I’m very fond of the Janis Ian song, “The Bridge.” The first line of the song is, “The bridge that spans the gap between our souls…”

That is the obvious symbolism of a bridge: something that brings people and places together — that fills in the missing bits of our communal soul. I live very close to one of the most famous bridges in the world: the Golden Gate Bridge. And although I cross over it quite often, I still get a thrill out of it. It is magnificent and it spans the void that separates the Left Coast from its Capital, which is San Francisco.[1]

For me, it is a symbol of the connection that all we Left Coasters share.

Symbol of Hope, Symbol of Death

But sadly, the Golden Gate Bridge is also a symbol of loneliness, despair, and death. On average, every two weeks someone kills themselves by jumping from the bridge. And because so many people have killed themselves with the Golden Gate Bridge, it has become something of a destination for people who see their best way forward as death.

I’ve long been fascinated by a quote from jump survivor Ken Baldwin, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable — except for having just jumped.” Those words have haunted me, because their meaning is clear: for most people, suicide is the result of a weak moment. Most people who are stopped or survive never try again. It’s like the old saying, “Wisdom comes to some suddenly.”

CHP Sgt Kevin Briggs is known as “Guardian of the Golden Gate.” Over the last two decades, he has stopped over 200 people from jumping from the bridge.A great deal of effort is spent watching for people on the bridge who look like they might be jumpers. But it is surprisingly hard to tell.

The Documentary The Bridge

Last week, I watched Eric Steel’s 2006 documentary, The Bridge. He put together a crew of 12 people who spent a year filming the bridge, every day. The results are amazing.

The film starts with various shots of the bridge and the bay and most of all of the people walking across the bridge and looking over the railing.

And then there is an older man looking over the edge. He looks like a tourist. He climbs over the rail and jumps. Many, perhaps most, people regret their decisions as they fall as Baldwin did. But this man doesn’t seem to have any regrets. He doesn’t try to reorient himself. He just falls to his death. It was shocking to watch. And it is not the only jump that was filmed. During the filming, 24 people killed themselves from the bridge, and the filmmakers got footage of 23 of them.

The Filmmakers Are Trying to Save Lives

Before you get the idea that the filmmakers were some kind of ghouls, let me be clear: they did not approach this as nature photographers, just capturing whatever happens without getting involved. When they could help someone, they did. And during the year, they prevented six suicides themselves.

One is in the film where a young woman climbs over the railing. The cameraman talks about it afterward. There is a tendency for people who do this kind of work to become detached from the reality that they are filming. But finally, it hit him, “She going to jump.” So he leaned far over the railing, grabbed her by her jacket and flung her back onto the sidewalk. They fought for about three minutes before authorities showed up and took her to the hospital. One hopes that she is now glad things turned out that way.

We Live for Others

In what was probably most compelling to me, the filmmakers captured an attempted suicide that is prevented by some CHP officers. They talk the guy down. The filmmakers found the guy and interviewed him later. He told his story about being in a very unhealthy marriage with lots of drugs and infidelity.

So he kissed his young son goodbye and went to the bridge. He was very candid about how the officers got him to stop, “They used my son against me.” But he seemed glad that they did.

Not a Fun Film — But Important

Overall, the film is kind of a downer. But it does have a hopeful message. If people can be stopped, or even slowed down, there is hope.

A lot of people have mental problems that are treatable. I hope that wider access to healthcare (especially here in California) will help matters. But the movie is worth checking out.

Since it was made, the bridge authority has been in the process of installing a “plastic-covered stainless-steel net below the bridge as a suicide deterrent.” Of course, nothing will stop everyone. But every bit the process is made harder saves lives.

See The Bridge — It’s Edifying

The whole film is on YouTube as I write this, but it will be taken down. You should buy it or rent it, of course. Here is the trailer:

[1] For the record, the Bay Bridge is my favorite with its double span. And by Left Coast, I mean the nation defined in American Nations, which includes Oregon and Washington, but not (Thank God!) Southern California.

I have a secret list of films that I think are magnificent. Some of them are silly like His Girl Friday and some are epic like Ran. But there is one film on the list that I don’t even like talking about because I really don’t know what it is, Francis Cooppola’s The Conversation. I’ve watched it twice just this week, and I have watched it dozens of times over the last three decades. It is different every time I see it. And to even talk about it is to minimize it. But talk about it I will do, even though I think it hopeless.

On its most basic level, The Conversation is the story of a murder plot. A couple has a conversation that is being secretly recorded by our hero, Harry Caul. But Caul mistakes the actual purpose of his work, which is not to uncover an affair, but to lure the suspicious husband to a hotel room where he can be murdered. But if that were all that was, it would be nothing more than Blow Out, which is a fine film, but not great. Instead, the film is interested in deeper questions, like Blowup, which The Conversation is clearly an homage to.

The Meaning of The Conversation

But whereas Blowup, in as much as it deals with anything, is about the nature of perception, The Conversation is about the nature of reality. Caul starts the film arguing with his landlord about having keys to his apartment. She tells him that she must have keys in case of a fire. He responds, “Well, see, I would be perfectly happy to have all my personal things burn up in a fire, because I don’t have anything personal. Nothing of value. Nothing personal except my keys…” That does sum up the state of his life. Since his business is invading other people’s privacy, the only thing he has is his own privacy. And what he is keeping private is a kind of non-life: he has a kept woman, Amy, he occasionally sees; he plays saxophone along with jazz records; and he has his work. And his privacy obsession stifles the blossoming of the two genuinely positive things in his life: his love of Amy and his love of jazz.

If Caul was truthful when he said that the only personal thing he had were his keys, then he has lost everything at the end of the movie. And that is, for many years how I saw the ending. He has found out that his former client has recorded him in his apartment. So Caul literally dismantles the apartment—never finding the bug. After giving up, we see him in his apartment, which is now a mess of debris, playing his saxophone. He is doubtless being recorded. The blinds and curtains have been torn down, so he is also visible to the world. He is naked. But is that a bad thing?

What Caul is doing at that moment is exactly what he would have been doing if he still had all the keys to his life. So the positive take on the ending is that Caul hasn’t lost his privacy; he has simply lost the illusion of privacy. And that illusion doesn’t shatter suddenly. Using a pen microphone, Moran manages to record Caul having the most honest conversation he has in the whole film. The next day, he learns that his client has known all about him from before they even hired him. This certainly was a painful realization for him, but in the end, he’s discovered a great freedom.

Now I know what regular readers will think about this: there goes Frank just trying to turn what is an incredibly depressing ending into something positive. Maybe. But I think there is a good reason to believe that he has been transformed. If he had been beaten, he wouldn’t be playing his sax. But there are points of his back story that point to a kind of rebirth. During the dream sequence, he tells the story of a near death experience and after he regained consciousness, “I remember being disappointed I survived.” And then, when his work in New York leads to the murder of three people, he flees all the way to San Francisco. He repeats over and over again, statements like “It has nothing to do with me” and “I’m not responsible.” But he knows better. In the confessional, after mentioning some minor things, he says, “I’ve been involved in some work that I think will be used to hurt these two young people. It’s happened to me before. People were hurt because of my work—my work. I’m—I’m afraid it could happen again, and I—I was in no way responsible. I’m not responsible.”

I think that after the ending, Harry goes into work. Maybe he decides he’ll only work for the IRS or go into another line of work altogether. He gets on better with Stan and everyone. Maybe he manages to find Amy. Regardless, he finds a woman to have an actual human relationship with. And he starts living. But The Conversation isn’t about a rebirth because Harry Caul has never really lived. It is, in a sense a birth—he’s finally made it out of the womb. The most remarkable thing about this is that our hero’s name is “Caul,” and the caul is “the amniotic membrane enclosing a fetus.” Most births take hours or days, this one took 44 years. Better late than never. Happy birthday Harry!

Other Meanings — If You Like

Okay, you don’t like my take on the film? I have at least a dozen others. One that I’m quite fond of is that nothing is happening externally in his most recent job. It is just a husband spying on his wife and the husband dies in a car crash—a pure coincidence. What’s really going on is that Harry Caul is finally coming to terms with his responsibility in the 1968 welfare fund case that led to the three murders. He sees a similarity in this case and begins hallucinating. There was no argument in the “Jack Tar Hotel. 3:00. Room 773″—no blood overflowing the toiler. There is no one recording his apartment. He tears it apart because he’s gone crazy. He is punishing himself for the sin of spying by creating a world that is now spying on him. But I don’t find that fulfilling, because that is basically what his whole life had been about up until that point: hiding from people he assumes are doing to him what he does to them.

Or you could see The Conversation the way most people see it: he has been destroyed, and now all he has is his sax that he plays alone, not even along with records. But that is not only boring, it dismisses what is probably Gene Hackman’s best acting performance ever. He is playing a character who talks very little but says very much. And it is a disservice to the character to think that he ever thought that being a good spy meant he was immune to being spied on himself. That’s why he created a life of his own that was so small that there was virtually nothing to spy on.

So right now: I think The Conversation is about the birth of a man. But I will doubtless change that opinion later. Or at least refine it.

The Conversation as Cinematic Art

Regardless of meaning, The Conversation is also a masterpiece of filmmaking as art. I’m rather glad that Bill Butler did the cinematography rather than the obvious choice of Gordon Willis (who just died last month at 83—of cancer). I love Willis’ work, but it is highly stylized and Butler’s more naturalistic approach works really well here. Some of the surveillance camera moves are a little too cute, but I don’t blame that on him.

The acting is strong, most especially Hackman. But some of the minor roles are really great too, especially Allen Garfield as the slimiest of characters: Moran. Also, I thought that Teri Garr managed to create a whole reality in her very small part. If there is one part that is weak, it is Harrison Ford as Martin Stett. He seems ill at ease in the part and although he doesn’t really hurt the film, he just seems out of place. Of course, I’m not a big fan of Ford. I like him well enough, but he’s wildly overrated.

More than most films, The Conversation lives and dies by the editing. And this editing is fantastic. Although the viewer is riveted, it is actually paced very slowly. And just as the tapes of the conversation are layered, so is the editing of the film. Taken all together, it is very much like a fugue. But with every pass we are drawn deeper and deeper into it. I think we have to credit this to Walter Murch more than to Richard Chew, who was nominally the editor of the film. Murch is both an editor and a sound designer, and that is the combination that is most impressive in the film. I’m sure Coppola was very involved too.

Over all, there were a lot of great people doing their best work on this film. But it is easy to see how the film could have been ruined. And I think we have to thank Coppola above all for never losing track of what he was making. He started with a great screenplay, got the right people to help him make it, and brought the whole thing home. Interestingly, the film lost the Best Picture Oscar to Coppola’s other film, the far weaker The Godfather Part II. But The Conversation did win the Palme d’Or, which is typical: Cannes has a much better history of spotting genius in real time.

Two Other Issues

There are two other things about the film that bug me. One is that almost everyone who sees the film is obsessed (at least for a while) about how Harry Caul was recorded in his apartment. I guess this is natural, but it is irrelevant. As Caul himself knows: there are always ways. The film also doesn’t reveal how Caul recorded the 1968 welfare fund case, but no one seems concerned about that. Both questions are irrelevant, and their answers would be boring. The point is that Caul being a great spy is of very little use to him in protecting his own privacy.

The other issue is the change in the recording of the line, “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” Even time, the inflection is the same, “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” This implies that they are worried that he is going to kill them. But after we know that they were the ones who murdered the older executive, the line is repeated with a different reading, “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” That implies that they are going to kill him before he kills them. Basically, it is a complete reversal of the meaning of the line throughout the film.

When I first saw the film, that was the killer line. It worked perfectly. In an instant, everything changed. It is highly effective. And I don’t like it. It can be justified, because it is the one time we don’t hear it repeated on the tape. It is Harry Caul’s memory and just like the audience, he suddenly sees the line differently and that he had the situation exactly backwards. But it still feels like a cheat and it isn’t necessary.

For the past couple of days (and to a large extent for the last many years), Dean Baker has been taking George Will to task for the fact that he is a complete idiot—most recently in, George Will Still Can’t Get Access to Government Data. I have a visceral hatred for George Will, because he is so much just William Buckley: the Next Generation. Although just like with Star Trek, the next generation has none of the spark of the original. What’s especially true is that Will doesn’t have the erudition of Buckley, and every time he includes an obscure reference, you know one of his many assistants came up with it. As I’ve noted before, if he were a liberal, he wouldn’t even be a blogger; but because the media are so desperate for any conservative who makes any sense at all, he’s a journalistic star.

This weekend, Will published, Showdown in Tar Heel Country. Mostly the column is just, “Thom Tillis: ra ra ra!” So who really cares? But Will then starts to talk about what a great job the Republicans have done with the North Carolina economy. That’s where he gets into trouble. That’s where he always gets in trouble, because he’s a total hack. He is the William Lane Craig of conservative politics: facts never stand in the way of what he knows to be The Truth™.

So George Will wrote, “The state has added more than 200,000 jobs in three years. Unemployment has fallen from 10.4 percent in January 2011, then eighth-highest in the nation, to 6.2 percent, one of the largest improvements among the states in the past 13 quarters.” Of course, the 200,000 jobs number has no context, and state unemployment numbers don’t necessarily mean that a larger percentage of the population is employed. Baker got right to the heart of the matter: what has been the percentage of job growth in North Carolina? Well, it turns out it is 5.18%, which isn’t bad, but the nation as a whole had a growth rate of 5.12%. So North Carolina has done about as well as the nation has. And then Baker noted, “Furthermore, the number of jobs in North Carolina is still a full percentage point below its pre-recession peak, while nationally the number of jobs is down by less than 0.1 percent from pre-recession levels.”

As for that claim about the unemployment rate going way down. Well, let me tell you what really happened. The unemployment rate in North Carolina stayed markedly above the national level. It was only in the last year that it plummeted. And it didn’t plummet because people got jobs. It plummeted because extended unemployment benefits were ended (because of George Will’s beloved Republican Party), so those who were at least nominally looking for a job dropped out of the labor market altogether. So in as much as the Republicans in North Carolina affected the economy of the state, they seem to have made it worse.

But maybe we should applaud Will. After all, he does get the basic facts right. He just does it in a totally deceptive and disingenuous way. This article is actually an improvement over what Will does whenever he writes about global warming. Still, it is an outrage that this sub-genius partisan hack is given such a prominent place in the mainstream media.

You may remember a week ago, I wrote, Capital in the 21st Century Not Refuted. It was in regard to an article by Chris Giles at the Financial Times, Data problems with Capital in the 21st Century. My article was mostly about what the political consequences of this would be. Regardless of what Giles found or how Piketty would respond, conservatives would use the initial Giles article to dismiss income inequality. As I concluded: “I imagine watching This Week in two years. Paul Krugman will be on it and say, ‘Thomas Piketty showed that income inequality is getting worse.’ And Peggy Noonan will scoff, ‘Oh, the Financial Times proved that was rubbish years ago!’ And George Stephanopoulos will just shrug. ‘Who can say?'”

We will see if this comes to pass, because Piketty was pretty quick with his response—a 10 page paper, Technical appendix of the book Capital in the twenty-first century Appendix to chapter 10. Inequality of Capital Ownership; Addendum: Response to FT (pdf). If you are technically minded, it is quite a fun read. It starts off with Piketty gushing about how grateful he is that the Financial Times is checking his work and that this is exactly why he made all of the data in the book available on spreadsheet. It comes off very much like a lion talking to a lamb about how happy he is that he decided to join him for dinner.

Piketty then goes on to talk about the data on wealth inequality: it is far worse than the data on income inequality. Implied: you did read the book, didn’t you? But they can agree on that, and Piketty talks about how these data will be getting better in the future in part because of his own and his colleagues’ work. At this point, the lion has not touched the lamb; it is smiling with just a hint of disapproval.

But Piketty continues to take it slow. He then goes in and discusses each of the four countries that he studied: Sweden, France, the United States, and the United Kingdom. He deals with each thusly:

Sweden

I see we agree on the overall numbers. Excellent! But you note some minor errors in the years? Yes, I explained this all in the book and even more in the appendix, but I should have been more clear. You see, you can’t treat wealth estimates on a yearly basis because there aren’t enough data and the data are too variable to deal with year by year. But thank you so much for pointing out this issue that I clearly didn’t highlight enough in the book. (The lion smiles broadly.)

France

I see we agree on the overall numbers. Excellent! But you make much about a single data point regarding how I correct for mortality. This is all clearly explained in the spreadsheets and the papers I put online for you to use. “This looks a little bit like criticism for the sake of criticism.” (The lion squints at the lamb and looks disapprovingly.)

United States

I see we agree on the overall numbers except in the most recent period. Yes, this is sad. The data from the United States is not as good as it is for France. This was well documented in the book. I made the best estimates that I could based upon the data. You have made different estimates. But it is interesting that the most recent and reliable estimates by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman agree more with my initial uncertain estimates. Their estimates actually find a larger rise in wealth than I did. This is now the state of the art and we should use this new data, but it does make your estimates look even more pathetic than they did based simply on my own careful work. (The lion licks its lips.)

United Kingdom

Ah, here we really do see a very big difference! You see wealth inequality actually decreasing in the recent decades. I cannot say that my methodology is correct. But you have broken up the data and used what I consider the more accurate (and higher) estate tax data in the early years and then shift to survey data that are known to under report total wealth. And those data are from a single year: 2010. Why would you do that other than to simply misrepresent the data? (The lion opens wide.)

That’s basically it. In one sentence: Chris Giles manipulated the US and UK data in such a way to prove what he wanted to prove and his methodology is worse than unwarranted—it is disingenuous. Piketty scored a knockout. Or if you prefer: the lion swallowed the lamb whole.

In fact, the case against Giles and the Financial Times and their over-hyping of the errors they found make me think that this may not give conservatives the cover they so desperately desire. One can hope.

Update (30 May 2014 8:23 pm)

I can’t seem to get enough of this. I’m reading what everyone else is writing about it. I was particularly struck with what RA at The Economist had to say, “One suspects that Mr Giles will not be satisfied by the response, and the discussion is likely to continue.” If this is true, it means that Giles is simply an ideologue who is totally resistant to argument and data. The best he can reasonably do is move the argument to minor points. Because his major point was totally destroyed. As Piketty noted:

If Giles continues this debate, he will lose all credibility. I fully expect Giles to lose all credibility.

Why is there civil war in Syria? How about drought! You see, there were all these farmers. And the drought caused an exodus of them to the cities, looking for work. But there was no work so they sat around in the streets are started focusing their anger on the government. And before you can say “Bashar al-Assad,” you got yourself a war.

Look: I get it. To Republicans, war is about bad people doing bad things. But war is almost always about resources and their distribution. This is one reason I think that a guaranteed minimum income is a good idea. Even if it reduced economic progress a little, it would reduce war a whole lot. But that doesn’t much matter, the fact is that the Syrian civil war is the result of drought. Is it from climate change? We can’t say. But we can say this: there will be more droughts and this will make the possibility of war more likely going forward.

The United States military understands this. And this isn’t just something that might happen “over there.” Here in my home state of California, water rights are a big deal. There is great tension over the issue and when there is a drought (as there is now), it becomes worse. If this continues on for ten years, there will be violence. Count on it. So the military is rightly concerned about global warming.

But you know Republicans: they always yield to the troops on the ground. Whatever the military says, they follow it. They aren’t a bunch of bureaucrats who are sitting around telling the generals what to do. Or at least they aren’t as long as the generals are doing exactly what the Republicans want them to do. Then, it’s a different matter. Remember when Army Chief of Staff General Shinseki told the Bush administration it would need “something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” to occupy Iraq? He was right, but they didn’t listen to him because the depth of commitment Republicans have for the military is equal to the thickness of their “Support Our Troops!” bumper stickers on the backs of their SUVs.

Ryan Koronowski reported last week, House Votes to Deny Climate Science and Ties Pentagon’s Hands on Climate Change. He explained:

When I was doing my preliminary research for my master’s thesis, I read a lot about all the work that the military had done on building structures in arctic regions. My main interest was permafrost, which turns out to be rather easy. Land that freezes and thaws is a much bigger problem, and this will become a bigger problem in the future as most permafrost regions begin cyclically thawing. But the point is that from its very earliest days, militaries have had to deal with climate and the problems that it brings. So our military of course should be thinking about global warming.

The military is by its nature a conservative (in a non-political sense) group. It is conservative the way I am: careful. We are planners. And from the military’s perspective, this isn’t a question of whether global warming is happening or not, it is simply that they have to be prepared for it if it is. (BTW: it is.) They don’t set up a military campaign and say, “I don’t think they’ll attack us on our right flank, so we’ll just forget about protecting it.”

But this is just what the Republicans in the House of Representatives want the military to do. (Note: four Democrats voted for it and three Republicans voted against it.) Why don’t they come up with some other bright ideas? There is great difference of opinion about whether nuclear war will ever happen. Why don’t we just get rid of all our nuclear weapons? Great sea battles in the future are unlikely. Why not dissolve the Navy? Drones seem to be doing a good job. Let’s get rid of all our pilots!

This is the worst kind of micromanagement. And it is all about politics. It isn’t about differences of opinion about how our military ought to be used. This is just yet another statement by the Republicans that global warming is a great big hoax. They read about the Climatic Research Unit email controversy in National Review back in 2009 and they know it. The fact that it was only about tree ring data and that eight different commissions have looked into it and found no fraud means nothing. Remember: five years ago, they read about it in National Review, and once a talking point is developed that supports what you want to believe, it can never be questioned! Global warming isn’t happening because they say it isn’t happening. And they will continue to say that until their homes burst into flames.

But conservatives love the military. Just look at their bumper stickers!

There is an issue with comments around here that even after almost five years, I don’t get. There are people who agree with me and go into some depth about details. There are questions. There are people who disagree with me and make cogent arguments. And then there are people who just come around to yell at me. It’s very frustrating because these people seem to not actually read what I’ve written. They are angry at me and so they grab onto something I’ve written and blast me on that.

This morning I had such an experience. For some reason, my article Ayn Rand and Indians has been getting an incredible amount of traffic recently (it always gets a fair amount). I assume this is because a popular Facebook account posted it. I’m glad. I’m proud of the article. One thing I know a lot about is Ayn Rand. It’s kind of funny. There are a lot of libertarians who run around thinking that Rand is super keen without having read much or any of her work. They just take it on faith (Really!) that the smart woman had it all figured out. She didn’t. There are gaping holes in her work because she didn’t take philosophy seriously.

This brings us to the following comment by a guy who runs a Philippines-centric website VINCENTON with the subtitle, “Free Market Rocks.” There hasn’t been an article posted on it for almost two months, it gets almost no traffic, and the writing is entirely typical of a college student who is brashly going to “tell it like it is!” But don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen much worse. The main problem is that I’ve see so much like it. At least I can say this of Frankly Curious, it isn’t like any other liberal blog and the quality of the writing and analysis are at a high enough level to attract a decent sized audience that even includes some “name” writers.

Here’s the start of his comment:

The two responses that he calls well-reasoned basically just repeated Ayn Rand’s initial philosophical error. If you say that everyone has the right to their own property, that means that everyone has the right to their own property. It does not mean that everyone has a right to their own property as long as you think they are using it as it ought to be used. That’s fascism. (I’ve noted before that her writing is a “bizarre mixture of fascism, anarchism, and Hollywood romanticism.”) They also made the mistake of thinking that there was an American Indian nation instead of all kinds of little nations with many different lifestyles. And above all, they made the mistake of thinking that the native peoples didn’t have the idea of property rights. This last bit really bugs me, because it not only justifies land theft, it justifies genocide, which is what we Europeans did regardless.

But I especially took exception to his quote of mine. I was responding to a commenter named George who said the Indians were all at war, implying I guess that they were savages who deserved what they got. Here is what I actually wrote in response, “Regardless, if being at war is what makes a culture savage (and I’m open to that idea), then the United States is the most savage nation ever.” So VINCENTON totally mischaracterized what I said and used it as an excuse to chronicle other nations’ savagery. It’s a typical strawman attack. And it wasn’t even a good argument on that basis because he didn’t show that these other countries were more savage than the US.

The main thing here seems to be that this young man was upset that I attacked Ayn Rand who is a hero of his. If you look at his About page, it doesn’t mention Ayn Rand, but it is filled with Objectivism dogma about “selfishness” and “ego.” And he’s written about her ad nauseum. He once wrote that Ayn Rand “is utterly hated by the Left because of her unassailable arguments against altruism, self-sacrifice, mysticism, communism, and all forms of totalitarian ideologies.” So the fact that I have doubtless read more of her (all of her, as far as I know) and have come to the conclusion that she is fundamentally fascistic, must be upsetting.

But his comment was very much like doorbell ditch. If Rand’s arguments are unassailable, why doesn’t he defend her? He doesn’t, because he can’t. Back in the 1980s, I heard Rand’s heir Leonard Peikoff say that the United States stayed pretty much a free nation for a hundred years. During almost all of that time, we had slavery in this country. How any reasonable person could say that the United States was more free in 1850 than it was in the 1980s is beyond me. But for Rand and Peikoff, it is quite easy. If you scratch Objectivism just a little bit, you will see fascism and white supremacy.

In the comment, VENCENTON also called me a “creature.” This goes along with one of his articles, “The Left’s Endless Smears Against Ayn Rand.” In it, he wrote, “Evidence or proof is not important to these half-wit creatures.” But neither is it important to him, based upon his comment. Then, just three sentences later, he wrote, “Ad hominem attack is one of the best weapons of the left.” It would be hard to write a believable character who was this aggressively clueless. He is upset that liberals claim, “Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism is a cult.” He then goes on to write many paragraphs quoting Rand reverently as if he were quoting the Bible. It’s sad, but hopefully he will grow out of it. (For the record: Objectisism is very cult-like, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a cult.)

As all my readers know, I’m very angry about the state of the world. But what I don’t do is go to other websites where I disagree and shout at people. In fact, when dealing with someone I disagree with, I try to be as polite as possible. This often leads to very useful dialogues and surprising common ground. (Of course, I feel no such need when people are dumping on me here.) I wonder if people like VENCENTON think by shouting and running away that they win the argument. In their minds maybe. Meanwhile, seven days a weeks, there are new articles here. And the fact that I get more and more immature comments is a sign of the growing success of Frankly Curious.

Last week, I wrote, Lord Michael Kinsley. It was based upon his “review” of Glenn Greenwald’s new book, No Place to Hide. The article is not really about what Greenwald wrote, but about what Kinsley always writes. He is an apologist for the power elite. I want to revisit this topic, because today, the Public Editor of The New York Times, Margaret Sullivan, wrote, Kinsley, Greenwald and Government Secrets. She is reasonably critical of Kinsley.

She makes two points. First, is that the “sneering tone” that Kinsley takes toward Greenwald is unworthy of the Book Review. Second, is that, “Kinsley’s central argument ignores important tenets of American governance.” She goes on to note the importance of journalism in the founding and the history of this country. I’d like to address both of these in a little more depth than Sullivan could in her very political editorial.

The very fact of the “sneering tone” should have made it unpublishable. It is clear that Kinsley doesn’t like Greenwald. And he’s hardly alone. Many journalists (Ones I like!) have a problem with him. He is notably harsh, seemingly without a sense of humor, and has no problem criticizing people who are on his own side. He rather reminds me of myself when I was twenty years old. But I really don’t understand what is wrong with this country. Somehow we have gotten to the point where it is more important that our presidents and journalists be good drinking companions than that they do their jobs well.

Now I can’t prove that Kinsley hated Greenwald before writing the article, other than quoting from the review itself, “Greenwald seems like a self-righteous sourpuss, convinced that every issue is ‘straightforward,’ and if you don’t agree with him, you’re part of something he calls ‘the authorities,’ who control everything for their own nefarious but never explained purposes.” I will note that this is the standard line on Greenwald. A couple of years ago, Jonathan Chait sarcastically referred to him as, “Brave Radical Truth Teller Glenn Greenwald.” And then said, “Greenwald’s penchant for telling bold truths that the corrupted partisans are too blind to see, in a manner that in no way is sanctimonious, is an inspiring example for us all.” Chait has said many similar things about Greenwald, even when he is agreeing with him.

But I can’t say what Kinsley has said about Greenwald or surveillance in the past, because of all the automatic content that web pages create. So even after searching for hours, I came back to the same current discussion. When I searched for articles from 2012, they include auto-links to, “Read about Michael Kinsley’s attack on Glenn Greenwald’s new book.” But it seems pretty clear that Kinsley is with Chait in long thinking that Greenwald is sanctimonious and in need of a good slap. And that is really all that Kinsley’s “review” is. So despite what Book Review editor Pamela Paul thinks, Kinsley was a lousy choice to review a book by Greenwald.

The second issue is even more of a head-scratcher. This is why I keep putting “review” in scare quotes. I don’t mind negative reviews. In fact, they are often some of the most useful reviews. But they need to engage in the material. Greenwald may be extreme, but he is also an expert—a successful civil rights attorney and very knowledge about this specific subject. He deserves a hearing. And based upon Kinsley’s “review” he got no hearing. Kinsley simply thinks that the government has the right to keep secrets and it should be up to the government to decide what secrets should be revealed. No Place to Hide is almost 300 pages long and I got absolutely no idea of what arguments he was making from Kinsley’s “review.”

Pamela Paul may think that Kinsley is a serious person who writes good book reviews, but it seems to me that there are many good writers with backgrounds in these issues that could have been hired to write a review. Whether those reviews were positive or negative, the reader would have been given some insights into the issues involved. Kinsley’s review was little more than, “So’s your ol’ man!” And although that is more or less what I expect from Kinsley, I generally expect more from The New York Times.

For months, I’ve been wanting to write about Victoria Jackson. Now you all probably know her from Saturday Night Live where she usually played a dumb blond. And then she came out as a big Tea Party member and we all knew that it wasn’t an act. Media Matters wrote an excellent article on her political evolution, How Fringe Media Helped Turn a Conspiracy-Loving SNL Star Into a Politician. But despite it all, I really do think that she’s a very funny woman. Here is her own song, “There’s a Communist Living in the White House.” Pushing aside that it is totally ignorant, not only of the president but of what communism is, I think it is quite charming. Jackson is a good example of just how dangerous strongly held opinions, enormous ignorance, and moderate celebrity can be:

My favorite line is, “Doesn’t anyone read history?” Yeah, Victoria, some of us actually do read history. That’s why we know what is “communism” and what is just “some policy I don’t like.” The parts about how maybe she’s stupid and maybe she’s crazy are less charming, because they’re meant as insults not just to liberals but to her own family and friends. Some Christian she is!

I don’t mind that she mentions that only Glenn Beck understands her. I wish she didn’t follow it up with other people who are the only one who understands her. But okay: she’s silly and I like that. But Sean Hannity?! He’s just a partisan hack. Whatever the Republican Party believes, he repeats. If the Republican Party went communist, there’d be a communist in Sean Hannity’s chair.

But it is the middle section of the song that makes it so great. This is where she goes through the reasons that she knows there’s a communist in the White House, “Where do you want me to start?” That’s always a bad way to start an argument because it usually means, “I haven’t much thought about it.” But she’s able to go through all the great hate radio talking points:

1. His grandparents were socialist. While she says this, behind her is an article about Frank Marshall Davis, who was said to be Obama’s mentor but wasn’t really. It’s also not the case that Davis was a communist, but in the 1940s and 1950s, pretty much any community organizer was labeled a communist at one time or another. I’ve never actually heard anything about the political leanings of his grandparents. His grandfather fought in World War II. His grandmother worked making bombers during the war. But this is entirely typical of conservatives. I still burn with anger at what conservatives were willing to say about war hero John Kerry just to win a political fight.
2. His father was a communist. I think it is safe to say that his father was a socialist. Given that Obama barely knew him, I don’t see what difference this makes. And even if he had grown up with him, we generally don’t hold children accountable for their parents’ actions and beliefs.
3. He had “Marxist” professors. This comes from part of Dreams of My Father. And the remark is about how he tried to be “cool.” Here is the whole paragraph:
   To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. But this strategy alone couldn’t provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerated. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.

   It’s not about politics; it’s about being young.

4. He taught a course on Saul Alinsky. Alinsky was explicitly not a communist. But for some reason he is a boogeyman for conservatives, even while they submerge themselves in Rules for Radicals for help with their astroturfing efforts.
5. His college records are sealed. That’s a common conspiracy theory, that even if it were true is simply racist and has nothing to do with him being a communist.
6. Obama said “spread the wealth” (to the liar Joe the Plumber) which is a direct quote from the Communist Manifesto. Not to nitpick, but that book was written in German, so it can’t be a direct quote. The English translation not only doesn’t have that phrase, it has no similar phrase. What’s more, “spread the wealth” is not the same as “redistribute the wealth.” And as people like me have been saying all along, the redistribution that is going on is the same as is always going on: from the poor to the rich.
7. He appointed Van Jones who is a “reported” communist. By this she means that when Jones was 24 he claimed to be a communist and probably knew as much about the term then as Jackson does now. He had long ago repudiated the statement.
8. His preacher was Jeremiah Wright and he followed black liberation theology, which some conservatives call Marxist. Obama, in a typical act of cowardice, repudiated Wright. But really, what in the world do conservatives not call Marxist?
9. He had the government take over the banks and the car industry. He didn’t.
10. He was trying to “jam socialized medicine done our throats.” Yes, and he was so sneaky about it that it was done in the form of free market reforms that all conservatives were in favor of until Obama accepted it.
11. He was for Cap and Trade. Again, it was another typical communist trick of using a free market approach to a social problem. It is strange that it is the very thing that John McCain ran against Obama on in 2008.

She ends with, “How much more proof do you need?” My answer to that would be, “Any!” But it shows why people claim that Obama is a communist and why the same people called Bill Clinton a communist. It’s the same reason that Bill O’Reilly calls any politician or pundit who disagrees with him “far left.” Because the conservative movement has moved so far to the right that they can’t see that ideas like Obamacare are conservative in an absolute sense. Cap and Trade is another free market conservative idea. These people have no idea what real leftist policies are. And as I often rant around here, “Why don’t we nationalize the banks, given that the conservatives are just going to say that we are doing that anyway?” Why don’t we have socialized medicine like they do in the United Kingdom, given that conservatives are just going to say that we are doing that anyway? Why don’t we provide a guaranteed income given that conservatives already claim we do?!

Victoria Jackson is silly and charming and funny. But her thinking on these matters is no less serious than most other conservatives and certainly no worse than the likes of Amy Kremer. If I had a ukulele, I’d perform a song about all the Tea Party members who have been elected to the House and the Senate. It would be called, “There’s a Bunch of Idiots in the Congress!”