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.
Michael Anton's astute political analysis is always worth reading. This time he writes about why "They Can't Let Him Back In." And you know very well who he is.
Anton writes:
Anti-Trump hysteria is in the final analysis not about Trump. The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are. That class—Angelo Codevilla’s “country class”—must not be allowed representation by candidates who might implement their preferences, which also, and above all, must not be allowed. The rubes have no legitimate standing to affect the outcome of any political process, because of who they are, but mostly because of what they want.
Complaints about the nature of Trump are just proxies for objections to the nature of his base. It doesn’t help stabilize our already twitchy situation that those who bleat the loudest about democracy are also audibly and visibly determined to deny a real choice to half the country. “No matter how you vote, you will not get X”—whether X is a candidate or a policy—is guaranteed to increase discontent with the present regime.
To the point that Anton makes about what might be called a country club war on Trump's base -- and Neo's related thoughts about the January 6 subcommittee's quixotic quest for something to charge Trump with legally -- think of Rodney Dangerfield's character in Caddyshack: Like Donald Trump, Dangerfield's character ("Al Czervik") has money enough for membership at the Bushwood Country Club, but other golfers consider him uncouth. Attitude-wise, Czervik, like Trump, has more in common with Bill Murray's gopher-hunting groundskeepr than with the other people in his social class.
I'm tickled by that fact that Anton uses a nautical analogy near the end of his essay. I had a similar thought (seawater on the brain?) for this recent piece published by The Locke Institute's Carolina Journal, except that I was looking at progressive reaction to Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, rather than political machinery prepping for the 2024 presidential election.
Mothers' Day on the American civic calendar coincides with Good Shephered Sunday on the American Catholic calendar this spring, and Maureen Mullarkey has thought a lot about the consecration of Russia that was performed earlier this year by Pope Francis. She's cynical but brings receipts, as they say:
Part One: (a snippet): "However grievous Putin’s sins, his regard for the Orthodoxy into which he was secretly baptized in infancy appears more convincing—to those who chance to look—than Joe Biden’s rosary rattling. Does this excuse Putin’s tactics in Ukraine? No, not at all. But it ought not be lost on us that the tactics we now condemn—aerial bombardment of civilian centers; no distinction between combatants and noncombatants—are the very ones used by the Allies in World War II."
Part Two: (a snippet): "Nations exist to protect their own interests. The moral quality of those interests, and the means to advance them, is hard to determine in a world anxious to scuttle Judeo-Christian reasoning. Instead we suffer the presumptions of unaccountable bureaucrats. A self-selected power network, they position themselves outside the constitutional constraints of the existing world order. Pope Francis embraces their enthusiasms. Our Lady of the Great Reset, ora pro nobis."
Meanwhile, Victor Davis Hanson confines his gaze to domestic goings-on, but he has no patience for unaccountable bureaucrats, either:
"...what is behind leaking Supreme Court drafts of impending opinions, or seeking to pack the Supreme Court with 15 justices, or ending the Senate filibuster, or adding two more states to the 60-year-old, 50-state union, or curtailing states’ rights to set their own balloting procedures, or trashing the Constitution’s Electoral College?
The hard Left has detoured from the mainstream of American voters onto a radical trajectory. So it will never find 51 percent public approval for any of its current extremist and crackpot initiatives. Instead, it sees success only through altering the rules of governance or changing the demography of the electorate—or both."
If you think that Hanson's worry about what he calls a "radical trajectory" is misplaced, then you haven't wrapped your head around such Orwellian developments as the new Disinformation Governance Board, the federal penchant for retaliating against disfavored groups, or the complicit silence from the Biden administration about protests at the homes of U.S. Supreme Court justices and the unprecedented leak of a draft opinion that triggered those protests.
Misguided reaction to that leak forced prudent Catholic parishes to pay special attention to security this past weekend, not because the legal reasoning in Justice Samuel Alito's draft is unsound, but because -- as John C. Wright and others (like Bookworm!) have noted -- it makes sense enough to strike idealogues as threatening. There's a good summary of the draft at Bookworm's blog.
Not be be combative, but anyone woke enough to cheer for the Next Big Thing has been miseducated or manipulated. In a few cases, they're manipulators themselves. Journalism and politics attract more than their share of such people -- they're activists under color of authority. But we now know, thanks to the COVID pandemic, that public health has big problems, too.
Fortunately, hope springs eternal, as singer/songwriter Mark Humphreys also reminded us years ago:
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.
Gerard Vanderleun's old poem for his then 16-year-old daughter Justine on her birthday is a thing of beauty.
If you don't read any of the investigative books now about about the mendacious Dr. Anthony Fauci, all you really need to know is that his signature moves are talking out of both sides of his mouth and moving the goalposts.
It's good to see Maureen Mullarkey wondering what hiding our faces says (or might say) about the condition of our souls.
From the 2016 memoir The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, by Andrew Klavan:
The fact was, as a story -- even leaving out the supernatural, especially leaving out the supernatural, taking it all as metaphor, I mean -- the Bible made perfect sense to me from the very beginning.
I saw a God whose nature was creative love. He made man in his own image for the purpose of forming new and free relationships with him. But in his freedom, man turned away from that relationship to consult his own wisdom and desires. The knowledge of good and evil was not some top-secret catalog of nice and naughty acts that popped into Eve's mind when a talking snake got her to eat the magic fruit. The knowledge was built into the action of disobedience itself: it's what she learned when she overruled the moral law God had placed within her. There was no going back from that. The original sin poisoned all history. History's murders, rapes, wars, oppressions, and injustices are not the inescapable plot of the story we're in.
The Old Testament traces one complete cycle of that history; one people's rise and fall. This particular people is unique only in that they're the ones who begin to remember what man was made for. Moses' revelation at the burning bush is as profound as any religious scene in literature. There, he sees that the eternal creation and destruction of nature is not a mere process but the mask of a personal spirit, I AM THAT I AM. The centuries that follow that revelation are a spiraling semicircle of sin and shame and redemption, of freedom recovered and then surrendered in return for imperial greatness, of a striving for righteousness through law that reveals only the impossibility of righteousness, of power and pride and fall. It's every people's history, in other words, but seen anew in the light of the fire of I AM.
It made sense to me too -- natural sense, not supernatural -- that after that history was complete, a man might be born who could comprehend it wholly and re-create within himself the relationship at its source. His mind would contain both man and God. It made sense that the creatures of sin and history -- not the Jews alone but all of us -- would conspire in such a man's judicial murder. Jesus had to die because we had to kill him. It was either that or see ourselves by his light, as the broken things we truly are. It's only from God's point of view that this is a redeeming sacrifice. By living on earth in Jesus, by entering history, by experiencing death, by passing through that moment of absolute blackness when God is forsaken by God, God reunites himself with his fallen creation and reopens the path to the relationship lost in Eden. Jesus' resurrection is the final proof that no matter how often we kill the truth of who we're meant to be, it never dies.
[That summary right there is worth the price of the book, I think].
But there's more:
For years, maybe most of my life, I had languished in that typical young intellectual's delusion that gloom and despair are the romantic lot of the brilliant and the wise. But now I saw: it wasn't so. Why should it be? What sort of wisdom has no joy in it? What good is wisdom without joy? By joy I don't mean ceaseless happiness, of course. I don't mean willed stupidity for the sake of a cheap smile. The world is sad and it is suffering. A tragic sense is essential to both realism and compassion. By joy I mean a vital love of life in both sorrow and gladness. Why not? The hungry can't eat your tears. The poor can't spend them. They're no comfort to the afflicted and they don't bring the wicked to justice. Everything useful that can be done in the world can be done in joy.
Klavan's insight summoned a song for me.
The "Nazareth" that Robbie Robertson of The Band was writing about pulling into "half past dead" was Nazareth, Pennsylvania, home of the Martin Guitar company. But we all know which Nazarene put the original town in Judea on the proverbial map. And I don't think it coincidental that the refrain of "The Weight" is deliberately redemptive: "Take a load off, Annie" [or Fannie, if you sing it that way]. Take a load for free!
If you take a load off, what are you supposed to do with it? Jesus is the man who stepped up to say "You put the load right on me!" Moreover, he volunteered for that.
The best kind of Christian music is stealthy Christian music. Ol' Luke ain't the only one "waitin' on Judgement Day." [Remember the stream of pilgrims going "down to the river to pray" in O Brother Where Art Thou, or Jake and Elwood Blues putting the band back together because they were "on a mission from God"? Remember the question about "Will the Circle be Unbroken" by and by, or Rick Beato pointing out that U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" has gospel music phrasing in it?].
It's not too much of a hop from "The Weight" to C.S. Lewis and what he wrote about "The Weight of Glory." Think of the same theme in two different keys. But as the Klavan excerpt (and the harmony between Levon Helm and Mavis Staples in their live recording) makes clear, the Chronicles of Narnia author wasn't the only one "surprised by joy."
While I'm on a roll, let me drag J.R.R. Tolkien up to the bar so he can help me make the argument from Middle Earth that Frodo and Sam and the other hobbits were invited into the Fellowship of the Ring not merely for their humility, but also because the most obvious characteristic of hobbitry (hobbitdom?) is joy (in contrast to the fragile valor of the humans, the cultivated detachment of the elves, the pugnaciousness of the dwarves, and the wisdom of wizards).
The Fellowship needed joy, which I think is why Tolkien inserted two "spare" hobbits into it for a total of four, and no more than two representatives of any other free race among the nine heroes. As Saint Paul had before them, Tolkien and Lewis saw joy as a hallmark of the Christian life.
It's inspiring to see a contemporary thriller writer like Andrew Klavan wrestle his way into the same insight, and then surrender to it.
