brainrow

I guess I’m not the only person who’s noticed that the Dark Side of the Force looks a lot like the Bush Administration. Here’s Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post:

“Revenge of the Sith,” it turns out, can also be seen as a cautionary tale for our time — a blistering critique of the war in Iraq, a reminder of how democracies can give up their freedoms too easily, and an admonition about the seduction of good people by absolute power.

Some film critics suggest it could be the biggest anti-Bush blockbuster since “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

A. O. Scott’s review of Revenge of the Sith in the New York Times is fun to read:

This is by far the best film in the more recent trilogy, and also the best of the four episodes Mr. Lucas has directed. That’s right (and my inner 11-year-old shudders as I type this): it’s better than “Star Wars.”

“Revenge of the Sith,” which had its premiere here yesterday at the Cannes International Film Festival, ranks with “The Empire Strikes Back” (directed by Irvin Kershner in 1980) as the richest and most challenging movie in the cycle. It comes closer than any of the other episodes to realizing Mr. Lucas’s frequently reiterated dream of bringing the combination of vigorous spectacle and mythic resonance he found in the films of Akira Kurosawa into American commercial cinema.

…

“This is how liberty dies – to thunderous applause,” Padmé observes as senators, their fears and dreams of glory deftly manipulated by Palpatine, vote to give him sweeping new powers. “Revenge of the Sith” is about how a republic dismantles its own democratic principles, about how politics becomes militarized, about how a Manichaean ideology undermines the rational exercise of power. Mr. Lucas is clearly jabbing his light saber in the direction of some real-world political leaders. At one point, Darth Vader, already deep in the thrall of the dark side and echoing the words of George W. Bush, hisses at Obi-Wan, “If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy.” Obi-Wan’s response is likely to surface as a bumper sticker during the next election campaign: “Only a Sith thinks in absolutes.” You may applaud this editorializing, or you may find it overwrought, but give Mr. Lucas his due. For decades he has been blamed (unjustly) for helping to lead American movies away from their early-70’s engagement with political matters, and he deserves credit for trying to bring them back.

Can a thing that has been used to do evil be turned to do good? The filibuster isn’t the problem. Like a hammer or a knife, it’s just a tool. What is the tool being used for? Richard Cohen in the Washington Post:

The president claims he should have the judges he wants because he won the last election. He has a mandate, he alleges, but if so, it is an insubstantial one — a bit more than 2 percent of the popular vote. When you compare that with recent second-term victories — FDR, who won by 24.3 percentage points; Ike, by 15.4; LBJ, by 22.6; Nixon, by 23.2; Reagan, by 18.2; Clinton, by 8.5 — it becomes clear that Bush’s mandate is, like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a figment of his imagination. His mandate, such as it is, should be to realize he ain’t got one.

I concede that I was not always so kindly disposed toward the filibuster. There was a time when it was used to thwart civil rights legislation and other legislative acts of basic decency. Now, though, it is being brandished to block a handful of prospective judges from narrowing those hard-earned rights.

Amy Sullivan in the Los Angeles Times:

Maybe my Bible was just a different translation from the one used by Pastor Chan Chandler. Chandler was the minister of East Waynesville Baptist Church in North Carolina who told members of his flock that if they voted for John Kerry, they needed to repent their sin or resign from the church.

Calling himself “merely the spokesperson” for “the most high,” Chandler charged that Kerry was an unbeliever…

The New Republican Standard Version of the Bible has been gaining popularity among evangelicals and Catholics. Just a few weeks ago, conservative political and religious leaders lined up on their so-called “Justice Sunday” to charge that those who oppose the ideologically extreme judicial nominees whom they support cannot be true people of faith.

Some members of the American Catholic clergy told Catholic voters last year that a vote for the pro-choice Democratic nominee would be punishable by exclusion from the sacrament of Holy Communion.

This is a shift — however slight — in conservative rhetoric and tactics.

The charge used to be that Democrats were godless, a party of secularists run amok. That changed somewhere around the time when Barack Obama boomed, “We worship an awesome God in the blue states!”; progressive minister Jim Wallis became one of the best-selling authors in the country; and Americans began to reconnect with their history, including centuries of religiously motivated political causes such as abolition, women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement.

So having failed to prove that Democrats are all secularists, conservatives now assert that liberals are not religious enough…

This is a debate that conservatives are going to lose. Because you don’t have to be liberal or conservative to be offended by the idea that a political or religious leader can decide whether your faith is good enough.

Somehow, it’s always about who will be the judge.

It’s been a while since George Lucas has had much worth saying, I think. But I’ve read about a scene in the new Star Wars movie: the Galactic Senate cheers when the Emperor declares the end of the Galactic Republic, “for a safe and secure society.”

Senator Amidala says, “This is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause.”

Rats. I wasn’t going to see the movie. Now I’ve gotta.

This is a fairly old story, from earlier this month: Ken Tomlinson, Republican Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, reportedly told PBS officials to make sure their programming reflected the Republican mandate.

He hasn’t denied that he said it, but says he was kidding! Sheesh, can’t you take a joke?

Gosh, I suppose I should lighten up. So here’s a cartoon from Mark Fiore, introducing the new PBS.

More news from the Republican jihad:

For many residents of this hamlet nestled in the Smoky Mountains, nothing is as important as church. That’s why nine longtime members of East Waynesville Baptist Church are so devastated after being kicked out of the congregation for, they say, supporting Democrat John Kerry’s presidential bid.

The minister delivered his fatwa in a sermon last October:

But the question then comes in, in the Baptist Church, how do I vote? Let me just say this right now: If you vote for John Kerry this year, you need to repent or resign.

Oh, yes. He’s going far in today’s GOP.

Frank Rich on the sycophantic White House press corps:

It was only too fitting that Mrs. Bush’s performance occurred on the eve of the second anniversary of the most elaborate production of them all: the “Top Gun” landing by the president on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. The Washington reviews of her husband at the time were reminiscent of hers last weekend. “This president has learned how to move in a way that just conveys a great sense of authority and command,” David Broder raved on “Meet the Press.” Robert Novak chimed in: “He looks good in a jumpsuit.” It would be quite a while before these guys stopped cheering the Jerry Bruckheimer theatrics and started noticing the essential fiction of the scene: the mission in Iraq hadn’t been accomplished, and major combat operations were far from over.

“We create our own reality” is how a Bush official put it to Ron Suskind in an article in The Times Magazine during the presidential campaign. That they can get away with it shows the keenness of their cultural antennas. Infotainment has reached a new level of ubiquity in an era in which “reality” television and reality have become so blurred that it’s hard to know if ABC News’s special investigating “American Idol” last week was real journalism about a fake show or fake journalism about a real show or whether anyone knows the difference — or cares.

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of V-E Day, celebrating allied Victory in Europe at the end of World War II.

That’s one reason I’m free to get worked up today about the Kansas Board of Education offering “a new definition of science that does not rely only on natural causes.”

There will be no Victory in America Day, because the battle for liberty does not end.

Sixty years ago, this country’s commitment to liberty was more than mere lip service. Whether we are so committed today is in our own hands.

Kim Campbell, briefly Prime minister of Canada, on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher:

Paul Krugman… wrote that he read Henry Kissinger’s PhD thesis, which is about what happens in a stable system — this time Europe at the time of the French Revolution — when one of the players is a rogue and doesn’t play by the rules. And he talks about all the rationalizations that people make, why they’re doing this. You know: “Well, they have to play to their supporters, and they’ll come on board soon.” And Krugman says as he’s reading this, he thinks “My God, I’m reading about the Bush Administration.”

I think when we face radicals — people who actually don’t accept the rules, who don’t accept the historical consensus of the separation of church and state, who have no respect for the notion of what science is, all of these kinds of things — it is so mind-boggling that people are kind of paralyzed. They don’t know what to do. And so they keep thinking, “Oh, it’s just a marginal thing, they aren’t really this focused at changing things.” And yet they are.

The discussion of Henry Kissinger’s thesis is in Paul Krugman’s book The Great Unraveling. I recommend it.

Revolutionaries depend on the incredulity of the rest of us. If you believe radical right revolutionaries mean to stop somewhere short of trampling on your rights, then they’ve won, you’ve lost.

Janeane Garofalo on the PBS program NOW:

The right wing noise machine over the last forty years has spent an enormous amount of money and time convincing the people that the truth is a liberal bias.

…

The mainstream media has now given fact and spin equal weight in a “he said, she said.”

I saw Jon Stewart performing live earlier today. He’s a funny guy. The audience laughed and applauded throughout the show.

Ohio was a “swing state” in last year’s election. Jon asked whether we’d enjoyed having presidential candidates visit every few days to tell us how much they loved us. He asked whether we’d seen any of them since the election. They used us, he said, then threw us away “after they’d done their dirty, dirty business.”

It wasn’t all politics. He talked about buying a new computer that the salesman assured him was “more powerful than the computers NASA uses to launch the space shuttle.” Jon said his shuttle was just sitting in the driveway at home because his old Tandy computer wasn’t powerful enough to launch it.

Mostly, though, there was a political edge. Paraphrasing very loosely, he said this:

The divide in America today is not between religion and science. It’s not between conservative and liberal, or Republican and Democrat, or red states and blue states. The divide in America today is between moderates and extremists.

We’re all moderates here. We’re not shouting slogans. Nobody here has their mouth taped over with the word “Life.” Nobody here is carrying around a can of red paint just to throw on somebody.

You don’t see moderates standing in front of a building chanting, “Let’s be reasonable!” You know why? Because moderates have stuff to do. They’re too busy to travel around the country staging vigils for the TV cameras. That’s why the extremists seem to be winning. Moderates have stuff to do.

We’ve had a lot of presidents — some really good ones, and some really bad ones — and our government has survived through all of them. It will survive through these guys, too. They may try to bring it down, but they’ll fail, and here’s why: when things get bad enough, all those busy moderates — the ones with stuff to do — are going to say, “You know, this stuff can wait ’til tomorrow.” And they’ll rescue the country from the extremists.

But he said it better than I did.

During World War II, we had rationing, scrap metal drives, housewives working in defense factories. Soldiers faced death on the front lines, but every American was expected to make some sacrifices to help the war effort.

We’ve made a lot of progress since those days. Now the president can ship our boys and girls in uniform off to fight and die whenever and wherever he wants to. The American people — well, except for the boys and girls in uniform, of course — can sleep easy, knowing they will never be asked to make any sacrifices for the war effort.

So, how dare
Ward Sutton suggest that home-front patriots who have already gone above and beyond the call of duty should do even more?

When Ohio State University president Novice G. Fawcett retired in 1972, the Ohio legislature changed the law so that a new campus building could be named after him. Before that change, a state government building couldn’t be named after a living person. Politicians were left to hope that some later generation might see fit to bestow such an honor. After the law was changed, later generations became irrelevant. A sitting politician could place the laurel wreath upon his own brow.

No Ohio politician was more honored by naming buildings after himself than James A. Rhodes, governor from 1963-1971 and 1975-1983. I haven’t been able to find a complete list of state buildings named for him. There are at least three right here in Columbus: the state office tower just across the street from the State House, a hospital building at the Ohio State University Medical Center, and a building at the state fairgrounds. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I’ve missed some.

The capper to Rhodes’ remarkable career of self-congratulation came on May 4, 1982, when he pushed authorization to build a monument to James A. Rhodes through the legislature, as a rider on a prison construction bill.

I called my state representative to protest. He said he had voted against the monument, but the prison bill was badly needed, so he had to vote for it. My question: Why did it have to be passed on May 4th? Why not May 3rd, or May 5th?

On May 4, 1970, thirty-five years ago today, National Guardsmen sent by Governor Rhodes killed four students and wounded nine at Kent State University. Rhodes was seeking a Senate nomination, so the day before the shootings he cranked up the heat, calling anti-war organizers “the worst type of people we harbor in America.” The killings thrilled a certain strain of conservative voter, so Rhodes never publicly breathed a word of sorrow or regret over the students gunned down on their college campus.

When Rhodes died in 2001, the Associated Press said:

Those close to him said he was saddened by the tragedy but blamed the turbulence of the war era and believed his action was necessary.

There is such a thing as coincidence, but human beings control legislative calendars. If Rhodes had been “saddened by the tragedy,” he wouldn’t have pushed for his monument to himself on the anniversary of the killings.

After Rhodes’ death, the sculptor who built the monument, a cast-metal statue of Rhodes, said he had engraved the names of the four dead Kent State students inside the hollow statue. It’s not enough. Not nearly enough.

In Memoriam

Allison Krause
Jeffrey Miller
Sandra Scheuer
William Schroeder

Four Dead in Ohio.

Update: Via a recent email message, here’s a Kent State scrapbook.

The Washington Post has a story titled Doubts About Mandate for Bush, GOP:

As the president passed the 100-day mark of his second term over the weekend, the main question facing Bush and his party is whether they misread the November elections. With the president’s poll numbers down, and the Republican majority ensnared in ethical controversy, things look much less like a once-a-generation realignment.

On November 4th last year, in an entry called Political Capital, I wrote:

You’ve spent your political capital, George. You’ve blown through it just like you blew through the budget surplus you inherited from the Clinton Administration.

You’ve got a deep deficit, George. You owe us.

So I feel like I’ve been ahead of the curve on the mandate issue.