side the new media. The latter is a samizdat amalgam of independent blogs, talk radio shows, Fox News, and social media like Twitter and Facebook which have helped to make the samizdat drumbeat louder. They are forcing old media to acquiesce and are further exposing that media’s obvious biases while further dwindling old media’s former captive audience.

While we had lots of fun earlier this month Photoshopping an alternative cover for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” story, Andrew has an even better choice for Time’s editors, which you’ll have to click over to read. In the meantime, a related video on OWS found at Small Dead Animals:

Elsewhere in news of fresh disasters and MSM journalists risking, as Jonah might say, scrotal torsion, at the Washington Examiner, Gene Healy rounds up “the Five worst op-eds of 2011.”

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“Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming,” Friedrich Nietzsche warned in 1885′s Also sprach Zarathustra, “he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man:”

‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’ thus asks the last man, and blinks.

The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest.

‘We have invented happiness,’say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one’s neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth…

One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

‘Formerly, all the world was mad,’ say the most refined, and they blink…

One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health.

‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.”

In his review of Steven Spielberg’s new film War Horse, published last week on the calenderical date some still refer to as Christmas Eve, Rick McGinnis concluded with a remarkable observation:

We are less than seven years away from the anniversary of the end of World War I, and the last surviving combat veteran of the war died this year. There might be young people unaware of the dire historical facts and the unspeakable human toll of that war, but for almost everyone else, the sheer scale of the losses and nightmarish reality of the trenches, repeated in refrain for almost a century, has dulled us to the staggering truth of it all. Which is probably why Spielberg and the creators of War Horse have seen fit to transfer our sympathy from a mere human caught in that carnage to a horse, enlisting it to re-awake our sense of pathos in the form of that most noble and graceful of animals, into whose big, dark, anxious eyes Spielberg invests so much human emotion. It’s a remarkable feat, to be sure, but some part of me can’t help but be saddened that we’ve had to transfer to an animal what we can no longer comprehend in men.

Or as a headline at the London Telegraph noted yesterday, “BBC criticised for naming panda as a woman of the year.”

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A new post by Andrew Ferguson on postwar essayist Dwight Macdonald and “The demise of middlebrow America” describes the shift in elite liberal thinking that transformed that ideology from nurturing to punitive during the course of the 1960s:

In the original introduction to Against the American Grain (1962), from which Summers selected most of the pieces in the new book, Macdonald saw two solutions to the “problem” of “everyone getting into the act,” culturally speaking: We could make “(a) an attempt to integrate the masses into high culture; or (b) a contrary attempt to define two cultures, one for the masses and the other for the classes.” He favored the second option, thinking the first was a fool’s errand. But a third option never occurred to him: that high culture would cease to exist, or at least disappear almost entirely from the general scene.

And that’s what happened. High culture and the middlebrow died one after the other. Both were victims of relativism—the quasi-religious faith of post-sixties eggheads, who abandoned any notions of objective excellence as culturally determined, or as mere artifacts of exploitation, or as mechanisms of social control, or as all of the above. When the idea of objective merit—one thing is better than another, and here’s why—went away, the aspiration to seek it went away, too.

The embrace of relativism meant that the second-rate would be conflated with the sublime. In the years after Macdonald’s essay, Menand writes approvingly, “a great river of pop, camp, soulful, performative [?], outrageous, over-the-top cultural products flooded the scene, and Macdonald’s system of cultural judgment was left stranded on the far shore.” As premier examples of this “culture of sophisticated entertainment,” he mentions  such unwatchable movies and TV shows as Bonnie and Clyde and All in the Family and the vastly overpraised music of Motown and Bob Dylan. In an amazing coincidence, all this sophistication matched the taste of Baby Boomers like Louis Menand and his peers. (Funny how that works.) Soon enough, being overschooled and undereducated themselves, they could take up their tenured professorships and apply tools of criticism that had been built for Henry James and Maurice Ravel and apply them to Alice Walker and Lou Reed, until the latter seemed as worthy as the former. I mean, who’s to say?

Relativism has the effect of Gresham’s law: The bad sooner or later drives out the good, and the low the high. Its triumph would have horrified Dwight Macdonald, to judge by the essays, while it bothers the Harvard professor not at all. Macdonald’s chief complaint about Midcult was that it would fudge distinctions between the genuinely beautiful and profound and its slipshod imitators. Macdonald always considered himself a man of the left, but in this collection you’ll find passages of surpassing right-wingery. In 1962 he published a furious protest against the just-published Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, in which the lexicographers officially abandoned the attempt to distinguish between the correct and incorrect usage of words.

There are several reasons that it is important to maintain standards in the use of a language. English, like other languages, is beautiful when properly used, and beauty can be achieved only by attention to form, which means setting limits. .  .  . The kind of permissiveness that permeates [Webster’s Third] results, oddly, in less rather than more individuality, since the only way an individual can “express himself” is in relation to a social norm—in the case of language, to standard usage. .  .  . If the very idea of form, or standards, is lacking, then how can one violate it?

I doubt that Macdonald knew the destructive power of his mockery of the middlebrow. He wasn’t a nihilist, as passages like this one prove. But he was a trendsetter, and when he and the other left-wing highbrows of his generation assailed bourgeois aspiration so devastatingly, so amusingly, the fashion-conscious intellectuals who followed him were bound to find all that striving for excellence infra dig—just too terribly middle class.

Read the whole thing. I was going to include this in the California post that just went up, but it seemed like it would be forcing it. But the demise of middlebrow culture in the mid-to-late 1960s did tremendous damage to America’s overculture — when all culture is pop culture, there’s little need to strive for greatness. One who championed the demise of middlebrow in the late 1960s was Pauline Kael, the New Yorker’s film critic. As Canadian journalist Robert Fulford wrote a few years ago:

Kael, whose critical reputation was in its early stages, used Bonnie and Clyde as the opening shot in what turned out to be a war against middlebrow, middle-class, middle-of-the-road taste. Her New Yorker piece began: “How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on? Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate. The audience is alive to it.”

She announced no less than a revolution in taste that she sensed in the air. Movie audiences, she said, were going beyond “good taste,” moving into a period of greater freedom and openness. Was it a violent film?

Well, Bonnie and Clyde needed violence. “Violence is its meaning.”

She hated earnest liberalism and critical snobbery. She liked the raw energy in the work of adventurous directors such as Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese. She trusted her visceral reactions to movies.

When hired as a regular New Yorker movie critic, she took that doctrine to an audience that proved enthusiastic and loyal. She became the great star among New Yorker critics, then the most influential figure among critics in any field. Books of her reviews, bearing titles such as I Lost it at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and When the Lights Go Down, sold in impressive numbers. Critics across the continent became her followers. Through the 1970s and ’80s, no one in films, except the actual moviemakers, was more often discussed.

It was only in the late stages of her New Yorker career (from which she retired in 1991) that some of her admirers began saying she had sold her point of view too effectively. A year after her death (in 2001) one formerly enthusiastic reader, Paul Schrader, a screenwriter of films such as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, wrote: “Cultural history has not been kind to Pauline.”

Kael assumed she was safe to defend the choices of mass audiences because the old standards of taste would always be there. They were, after all, built into the culture. But those standards were swiftly eroding. Schrader argued that she and her admirers won the battle but lost the war. Acceptable taste became mass-audience taste, box-office receipts the ultimate measure of a film’s worth, sometimes the only measure. Traditional, well-written movies without violence or special effects were pushed to the margins. “It was fun watching the applecart being upset,” Schrader said, “but now where do we go for apples?”

Where indeed?

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Michael Graham slams It’s a Wonderful Life as “one of the most beloved holiday movies ever made. And one of the very worst:”

And, of course, Clarence is right, but how is that wonderful for George? Sure, his neighbors all bust their piggy banks to help out, but in the end George is still stuck in Bedford Falls, his friends are out their savings  . . .  and Potter still has the 8 grand! You call this “wonderful?”

You want to see a wonderful life? Forget Bedford Falls with George Bailey. Show me George Bailey without Bedford Falls.

Show me George in his New York penthouse, with that hottie Violet dressed to the nines, talking about the new dam he’s building in Central America, bringing power to an entire country. Show me his plans for a big-city skyscraper that will house thousands.

Show me the great life of George Bailey at his unfettered best, with a family safe and prosperous thanks to the wealth he’s earned making the world a better place for the most people. Now that is a wonderful life.

That was the story featured in the lesser-known remake made just a few years later starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. Killer production design and story arc, but the dialogue was more than a little sketchy at times.

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Stephen King really covers all the bases. As AP reports, King has helped to raise money to help low-income residents of Maine pay their winter heating bills:

King announced last month that his foundation would match up to $70,000 if listeners of the three Bangor-area radio stations he owns donated that amount, for a total of $140,000.

Listeners donated $24,000, the Lerner Foundation pitched in $46,000 and the foundation kept its promise.

On-air personality Pat LaMarche says an anonymous Californian then promised another $50,000, if King matched it. The Maine native agreed, bringing the total to over $240,000.

But King also supports the president who vowed in 2008 to do everything he can to keep their energy costs as high as possible — the one campaign promise he’s kept. If only there was a presidential or vice-presidential candidate who ran on a platform in 2008 of reducing energy costs…

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