Recently in Politics Category

I had just begun working on a piece about how comedy is the the only adequate response to the modern world, and the most profound approach to exploring and understanding the modern human psyche... when this happened. The folly and tragedy of human existence, and the indifferent and inhospitable relationship of the universe to human needs and desires, can be plumbed only by the sharpest and most penetrating comedy, without which tragedy loses its meaning and its deepest pain. And sometimes it just happens without comedy writers needing to make anything up. Or is it the other way around? Miss Congeniality. Elle Woods. Tracy Flick. Could this be an example of life imitating comedy?

Maureen Dowd in The New York Times takes a lighter comedic view:

So imagine my delight, my absolute astonishment, when the hokey chick flick came out on the trail, a Cinderella story so preposterous it's hard to believe it's not premiering on Lifetime. Instead of going home and watching "Miss Congeniality" with Sandra Bullock, I get to stay here and watch "Miss Congeniality" with Sarah Palin. [...]

This chick flick, naturally, features a wild stroke of fate, when the two-year governor of an oversized igloo becomes commander in chief after the president-elect chokes on a pretzel on day one.

The movie ends with the former beauty queen shaking out her pinned-up hair, taking off her glasses, slipping on ruby red peep-toe platform heels that reveal a pink French-style pedicure, and facing down Vladimir Putin in an island in the Bering Strait. Putting away her breast pump, she points her rifle and informs him frostily that she has some expertise in Russia because it's close to Alaska. "Back off, Commie dude," she says. "I'm a much better shot than Cheney."

[UPDATE: Now comes news from the McCain-Palin campaign that there's an unmarried, pregnant 17-year-old daughter in the pro-family Palin household. You can't make this stuff up. Reuters reports that the minor is "about five months pregnant and is going to keep the child and marry the father, according to aides of Republican presidential candidate John McCain." Damn right she will. It's written into the GOP platform!]

Quite often, the behavior of public figures displays a cosmic humor beyond anything a comedy writer could actually have gotten away with. In this case, the joke would seem too crass and cynical if it weren't for real. Now its crassness and cynicism give the humor real bite. A week ago if some film or television writer had proposed this preposterous scenario (old politician chooses Alaskan creationist former small-town mayor and beauty contest winner as running mate), it would have just seemed mean and a little desperate. Now? Well, see "Ham Sandwich McCain's Actual Choice for Veep." It no longer seems so far-fetched.

Now you have to wonder: Why didn't he choose someone more qualified? Like Harriet Miers?

When it comes to experience, Dan Quayle was the natural choice -- but his Y chromosome made him ineligible in the all-important tokenism category. (Brownie could bring his hurricane ineptitude to the table, but he's still sporting a scrotum so that won't play.) The main attribute McCain's running mate needed was that she be able to play up her sisterhood with Senator Hillary Clinton, the veteran politician so long beloved and revered by the Republican Party. That and she had to have spunk. The convention is in Minneapolis, and she's gonna make it after all.

Once comedy of this magnitude has occurred, and satire has been rendered superfluous, the really brilliant comedians have only to recognize the situation for what it is. I'm tremendously grateful, then, that Jon Stewart, with his unerring eye for future casting opportunities, and Samantha Bee, with her sharp-as-a-tack "lady brain," found exactly the right words to summarize the genius behind this unprecedented decision.

(Transcript below, after the jump.)

Has "The Dark Knight" signaled a change in the way superhero movies are perceived by the mainstream? Will it "legitimize" a so-called "disreputable genre" (if comic-book superhero movies can be said to comprise a genre)? Has it become to signify a desire for larger acceptance by comic fans, or a crossover hit that aficionados feel can only be fully understood by those well-versed in Batman mythology?

In his indispensable new essay, "Superheroes for sale," David Bordwell takes on the new (tidal) wave of comic-book and superhero movies, examines their historical reputation, their development, reasons for their popularity, critical attitudes and misconceptions, comic-book acting styles...

First -- well, first go read it. DB says he came away from both "Iron Man" and "The Dark Knight" "bored and depressed. I'm also asking questions":

As I was leaving a matinee of "The Dark Knight" this week, I heard a little kid behind me say, "Well, we know there's gonna be a third one." This kid looked to me like he was 8 or 9 years old -- maybe even younger. And he unmistakably felt the "Empire Strikes Back" cliffhanger vibe that concludes the second in this series of Batman movies. The Joker is left suspended in mid-air (though, sadly, he won't be back), Commissioner Gordon gives a big speech over the closing montage about the importance of the heroes we need (and the ones we deserve), and Batman rides off into the dark night. The movie does have an ending but it's still an open-ended ending.

Of course, a serial cliffhanger is one thing, but the strategy of some movies is to deny us the satisfaction of resolution...

“…the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our photographs but in ourselves…”

-- Errol Morris, paraphrasing Shakespeare, in a footnote to an October 4, 2007, New York Times Zoom column about a pair of Roger Fenton Crimean War photos

* * * *

Errol Morris's new film, "Standard Operating Procedure," is not about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. It is about the photographs themselves, and what went on in and around them, before, during and after they were taken. Perhaps the most baffling question surrounding them is why they were taken at all.

The film reflects Morris's desire to make another "investigative film" in the vein of "The Thin Blue Line." "I think of the film as a nonfiction horror movie," he says in a Q&A on the official web site. The imagery is designed to take the viewer into the moment the photographs were taken, as well as to evoke the nightmarish, hallucinatory quality of Abu Ghraib."

Although I'm still reeling from the shocking revelation that David Mamet once considered himself a liberal ("David Mamet says he is not a brain-dead liberal anymore"), I find myself looking forward to his next (screen-)play more than ever, if only to see if I can detect an interest in ideological politics that I never noticed in his work before.

The week of his much-publicized announcement, history presented him with a perfect subject for a future writing project: the collapse of the investment banking film Bear Stearns and the last-minute bailout by the Federal Reserve, allowing it to merge with JP Morgan Chase. What a dilemma for free-marketeers! This could make for great drama in Mamet's hands. Imagine a "Glengarry Glen Ross" in which Mitch and Murray are rescued from bankruptcy by the intervention of the federal government.

Mamet writes: "...a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism."

And: "[William Allen] White knew that people need both to get ahead and to get along, and that they're always working at one or the other, and that government should most probably stay out of the way and let them get on with it."

And: "... I began to question my hatred for 'the Corporations'—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live."

UPDATED: Three more trailers (1997 & 2008) added below for comparison.

When Michael Haneke's movie-star remake of his own "Funny Games" opens Friday, he claims it will pose a direct challenge to American audiences. (In my review, which will appear that day, I call his bluff and propose a few counter-challenges in the same spirit. Two -- or more -- can play at this funny game!)

If you've seen the 1997 version, you've pretty much seen the English language one, because it's virtually a shot-for-shot recreation. Here, from the studio press kit, is what Haneke (whose "Code Unknown" and "Caché" I consider to be masterpieces) has to say about what he's trying to do with "Funny Games":

"I’m trying to find ways to show violence as it really is: it is not something that you can swallow. I want to show the reality of violence, the pain, the wounding of another human being....

"Recently a friend and critic who recently watched 'Funny Games' said to me 'now the film is where it belongs.' He is right. When I first envisioned 'Funny Games' in the middle of the 90s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American Cinema, its violence, its naïveté, the way American Cinema toys with human beings. In many American films violence is made consumable....

One of these days
I'm gonna play it black
Play it black
One of these days...
-- misquoted Elvis Costello song from "My Aim is True"

What will the Jim Crow "one-droppers" who didn't think Angelina Jolie was "African enough" to play Dutch-Jewish / Cuban-black-Hispanic-Chinese Mariane Pearl make of this? The actor in the center of the accompanying image is Robert Downey Jr., a white German-Scottish / Irish-Jewish actor. He's playing a white actor who is cast in a part originally written for a black actor, so he decides to play it black. The movie, "Tropic Thunder," is a satire of Hollywood actors making an epic war movie. It's directed by Stiller, co-written by Etan Cohen ("Idiocracy," "My Wife is Retarded" -- note that the "h" is not in the first name but the last; he's no relation to Joel) and Justin Theroux (who played a director in "Mulholland Dr." and an actor in "Inland Empire"). Nick Nolte, Jay Baruchel and Steve Coogan also star -- along with some big names in cameo appearances.

As Downey told Entertainment Weekly, "If it's done right, it could be the type of role you called Peter Sellers to do 35 years ago. If you don't do it right, we're going to hell." [...]

"We need to examine the history of blacks in film to appreciate their deep roots.... Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, the top comedy stars of the 80s, have a strange, subversive ancestor in Stepin Fetchit, America's first black millionaire actor."
-- Richard Corliss, Time, "The 25 Most Important Films on Race"

See: "Stepin Fetchit to Denzel Washington (Part I )"

"Stepin Fetchit, then and now" by Jim Emerson (2005)

* * *

The day Clarence Thomas was nominated by George H.W. Bush for the Supreme Court, I was interviewing 23-year-old writer-director John Singleton about his upcoming movie "Boyz N the Hood" (1991). Singleton was sitting in front of a hotel-room TV tuned to CNN and the first words out of his mouth were: "He's the biggest Uncle Tom."

That memory came back again recently as I was reading Harvard Law Professor and Supreme Court bar member Randall Kennedy's book, "Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal." [1] Kennedy writes:

Sometimes "Uncle Tom" is used interchangeably with "sellout." In a Washington Post profile of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, two journalists write that "Uncle Tom is among the most searing insults a black American can hurl at a member of his own race." They describe "Uncle Tom" as a "synonym for sellout, someone subservient to whites at the expense of his own people."

This usage is ironic. The original Uncle Tom -- Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom -- was a character who chose death at the hand of his notorious owner, Simon Legree, rather than reveal the whereabouts of runaway slaves. Still there are those who use "Uncle Tom" to refer to any black whose actions, in their view, retard African-American advancement. Others are more discriminating. For many of them, the label "sellout" is more damning than "Uncle Tom" or kindred epithets -- "Aunt Thomasina," "Oreo," "snowflake," "handkerchief head," "white man's Negro," "Stepin Fetchit"....

Of course, all those terms aren't synonymous, either. The name of Stepin Fetchit is nearly as well-known, and almost synonymous with "Uncle Tom" -- and that, too, may be somewhat ironic. Fetchit (born Lincoln Perry, 1902-1985) was a tremendously popular movie star with black and white audiences. But his act, on stage and screen, was also vilified for perpetuating a stereotype of African-American men as lazy, shuffling, bowing and scraping buffoon. (Other stereotypes of black men as pimps, gangstas, rapists, con artists, drug pushers/addicts, violent criminals, woman-abusers would come from elsewhere, and long outlive him.) He was admired and in many ways emulated by Muhammad Ali, with whom he converted to the Nation of Islam, and he was honored with an NAACP Image Award in 1976.

But how many people today have actually seen him in a movie?

Regarding issues raised by Brian De Palma and "Redacted" (see below): Here are two frame grab from Woody Allen's 1980 feature "Stardust Memories," a United Artists release. The movie is a Felliniesque comedy (it starts right off as a parody of "8 1/2"), not a documentary. The blown-up image on the wall was taken a dozen years before "Stardust Memories" (February 1, 1968) during the Tet Offensive by Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams in Saigon.

The man with the gun is South Vietnamese National Police Chief General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan. The man in the plaid shirt, who is or is about to be shot in the head (his death is shown in NBC News footage taken at the same time), is thought to be Nguyễn Văn Lém (or possibly Le Cong Na), and was either a Viet Cong officer or a political operative. His face was disfigured because he had been beaten. The title of the photo, which became instantly famous around the world, is "General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon" and it won a Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1969. It was widely reprinted and was used as a symbolic image by the anti-war movement.

Adams later wrote in Time magazine:

The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths... What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'

Although a number of "galleries and artists" are acknowledged in the end credits of "Stardust Memories" for the use of photos and artworks in the film, the source for this picture is not cited. The film does contain a standard disclaimer, reading: "The story, all names, characters and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons is intended or should be inferred."

Edward Copeland, mastermind and organizer of the online ""Best" non-English language films poll, reports that Danny Leigh at the film blog at The Guardian (UK) is wondering about our motives ("The view: Is Hollywood America?"):

Naturally it's nice to see this kind of attention lavished on some of history's finest yet lately neglected films; but between Copeland's poll (coming after The Guardian's similar exercise earlier in the year) and the surging popularity of foreign movies in the UK, I can't help wondering how much of the current enthusiasm for what was once known as world cinema is purely that - and how much a rejection of Hollywood at a time when the wider America is so reviled. In other words, is George Bush responsible in some odd tangential way for the rediscovery of Jean Renoir and Fassbinder?

If so, it's clearly a phenomenon with differing degrees of enmity; few US bloggers are likely to share the anti-Americanism of many British audiences. And yet in both cases there may be an underlying notion of Hollywood as a tool of a cultural imperialism that, however murkily, reflects the actual imperialism of US foreign policy. Follow that logic far enough and Hollywood flicks aren't just dopey time-killers - but sermons straight from the bully pulpit.

I see his angle regarding Hollywood hegemony, but to attribute anti-American (or, rather, anti-Bush) motives to this particular project is stretching things quite a bit.

When it comes to Hollywood movies, I thought we had the British (Robin Wood, Raymond Durgnat) and the French (the Cahiers du Cinema crowd) to thank for originally helping us see the artistic worth of American studio pictures once dismissed as "dopey time-killers."

On the other hand, according to the incessant drumbeat of Fox and the rest of the far-right media, "Hollywood" is America's greatest enemy (since Ronald Reagan left town, anyway) -- especially its outspoken movie stars and Jewish singers! Their favorite targets are Sean Penn, Alec Baldwin, George Clooney, Barbara Streisand... So, in this climate, if we really wanted to appear "anti-American" (by their definition) wouldn't we actually align ourselves with "Hollywood"?

But this effort to showcase films that aren't in our native tongue (including non-British films, if you want to put it that way) has nothing to do with contemporary politics. It has to do with looking beyond the English-speaking film-world to... the rest of the world and the diversity of movies beyond the five government-selected nominees for the annual Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and the like.

There's a movie moment for nearly every occasion in life. Take this one from Harold Meyerson -- arguing against impeachment (of Bush and Cheney, anyway) in a cover story in The American Prospect:

You may recall the scene in Clint Eastwood's 1992 Western "Unforgiven" where Eastwood's character levels his gun at Gene Hackman's malevolent sheriff, whom he is about to dispatch to hell's lower depths. "I don't deserve this," Hackman protests. "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it," Eastwood replies, and pulls the trigger.

And that -- a touch overstated, I'll admit -- is pretty much my position on impeachment. Does George W. Bush deserve to be impeached? Absolutely. Problem is, that doesn't resolve the question of whether trying to impeach Bush (and, necessarily, Dick Cheney, too) is a good idea.... "Deserve" does have something to do with it, but not enough to carry the day. At least, not this day. [...]

Two gay icons in a network TV musical number celebrating illicit drug use. The "Anything Goes" of the 1970s. Have times changed, do you think?

(Than kyew to Dina Martina.)

In the discussion about my hypothetical Athiest Film Festival (before the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni), I was trying to get at the difference I see between Bergman's theological sensibility (seeing/defining the world in terms of man's relationship with god, even if that relationship involves god's silence, indifference, death or nonexistence) and a view in which god is not only not a default position, but not even a question. This, I think, is closer to Antonioni's aesthetic and philosophical outlook, at least as far as his films express it.

There's an excellent, and long overdue, article in the New York Times Magazine today ("The Politics of God"), which is primarily about how the West has (catastrophically?) failed to comprehend that, even in modern times, "theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong."

The piece, by Columbia University humanities Professor Mark Lilla, is adapted from his upcoming book "The Stillborn God: Religion Politics and the Modern West," but the passage that got me thinking about the Atheist Film Festival (and the "Banana as Atheist's Nightmare") again was this one:

Theology is, after all, a set of reasons people give themselves for the way things are and the way they ought to be....

Imagine human beings who first become aware of themselves in a world not of their own making. Their world has unknown origins and behaves in a regular fashion, so they wonder why that is. They know that the things they themselves fashion behave in a predictable manner because they conceive and construct them with some end in mind. They stretch the bow, the arrow flies; that is why they were made. So, by analogy, it is not difficult for them to assume that the cosmic order was constructed for a purpose, reflecting its maker’s will. By following this analogy, they begin to have ideas about that maker, about his intentions and therefore about his personality.

In taking these few short steps, the human mind finds itself confronted with a picture, a theological image in which God, man and world form a divine nexus. Believers have reasons for thinking that they live in this nexus, just as they have reasons for assuming that it offers guidance for political life. But how that guidance is to be understood, and whether believers think it is authoritative, will depend on how they imagine God. If God is thought to be passive, a silent force like the sky, nothing in particular may follow. He is a hypothesis we can do without. But if we take seriously the thought that God is a person with intentions, and that the cosmic order is a result of those intentions, then a great deal can follow. The intentions of such a God reveal something man cannot fully know on his own. This revelation then becomes the source of his authority, over nature and over us, and we have no choice but to obey him and see that his plans are carried out on earth....

My question is: By what authority does anyone claim to know, and be able to interpret, the intentions of such a God? It's always puzzled me how many leaps of faith a person has to take before even getting to the idea of a deity... which may be one reason why, if I had to compare, I'd have to say Antonioni's films do speak to me more deeply and personally than Bergman's.

(Of course, when it comes to movies, you can usually just substitute the term "auteur" for "God" in that quotation above.)

See Martin Scorsese's eloquent appreciation of Antonioni for more...

I'm still on vacation. Back Thursday with some thoughts on Martin Scorsese, the late Tony Wilson and Merv Griffin, Michelangelo Antonioni (surprise!), video games, the Meaning of Life, and more. In the meantime, here's what in any rational world would be a shocking clip (if the country wasn't already so jaded by nearly seven years of malfeasance), from a man with (evidently) unimpeachable integrity:

Elizabeth Edwards says this in a Salon interview:

Ignoring the fact that she exists doesn't make her go away. If it did, you wouldn't hear me utter her name. So I think maybe the better thing to do is simply confront people like her. Are you going to stop them? Under no circumstances will you stop them. But maybe you empower other people to stand up, and maybe that has an effect. When I travel, so many older people thank me for what I did. Because the vile kind of way [she] thinks and talks, that was not ever part of the public discourse until recently. [...]

And later on, I talked to somebody, not an advisor -- I really don't have anybody advising me -- and not someone in the campaign. She'd been in a previous campaign, and she said, "Oh, I wouldn't have done that. I think that you put yourself at risk, subject to criticism unnecessarily." I understand the advice -- if you were advising somebody you might say that -- but that exact attitude is what protects somebody like [her]. Nobody wants to jump in the mud puddle with her.

Gosh, I wonder what Edwards could be talking about...?

The term "moral relativism" (or "moral equivalence") has always fascinated me because of its slipperiness -- its moral relativism, if you will. The way the term is used in politics these days (by Israelis and Palestinians, conservatives and liberals, Christians and Muslims, and so on), it can mean one thing or its opposite, depending on who's using it and what they're trying to justify.

What it boils down to, in popular rhetorical discourse, is the moral equivalent of a five-year-old's finger-pointing: "But they started it!" and "What they did was worse!" This creates an inescapable and illogical ideological loop, wherein each new assault is justified by a previous one (or fear of a future one) that attempts to even the score but never, ever does, since it is always used to rationalize the next reprisal. It's always a matter of "self-defense" in the minds of the perpetrators.*

This ever-escalating tit-for-tat is, in fact, moral relativism at its most insidious, because it posits that there is no objective right or wrong. Something is considered moral or immoral depending on who does it and when, rather than on the nature of the act itself and its consequences -- whether unintended ones, or the intended kind that pave the road to hell.

Judea Pearl, the father of Daniel Pearl, has an essay at The New Republic website ("Moral relativism and 'A Mighty Heart'") in which he recalls a conversation with a Pakistani friend who said "he loathed people like President Bush who insisted on dividing the world into 'us' and 'them.' My friend, of course, was taking an innocent stand against intolerance, and did not realize that, in so doing, he was in fact dividing the world into 'us' and 'them,' falling straight into the camp of people he loathed."

In other words, if there's one thing I can't tolerate, it's intolerance.

In A.O. Scott's review of "Knocked Up" in the New York Times, he expressed admiration for "a funny, knowing riff on the reluctance of movies and television shows even to use the word 'abortion.'" I thought that was one of the most brilliant bits in the movie, and not just because it emphasized the entertainment industry's squeamishness about the "a-word," but because it also captured men's unwillingness to interfere with (or face up to) "a woman's right to choose," and the way abortion has been swept under the carpet by the new right-wing Political Correctness. No longer is abortion considered a difficult and regrettable personal choice; the new PC has restored the shame and guilt from the old Scarlet Letter days of back alleys and coat hangers. That's one of the things I think "Knocked Up" was satirizing: Don't mention abortion! (The Bush administration cuts funding to any family planning counseling facility, in Africa and elsewhere, that acknowledges abortion as an option for women.)

In the Genuine Canadian Magazine (says so right on the cover) cinema scope, Associate Editor Jessica Winter offers this take:

As funny and endearing as Judd Apatow’s proudly vulgar new comedy can be, it may give the viewer nostalgia for the sequence in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982) when Jennifer Jason Leigh falls pregnant by a guy she shouldn’t be with, promptly gets an abortion, and rides back from the clinic with her brother, who takes her out for a cheeseburger. And that’s it: no apparent self-torment, no post-facto breakdown, no further discussion. Twenty-five years later—plus a nationwide swing to the right, the founding of Operation Rescue, and that deathless Ben Folds Five song—"Knocked Up" presents us with a similarly unpromising scenario: smart twentysomething who just got a big career break has inadvertently fruitful one-night stand with unemployed shlub. Yet in this case, abortion is only briefly suggested by third parties and dismissed out of hand. That’s not to say that the outcome is unrealistic: When Allison (Katherine Heigl) bursts into tears at the sight of the heartbeat on the sonogram, it’s obvious that ending the pregnancy simply isn’t an option for her—just as bearing a child simply isn’t an option for Leigh’s teenage character in "Fast Times." Still, when the closest a movie like Knocked Up comes to even saying the word is “rhymes with shmashmortion,” it’s clear that we’re considering less a depiction of life as actual people live it but rather a pop-culture product that embodies the squeamish contradictions of the mainstream moment a little too accurately. This is a movie, after all, in which Allison always has sex with her bra on but we get an extreme close-up of the baby’s head inching through Mom’s conspicuously bald vagina. Who knew the miracle of childbirth could be liberated from the dark shame of pubic hair?

Winter says that we can "blame the MPAA" for the missing pubic hair.

How will the movies handle -- or avoid mentioning -- abortion once the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, I wonder?

"A Mighty Heart," Michael Winterbottom's film based on Mariane van Neyenhoff Pearl's book about her husband Daniel, a journalist who was kidnapped and executed in Karachi, Pakistan, opens this weekend. I've had my say about the casting of (Czech / Haudenosaunee / American) Angelina Jolie as (Dutch / Cuban / French) Mariane Pearl. And so has Mariane Pearl, who told Newsweek: "This is not about skin color. I wanted her to play me because I trust her. Aren't we past this?"

Well, some people are. And some aren't. Like, I guess, the people who hired Halle Berry to play white Nevada schoolteacher Tierney Cahill in the upcoming "Class Act." (Berry's at least as much white as she is black. But will she wear "whiteface" in the movie? Do you care?) Or, perhaps, the ones who hired John Travolta to play a woman in "Hairspray." Or even those who think it was just wrong for Marriane Pearl to have married a white Jew in the first place. (Miscegenation!) Let's take that logic to its inevitable extreme. Some people are sticklers for racial, cultural and gender purity. If only race, culture and gender were really that monolithic and clear-cut...

And we're talking about actors here. I'm not advocating blackface or whiteface minstrelsy (that implies bad acting, doesn't it?), but these people are supposed to be able to play characters other than themselves. That's what they do.

Maybe Jolie is terrible and totally miscast in the part. I don't know, I haven't seen the movie yet. But a commenter at the site concreteloop.com succinctly summarizes my own feelings about the matter at this stage:

At first it does seem a bit odd, because I am sure there are women of African American or Afro-Cuban descent who could play that role but I would not say this is modern day black-face. If it were some blond-hair, blue-eyed non-talented actress, I would really have a problem. However, I do think Angelina is a great actress and as a matter of fact Mariane Pearl wanted Angelina to portray her in the film. So shouldn’t her wishes be respected?

Producer Brad Pitt, who hired his honey for the part, said he was nervous about doing it, but he felt it was the right decision for the movie: "I knew the part had to be played by someone with Mariane's strength and understanding of the world, but I didn't know how to broach the subject. It feels a little like Wolfowitz trying to get his girlfriend a job. [...]

"I know that people are frustrated at the lack of great roles (for people of color), but I think they've picked the wrong example here."

I guess it also depends not only on whether you think Mariane Pearl has a (moral? contractual?) right to approve who plays her in a movie made from her own book, but whether you consider Angelina Jolie an actress or just "Brad's girlfriend" -- you know, half of "Brangelina." (Or even whether women are capable of making such important judgments, since those who cry "racism" here insist that Jolie and Pearl do not have the personal or professional credibility or authority to make such decisions for themselves.)

And whether you consider the fact that both share Northern European / Caucasian heritage. Much of the criticism I've seen has focused on the tabloid "Brangelina" phenomenon (as if that were real anywhere beyond the supermarket checkstands), or has tried to tie this casting into the history of racist portrayals of African-Americans in Hollywood movies. (In that regard, I recommend Donald Bogle's book, "Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks.") But is that really an appropriate conclusion to draw in this particular instance?

I agree that actors of color should be offered more and better roles -- including those that weren't originally written to be one race or another. (Sigourney Weaver played a man's role in "The TV Set" without changing a word. Other parts have been re-written for the actor selected for the part.) But is the problem really one of casting people with the same racial make-up as their characters? Or is it more significant that writers and directors and casting directors are not making films with enough characters of color?

On the practical side... well, a star is a star. Angelina Jolie and Halle Berry are Oscar winners, marquee names, not struggling unknowns. (Not that struggling unknowns or semi-knowns don't deserve a chance, but they're unlikely to get one in such a high-profile project.) Mariane Pearl wanted Angelina Jolie to play her, sought her out, and sold the rights to Brad Pitt's production company. Based on this "package," the film was able to get a greenlight from Paramount Vantage, with the expectation that they would make a profit. The question becomes: Is the only form of "good casting" to make sure the racial balance of the character matches that of the actor?

Is Beyonce really too light -- or too dark -- to have played a character based on Diana Ross in "Dreamgirls"? Is Denzel Washington really too dark to have played light-skinned, reddish-haired Malcolm X? Was it racist to have cast Chinese actress Gong Li as a Japanese woman in "Memoirs of a Geisha"? Were Al Pacino -- or Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio or Robert Loggia -- terrible in "Scarface" (1983) because they are not Cuban? Was it wrong for Benecio Del Toro (Puerto Rican-American) to play a Mexican cop in "Traffic"? If these actors were good or bad in those movies, was it because of their racial background, or because of the roles and their performances in them?

I wonder what happened to a sense of proportion here. This isn't exactly Mickey Rooney playing a grotesque caricature of a Chinese guy in "Breakfast at Tiffany's." Doesn't the performance itself count for anything -- or is it all about appearances? (OK, if Jennifer Aniston had been cast as Pearl, I'd be a lot more skeptical. Even though she's only two years younger than Pearl, while Jolie is seven years younger. But if Jolie is playing Pearl in 2001-2002, then she's just about the perfect age, no?)

Judd Apatow's "Knocked Up" ought to be the most-discussed (and argument-generating) movie of the year so far -- which means it's uncommonly smart and subversive and disturbing (and funny), especially for a summer sex comedy. I happen to think Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann, as Pete and Debbie, the bitter and resentful married couple with kids (Mann is Apatow's wife, and the kids in the movie are theirs) are the funniest characters/actors in the picture (and Kristen Wiig: amazing), mainly because their material, and their performances, are so painfully true that it's not funny. Which is what makes it so funny. It helps that all three are top-flight actors with a gift for uncanny understatement. Sometimes you don't even know if the scene is funny or not (like Debbie's suburban ambush of Pete) -- and those are inevitably the most revealing and rewarding kinds of laughs, when you surprise yourself by laughing at how awful and truthful the characters are behaving.

Anyway, I've found that some women don't like the movie, for sex-specific reasons I hope to discuss at length in the near future. Let me offer a few examples now from reviews that I think "get" "Knocked Up" -- and not from my usual suspects, either.

Anthony Lane, The New Yorker:

One night, Ben [Seth Rogen] goes to a bar, picks up a girl, and goes to bed with her. Both are drunk at the time, and both, in consequence, throw up: Ben the next morning (“I just yakked,” he says winningly over breakfast), and the girl—who is no girl but a young woman named Alison (Katherine Heigl), with a growing career on television—some weeks later, into a trash can at work. Here comes the bit that will divide Apatow’s audience and (he hopes) get them arguing over the movie: Alison decides to inform the father and, little by little, to enfold him and his oafish, froggy grin in the gentle business of parenting. Call it the taming of the Shrek. Most women, I imagine, will scoff with incredulity: this is neither a last hurrah (Alison is still in her twenties) nor the ideal time (she has a good job), and Ben is the last slob on earth she would have chosen. Most men, meanwhile, will be too busy watching through their fingers. To them, this is “The Omen.”

What's interesting about this paragraph is that it's slightly wrong. We go to the bar with the women, not the men. The gals are swept inside (even though Mann's character is really too old to be there), while we catch a glimpse of Ben and his geek buddies near the front of the line. They've probably been standing out there for hours. (This doorman scene will pay off later -- though I think it's the weakest in the movie.)

My first reaction to the Ben-Alison match was that she would never want to see him again after their one-night stand. But, like so many women, Alison is someone who falls in love with a guy for who she wants him to be, not for who he really is. (She doesn't even know who he is -- and vice-versa.) At the point where she (improbably) lets him back into her life, it's because she now views him as "the father of her child" (which, in her view though not our society's, gives him some marginal rights) and as Pete and Debbie indicate cynically at the breakfast table in front of the kids, men and women who are in love get married and have babies. Or men and women who have babies get married and fall in love. Or something like that. Alison wants to be in love with the father of her child (their child, she insists), so she is determined to make herself believe that's the case, even when it isn't, because that's the way it should be. And maybe she can even make him believe it.

From a 2003 interview with Toby Young, celeb interviewer, memoirist and author of "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People":

"I have this idea for a dystopian satire. It's set in the immediate future, and it's going to be about the moment when ordinary Americans turn on the celebrity class. There's going to be a sort of French Revolutionary-style bloodbath where A-list celebrities are strung up from lampposts and lynched on street corners. The storming-the-Bastille moment is going to be when the looky-loos outside the 2023 Academy Awards kind of break through into the Kodak Theater and start lynching A-list movie stars on live TV." (Only 15 minutes 'til the first VF Oscar party reference, I note.)

"And it sets off a chain reaction across the United States," he continues, leaning in, conspiratorially. "And there's a scarlet pimpernel figure, who's kind of a second rate English talent agent based in Los Angeles, and in the pre-revolutionary era, he couldn't get anyone to return his calls. But in the post-revolutionary era, he figures out a way to get celebrities to safety. And the way he does that is, the only country where celebrities are still safe is Britain, because they're such craven starfuckers that the revolution doesn't actually affect them. And the way he smuggle celebrities out of Los Angeles is by disguising them as flight attendants on Virgin Atlantic. They occasionally get spotted. They get rumbles in mid-air and tossed off the plane. I need to come up with the right word to describe this celebrity apocalypse. If I can come up with the right word, I'll be in business. My father wrote a similar book in the 1950s called 'The Rise of the Meritocracy,' which is about a bloody revolution in which a kind of meritocratic overclass overcame and coined the term 'meritocracy.' I want to coin a similar word to describe a society in which celebrities are the kind of governing class."

Don't we already live in a celebritocracy? Not in the sense that the National Inquirer and the Star and People and Vanity Fair and cable news continue to inflate the importance of celebrities (including wannabes from the media like Anna Wintour or Graydon Carter or A-- C------). That kind of thing has been going on for a long time.

What I'm fascinated by is the insistence by some of the media entertainers (from Sean Hannity to Wolf Blitzer) that the lives and political views of celebrities really are as important as those of elected officials! It's just amazing. Quote from a reader at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog:

... [T]he actor Alec Baldwin was on a radio show in NYC a short time ago when conservative radio hosts Sean Hannity and Marc Levin called in to hurl insults against him. During the course of the 7-minute battle, Levin, out of nowhere, suddenly seeks to mock Baldwin as "Brokeback Alec."

Which, when you think of it, makes no sense. You can love or hate Alec Baldwin. But to hurl the epithet "Brokeback Alec" at him – at an actor who was married to, and had children with Kim Basinger, who has had any number of relationships with any number of starlets -- to call him "Brokeback Alec" is as nutty, as counterintuitive and just plain silly, as to hurl that ["faggot"] epithet against Edwards!

[Sullivan responds]: Mark Levin anti-gay? I listened to the exchange. Levin called Baldwin a "butt-boy" as well as "Brokeback Alec."

This is hilarious! Well, OK, pathetic. But it reveals the priorities and reasoning abilities of lightweights like Hannity and Levin when they feel they have to call in to a talk show to hurl nonsensical names at an actor. (BTW, "30 Rock" is really funny most of the time. It's a TV sitcom. Starring Alec Baldwin. I hope Hannity and Levin will call in to randomly question Jim Belushi's sexuality the next time he does promotion for "According to Jim." Then they can go on Ellen DeGeneres's show and accuse her of having a hankering for man-flesh!)

What Hannity and Levin and other celebritalkers don't get is that they themselves are just celebrities, famous for being on TV or radio. (And, I suspect, some acting talent.) If Toby Young's "revolution" ever comes about, they'll be the first ones to go -- not because they're "A-list" (they're certainly not), but because, like Paris Hillton or Zsa Zsa Gabor, they're famous just for being famous. They're at the bottom rung of celebrity along with reality TV personalities (maybe above William Hung but below Rob and Amber), yet their entire careers depend on them pretending to be serious ideologues. (Except for Rush Limbaugh, who admits to just being an "entertainer" who makes stuff up in character that he's not stupid enough to actually believe himself. Is that worse?)

"I mean, you got the first sorta mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and- and- and clean, and a nice lookin' guy. I mean, it's -- that's a storybook, man!"

or

"I mean, you got the first sorta mainstream African-American, who is articulate and bright and- and- and clean, and a nice lookin' guy. I mean, it's -- that's a storybook, man!"

What Joe Biden said of Barack Obama -- it all comes down to one li'l comma.

Or a pause that is the equivalent of a comma.

I guess I'm a little behind on this story. A Scanners reader (thanks again, Matthew!) posted a comment with this link from Language Log that gets into more detail about what Biden said (including an actual recorded excerpt of the interview, so you can hear for yourself) versus what the New York Observer reported he said. It's so interesting I thought it deserved a separate top-level post.

From Mark Lieberman at Language Log:

But there's also a linguistic and a journalistic point here. Senator Biden's word sequence corresponds to two different sentences with very different meanings, and the Observer misquoted him by omitting the comma.

I don't know whether the Observer misrepresented Biden's statement out of ignorance, carelessness, or malice. Maybe [reporter Jason] Horowitz and his editors don't know the difference between the two types of relative clauses; maybe they didn't bother to think about the difference in interpretation in this case; or maybe they know the difference in general, thought about it in this case, and decided that it would make a better story to present the wrong version.

Again, let me emphasize that I do not know what Biden was thinking when he said what he said. As I wrote before, I'm sure that some people use "articulate" (intentionally or not) to express their mild surprise that some African-Americans have a command of the English language.

But having listened to the Biden interview excerpt, and considering the context of his remarks (sizing up his opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination), I agree with Lieberman that what Biden most likely meant was: Obama (the storybook political phenom behind "Obama-mania" -- a phrase that returns "about 105,000" results on Google) is the first African-American candidate who has a serious shot at the nomination because he is articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking. (I'm more disturbed by the word "clean," but I assume he's talking about the first-term senator's lack of negative baggage, not how often he showers. But I don't see how any of those adjectives in the second part of his sentence can be construed as prejudicial -- especially in politics. I welcome Joe Biden to say the same things about me, as long as he's sincere.)

In this context, if you can't describe a man like Senator Barack Obama, former president of the Harvard Law Review, as "articulate" (as in "Expressing oneself easily in clear and effective language: an articulate speaker"), then the word has no real-world meaning -- unless you honestly think Biden was attempting to point out that his fellow senator is "Endowed with the power of speech." Look: With Obama in the race, Biden doesn't have a chance at the nomination, anyway. I would love for Obama to be our next president. How refreshing it would be to have someone in the White House who expresses himself easily in clear and effective language. Or who knows how to pronounce "nuclear." Or who knows the difference between "dissemble" and "dissasemble"...

"I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe — I believe what I believe is right." — President George W. Bush, Rome, Italy, July 22, 2001

Senator Joseph Biden praised (or faintly damned) Senator Barack Obama last week by calling him "the first sort of mainstream African-American [presidential candidate], who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." OK, we know Jesse Jackson's record isn't exactly squeaky clean, what with the "Hymietown" and infidelity/paternity scandals and all. (I'm assuming that Biden was talking about the cleanliness of candidates' public images, not their personal hygiene.) Shirley Chisolm, Elizabeth Dole, Hillary Clinton and Carol Moseley Braun are not guys. Al Sharpton is not all that mainstream (how many people outside New York know who he is?) and -- at least when wearing a track suit -- not particularly nice-looking.

So, that leaves Obama, who is male and partly African-American. (He was born in Hawaii to a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas). He may also be all those other things Biden said, but it was the "African-American" part and the "articulate" part that got Biden in the most trouble. Obama said he didn't think Biden was making a subconscious racial slur. But as Lynette Clemetson wrote in a piece called "The Racial Politics of Speaking Well" in Sunday's New York Times: "Being articulate must surely be a baseline requirement for a former president of The Harvard Law Review.... It would be more incredible, more of a phenomenon, to borrow two more of the senator’s puzzling words, if Mr. Obama were inarticulate."

Good point. But if the former president of the Harvard Law Review cannot properly be described as "articulate," then who can? Just because somebody has achieved a certain position in life does not necessarily mean that person is articulate ("Expressing oneself easily in clear and effective language: an articulate speaker."). Clemetson notes that President Bush has also called Obama "articulate" -- which reminds me of when Bush called the late Gerald Ford "decent" and "competent." Mr. Bush went to Yale University (and is President of the United States of America) and yet he is about as articulate as Lindsay "Be Adequite" Lohan. Listen to him talk sometime. He appears to be painfully unaware of the meanings of the words he attempts to pronounce -- especially, perhaps, "decent," "competent" and "articulate." (Some Disassembly Required.) From his mouth, those words sound like insults. Given his record and the way he speaks, what indication do we have that he understands them?

I love Sarah Silverman and A.O. Scott all the more for this, from today's New York Times:

While most actors are reluctant to discuss critics’ opinions of them, Ms. Silverman addresses them head on, particularly a 2005 review of “Jesus Is Magic” by A. O. Scott, a film critic for The New York Times.

“It totally hurt my feelings and was like a kick in the stomach,” but, she said, she found it fascinating.

In the review Mr. Scott said her act was “the latest evidence that mocking political correctness has become a form of political correctness in its own right.”

“She depends on the assumption that only someone secure in his or her own lack of racism would dare to make, or to laugh at, a racist joke, the telling of which thus becomes a way of making fun simultaneously of racism and of racial hypersensitivity,” he wrote. In short, he added, “naughty as she may seem, she’s playing it safe.”

Ms. Silverman said the review articulated a point that she had felt, but had been struggling to express. “That was something that always festered in the back of my mind that I never talked about,” she said. Her crowds are usually liberal ones, “and we know we’re not racist,” she said. “But the whiter the crowd, the more that kind of voice in the back of my head comes toward the front, and I feel grosser doing that kind of stuff.”

“At the very least, it’s made me assess the choir,” she continued. “Context is everything, and I don’t think he would be pondering all that stuff if I was doing the material in front of an all-black crowd or a very mixed crowd,” which, she said, she regularly does.

Still, she added, she is reassessing at least part of her work.

“It was rebellious to be politically incorrect now and in the past couple of years,” she said. “But I don’t know how rebellious it will be when everybody has that point of view. It becomes hackneyed and it becomes irrelevant and it turns into something else.”

I've been arguing for several years now that, especially since 9/11, "political correctness" has evolved into a mostly reactionary phenomenon. The lefty PC that began as a way of showing sensitivity to minorities and those who had been discriminated against for years (women, the disabled, etc.) eventually turned into a form of monolithic, euphemistic denial of reality, where questioning was verboten and anything that could be interpreted as doubt or dissent was denounced as "fascist." Now we see the same thing coming from the right. The terminology has changed but the brainwashed thinking hasn't.

The inevitable backlash to liberal PC came in the form of the right-wing, talk-radio rebellion, in which uppity women were "feminazis" and liberals were "terrorist sympathizers" (even when they were too timid and spineless to oppose the administration's foreign policy blunders, which, ironically, flagrantly violated traditional conservative principles). Fox News took the talk-radio attitude mainstream, appealing to its viewers' PC biases so that it appeared, at least to the network's partisans, "fair and balanced." (If somebody already sees the world in black and white, and you show them a black and white image, they won't notice it's not in color.)

Anyway, even though I was a fan of Silverman's "Jesus Is Magic," I appreciate Scott's warning about where this is all going in the era of so-called "'South Park' Republicans." And I admire Silverman for questioning her own (and her audiences') underlying assumptions, as well.

“It’s now fundamentally an information fight. The enemy gets that, and we don’t yet get that, and I think that’s why we’re losing.�?
-- David Kilcullen

In "Knowing the Enemy," an essential article in the December 18 issue of The New Yorker, George Packer reports that some experts inside the Pentagon and Departments of State and Defense have been trying for years to explain (to Condoleeza Rice and others) why the US has yet to properly identify the enemies it's fighting in the "War on Terrorism" -- and, therefore, why we have been so shockingly ineffective at fighting it. As David Kilcullen, an Australian lieutenant colonel and political anthropologist currently "on loan" to the State Depatment, explains: "After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,’ I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It’s about human social networks and the way that they operate.... [I]t's not about theology. There are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what’s happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior.’"

Packer reports:

In a lecture that Kilcullen teaches on counterterrorism at Johns Hopkins, his students watch “Fight Club,�? the 1999 satire about anti-capitalist terrorists, to see a radical ideology without an Islamic face.

That, I submit, is revelatory. I wonder if those who can't see what's going on in "Fight Club" -- the feelings of impotence and alienation and personal violation that fuel the rage and the desire to belong to a force larger than the individual, even if it's just a form of nihilistic fascism that lacks the religious, racial or nationalistic aspirations of Naziism, Soviet Communism or "Bin Laden-ism" (for lack of a better term) -- can even begin to comprehend contemporary jihadism and what we now call "the insurgency" (as if there were just one).

Just as the Bush administration misunderstood Saddam's motives (Why is he acting like he's hiding something? Is it because he's hiding WMD -- or because he knows he'd be gone in a second if anybody knew he didn't have them?), they have also misread the nature of Osama bin Laden's motives, power and strategy for Al Quaeda and global jihad:

Just before the 2004 American elections, Kilcullen was doing intelligence work for the Australian government, sifting through Osama bin Laden’s public statements, including transcripts of a video that offered a list of grievances against America: Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, global warming. The last item brought Kilcullen up short. “I thought, Hang on! What kind of jihadist are you?�? he recalled. The odd inclusion of environmentalist rhetoric, he said, made clear that “this wasn’t a list of genuine grievances. This was an Al Qaeda information strategy.�? Ron Suskind, in his book “The One Percent Doctrine,�? claims that analysts at the C.I.A. watched a similar video, released in 2004, and concluded that “bin Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reëlection.�? Bin Laden shrewdly created an implicit association between Al Qaeda and the Democratic Party, for he had come to feel that Bush’s strategy in the war on terror was sustaining his own global importance. Indeed, in the years after September 11th Al Qaeda’s core leadership had become a propaganda hub. “If bin Laden didn’t have access to global media, satellite communications, and the Internet, he’d just be a cranky guy in a cave,�? Kilcullen said.

Kilcullen would make a good film critic. He understands human nature and has an eye for reading it in dramatic context. Thumbs up for him! (Bin Laden hadn't been a champion for the Palestinian cause before, either. It was obvious he was trying to create the perception of a war declared by the West against Muslims -- and Cheney, Rummy and Co. played right into that perception from Day One.)

Jagshemash! If you are confused about the difference between the fictional Kazakhstan, homeland of Borat Sagdiyev, as portrayed in "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" and the former Soviet Socialist Republic in Central Asia, why not visit the Official Web Site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan? Here you will find a FAQ (Truth About Kazakhstan) and other helpful resources, from which you will learn that potassium is not even listed among Kazakhstan's major exports:

Kazakhstan possesses 30 per cent of the world’s proven resources of chromium, 25 per cent of manganese, 19 per cent of lead, 13 per cent of zinc, 10 per cent of copper and 10 per cent of iron. Kazakhstan also possesses about 20 per cent of the world’s uranium resources, with plans to become among the world’s top producers, and contains Central Asia’s largest recoverable coal reserves.

Also, if you like America but are confused by the portrayal of the fictional one in "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," you can visit the Official America Web Site and learn about the land of Premier George Walter Bush, where you will discover that "Mainstream Media Reports Inaccurate." Also, there is this from Imperial Leader Bush: "We have a plan for victory in Iraq.... And I know the people of Montana can count on Conrad Burns to make sure our troops have all that is necessary to do the jobs I've asked them to do." This is the difference between the fiction America and the real one, if you can't tell. Conrad Burns from Big Sky Country will finally make sure our troops get what they need to do the job Bush has asked told them to do in Iraq! (And wasn't he the dad on "Diff'rent Strokes," too? Amazing fellow!)

The indignation over the BBC British speculative fiction film "Death of a President" has died down substantially since the film received its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Some of those who were initially alarmed and offended and downright disgusted at the idea of a film about the assassination of an American president seem to have figured out that presidential assassination is not a novel idea, even in the movies. (I do not recall a storm of outrage after season two of "24," which ended with an attempt on the life of President David Palmer; nor after the beginning of season five last January, which began -- SPOILER ALERT -- with a depiction of his assassination far more explicit than anything in "Death of a President.")

The most shocking thing about the movie is portrayal of the essential truth: that George W. Bush, like his father before him during Iran-Contra, is out of the loop of history. He's a dupe, the "wimp factor" personified, and he serves only as a placeholder for the people who decided to put him in power, when he was still a pathetic nobody in Texas (the pathetic nobody he reveals himself to be every time he opens his mouth). Dubya is but a balloon with a cartoonish face painted on it. Sooner or later, the illusion will pop. By 2006, that news shouldn't be shocking to many people -- but as a perspective on history, it's still a little ahead of the curve.

For the literalists among us, however, it's all in a name. As long as the character's name is fictional (even if the office he holds is not), then the dramatization of the repercussions of a hypothetical assassination (in the case of "DoaP," set in the future: October, 2007) is OK. Just as it's apparently OK to use Robert F. Kennedy's death as an opportunity to turn the Ambassador Hotel into something like "Neil Simon's California Suite with Assassination" (in "Bobby") because, well, that murder actually happened. Right? Then there's Philip Roth's 2004 alternate history novel, "The Plot Against America," in which Charles Lindberg defeats FDR in the 1940 presidential election and turns the United States into an anti-Semitic isolationist dystopia. That one has been read as an allegory for the current Bush administration, too, but Roth used other real names instead of George W. Bush's. Meanwhile, "South Park" and "Team America: World Police" graphically kill off real public figures by name, but use cartoons or puppets (with realistic gore). And disaster and horror movies depict the destruction of entire real-life cities and landmarks, with thousands or even millions killed, without any serious intent, but just for entertainment.

I don't know what the fuss is about, except that it's provided people on the right and the left with an opportunity to profess disingenuous pseudo-patriotic horror (they are shocked, shocked!) that such a thing would be deemed a suitable subject for a motion picture, and it's a good thing the U.S. Constitution protects freedom of speech because this is in bad taste and going too far, blather, blather, blather... (These are the same people who think Borat lives in the real Kazakhstan.)

Either you understand the difference between fact and fiction -- whether the names are real or not -- or you don't. Here's what I wrote after the Toronto press screening of "Death of a President":

"Death of a President," the documentary-style speculative fiction about the assassination of the 43rd President of the United States, is seamless, intelligent and maybe even necessary to an understanding of George W. Bush's role in the world today, and his place in the wider scope of history. Especially when public awareness of the facts about his administration lags so far behind what has already been documented.

Written and directed by Gabriel Range, this very convincingly staged television "documentary" falls into a tradition of fictionalized British films (going back to Peter Watkins' famous "The War Game" and "Punishment Park" in the early 1960s) that use nonfiction techniques to explore contemporary social and political issues. Range himself made a film in 2003 called "The Day Britain Stopped," about what might happen if public transportation came to a standstill. Before that, he made "The Menendez Murders" (2002), described as another form of docu-drama.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has issued the following statement about "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," which opens in the US November 3:

When approaching this film, one has to understand that there is absolutely no intent on the part of the filmmakers to offend, and no malevolence on the part of Sacha Baron Cohen, who is himself proudly Jewish. We hope that everyone who chooses to see the film understands Mr. Cohen's comedic technique, which is to use humor to unmask the absurd and irrational side of anti-Semitism and other phobias born of ignorance and fear.

We are concerned, however, that one serious pitfall is that the audience may not always be sophisticated enough to get the joke, and that some may even find it reinforcing their bigotry.

While Mr. Cohen's brand of humor may be tasteless and even offensive to some, we understand that the intent is to dash stereotypes, not to perpetuate them. It is our hope that everyone in the audience will come away with an understanding that some types of comedy that work well on screen do not necessarily translate well in the real world -- especially when attempted on others through retelling or mimicry.

My response: If anybody is stupid enough to think that "Borat" reinforces their own bigotry, then they can find reinforcement just about anywhere -- including the ADL's statement, which will probably do more to unintentionally inflame anti-Semitism than anything in "Borat."