Filed under: Uncategorized
Note: This originally appeared on @TAC on June 30th, 2008.
Over the past weekend I had the pleasure of seeing Disney-Pixar’s new animated movie “WALL-E.” Set in the apocalyptic-lite 28th century, WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) is a small robot left behind on an abandoned planet Earth, which you discover through a set of video clips has been evacuated due to heavy pollution, brought on by mass consumerism and exploitative big business. His chance encounter with EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) is the catalyst for a surprisingly poignant love story that becomes the center of the movie’s plot. Without delving too much into my own personal opinions on the film–this post is not meant to be a review–I thought it was visually stunning, powerful, and deeply touching, and by my estimation the first Disney movie that is more meaningful and enjoyable for adults than for children.
The film has been received warmly by an overwhelming majority of critics, but some on the right are upset about some of the movie’s themes. Greg Pollowitz at the NRO blog “Planet Gore” writes:
I saw WALL-E with my five year old on Saturday night. It was like a 90-minute lecture on the dangers of over consumption, big corporations, and the destruction of the environment. All this from mega-company Disney, who wants us to buy WALL-E kitsch for our kids that are manufactured in China at environment-destroying factories and packed in plastic that will take hundreds of year to biodegrade in our landfills.
Much to Disney’s chagrin, I will do my part to avoid future environmental armageddon by boycotting any and all WALL-E merchandise and I hope others join my crusade.
These sentiments have been echoed by Shannen Coffin on The Corner, claiming the movie is a “Godforsaken dreck” and was upset about being “bombarded with leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind.” Indeed, a point that Coffin makes that is echoed by outraged film critic Kyle Smith is that, when the audience is introduced to the fat, dumb, technologically-enslaved humans, Pixar is insulting their target audience:
Wall-E…supposes that the human race of the future will become a flabby mass of peabrained idiots who are literally too fat to walk. Instead they zip around in flying wheelchairs surfing the Web, chatting on phone lines and stuffing their faces with food meant to be sucked down like milkshakes while unquestioningly taking orders from the master corporation that controls all aspects of their existence. I’m trying to think of a major Disney cartoon feature that was anywhere near as dark or cynical as this. I’m coming up blank. I’m also not sure I’ve ever seen a major corporation spend so much money to issue an insult to its customers.
The real tragedy of these callous conservative critics (say that three times fast) is that they are missing the real lessons of the movie, ones I found immediately attractive to a traditional conservative. In the film, it becomes clear that mass consumerism is not just the product of big business, but of big business wedded with big government. In fact, the two are indistinguishable in WALL-E’s future. The government unilaterally provided it’s citizens with everything they needed, and this lack of variety led to Earth’s downfall.
Another lesson missed is portrayed perfectly in Coffin’s claim that WALL-E points out the “evils of mankind.” The only evils of mankind portrayed are those that come about from losing touch with our own humanity. Staples of small-town conservative life such as the small farm, the “nuclear family,” and old-fashioned and wholesome entertainment like “Hello, Dolly” are looked upon by the suddenly awakened humans as beautiful and desirable. By steering conservative families away from WALL-E, these commentators are doing their readers a great disservice.
Filed under: War
Most emotional and difficult to watch at 19:15 during Part 2:
BILL MOYERS: You say, and this is another one of my highlighted sentences, that “Anyone with a conscience sending soldiers back to Iraq or Afghanistan for multiple combat tours, while the rest of the country chills out, can hardly be seen as an acceptable arrangement. It is unfair. Unjust. And morally corrosive.” And, yet, that’s what we’re doing.
ANDREW BACEVICH: Absolutely. And I think – I don’t want to talk about my son here.
BILL MOYERS: Your son?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: You dedicate the book to your son.
ANDREW BACEVICH: Yeah. Well, my son was killed in Iraq. And I don’t want to talk about that, because it’s very personal. But it has long stuck in my craw, this posturing of supporting the troops. I don’t want to insult people.
There are many people who say they support the troops, and they really mean it. But when it comes, really, down to understanding what does it mean to support the troops? It needs to mean more than putting a sticker on the back of your car.
I don’t think we actually support the troops. We the people. What we the people do is we contract out the business of national security to approximately 0.5 percent of the population. About a million and a half people that are on active duty.
And then we really turn away. We don’t want to look when they go back for two or three or four or five combat tours. That’s not supporting the troops. That’s an abdication of civic responsibility. And I do think it – there’s something fundamentally immoral about that.
Again, as I tried to say, I think the global war on terror, as a framework of thinking about policy, is deeply defective. But if one believes in the global war on terror, then why isn’t the country actually supporting it? In a meaningful substantive sense?
Where is the country?
If the modern American cityscape is an affront to the mind and the senses–and by my estimation, it is–Washington, DC is the ugliest city in the country. It embodies everything wrong with the modern city, and nothing of the sparse positives that exist in small city neighborhoods. Outside of government buildings and monuments, its architectural style is unsightly and unimaginative. And its monuments, with few exceptions, are products of political maneuverings and secretive Masonic subversion. The will and desire of the people is almost always absent in their designs.
In discussing this with a friend last night, he came to the conclusion that Washington was indeed ugly, but that “it was one of the few working cities in the country.” I could not disagree more. It has a transit system that, with the exception of the Metro, is horribly impractical and expensive. During the short 15 minute walk from my apartment to the National Mall, one passes countless examples of government nonsense. Building after building with titles like “The Office of Personnel Management” drive home the government’s own self-masturbatory nature. It is an accentless, personless, communityless city consisting of descriptionless glass buildings and the colorless, column-adourned walls of government monstrosities that house a systematic mess and misdirection piquing the grand quotes that wreathe them.
But Washington doesn’t just have the appearance of ugliness. Every summer, the soulless city is filled yet again with wide-eyed interns, traveling from every corner of the country, their young moist tongues eager to lick Feinstein office envelopes for three months. In their heart is the hope that one day they can be allowed to prepare Feinstein’s coffee, then maybe write her press briefs, maybe organize phone-banks in the unlikely event she faces a competitive election campaign, and having acquired this on-site training, maybe return home and recycle Washington’s tried-and-true folly in their own political careers.
This is not London or Paris; beautiful cities that bloomed first into community-centers for their respected nations and then into power-centers. Washington was built as a power-center. Our only hope is that middle-American communities keep sending their men and women to DC–families and values and traditions and career experiences in tow–to check the ambitions of Washington and her adopted children.
By my estimation, having spent the last three years with aspiring bureaucrats, Washington isn’t getting any prettier anytime soon.
Tonight I read two fantastic pieces on TakiMag that are worth sharing.
First was a piece recently posted by Jeffrey Hart, who is somehow still affiliated with National Review, despite his having long since left the increasingly irrelevant magazine behind to publish for Taki and TAC. He discusses Solzhenitsyn’s works, and the entire piece is worth reading (although in my estimation he is wrong about Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard address, an address I consider to be brilliant and brave). What struck me was his story about the Soviet Gulag visit by Vice President Henry Wallace and his encounter with a Russian doctor imprisoned there named Elinor Lipper. Here’s the story:
“During the war, a rumor swept Elinor’s camp that the president of the United States was coming. Everything was scrubbed, the watch towers were even taken down. Kolyma now became a vast Potemkin village. But it wasn’t the President who came. It was the vice president Henry A. Wallace. The inmates were gathered together to greet him. Wallace smiled and waved. He was told that this was a camp for incorrigible prisoners who were mentally ill.
“Suddenly, a woman ran from the ranks and threw herself at Wallace’s feet. She screamed in Russian how the prisoners were being treated, how they were dying, how they were innocent, as innocent as the snow at his feet. ‘Please,’ she sobbed, ‘please help us.’
“She was taken away, of course, while Wallace’s translator told him that she was mentally ill and he could not understand what she was saying… I subsequently discovered that Wallace’s translator that day had been Owen Lattimore…
“When we returned to New York in 1952 I arranged for Elinor, at her request, to meet Henry Wallace. I got his number through directory assistance, and he answered the phone himself. I was amazed that it was so easy to et hold of a former vice president of the United States. I told him about Elinor and said she wanted to meet with him. He invited us to his farm in South Salem, New York. She told him what had actually happened that day in Siberia. As she spoke his face paled. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know – please believe me – I didn’t know’.”
This story is shocking enough without the appearance of the despicable Lattimore, who was a target of the estimable and admirable Senator Joe McCarthy, but that led me to read a linked to piece by W. Wesley McDonald, a review of M. Stanton Evans’s book “Blacklisted by History.” I just started reading it myself, but the focus of McDonald’s piece is on the scathing review the book received in National Review, a magazine who’s founder penned a book himself attacking McCarthy’s enemies. McDonald writes:
For Evans, however, to find himself lambasted for his views in the pages of NR is a wholly different matter. “Having been around the block a time or two,” as the astonished Evans confessed in a letter to the editor (Dec. 31) in response to Radosh, “I guess nothing should surprise me, but I have to admit I was profoundly shocked by Ronald Radosh’s onslaught against my work—and honor—in what professed to be a review of my new book about Senator McCarthy.” If Radosh’s purpose was to do maximum damage to Evans’s reputation, he couldn’t have been given a better opportunity, given the publication’s history and standing as a premier journal of conservative opinion. In 1954 NR’s founding editor, William F. Buckley, co-authored with his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies, the first book that questioned the motives of McCarthy’s critics. Many NR contributors in the 1950s and 1960s vigorously took up McCarthy’s cause. Evans could not afford to ignore an assault emanating from a onetime implacably anti-Communist publication. “Had this Radosh invective been printed in The New Republic or the Washington Post—where it would have been more fitting—I probably wouldn’t have bothered to reply.” Evans explains, “As it appeared instead in the once-beloved pages of National Review, with which I have been connected since its inception, I can hardly let these poisonous charges against my writing, and my character, go unanswered.”
Evans is hardly an unknown figure on the Right. In addition to being a columnist, an author of many popular books, and a sought after lecturer, he has been for over 20 years the director of the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C. Given his reputation as one of the most respected and prominent spokesmen for conservative principles, he deserved the courtesy of a fair review in what is reputedly a conservative publication. The way his book was treated in its pages strongly suggests what the fortnightly editors may really think about Evans.
In one swoop National Review attacked a man who it once bravely defended (McCarthy) and published a disgraceful review attacking a man who is still widely respected across the conservative spectrum (Evans). I was unaware at the time, but it only confirms what many already know; National Review, the magazine that was a bastion of right-wing intellectualism, is dead. In its place is the dull Lowry, the brain-dead Lopez, and the self-promoting, profoundly unfunny Goldberg.
