Class warfare in the multiplex

My sweetheart and I both enjoyed Where the Crawdads Sing, and in that we were not alone, despite the movie's very mixed reception among professional film critics (see samples below).

These critics can't be trusted. As the snippets illustrating this post show, neither Clarisse Loughrey nor Peter Bradshaw was paying enough attention to the film they were supposed to review. 

Loughrey, for example, missed several onscreen cues to the effect that "Crawdads" takes place in North Carolina. 

One might excuse a British reviewer for not knowing what North Carolina's state flag looks like (it's in courtroom scenes), but the movie also announced its location in dialog more than once. 

Bradshaw's complaint is even dumber. Two Black actors play pivotal roles in the story, so to call the movie an "all-white reboot" of anything else is ridiculous. In the current social climate, it's also irresponsible.  

And it's hard to say anything about Gary Kramer except that his visceral dislike for Where the Crawdads Sing sure makes him seem an unhappy soul.

Sadly, the dichotomy between critical (33% approval) and popular (96% approval) reception for Where the Crawdads Sing isn't a one-off. 

You can see the same dynamic at play in the "Rotten Tomatoes" reaction to the last year's hero-worshipping documentary about Dr. Anthony Fauci, the camera-loving face of federal response to COVID-19 who hasn't seen actual patients since he completed his residency decades ago:

More recently, scoring on Rotten Tomatoes also shows a gulf between what audiences (95% approval) and critics (39% approval) think of The Terminal List. 

That eight-episode exposition of a U.S. Navy SEAL's revenge is many things, not least a commentary on the value of informed consent. I thought season one very much worth watching, with fine performances throughout, and unusual fidelity to the novel on which it is based. 

Actors Chris Pratt, Taylor Kitsch, Constance Wu, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Tyner Rushing all turned in yeoman work for season one of that series. Even so, professional critics were more likely to sneer at the effort. One can't help but wonder if their beef with The Terminal List was mostly ideological. They probaly don't understand the appeal of such allegedly polarizing real-life figures as Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson, either.

Gimlet eye on WRAL

It's another spring weeknight in the Carolinas. I haven't yet mastered a "shut down" routine as recommended in Cal Newport's Deep Work, and raiding the freezer at this hour for a Drumstick ice cream seems irresponsible. Beyond that, going back to the novel I'm currently reading means keeping its characters sorted in my head, and I don't have the mental energy for that at the moment, so TV wins. 

I decided to have fun with story treatment in today's 7:00 pm news on WRAL, the local broadcast affiliate for both Fox and NBC, which in my head is best known for throwing talent and money at its "severe weather center" and "storm team."

• In the first news block, there's a story about 70 municpal employees suing the city of Raleigh over its vaccination and COVID policies, including a monthly surcharge that Raleigh will soon be levying against medical insurance for the unvaccinated.
  
  Many of those suing the city are first responders, the reporter notes, without providing any other context for the suit, such as how the city settled on its $50 per month figure for the surcharge. Neither reporter nor anchor mentions that even vaccinated people can still get COVID. I'd also like to know a bit about the history of suits like this -- have municipal employees in North Carolina filed class action suits against their employers before? Alas, WRAL won't answer questions like mine.
  
  
• The lawsuit story is followed by a story describing an FDA meeting about "the need for a fourth [COVID] booster shot." After the in-studio introduction, both news anchors toss to a field reporter who quotes a local doctor touting boosters ("If you've only had three shots...I am a little concerned.").
  
  The story includes a plug for a local pharmacy. Juxtaposing its fear-mongering against the suit by people who "chose not to be vaccinated" (emphasis from the WRAL anchor, because it's their fault) makes the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Raleigh sound unreasonable. Was that the intent?
  
  
• The one bright spot in the broacast turns out to be a hit from a Duke University School of Public Policy professor about events in Ukraine. It's very clear that the intentional targeting of civilians is a war crime, he says, while describing the "repetitive fire patterns" used by Russian artillery to shell an area, pause, and then resume fire so that first responders in that area are targeted, too. That's a detail I haven't heard elsewhere.
  
  The professor also points out the Vladimir Putin is, among other things, a "serial bigamist." Unlike most of the people who provide sound bites for this broadcast, Professor Simon Miles contributes several nuggets of new information. Full marks to WRAL producers for his segment, which unfortunately seems to be the only one of its kind.
  
  
• Following the Ukraine story and a blurb about the shooting of two people in Fayetteville (with no names released by the police and no suspects found yet), WRAL teases a story about how supply chain woes might be good for business. Say what?
  
  It turns out that two local pundits think the pandemic represents a "significant opportunity" for companies to be proactive rather than reactive about their sourcing. That's a solid point, but it doesn't mean that supply chain disruptions are good, as WRAL claimed while trying to gild the decomposing lily. 

Local news producers have never called me for advice, but then they tend not to use inset maps when talking about wildfires or shootings in other states, either. How hard would that be? Are Carolinians supposed to recognize the names of little towns in California's Napa Valley, for example? 

I give this newscast a C+, which it gets only because the Duke University professor added unusual detail about the war between Russia and Ukraine.

Update (18 April): In a story on evening newscasts about mask mandates being lifted at RDU Airport in the wake of today's ruling by a federal judge who struck down the nationwide travel mask mandate that the CDC had imposed for more than two years, the WRAL reporter is wearing a mask. I hope that was a personal choice rather than a diktat from her producers, because the optics involved are decidedly ironic.

As 2021 slinks away

Among many other things, I'm thankful for the preset buttons on my car radio. I actually heard all of the following songs today:

• I Can See Clearly Now (Johnny Nash)
  
• Sister Golden Hair (America)
• With or Without You (U2)
• Day After Day (Badfinger)
• Walk Like a Man (Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons)
• Slip Sliding Away (Paul Simon)
• These Dreams (Heart)
• Crazy Little Thing Called Love (Queen)
• I Heard it Through the Grapevine (Marvin Gaye)

In other entertainment news, "American Underdog" is a movie worth seeing.

If Blue Bloods characters talked masking

Blue Bloods has been a mainstay of network TV for more than a decade. While Tom Selleck gets top billing for playing NYPD Commissioner Frank Reagan because even his mustache enjoys gravitas, the commissioner's unflappable competence makes him a “Mary Sue'' compared to other members of the cast. That’s why supporting characters in the series fit into mashups that Frank doesn’t. 

Think instead of Bridget Moynahan and Steve Schirripa, who play Frank's daughter, Assistant District Attorney Erin Reagan, and her chief investigator, Anthony Abetemarco. What might those two say to each other if they were arguing about, for example, mask mandates in church?

Both Anthony and Erin are at least nominally Catholic. Irish and Italian backgrounds give them common cultural and religious references. When they volley back and forth, it's not always a foregone conclusion as to whose thinking will impress enough to become an anecdote at the Reagan family dinner table next Sunday night.

The following conversation hasn't actually happened. But with a respectful nod to the Blue Bloods script writers, it probably should:

Anthony broaches the subject of mask compliance while on his way out of Erin’s office after a long day. He pauses with his hand on the knob of her frosted glass door to look back over his shoulder and sound her out. The pose is familiar to both of them:

“This mask thing in church is getting to me, Erin.”

She looks up without saying anything. She'll wait. She’s the counter-puncher.

“I mean, I get it,” Anthony adds, stepping tentatively toward her desk. “Nobody wants the covid. But when somebody says that vaccination doesn’t keep me from catching the virus and spreading it, then I gotta wonder what the shot is for, you know?”

“I can’t see fighting your parish priest on that one,” she replies. Thanks in part to her job within the criminal justice system, Erin has always been quicker to bend the knee to authority than Anthony ever will be. “The diocese doesn’t want legal trouble, and the churchgoing crowd skews older. When the governor’s trying to keep everybody safe, the archbishop can’t afford to look callous.”

Anthony looks disappointed with that answer. He knows when his boss tries to skate past a point by being glib.

“It’s not the governor’s job to keep everybody safe,” he says. “That’s what people like you and me do. That’s what your brothers do. And most of the seniors who want the vaccine already have it. Even when the teachers’ unions were calling their members 'front-line,' seniors had first crack at vaccination.”

“But masks help slow the spread of the virus,” Erin suggests.

“Do they?” Anthony pushes back. “The doctor who talks most about masks is making bank, but even Congress can’t get a straight answer from the guy. Let's face it: Tony Fauci hasn’t had a bedside manner since before Giuliani was mayor.”

“The mask thing is about following the science, Anthony. You know that.”

“Maybe it was once. It’s not now. I trust the CDC about as much as I trust the FBI. Even little kids still have to mask up. Little kids! And what do we hear from public health officials? ‘If it saves just one life.’ Or baseball analogies. Like nobody outside insurance understands risk assessment anymore.” 

“You don’t like masking? Nobody does.”

“I’m not anti-mask. I’m `pro face’. Especially in church. To be honest, I’m more of a Christmas and Easter guy than a regular churchgoer, but the idea of people being made in the image and likeness of God ought to give pastors pause, don’t you think? All I hear is fear. You'd think going maskless for an hour on Sundays was like playing with rabid dogs.” 

“Can you blame shepherds for not wanting to lose any sheep?”

“How much caution is too much? You see bodies being stacked like cordwood in Florida and Texas and Mississippi? I don’t. Last I checked, science was science even in places like Georgia. I guess the archbishop watches TV news. With those guys, it’s all case count and who needs a ‘vaccine passport.’ They wouldn’t know context if it bit them in the ass! They don't say jack about unintended consequences, either. I need to share my medical history to get on a plane or go to a show? I guess HIPAA doesn’t exist anymore. And the people pushing vaccination louder than anyone else just give you a deer-in-the-headlights look if you ask why we should all be guinea pigs, which is what we are if the nurse with the syringe in his hand has to tell you that you're getting a dose under an emergency use authorization.”

“I understand your cynicism, Anthony. You sound like Danny trying to sell me on a prosecution despite problems with chain of custody in the evidence room. But if you have this conversation with your pastor and he says, ‘I still think protecting you from me is my duty,’ then what?” 

“Like my pastor's gonna listen to an old detective when there's epidemiologists who can't get a word in edgewise? But maybe I start talking to Saint Jude again.”

“The patron of lost causes?”

“Bet you didn’t know he was a paisan.”

“Good night, Anthony.” 

“Good night, Erin.”

Entertainment for a pandemic?

I wrote a post about "pandemic pals" last May, but the movie list in that blog entry needs an update. 

Even with vaccination widely available now, repression continues. Small business owners remain in reluctant league with unelected public health officials and self-aggrandizing politicians to keep mask mandates and so-called "social distancing" in effect. 

(If you're distancing, you're not being social. Words mean things, as I'm fond of saying).

In any case, movies watched since last May have helped to pass the time:

• A Fall From Grace (2020)
• The Maltese Falcon (1941)
• Sully (2016)
• Fatman (2020)
• Nobody's Fool (1994)
• Finding Ohana (2021)
• Parasite (2019)
• An Ideal Husband (1999)
• Lincoln (2012)
• Apollo 13 (1995)
• Nomadland (2020)
• Risen (2016)
• White Nights (1985)
• The Terminal (2004)
• Concrete Cowboy (2021)
• Miracles from Heaven (2016)
• The Untouchables (1987)
• The Zookeeper's Wife (2017)

Scott McKay understands what Rush did

Rush Limbaugh's death at age 70 from lung cancer was announced on his radio show yesterday morning by his wife, Kathryn. 

Mark Steyn wrote what I think is the best of several very good obituaries for the talk radio pioneer, but Scott McKay does a fine job of putting Limbaugh's excellent work in context:

"He created an industry and fueled a movement that has won the modern American argument. Thanks in large measure to Rush Limbaugh, the Left doesn’t even bother trying to persuade anyone of their ideas; instead they invented cancel culture to stop the argument altogether.

They couldn’t cancel Rush, so they’re trying to cancel the rest of us.

We should honor him by continuing the fight. It will take all of us to paper over the void his passing leaves behind."

Expertise should not be soulless

It's hard to blame the world's most famous virologist for being tone-deaf to the concerns of ordinary people when he hasn't seen actual patients since completing his internship more than 40 years ago. (Some context: That was before Woodstock, and before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made the original moon landing).

I can't help but wonder, however, why Dr. Anthony Fauci is the highest-paid employee in the federal government, given his history of talking out of both sides of his mouth, bowing to Planned Parenthood, and greenlighting very questionable  investments such as gain-of-function mutation research done overseas (away from American-style quality control and potentially pesky oversight).

He's not ignorant (and not alone), but he's a political animal who pretends to neutrality, and defends his own credibility in sanctimonious fashion. He was against quarantines before he was for them. 

Like all politicians, Dr. Fauci has grown fond of the limelight. Accordingly, he cuts himself the benefit of doubt but makes no allowances for anyone who questions the narrative of choice.

He's more enthusiastic about serving the current administration than he was about being an oracle for "Operation Warp Speed" in the previous administration, and (since his new boss has no objection) he didn't waste any time appearing on Rachel Maddow's cable TV show to do bad impressions of gospel hymns like "Free at Last." 

On the few occasions when news producers don't lead broadcasts with COVID death numbers or 20-second clips of things Dr. Fauci says, they run footage from the World Health Organization instead, and that, please note, is not a step up.

What's next? That's what Neo asked. She could as well have pondered more colorfully, along the lines of "What fresh hell is this?"

UPDATE: Peter Barry Chowka had Dr. Fauci's number a year ago.

Double feature movie night

I don't typically do double features, and of course movie theaters closed down in the wake of state edicts about groups of people gathering indoors in time of pandemic. But when the best person you know is recovering from a double mastectomy that followed six months of chemotherapy, and you get to love her through the whole ordeal --well, routines change, especially when she's trying to take her mind off stitches.

Saturday night in the living room, we enjoyed two different but surprisingly compatible movies: The Doctor (from 1991) and The Life Ahead (from earlier this year). 

William Hurt and Mandy Patinkin were in the older movie, while Sophia Loren returned to the screen for the first time in many years for the more recent film (in Italian with English subtitles).

Both movies are worth watching -- or watching again, as the case may be.

In the world of episodic media, aka TV, we've enjoyed re-runs of Chip and Joanna Gaines' flagship program, Fixer Upper.

Of viruses and political ops

The indispensable Ace has this to say today: "Covid is not a medical story -- not in the American media. It hasn't been for some time. It's mostly a Political Op now, as far as media coverage. Only Republican gatherings have been portrayed in the media as spreading Covid for some time now. Apparently left-wingers are immune to the virus."

And let's not forget that co-blogger J.J. Sefton brought the heat (with an assist from Megan Fox at the link) earlier:

"Amazing how every lie, smear and accusation against Trump was front-page stop-the-presses news and allowed to flow on Twitter and Facebook freely along with calls for violence against Trump and his supporters. Yet this [new story from the New York Post about Joe Biden's corruption and his son's grift] was immediately censored because, reasons!"

I expect the Democrats and Republicans to run political ops on each other, in the old Mad Magazine "Spy vs. Spy" fashion. But now we know that vast swaths of federal law enforcement and investigative machinery have been corrupted to run political ops as well. It's equally disconcerting to realize that any line between news and opinion was erased three presidential terms ago, when the media slobbered over Barack Obama in ways that Joe "That's storybook, man!" Biden would have approved (and likely did, when he was still among the silverware, albeit not the sharpest knife in the drawer).

A fine film for Juneteenth

My sweetheart and I enjoyed Miss Virginia last night. Virginia Walden Ford is not well known outside the ambit of education reform in the District of Columbia, but she's a woman worth celebrating, and the 2019 movie about her crusade for children does a good job of that.

Unrelated to education reform but in the spirit of Juneteenth, you might also want to check out The Help, from 2011. It's a good 'un!

My Pandemic Pals

A nice gesture from the USN and the USAF over NYC

These are the people whose YouTube videos helped make social distancing and other lockdown measures --including chemotherapy precautions -- easier (albeit not easy) to take.

Knowing they're out there helps keep me going until the end of sweetie's chemotherapy and the not-a-minute-too-soon return of live music, library hours, professional haircuts, pub food served on dark wooden tables, elective surgeries, community theater, road trips, baristas who work counters rather than drive-up windows, and hot / olive / salad bars in better supermarkets:

• Matt and Savanna Shaw: The father-daughter singing team was new to me, and immediately showed itself worthy of a subscription. Two great voices in one household! Three cheers for family bands!
• Rick Beato: His "crazy musical uncle" shtick still works, even when I disagree with some of his choices (e.g., there's no way that John Lennon's pretentious "Imagine" or Sting's criminal-minded "Every Breath You Take" should be on ANY list of 'Top 20 Rock Ballads,' much less in higher positions than "Let it Be" and "She Talks to Angels")
• Mary Chapin Carpenter: Songs she sings from her kitchen introduced the rest of us to Angus, the mellow golden retriever, and White Kitty, the striking feline whom Angus keeps company with. And she still sounds as resonant as she did when making hits in the Nineties. Artistry without artifice -- gotta love it.
• Local talent Jonathan Byrd is an old hand at livestream video concerts, but where he really comes into his own is in the "Byrd Word," his thoughtful weekly email to fans.
• Billy Strings: I found this guitar wizard via Tommy Emmanuel, himself a grandmaster on that instrument, and wow! But Strings can sing, too. As one fan noted, "He's like a cross between Roy Rogers and Stevie Ray Vaughan." 
• The winsome  "MonaLisa Twins" have covered both Pink Floyd and David Bowie to very good effect.

I would be remiss if I didn't also note a few filmmakers, because I enjoyed the following movies on a little screen:

• The Searchers
• Bohemian Rhapsody
• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
• Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
• Dan in Real Life
• The Mission
• Open Range
• The Blues Brothers
• The Mask of Zorro
• Soul Surfer
• Hell or High Water
• The Help

Straw men selling false choices

The original essays to which Barry Brownstein links from social media platforms such as LinkedIn usually bring more light than heat to issues of the day. He's a professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore, and he sounds like an uncle you'd take advice from. But in a March 24 essay at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), Brownstein tries to make a case for "Why We Should Love China, Not Fear It" -- and therein lies my problem: A straw man in a headline never travels alone, and Brownstein's plea for Sinophilia is thick with them.

Brownstein mounts an anti-Trump horse and goes to the whip hand right out of the gate, planting the idea that tariffs imposed on Chinese imports  are monstrously ill-advised. "FEE readers," he writes, "understand well the destructive effects of Trump's tariffs." 

It's an interesting way to start an essay that is not about tariffs, and it only makes sense if you see those economic tools as symptoms of a pathology that the president suffers from. One hopes readers on the FEE website also understand that tariffs have time limits. Consider the new trade agreement between the U.S and China that was announced in January: Other observers have concluded that it is "delivering despite coronavirus." That was the gist of a Fox Business story published the same week that Brownstein decried Donald Trump's allegedly "narcissistic" vision for America.

Straw men love adjectives in the same way that snipers love high ground. Busy reminiscing about the time he saw Trump's Tariffs open for Pandemic Overreaction, Brownstein skates right past the fact that "narcissistic vision" never signed a major label recording contract. Unlike Hillary Rodham Clinton, his opponent in their battle of the bands, the "Make America Great Again" artist whom more than 62 million Americans voted for in 2016 was all about patriotic vision.

The current U.S.-China deal was made possible partly by tariffs, and -- according to MarketWatch -- it could "move the world closer to free trade and ultimately save the World Trade Organization." Increased exports and stronger protection for intellectual property are  good things, right?

The big picture would have been easier for Brownstein to see if he hadn't been enchanted by the work of a Harvard professor known for identifying sixteen different cases "in which an ascending power (like China) challenged an established power (like the United States)." In 12 of those 16 cases, challenger and champion made war on each other.

Clutching the memory of conflict between Athens and Sparta to his chest like a model of covid-19 influence that's too scarily impressive to revise in light of actual experience, Brownstein turns from straw men he's already used (tariffs as horrible weapons, America-first trade policy as narcissistic) to introduce yet another straw man, Mr. Specious Analogy: "Suppose Mississippi became a wealthy state," he wonders-- Would that gladden your heart, or would you "worry that Mississippians gained their wealth by ripping you off"? (Subtext: Are you a kind person or a xenophobe?)

China is not Mississippi, Brownstein admits, but he is at pains to remind us that "the tide of war will stay offshore when we add love to thick economic interdependence." We do that for people with whom we share a national identity, but we ought also to do it for people from other nations, he says.

As one reader noted in comments for his essay, Brownstein's notion of love between countries seems flexible enough to include capitulation. Moreover, he doesn't allow for the possibility that you can love China while simultaneously working to check the pernicious influence of its Communist leadership at every turn (or, indeed, love China precisely by doing that if you have the power to do so, and sometimes even if you don't -- as witness the Wuhan residents saying that coronavirus figures released by their government don't add up).

Brownstein echoes National Public Radio in suggesting that Donald Trump has a zero-sum view of the world where America cannot win unless China loses. He wants the rest of us to believe that Donald Trump is a hateful narcissist treating trade policy like a zero-sum game. Have we reached the point where calling for an end to illegal trade practices is considered warlike activity when performed by Republicans from Queens? Brownstein seems to think so, but based on what we've seen throughout his presidency so far, it's more accurate to think of Donald Trump as a shrewd patriot using every peaceful means at his disposal to broker win-win agreements internationally. 

Let me propose that to the extent that it exists, zero-sum thinking comes from Chinese communist leaders who used the covid-19 crisis they abetted to bulldoze temples and churches. When they appeal to national memory or world opinion, it's with a view toward retaining their own grip on power, rather than out of nostalgia for China as the fabled  "Middle Kingdom." [Sebastian Gorka is another commentator with a few things to say on this subject].

Another straw man deserving of a brotherly backhand is the idea that a worrisome number of Americans up to and including the president operate from an assumption of "national supremacy." 

Look: Ray Charles' version of "America the Beautiful" still brings tears to my eyes, but supremacy and self-sufficiency are two different things. If you can't be patriotic without flirting with national socialism or prudent without being dismissed as hopelessly parochial, then Brownstein must also be disappointed with Brazilians (Headline on an April 8 story about developments in their country: "Brazil Turns to Local Industry to Build Ventilators as China Orders Fall Through").

Faulty premises undergirding a misguided plea for tolerance  affection would not warrant rebuttal if they were uncommon, but Professor Brownstein's willingness to speculate about motive, cherry-pick examples, and give Premier Li Jingping more latitude than President Donald Trump are in line with prevailing bias in the mass media, and it's not a good look.

[UPDATE: an early version of this essay was also published by American Greatness on May  5]

Ignoring reality for fun and profit?

Although LinkedIn is a social networking site focused on professional networking and career development, it has over the course of the last five years become almost as politicized as Facebook and Twitter, with news stories used as cudgels in support of progressive or conservative agendas.

I know, for example, of an advertising copywriter whose "award-winning" B2B (business-to-business) content seems to spend most of its time hiding behind anti-Trump diatribes that a handful of other LinkedIn users applaud as enthusiastically as trained seals. This copywriter shall remain nameless here, but -- like MSNBC host Rachel Maddow -- he's angry at the frequent White House Press Briefings in our covid-19 world because (he says) they give President Trump too sturdy and high-profile a platform from which to stoke "false hope" and launch a continuing volley of "lies."

Anyone not suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome might be forgiven for wanting examples of that execrable behavior, and Brave Sir Robin (not his name) does not disappoint. Unfortunately, however, his examples don't make the damning case that he wishes they did, likely because they come from too often from CNN or MSNBC.

Case in point: About a week ago, this LinkedIn denizen claimed it was deceptive for the president to say he was dispatching a U.S. Navy hospital ship to New York City. According to this armchair quarterback, the Navy's hospital ships "are being retrofitted and don't even have crews."

It didn't matter to him that New York's Democrat governor had echoed the president's words, because he said his skepticism was based on unspecified reporting by "The AP, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times."

Following President Trump's lead, Governor Andrew Cuomo had recently said that a hospital ship would be in New York Harbor by mid-April. The good news at the end of March is that it's already there.

The USNS Mercy arrived in Los Angeles on March 27, and the USNS Comfort arrived in New York City on March 30. In case it matters, I didn't get either of those facts from Fox News.

Let's hope for the sake of whatever positive reputation national news outlets still have that their reporting was filtered clumsily through worst-case scenarios in some consumers' heads, because even less-than-heroic reporting since the screed that inspired these thoughts vindicates the president.

Ever faithful to mendacious narratives of Trumpian incompetence that it helps create, the New York Times now observes that the converted supertanker its reporters can presumably see is "not made to contain the coronavirus."

Oof. This rhetorical sleight-of-hand downplays the important fact that the mission of both hospital ships was never described that way by the president or his pandemic response team. The ships are in port to support medical facilities in the major metropolitan areas close to where they're anchored. They are, in other words, strategic assets, rapidly and intelligently deployed by a president who habitually acts more decisively than his capricious and tone-deaf critics or Machiavellian enemies would prefer.

This is not to say that the president is always right. As Daniel Flynn of American Spectator mused, "Who else did not vote for $5 trillion deficits, a Monopoly-money debasement of the currency, and government spending exceeding anything in Barack Obama's wildest dreams when they cast ballots for Donald Trump?"

But if the hospital ships didn't even have crews a week ago (a self-evidently doubtful assertion, given where the vessels are now and how they got there), then Trump's critics (Brave Sir Robin among them) are tacitly admitting that he was either telling the truth or motivating the U.S. Navy to perform logistical miracles. One might even embrace the healing power of "and" here. Either outcome seems good to me.

Given the way it tears heedlessly at our national fabric by sounding alarms about the orange man's wolf du jour on the flimsiest of pretexts, Trump Derangement Syndrome is every bit as problematic as the Wuhan coronavirus. On the other hand, there may be an upside to any mental condition robust enough to drive even the most graspingly ambitious Democrats from fixating on entirely farcical charges of collusion, obstruction, and impeachment to paying at least lip service to prayer.

Hope for Netflix yet

"Anne with an E" is good TV, with top-drawer acting, writing, and cinematography.

Among other things, the show reminds me of "Little House on the Prairie," except that it has more verisimilitude than that show did.

I like the Canadian setting, because (as in the original Anne of Green Gables books), following late nineteenth-century lives on Prince Edward Island evokes for me the song "St. Anne's Reel," which I first heard played by a now-retired concert violinist named Charlann Gastineau, very likely at the Topanga Banjo and Fiddle Contest in an early-Nineties gig with Phil Salazar when he helmed The Acousticats.

Years later I realized that the tune had also been covered by John Denver.

FWIW, nearby Cape Breton Island also has a strong fiddle tradition.

A solid movie year

In no particular order, 2019 gave us:

• Yesterday
• Ford v. Ferrari
• The Peanut Butter Falcon
• Rocketman
• Richard Jewell
• Harriet
• Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice
• Unplanned
• Knives Out

In my blog, that's a movie year to be thankful for.

If I were giving out the Academy Awards, I'd tap Paul Walter Hauser (Richard Jewell) for Best Actor, and Cynthia Erivo (Harriet) for Best Actress. As for Best Picture, I'm thinking either Ford v. Ferrari or The Peanut Butter Falcon, even though both films have no shot at that award among the glitterati who do the actual voting about such things.

I'm also sympathetic to the idea that when you get right down to it, art should not be competitive, because it is not sport. If you think that one through, I suppose it means that art can ultimately be "good" or "bad," but not "best". Lists are made for convenience, but it's silly to compare Casablanca (for example) with The Searchers -- both films sit firmly in the "good" column.

Creative writing

Movie critic Anthony Lane manages to link Elton John with Godzilla:

"In many respects, Godzilla is hard to distinguish from Elton John. Terrible temper? Check. Professional longevity? Check. Tireless vocal vigor? Check. They even share a fondness for baseball parks as suitable arenas for their skills; “Rocketman” re-creates Elton’s triumphant appearance at Dodger Stadium, in 1975, while “Godzilla: King of the Monsters,” a new addition to the franchise, shows the title character slugging a rival predator at Fenway Park. For years, it’s true, the singer has beaten the beast in the costume stakes, since Godzilla prefers to function au naturel, with his dark-green skin, all wrinkled and ridged, lending him the look of a furious avocado. For the latest film, however, he grows more fashion-conscious, arranging for his dorsal plates to flash bright blue whenever he’s totally stoked. Once Elton John sees this movie, he will have to get himself a set of those."

That new business model

They used to call tabloid newspapers like the one in the Raleigh metropolitan area "alternative weeklies." I'm not sure what they call them now, but I do have some thoughts about the new business model being touted by the progressive tabloid in my backyard.

Small but worthwhile movies

Stumbled across some good movies lately. The list order here is subjective, approximately in order of their cinematic quality, but every film is worth watching, and each tackles larger issues than you might expect, with a certain grace.

The Straight Story (1999)  -- On family and simple wisdom
The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015) -- Triumph over adversity in a culture not your own
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018) -- How one person affects others
The Soloist (2009) -- The limits of genius
Io (2019) -- On duty and what it means
Minding the Gap (2018, documentary) -- On growing into young manhood today
Paddleton (2019) -- On friendship
Priceless (2016) -- Human trafficking as an all-too-common affront to dignity
Juanita (2019) -- The value of a shift in location and perspective

Ascribing too much to Rush

On the one hand, "God writes straight with crooked lines". On the other hand, leftists like to "retrofit history to their own ideology, rather than learning from history," as my friend Bookworm has observed.

I noticed a progressive crediting Rush Limbaugh with making Americans believe in God. Rush is a talented and hard-working, indeed pioneering, talk show host, but that seemed to me to be an example of progressive wish-casting, so I took issue with it (and related anti-Trumpian illogic) in fresh pixels at American Spectator Online.

Why the sorry state of debate?

Some original answers to the question in the post title are now posted at American Spectator Online.