"What worries me most is winding up a vegetable — any vegetable..."

"... and that includes corn, which under happier circumstances I rather like."

Warning: The linked funny essay is in the NYT and by Woody Allen — cue all the usual attacks — and he sums up with punchline that ends with the words "probably better than being a Republican."

How the Democratic Convention should retaliate against the GOP's Clint Eastwood "empty chair" routine.

Get your own great American movie director who supports your side and knows how to be funny in a 1-man empty chair routine.

Bring on Woody Allen to do a political version of his hilarious courtroom scene in "Bananas":



IN THE COMMENTS: creeley23 said...

My bet is that they'll go to Tom Hanks or George Clooney or maybe double-team them.

The bit will be smooth and rehearsed, it will affect an insouciant air (like our trolls), and it will attempt to ridicule Clint Eastwood's performance, but it won't have his edge.

I bet you're exactly right! My suggestion was a joke. Obviously, you can't have Woody Allen when you've got your war-on-women theme. (Even though they will have Bill Clinton.) But I do think they will have some kind of a response — if only in the form of numerous references to Clint Eastwood (e.g., regular speakers with little asides about how they just saw Clint Eastwood talking to a chair, somebody else talking to a chair, Clint Eastwood talking to some other inanimate object, Clint Eastwood talking to some other person, possibly Mitt Romney, who is less animate than an inanimate object like a chair).

How's your optimismalso? (Is that like machismo?)

So I got distracted reading Charles Lane's book review in the Washington Post of Brian Z. Tamanaha's "Failing Law Schools." It begins like this:

In “Broadway Danny Rose,” Woody Allen plays a theatrical agent forever looking on the bright side of his clients’ sorry careers. Don’t worry, he tells a washed-up lounge singer, “you’re the kinda guy that will always make a beautiful dollar in this business.”

For the past generation or so, Danny Rose’s optimismalso applied to anyone with a law degree. Lawyering might be disappointingly tedious, but at least it was remunerative enough to justify investing thousands of dollars in tuition....

Optimismalso? Presumably, that's pronounced op-TEASE-mall-so op-ti-MEESE-mal-so. How's you optimismalso as you approach the fall semester?

Optimismalso, n.

Etymology: <classical Latin optimus best  + -ismo -ism suffix.

The quality of being showily optimistic; pollyannaishness; strutting over-confidence.

The lawyer's optimismalso entertained the jurors, who proceeded to convict his obviously guilty client.

The admissions committee laughed at the unnecessary optimismalso in the personal statement from the applicant with LSAT score 2 points above the target median.

At 1L orientation, the new students worried about the dean's display of optimismalso.

The opposite of optimismalso is peptobismolso.

"RAT is an anagram of ART. Do you think that inspired them, perhaps subconsciously?"

Asks Dr Weevil.

"A weevil is any beetle from the Curculionoidea superfamily. They are usually small, less than 6 millimetres... and herbivorous." Sounds delicious!

Dr Weevil. A nice portmanteau pseudonym. Combines Dr. Evil with our theme-of-the-day: pests.

Let's listen to Tex Ritter and Mantan Moreland:



10 things I judge to be interesting:

1. The term "portmanteau" originated in "Through the Looking-Glass," as Humpty Dumpty explains "Jabberwocky," within which, for example, "slithy" combines "lithe and slimy" and "mimsy" combines "flimsy and miserable." "You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word." (The word "portmanteau" already meant suitcase.)

2. "Portmanteau" comes from French — combining words for "carry" and "coat" — but the French don't say "portmanteau" to refer to "suitcase words." They say mot-valise — which they came up with by making a literal translation of the English term "suitcase word." That makes "portmanteau" something that's called a "false friend" (a term I did not know).

3. Tex Ritter's real name was Woodward Maurice Ritter. You'd think if he needed a nickname, Woody would have popped up. Think of all the Woodys that that had to stretch to get to "Woody." Woody Allen, for example, was named Allan Stewart Konigsberg. I can't discern how he got to Woody from his Wikipedia entry, which says: "It the age of 17, he legally changed his name to Heywood Allen." That sounds like he was setting up a knock-knock joke: "Heywood who?"

4. Now Woody Guthrie got to Woody quite directly. He was named Woodrow Wilson Guthrie. Born in 1912. You might say: Woodrow Wilson! Woodrow Wilson didn't even become President of the United States until 1913. Yes, but he was Governor of New Jersey. No matter that Woody Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma. It would be like somebody today living in some state that's not New Jersey naming their new baby Chris Christie Smith or Chris Christie Jones or whatever.

5. Back to Mantan Moreland, the other guy in the Tex Ritter "Boll Weevil" video. Looking at his Wikipedia page, I see he was in a surprising number of movies, including many movies I'd never heard of like "Freckles Comes Home" (1942) and "King of the Zombies" (1941). "He is perhaps best known for his role as chauffeur Birmingham Brown in Monogram's Charlie Chan series. (The lyrics of The Coasters' 1963 song 'Bad Detective' are sung from the first-person perspective of Birmingham Brown, Mantan Moreland's character in the Charlie Chan movie series.)" There's some very heavy racial context here. Spike Lee's movie "Bamboozled" appropriates some things about Moreland. And the Beastie Boys sampled something of his about mashed potatoes, and you can listen to the original (NSFW) here.

6. Moreland "was briefly considered as a possible addition to the Three Stooges when Shemp Howard died in 1955." And he was in the 1957 Broadway stage production of "Waiting For Godot." He played Estragon, the role played by Bert Lahr in the original production of the play.



7. In the "Waiting for Godot" with Moreland, Geoffrey Holder played the character Lucky.



8. You may remember Geoffrey Holder from 1970s-era 7-Up commercials.

9. The New York Dolls recorded "Bad Detective" — replete with the opening notes that you may well recognize as the music that was always used in the past to signify: This is Chinese.

10. Mantan Moreland was known for his "Incomplete Sentences" comic routines. They went like this (from some Charlie Chan movies):

St. Patrick's Old Cathedral gets 4-and-a-half stars on Yelp.

"How can you not give a Church 5-stars - maybe it's just the Catholic guilt in me but if you go to Church, even if only once a year, you should give it 5-stars :-)"

I never noticed Yelp had ratings on churches. Fascinating. I was Googling St. Patrick's Old Cathedral — which is in Little Italy in New York, prompting one Yelpist to say "it's funny when the patron saint of another country is in the wrong ethnic neighborhood." She gives 4-and-a-half stars, and perhaps that half-star deduction is for ethnicity mismatching.

I was Googling on the occasion of Alec Baldwin's wedding, which the Daily Mail has celebrated with an array of photographs of quite a few remarkably unattractive celebrities. Remember when "Baldwin" was slang — in that movie "Clueless" — for a really cute guy: "Okay, okay, so he is kind of a Baldwin." This is no longer apt.

A comment at the Daily Mail: "A bizarre looking lot. And why do churches allow themselves to be used as mere props for nincompoops who only regard them as a backdrop?"

I was Googling to try to get a closer look at the painting above the altar depicting Jesus floating above an open tomb. Ah, here's the lovely website for the cathedral. Here's a recent NYT article about it, noting that the area isn't so much "Little Italy" anymore:

"In recent years, the area has been transformed by the arrival of fancy boutiques, specialty shops, multi-million-dollar apartments and, from [the] perspective [of  Msgr. Donald Sakano], a new generation of souls.

“Now we are surrounded by young people,” Monsignor Sakano said. “It’s a young, vibrant, trendy area.”

Hipster souls... and flaccid celebrity souls... including Woody Allen's soul and Robert Kennedy Jr.'s soul. Souls galore. Just waiting for salvation.

Is "flaccid" the right word or does it make you think only of genitalia? The OED definition is: "Wanting in stiffness, hanging or lying loose or in wrinkles; limber, limp; flabby." That — and the following examples — makes me it is the right word:

1620   T. Venner Via Recta v. 87   The one it maketh flaccide, and the other subiect to putrefaction.
1660   R. Boyle New Exper. Physico-mechanicall iv. 46   The sides of the Bladder grew flaccid.
1705   F. Fuller Medicina Gymnastica 37   Yet are the Muscles not Flaccid, but Tense and Firm.
1751   Johnson Rambler No. 117. ⁋8   The flaccid sides of a football.
1848   Thackeray Bk. Snobs in Wks. IX. 385   His double chin over his flaccid whitey-brown shirt collar.
1848   Thackeray Vanity Fair lxi. 554   The flaccid children within.
1879   J. A. Froude Cæsar xv. 234   His hair moist, his eyes heavy, his cheeks flaccid.

My favorite phrase there is "flaccid whitey-brown shirt collar." If only I could write more like Thackeray! There were some flaccid whitey-brown folks at the Baldwin wedding.

But the OED says "flaccid" is "Chiefly of flesh and similar structures: rarely of a person." Rarely. It was a rare occasion. A wedding. A wedding attended by many conspicuously divorced persons... including the groom... a bloated 54-year-old man, a Baldwin, marrying a 28-year-old woman named Hilaria.

In ancient Rome, Hilaria were "festivals celebrated on the vernal equinox to honor Cybele." It's a plural noun, really. Not that many names for individuals are plural, but a young woman may have many dimensions. In marrying a man, however, she is one of the two who become one.

Therefore now they are not two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.

"Happy father's day - or as they call it in my family, happy brother-in-law's day."

A tweet, from Woody Allen's son Ronan Farrow.

The message was then retweeted by Allen's ex-wife Mia Farrow, who added the word: 'Boom'

Fathers should not marry their daughters. That's clear. But should moms retweet?

What do Bob Dylan, Toni Morrison, John Glenn, and Madeleine Albright have in common?

Obama is giving them all a medal — the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Speaking for freedom, Bob's got an old song called "I Shall Be Free." It says:

Well, my telephone rang it would not stop
It’s President Kennedy callin’ me up
He said, “My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?”
I said, “My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot
Anita Ekberg
Sophia Loren”
(Put ’em all in the same room with Ernest Borgnine!)

It's not a slow jam, but like that Obama's slow jam the other day, it got that idea that sexual stimulation is what the country needs. (Speaking of old, there's that old Woody Allen joke: "I ... interestingly had, uh, dated ... a woman in the Eisenhower Administration ... briefly ... and, uh, it was ironic to me 'cause, uh . . . 'cause I was trying to, u-u-uh, do to her what Eisenhower has been doing to the country for the last eight years.)

Bob's most famous reference to the President is in "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)":

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

Lest you think that was sexy-naked, the year was 1965, and the President was LBJ.



Finally, back to the subject of freedom, here's one of my favorite obscure Bob Dylan songs, from the album we listened to all the time in college, "New Morning":

If dogs run free, then why not we
Across the swooping plain?
My ears hear a symphony
Of two mules, trains and rain
The best is always yet to come
That’s what they explain to me
Just do your thing, you’ll be king
If dogs run free

Run, dogs, run!

50 years ago, in a standup comedy routine, Woody Allen sketched out the idea...

... that would become the much-loved 2011 movie "Midnight in Paris":



(Via Kyle Buchanan.)

"I'm a bigot... but for the left."

An old Woody Allen punchline that came up in conversation just now. It's from the movie "Annie Hall." The actress is Carol Kane.

***

Whatever happened to Carol Kane? She had such interesting feminine beauty. I can't think of any actresses today who have the her style of beauty. Is it because they've all been surgically altered? I resist movies these days, in part because the actresses all look alike. Presumably, the look is beautiful, but it doesn't read as beautiful anymore, because they all look alike. This was all predicted in the "Twilight Zone" episode "Number 12 Looks Just Like You."



I know. It's not a day for talking about feminine beauty. It's a day for masculine beauty. It's Super Bowl Sunday, and here in Wisconsin "Number 12" is Aaron Rodgers, who is interestingly beautiful in an individualistic way. Which reminds me, despite my (and Meade's) resistance to watching movies, we did watch a movie last night: "Moneyball." It features the masculine beauty of Brad Pitt, who has to hide is splendor a bit in baggy pants, greasy hair, and constant munching of food, so he'll seem as though he belongs in the shabby office space and locker rooms of the Oakland Athletics baseball team (and not in the spiffy digs of the Boston Red Sox). Everyone else in the movie is pretty awful looking. He's bookended throughout by the Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who seem to be in a competition over who most embodies the word "tubby." There's scarcely a woman anywhere in the movie, though there is at least one scene with the Robin Wright, who is beautiful in that boring way and who was once in a movie with Carol Kane.

Why are there 9 — not 5 and not 10 — Best Picture Oscar nominations and which are the real nominees...

... that is, the nominees that would be the nominees if, as in the old days, there were only 5 nominees. My 28-year old son Christopher Althouse Cohen does the analysis:

This year there are 9 nominees. There's a reason there are 9 instead of 10 (or 5). The category originally got expanded to 10 nominees after 2008, probably because a lot of mainstream moviegoers were upset that The Dark Knight was "snubbed" in favor of The Reader. The Academy figured that, if only there had been some more slots, The Dark Knight would have been nominated and the viewers would have been more happy.

The next year, there were 10 nominees, and it was a much more commercial lineup that included at least 5 box office hits (Avatar... District 9, Inglourious Basterds, Up, and The Blind Side). They probably liked seeing District 9 and Up nominated, but the critics largely didn't consider The Blind Side to be Oscar material. The next year, Inception and Toy Story 3 got nominated, probably because of the expanded category, but so did the not-particularly-good-for-ratings Winter's Bone and The Kids Are All Right.

The Academy probably thought the category was getting watered down, but they wanted to keep the category big enough so that some hit movies would keep getting in. So, they came up with some formula where there are at least five nominees, and other movies can get nominated (but no more than ten) if they meet a certain voting threshold. It happened to be 9 this year, but it could just as well have been 8, etc.

Here are the nominees:

The Artist
The Descendants
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The Help
Hugo
Midnight In Paris
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
War Horse

So, let's figure out which of the 9 are the "real" nominees that would have made it into a normal, 5-nominee list, and which are the extra ones.
We just have to eliminate four of these movies. But first, there are two movies that are locks on the 5-nominee list, the ones that got by far the most nominations: The Artist and Hugo. Those have to be nominated, so really we just have 3 open slots and 7 movies to choose from.

The easiest to eliminate is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which was such a surprise the journalists in the audience yelled out and gasped when they heard it announced. It only had one other nomination -- Supporting Actor -- and that too was considered a major surprise.

Now we're down to 6, and exactly half of these would have gotten nominated: The Descendants, The Help, Midnight In Paris, Moneyball, The Tree of Life, War Horse. That looks like a strong list, but since we can see what other Oscar nom's these movies got, it should be easier to whittle it down.

War Horse is the first of the remaining I'd remove from the list. It was considered a strong contender at one point, but Steven Spielberg didn't get a Director nomination, and even though it got six nominations, all of them other than Picture were in technical categories. It's never happened that a Spielberg movie got nominated for Best Picture without getting any other major-category nominations (though he did get snubbed in the Director category for The Color Purple).

I'd also get rid of The Help, because its other three nominations are all in acting categories. It didn't even get nominated for Adapted Screenplay.

So, finally, we have four movies left, one of which must be elimated: The Descendants, Midnight In Paris, Moneyball, and The Tree of Life.

Now the elimination is harder. The Descendants is probably the strongest of these. It just got 5 nominations, but they included Director, Actor, and Screenplay. Moneyball is the only one that wasn't nominated for Best Director. But almost every year when there were 5 Picture nom's, the Picture and Director categories didn't line up exactly. Moneyball did get a Screenplay nomination and two acting nom's, so it's fairly strong overall. What's most likely is that one of the remaining two -- Midnight In Paris or The Tree of Life -- would have been the movie nominated for Director but not Picture, and Moneyball would have been the Picture-but-not-Director movie.

Midnight In Paris is (from my count) the third Woody Allen movie to get a Best Picture nomination (after Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters), but it's his sixth Director nom, so it's happened three times that his movie got the Director-but-not-Picture thing (Interiors, Broadway Danny Rose, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Bullets Over Broadway). Midnight In Paris could have been the fourth one. But maybe not. Midnight In Paris was commercially successful in a way that those Picture-snubbed movies weren't. Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters were hit movies with broad appeal when they came out. Midnight In Paris was kind of a hit, technically his highest grossing movie ever. With the expanded category, it was considered something of a lock. The Tree of Life, however, does not have broad appeal, is clearly an art movie, and feels like the sort of thing directors love but that gets fewer votes from other branches. Keep in mind, the nominations in each category are chosen by their respective branches, but everyone votes for the Best Picture nominees. Both of these movies got three nominations each this year. Midnight In Paris got Picture, Director, and Screenplay; The Tree of Life got Picture, Director, and Cinematography. I think it's close between the two, but I would go with The Tree of Life as the one that would have gotten left out.

So, with that, here are the real nominations for Best Picture today:

The Artist
The Descendants
Hugo
Midnight In Paris
Moneyball

or, perhaps:

The Artist
The Descendants
Hugo
Moneyball
The Tree of Life

I'd go with the former.

Woody Allen's 2 super-powers.

Over the last couple days, we watched the lengthy PBS documentary about Woody Allen. I know a lot of my readers haven't been watching his movies and think of him only in terms of his sexual misdeeds. Exclude that topic for the comments on this new post. All that has been said. Noted. If you must say that again, go to the link above and put it in that comments thread. I want to say something new, based on the documentary, which is overwhelmingly about Allen's work. If you don't know his movies or don't want to talk about the ideas about writing that I'm going to raise, please don't comment in this new thread.

Woody Allen has directed a movie a year — almost precisely — every year since 1969. He's an astounding movie-making machine. It's really quite bizarre. He's a monument not so much to hard work, but to consistently cranking out work, much of it quite excellent. As a writer, he's a lot like a blogger. He just keeps going. It's what he does, quite aligned with living itself. I love that.

Now, it suddenly occurred to me that his achievement is propelled by 2 super-powers — one which he knew he had from his teenage years and another that he discovered through Diane Keaton. (I'll try to finds the specific lines in the documentary that support my theory and transcribe them for you, but I don't have time for that now).

Super-power #1: Automatically thinking of one-line jokes. It's harder for him to stop his thoughts from taking the form of jokes than to think of them (he says). As a teenager, he got a job making $20,000 a year writing jokes. He had to write 50 jokes a day. It wasn't difficult for him.

Super-power #2: As a man, taking the woman's perspective. We see this power burst forth in his fabulous movie "Annie Hall." Allen gives credit to Diane Keaton, whom he worked with in the earlier films "Sleeper" and "Love and Death," for getting him interested in taking on the feeling of being inside the woman's head and writing from there. In this position, he experienced a flow of ideas, that let him write wonderful scenes for actresses, like this one, from "Hannah and Her Sisters," which is used in the documentary as an illustration of his style of writing from the woman's perspective:



You can say that he doesn't really achieve the female perspective or that women aren't really quite like that, but that isn't the point. The point is that his sense of being inside a woman's head empowers him to produce writing that often works for the viewer, including many, many women who love and identify with scenes like that. He's a man, with male thoughts, projecting those thoughts into women's minds. What a powerful force that is, the male with something of his own that he wants to put inside the woman. It makes the urge to write like the sexual urge. That's creative flow. If you can put that force behind your writing... it's a super-power.

The PBS documentary on Woody Allen.

I enjoyed it quite a bit. Here, you can watch the whole thing on line. I particularly liked all the detail about working methods, intense work ethic, and working for the sake of working, without looking for admiration. If you're wondering how the Mia Farrow stuff was handled, it was all about her fine work as an actress, and not one word was said against her. There was no effort to excuse or defend Allen for his betrayal of Farrow. And, in my view, that's how it has to be. There's nothing to be gained by trying to explain his side of the story. Did she somehow do something wrong? Some reason to empathize with Allen? It doesn't matter. It would not improve his reputation for us to hear that, and the impression I get is that Allen doesn't care about about correcting any misimpressions. He just works and works. It's life, and he hates death.

"On Friday, 'Midnight in Paris' will become the top-grossing movie of Woody Allen's long career."

It's "on track to dethrone 'Hannah and Her Sisters' as the biggest grossing movie in Allen's directorial career, which has lasted for 35 years and 41 films."

We saw that movie tonight. A fine romantic comedy. And I'm saying "fine" because Ernest Hemingway was always calling things "fine," especially in this movie.



A fine trailer that does a fine job of avoiding spoilers.

They say that 20-foot cross that the ACLU objects to was a gift from Woody Allen.

What a funny world we live in!

The ACLU of New Jersey threatened legal action against the Neptune school district after an attendee at last year’s graduation ceremony took offense to the building’s religious symbols and Christian-based references -- among them a 20-foot white cross above the auditorium’s entrance. The ACLU asked the school to remove or cover up the cross and three other religious signs, arguing their visibility during a public school event is a First Amendment violation....

The Camp Association said it could not cover the cross, said to have been a gift from movie director Woody Allen, who used the auditorium during shooting for the 1980 film "Stardust Memories."

Interestingly, if this case goes to court, the key Supreme Court precedent will be Van Orden v. Perry, the case about the 10 Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds, and that monument supposedly originated as a promotion for the Cecil B. de Mille movie "The Ten Commandments." From the oral argument in Van Orden:

Justice O'Connor: How did this monument get there? Was it in... is it true that it was put in as a result of promoting a movie about the Ten Commandments?

Mr. Chemerinsky: The record is unclear as to that. There are certainly many indications in the popular press that Cecil B. DeMille together with his movie, The Ten Commandments, worked with the Friends of Eagles to have these monuments put around the country. But there is nothing in the legislative history that links this particular monument to that.

And the cross is only said to be a gift from Woody Allen.

Where do all the religious stories come from? If there were movies back in Biblical times, what movie directors would be wandering around in those old Judeo-Christian stories? Anyway, I tried to find a YouTube clip showing the cross in "Stardust Memories," but I can't remember that movie well enough to know what scene it's in. I did run across this clip from Woody's "New York Stories" that has a little Larry David performance in it. And here's Larry David saying "Religion should be made fun of, it's quite ridiculous, isn't it?... If I really believed that stuff, I'd keep it to myself, lest somebody think I was out of my mind":

"The baguette scene could not have been simpler, but Carla wanted to make it a big one."

French First Lady Carla Bruni, doing a Woody Allen movie.

I rewatched "Vicky Cristina Barcelona."

I saw this movie when it came out and wrote about it — using my random list blogging approach — on August 15, 2008. The movie is all about romantic love and sexual feeling, and when I saw if the first time, I hadn't been in love in a long while. So it was fun to see it again and to go back and read that old post about it. And it was really fun to dip into the comments and find my then-future-husband Meade, who said: "If only I had a nickel for every time someone has come up to me on the street and mistaken me for a lesbian Javier Barden..." Ha. Lord knows what I pictured back then, before Meade ever sent me his photograph. But did the movie affect me differently now that I have my dear Meade? I'd say it made a deeper impression when I was love-deprived, because it's about people trying to understand and get to the love they want.

Too much personal happiness may diminish one's appreciation of art!

In the movie, Javier Bardem — Meade typo'd his name — plays an artist who can't maintain a stable attachment to his wife. He passionately loves her, but it's all tempestuous and violent. And it makes his art fabulous, of course. He's splattering paint all over the canvas — as painters in movies usually do, because it's not sufficiently cinematic to be dabbing paint carefully. A great exception to the movie rule that every painter must fling paint like Jackson Pollock is the Catherine Keener character in "Synecdoche, New York." She paints pictures so extremely tiny they require magnifying glasses to view.

But painting in movies is always a metaphor for sex, is it not? It's different sex in Synecdoche and Barcelona. And that makes me wonder if, on rewatch today, "Synecdoche, New York" would make a deeper impression.

What are the works of art that become more profound when you are, in real life, experiencing great happiness?

"[W]hat if we could just be China for a day?... You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions...."

"... and I do think there is a sense of that, on, on everything from the economy to environment.  I don't want to be China for a second, OK, I want my democracy to work with the same authority, focus and stick-to-itiveness.  But right now we have a system that can only produce suboptimal solutions."

So said Thomas Friedman on "Meet the Press" today. And the funniest part of him saying that wasn't the horrible vision of America as a dictatorship.... though it must be hilarious to think of America as a dictatorship, because famous funnyman Woody Allen said it too: "It would be good… if [President Obama] could be dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly." Nor was it the fact that he said it and at the same time tried to deny that he was saying it with all that "I don't want to be China for a second, OK" business.

No, the funniest part was that he said it right after he deplored the way the political center has been "decimated" in part by the "an Internet where I can create a digital lynch mob against you from the left or right if I don't like where you're going." He's reminding us Internet folk of our lynch-mob powers and then throws us the rope to hang him with that wish that "we could just be China for a day." Come on, everybody, let's destroy Thomas Friedman for saying he knows all the "right solutions" and wishes — or would wish if he could get away with it — that we could have a dictatorship to get it done. 

A love of autocracy often lurks beneath the liberal veneer. There's this idea that the right answers are known and the people are just too deluded and distorted to see what they are and to vote for them. And Friedman openly deplores the internet, which decimates moderation because there are people like me who who persecute elite truthbearers like him. Ooh! It's a lynch mob. Ha. Sorry. I don't want the rope. I just want to laugh at you.

It's late now. Let me sign off with a crazy old song that supposed to be beautiful but that's really dreadful, the way Friedman's lament is dreadful:

If I ruled the world, every man would be as free as a bird,
Every voice would be a voice to be heard
Take my word we would treasure each day that occurred
My world would be a beautiful place
Where we would weave such wonderful dreams
My world would wear a smile on its face
Like the man in the moon has when the moon beams
If I ruled the world every man would say the world was his friend
There'd be happiness that no man could end
No my friend, not if I ruled the world
Every head would be held up high
There'd be sunshine in everyone's sky
If the day ever dawned when I ruled the world

Nighty-night.

"[C]oncern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa."

"To the man of action the first criterion in determining which means to employ is to assess what means are available. Reviewing and selecting available means is done on a straight utilitarian basis -- will it work? Moral questions may enter when one chooses among equally effective alternate means."

From a list of Saul Alinsky quotes selected by Right Wing News.

I also liked this story:

The difference between fact and history was brought home when I was a visiting professor at a certain Eastern university. Two candidates there were taking their written examinations for the doctorate in community organization and criminology. I persuaded the president of this college to get me a copy of this examination and when I answered the questions the departmental head graded my paper, knowing only that I was an anonymous friend of the president. Three of the questions were on the philosophy of Saul Alinksy. I answered two of them incorrectly. I did not know what my philosophy or motivations were; but they did!

I wonder if that is as severe of a criticism of the teachers as he seemed to think. The teachers haed learned and taught Alinsky's philosophy based on what he put in writing, but he had access to his own brain, which was continually creating new material and choosing, when writing, what to include and how to frame things.

Note how he shifted from the phrase "the philosophy of Saul Alinksy" (the subject of the questions) to the "philosophy or motivations" of Saul Alinsky. He had unique access to knowledge of his motivations, and I wonder how honest he was with himself or in his written answer to the questions about what his motivations were (if that's what a question called for). The teachers might have wanted some critical thinking about Alinsky, while he may have flattered himself.

The author is not the best judge of what is contained in his own books, because it is confused with all the other things he thinks and the things he meant to say but didn't or wishes he had (or hadn't) said.

On the other hand, there's Woody Allen's great fantasy of producing the author to refute some jackass's assertion about what is in a book:

"Both the old guy at Fårö who made his coffin and Woody Allen will be invited."

A retreat.

"Yeah, I also don't like having the idea of 'the void' thrust upon me while I'm driving."

"I'm afraid of that phantom crazy impulse to drive my car into the oncoming headlights."