Just now I logged on to Facebook and on an irritated whim I commented on a remark posted by a friend who has been somewhat estranged lately for reasons not germane to this.

Or perhaps they are. I often wonder how ideology affects one’s personal loyalty, ethics, etc. I haven’t seen a direct one-to-one relationship, it’s more complicated than that, but still…

At any rate, what this person posted was:

“Unregulated free market capitalism looks suspiciously like China…..”

I posted:

“Stephen W. Browne: Dumb on so many levels. A free market is not and cannot be “unregulated” by definition. A market systems cannot function without rules: against fraud and force, misrepresentation in advertising, enforcement of contracts,”

Then I hit the ENTER key, which I do often on Facebook. On some sites ENTER gives you a paragraph break. On Facebook it actually enters what you’ve written, and I often forget that. (And by the way, how do you get a paragraph break on Facebook?

So I continued to write:

“Stephen W. Browne: China has moved away from a totalitarian system that outright murdered tens of millions of people and caused mass starvation of similar numbers through the sheer economic idiocy that has resulted from every attempt at centrally planning the economy. And have you seen China? Nor have I, but I have taken the trouble to get to know a fair number of Chinese with first-hand experience of both countries. Some in the context of helping them defect. I have seen and lived in not one, but three countries which were in the process of moving from controlled economies to at least freer markets. In each case I saw first-hand the explosion of prosperity that followed immediately afterwards. I have visited at intervals several more, and seen reliable reports of still more. In contrast as a country, ours in this case, has fallen lower on the economic freedom index maintained by the Canadian think tank Fraser, well we see the results around us. This is so silly that, as one scientist said, “It’s not even wrong.” How China and the U.S. resemble each other is not in being “an unregulated free market” but in us moving towards the kind of crony capitalism of China. One where the government allows a minimal market, but picks the winners and losers through preferential regulation, complicated tax codes, awarding government contracts to favored supporters, and outright subsidies, bailouts etc.”

Then I hit ENTER, and this popped up:

“Sorry, you may not have permission to add this comment or the original post may have been deleted.”

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Note: Published in the TV Guide issue of The Marshall Independent.

I must confess, I am kind of tepid about vampire fiction as entertainment, but as a jackleg social scientist I find the recent social phenomenon of “vampire as good guy” fiction fascinating.

Underworld Awakening is in chronological order the third movie in a series of four of the Underworld vampire/werewolf saga and set in the near future. A prequel, “Underworld: Rise of the Lycans” filled in the back story of the origin of vampires, werewolves, and the war between them back in the middle ages.

The first two movies: “Underworld,” and “Underworld Evolution,” are set in the present. “Underworld Awakening” is set in the near future, when the existence of vampires and werewolves has become known and the authorities have waged a war of extermination against them.

Now in a previous generation of vampire films, that would be taken as a given, “Well duh.”

A lot vampire/werewolf flicks of the past, such as the Hammer films of fond memory, would have a plot subtext of the valiant vampire hunter desperately trying to prove to skeptics there are such things, precisely so we could get together and exterminate them.

In the Underworld world, vampires are a virally mutated species who have learned how to produce artificial blood, or just live off animals, and coexist with normal humans while they fight werewolves (“lycans”) with hi-tech weapons. Except sometimes they yield to temptation and just have to dine on traditional vampire cuisine, a la the Twilight series.

The central character is again Selena (Kate Beckinsale,) a beautiful 300-something vampire trained as a death-dealer, i.e. a superhuman martial arts master who kills lycans.

Selena had previously found out the secret behind the centuries-old war, and the death of her family at the fangs of the vampire elder who turned her. Vampires and lycans it turns out, are sort of cousins, descendants of twin brothers who got bitten by a bat and a wolf respectively. By the end of “Underworld: Evolution” Selena has mutated again to the point she can stand sunlight, and is partnered with the first vampire-lycan hybrid.

At the beginning of “Awakening” Selena has been in cold storage in a laboratory for 12 years, and evidently had a daughter (India Eisley) while she was on ice. The daughter is a hybrid like her father. The lab is run by secret lycans who want to vivisect her daughter Eve (get it? First of a new race, Eve) to create a race of bigger, stronger lycans who are immune to silver.

Selena’s mate, Eve’s father Michael (Scott Speedman) is AWOL in this flick, though present in spirit and presumably will be reunited in the future.
There’s lots of slam-bang action, gun fights, explosions, and hand-to-hand combat in this one. My 10-year-old son loved it of course, “Because I like movies with hotties in them.”

The plot alas, is a bit thin, though to be fair it does advance the series story line in a way that promises more sequels.

The movie ends with Selena, Eve, and a young vampire David (Theo James) escaping just behind and just missing Michael, promising they’ll be back. Back to what is only hinted at, but perhaps to being the secret masters of the world or something. Not an appetizing prospect for us mere humans, but could hardly be worse than the current crop of blood-sucking politicians who run things.

So what is it about vampires and why has the modern incarnation of the legend mutated so far from its origins as a walking, blood drinking corpse?
Well for one, they’re immortal, and they’re super strong and fast. For another, they’re scary when they want to be. If you’re a vampire guy, you can offer the ladies something nobody else can, eternal youth and beauty. And vampire chicks are hot.

Vampires it seems, have replaced Superman as the hero we would like to be. Perhaps it’s because becoming a vampire is doable, while to be Superman you have to have been born on Krypton.

And vampires are powerful in an age when many feel we have lost power over our own lives.

So what the heck, take your kids (10 is about the lower limit I’d say,) they’ll enjoy the action and noise. And dad, watching English actress Kate Beckinsale kick butt in a skin-tight leather jumpsuit is the best English import since Emma Peal in “The Avengers.”

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Note: Published in the TV Guide of The Marshall Independent.

Critical reactions to “The Adventures of Tintin” seem to be either love it or hate it, I confess to mixed feelings.

I have been passingly familiar with Tintin longer than Spielberg actually, because as a boy some of my best friends were French and had the books around. But I was not a fan myself, so the character was sort of new to me, and entirely new to my 10-year-old son.

Tintin was directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Peter Jackson, based on the long-running series of comic books by Belgian artist Georges Prosper Remi (1907 – 1983,) better known by his pen name Hergé.

You’d think a combination like that couldn’t be beat. Indiana Jones meets Lord of the Rings, via one of the most popular European comics ever.
Spielberg became a fan in 1981 when he read a review comparing “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to Tintin. Herge returned the compliment when he declared Spielberg the only man who could bring his creation to the screen.

Tragically, Herge died a few weeks before they were to meet.

The film, Spielberg’s first animated feature, was made in 3-D using motion capture, the technique where the movement is recorded and translated on to a digital model. I saw it on flat screen but didn’t feel I missed anything.

The major supporting character Captain Haddock was played by Andy Serkis, famous for his uncanny mocap performance as Gollum in Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings.”

The film follows young reporter/adventurer Tintin (Jamie Bell) who discovers a secret clue to the location of a pirates treasure in an antique model ship he buys at a flea market. A villain Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine (Daniel “Bond, James Bond” Craig) immediately shows up and attempts to buy, then steal the ship, and then kidnaps Tintin and imprisons him on a ship bound for Algeria. There he meets Captain Haddock and through a series of non-stop action scenes discovers the history of the families of Sakharine and Haddock, the location of part of the treasure, and a map to the rest of the treasure, whereupon the movie ends on the promise of at least one sequel.

The reviewers were right, the action of Tintin is uncannily like Indiana Jones adventures. So much so that I automatically assumed this was Spielberg doing Spielberg with someone else’s character. Not so, it was evidently the meeting of kindred spirits in a match made in Hollywood heaven.

And yet, though I certainly don’t mind movies depicting newspaper reporters as action heros, there was something underwhelming about it. Something I can’t quite put my finger on.

The action was slam-bang, the plot convoluted enough to keep one mentally occupied. There are moments of maddening tension, as when the bumbling Interpol detectives Thompson and Thompson are admiring Aristides Silk’s “wallet collection” and you’re jumping up and down waiting for these two idiots to realize the fellow is confessing to being the pickpocket they’re after.

But I left the theater in a mood not much different than I went in, and my son had nothing to say about the movie from that moment to bedtime.

Steve Rose, movie critic from The Guardian said the film entered the “uncanny valley.”

That’s the hypothetical point at which a robot or 3D computer animation starts to look too human. When a character looks human-like but not too humanoid the theory goes, it inspires affection. At the point it starts to look too human, it inspires revulsion.

Not quite, I think. What I felt was not revulsion.

What I think it was, was that when you see Indiana Jones doing these wildly improbably but barely possible stunts, like doing a balancing act between two speeding vehicles or hitching a ride on a submarine by clinging to the periscope, you can suspend disbelief enough to be thrilled by the danger and excitement.

The trouble is, Tinin is neither cartoon nor human. The action does not suspend the laws of nature like a cartoon. You don’t see any character walking off a cliff and not falling until he notices he’s walking on air for instance. But when he does these Indy Jones type of stunts, I was left with a feeling of, “Big deal, he’s a cartoon.”

Maybe I’m wrong, box office has been great around the world. Maybe I’ll get used to this eventually. But for now, though I’ll probably see the sequel, it didn’t smack me right between the eyes like Raiders or Lord of the Rings.

On the other hand, what else does?

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(Cross-posted on my blog at The Marshall Independent.”

For those who enjoy following celebrity public spats, there was rather a good one at the American Airlines lost luggage area at LAX on Sunday (Dec. 18.)

Cuban-born star Maria Conchita Alonso spotted Sean Penn, approached him and braced him for his support of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.

Things escalated until Penn called Alonso a “pig,” and Alonso replied, “And you are a communist a**hole! It is great to live the way you do as a communist!”

Penn would not reply to press inquiries about the incident, but a representative told the New York Post that a “hostile woman was nonsensically berating” Penn.

Alonso later made a statement, “The only thing I regret is me calling him an a** hole because I lowered myself to where he is at, and took away my class at that second, but I don’t regret calling him a communist. The other thing I regret that nothing came out of this for us to meet in private. What happened Sunday isn’t really the way I wanted things to happen, I thought, ‘This is the perfect moment for me to go and tell him lets meet and talk.’ I have facts and he doesn’t. All he sees is what Chavez has presented. I am still not having a conversation with him, which is what I wanted to achieve that day. But all this is still good because I have an opportunity now to tell people that what Sean says is not true. How can you believe someone like Chavez? You have to be stupid, which I know Sean is not.”

Alonso was raised in Venezuela after her parents escaped Castro’s Cuba. She is a former Miss Venezuela and first entered show business in Venezuela and Mexico.

Penn is Hollywood royalty, the son of actor/director Leo Penn and actress Eileen Ryan. Leo Penn was blacklisted during the 1950s, and though you have to dig a bit to confirm it, was in fact a member of the Communist Party (CPUSA.)

Sean Penn has palled around with Chavez, as well as spending some serious face time with Cuban dictator Raul Castro in 2008. Back in 2002 he toured Baghdad as celebrity guest of Saddam Hussein, and on his return erected a larger-than-life sized statue of the late unlamented dictator in his front yard.

So is Sean Penn a communist, a chip off the old block?

I seriously doubt Penn has the brains or the patience to wade through ‘Das Kapital.’ Nor does he seem the kind to give up his fortune to live in a commune, or subject his professional judgment to Party discipline as so many Hollywood writers did back then. His fairly lengthy arrest record for assault indicates “does not play well with others.”

Penn once described himself in an interview, “Let’s face it. I’m a person that feels pretty alienated from the rest of the world and never felt understood by anyone.”

Poor misunderstood fellow, with nothing to console him but his millions.

“I’ve been spreading the word around for a while that I’ve wanted to talk to him and Danny Glover and even Oliver Stone. But they haven’t wanted to talk to me. I want to believe that it is just ignorance. I want to believe that those amazing directors and writers and actors that praise communist leaders just don’t know the truth and have been brainwashed by the propaganda,” Alonso said.

With all due respect to Alonso, I think she misses the point entirely.

What Penn, Glover, Stone, and a lot of their ilk are, is dictator groupies.

Dictator groupies, to put it bluntly, like hanging around with people who kill people. Similar to gangster groupies, like the celebrities who liked to hang around with “Crazy Joey” Gallo before he got whacked in the Gallo-Profacci War in 1972. (But hey, he got immortalized in a song by Bob Dylan no less.)

Dictator groupies are not unaware of the mass murders committed by their idols, how could they not be? They admire them.

Probably everyone has had the “if I were king of the world I’d set everything to rights and kill all the no-good $#!+s” fantasy. The difference is, these people take it a lot more seriously than us grownups. And of course, who else but professional creators of fantasy would be so susceptible to taking that fantasy seriously?

But there’s another thing too I think. Academics, professional intellectuals, and people who have inherited wealth and professional advantages (and note how many prominent Hollywood people these days have inherited their intro into the entertainment industry,) tend to be a bit on the wimpy side. They admire strength, but they don’t know what real strength is.

And all too often, they think strength is brutality.

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Published in The Marshall Independent TV Guide

I really didn’t want to like this movie, so it was with some trepidation that I decided to review it, with visions of mobs of angry teenage girls besieging the Independent’s office with torches and pitchforks dancing in my head.

Plus I have met and liked one of the actors (Dimitri the vampire) and it’s kind of touchy critiquing the work of someone you know, however slightly.

But I was trained as an anthropologist with a strong background in folklore studies since childhood. This recent trend in reworking the vampire legends offends me professionally.

Let’s get this straight, a vampire is not Anne Rice’s “dark, Byronic figure.” A vampire is a corpse risen from the dead. In some legends reanimated by a demon. They could be victims of other vampires, atheists, illegitimate children, or other outcasts and undesirables come back from the dead to exact a geek’s revenge on society.

And they have bad breath.

Admittedly there have been some pretty good modern reworkings the vampire theme, discarding much or most of the supernatural elements of the legends. One is vampirism-is-a-disease, inspired by theories that vampire legends may have drawn on observations of victims suffering from pernicious anemia, porphyria, or rabies. The “Blade” series is an example.

Another is that vampires are another species that prey on humans from their position one link higher on the food chain. Good examples of this are “The Vampire Tapestry” by Suzy McGee Charnas, and “Fevre Dream” by George R.R. Martin.

The “Twilight” series falls into the vampirism-as-a-communicable-disease camp. If you can call an infection that makes you stronger, faster, and gives you psychic powers and everlasting youth a disease. There is that overwhelming desire for human blood thing, but evidently that can be controlled by strong self-discipline and animal blood, according to author Stephanie Meyers.

There is so much about this movie that grates. To begin with it drags, if you’re not in the mood to watch beautiful scenery (Oregon and Rio) while waiting for the action to start. And for those of us who have actually been present for a partner’s pregnancy and delivery, it makes one kind of queasy as Bella’s life-threatening pregnancy advances, and definitely gross when she drinks human blood and delivers by Caesarian section performed by amateurs.

And oddly, since Robert Pattinson (Edward) and Kristen Stewart (Bella) are reportedly a real-life couple, there is something missing from their on-screen romance. Edward is 80-odd years older than Bella but we don’t see a hint of the tensions, misunderstandings, and sweet poignancy couples with a marked age difference experience. It is mentioned Edward struggles between his love for Bella and his desire to murder her for the blood in her veins, but again it doesn’t show in their performances much.

(Russian-English actor George Sanders once remarked, “It is impossible to be in love with a woman without experiencing upon occasion, a desire to strangle her.” I suspect women feel a different urge than strangulation, and am quite certain it’s more than occasionally.)

But all that said, I have to say the popularity of the Twilight series among young people fascinates me.

I think all thoughtful people must realize this is a bad time for lovers in our society. We are conflicted about what the nature of real manliness is, somewhere between the extremes of wimpiness and brutality.

What I see here are young, and not so young, girls longing for manly strength, gallantry, and lustiness tempered by honor and discipline. A man who could tear apart anyone who threatens them, but who wouldn’t willingly harm a hair on their head. A man who is stirred by their femininity but can keep his hands to himself. A man in whose arms they’d feel safe jumping off a high cliff into a tropical pool.

Teenage Bella is courted by not one, but two such men. Bitter rivals who it appears will become fast friends. And it is strongly hinted, the rejected suitor will become the hero her newborn daughter will need in a dangerous world.

I see the wish-fulfillment fantasy of every girl becoming a woman, in a society unsure of what a man should be. And I wonder what it means that this is presented as a fantasy.

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Note: Printed in the Marshall Independent TV Guide

What you first see when you tune into “Knights of Mayhem,” a new reality show on of all places the National Geographic Channel, appears to be a bunch of smack-talking, foul-mouthed rednecks with egos bigger than their outsized selves. Then you see them in 130 pounds of plate armor mounted on 2,000-plus pound horses, charging at each other with 11-foot wooden poles at 30 miles per hour.

What they’re doing is called “jousting” which was what men did in the Late Middle Ages instead of football.

Jousting originated as a combat sport for mounted knights in the High Middle Ages. By the 15th and 16th centuries it had evolved pretty far from its martial origins, using specially designed jousting armor much heavier and less articulated than armor for warfare.

This by the way, is what led to the popular misconception that a knight unhorsed and lying on the ground could not get up due to the weight of his armor.

The death of King Henry II of France in a joust in 1559 is generally held to mark the end of jousting as a sport. Since then there have been periodic revivals, mostly of what is called “theatrical jousting,” where the joust is carefully choreographed with a pre-determined “winner.”
This isn’t that. These guys in the Ultimate Jousting Championship engage in the real thing, breaking lances on each other’s armor and trying to knock them off their horses.

It’s worth mentioning that in 2007 a jouster in England was killed in precisely the same way as Henry II when a splinter from a lance got him right through the eye-slits of the helmet. Concussions are common, as are injuries to the hands and shoulders.

The UJC is the brainchild of Charlie Andrews, who founded the organization in 2010 with the intention of popularizing jousting as the Next Big Thing in extreme sports. Charlie was taught jousting by Patrick Lambke, aka “The Black Knight,” onetime mentor and now bitter rival.

Charlie, to put it mildly, has an ego. He’s proclaimed that it is vital for the future of the sport that he win the World Championship.

Considering the “World” in this case is no more than a dozen guys who meet at various venues around the country, that tends to grate on people’s nerves.

Charlie is a tad obsessive about jousting. He’s admitted he’s gone broke and lost his family trying to promote the sport.

Add to that a lot of typical reality-show bickering, and talk like, “If you put my grandmother up on a horse I’d knock her on her…” and you’ve got a pretty high irritation factor.

Plus, jousting is actually a very sophisticated sport requiring superior horsemanship and fine point control of a long lance that is not light while atop a bouncing horse. The uneducated eye will not see the subtleties of technique and become easily bored.

Not to mention jousting is expensive. It requires a full suit of custom-made plate armor, a carefully-trained horse only slightly smaller than an elephant which consumes massive amounts of grain, not hay, and the rig to haul it all around in. Factor in training time and that $20,000 purse for the championship doesn’t look all that big.

So who does this kind of thing?

To begin with, big guys. If jousting had weight classes, a 200 pound man would be a lightweight. Other than that, former soldiers, football players, one former MMA fighter, guys who grew up on horses, a few who learned to ride just so they could joust.

And why do they do it?

Glory. The charge that comes from mastery of something so strenuous, so dangerous, and so cool.
You see real jousting, and you don’t wonder where all that ego comes from.

Now if only they could learn to talk with the delicate courtesy of the knights of old.

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Movie review: Immortals. Starring: Henry Cavill, Mickey Rourke, Frida Pinto, John Hurt. Directed by Tarsem Singh. (Published in The Marshall Independent TV Guide.)

Years ago at a graduate school party I was having a typical grad student discussion of Deep Stuff with some Asian fellow-grads about Western Civilization.

Trying to explain what I thought was the basis for the self-identification of North Americans and Europeans as “Western” I said, “No matter where our ancestors came from, if we are Western then in some essential way we are all Hebrews and we are all Greeks.”

Once upon a time when I was young, all students were exposed to the Greek myths at least a little by the end of grade school. I am no longer sure if that’s true, which is why I welcome movies based on the Greek myths reintroducing another generation to some of the founding traditions of our civilization.

When you translate ancient myths into novels or movies, there are several options open to you.

You can use special effects to recreate the fantastical elements of the classical myths and do a fairly straightforward story based on the myth, perhaps with some modifications for modern audiences. This was done brilliantly in Ray Harryhausen’s “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963,) and pretty well in “Clash of the Titans” in 1981, and not quite as well but with the benefit of CGI in 2010.

You can euhemerize the story. Euhemeros was a Greek who lived in the 4th century BC. He theorized that myths were fantastic or allegorical accounts based on real historical events and people. Euhemerization is a kind of back formation based on a theory of what the real people and events that inspired the myths might actually have been.

This is how poet Robert Graves treated the story of the argonauts in his novel, “Hercules My Shipmate,” portraying a world of men motivated by fear of angry gods and vengeful ghosts, and banded together in fraternities with totems such as the horse (“centaurs,”) or goat (“fauns.”)
You can take a mythological character and the broad outlines of his legend and create a whole new series of adventures for him. Such as the lightweight but fun Kevin Sorbo “Hercules” TV series. One may always hope this will motivate some kids to look up the original myths.

And lately there has been a science fiction approach to the myths, where the gods are interpreted as aliens or inter-dimensional beings who inspired the myth makers.

This was the approach used in an original Star Trek episode, “Who Mourns for Adonis?” and recently in the Marvel Comics production “Thor.”

Or you can totally disregard the original story, rip off a few names from mythology, and call it ancient Greece.

That was what director Tarsem Singh did in this piece of dreck, “Immortals.”

There is no resemblance to the myths of Theseus (and by the way, the correct pronunciation is “Thee-soos,” not “Thee-see-us,”) Phaedra, or Hyperion.

There is a plot of sorts, the quest of the hero for a Weapon of Power that Unleashes Unimaginable Evil.

There are a lot of predictable developments you’ve seen before. Not necessarily a bad thing, myths are stories told again and again that we never get tired of. When the hero and the love interest, in this case a virgin prophetess (a al “The Scorpion King,”) consummate their attraction for each other this early in the movie, you know the hero is going to die in the end after fathering a son (“Terminator.”)

But mostly nothing hangs together. Plot developments are introduced, and just left hanging.

Theseus isn’t the son of a princess and either a king or the god Poseidon, His mother was raped and is the village cast-off. King Hyperion reveals he hates the gods because his family all died in a plague, and he was a peasant like Theseus who worked his way up to king and war lord. Phaedra the prophetess gives herself to Theseus because foresight is an intolerable burden, etc.

And what is done with these admittedly intriguing plot lines?

NOTHING! Zero, zip, nada.

On the other hand there are lots of good fight scenes, Henry Cavill is hunky, and Frida Pinto is definitely easy on the eyes. Treat it as eye-candy and you’ll be OK with it. But if it’s the Greek myths you want, find a DVD of “Jason and the Argonauts” for your kids.

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Note: Cross-posted from my newspaper blog.

Friday morning I got to climb up one of the two interior ladders of the wind tower simulator at the Minnesota Emergency and Response Industrial Training (MERIT) Center in Marshall. Very cool.

That evening I went to a wine tasting for the United Way. Also very cool. Very glad it was in that order though.

The excuse was to take photos of the preliminary informal dedication of the tower simulator, which will be used to train maintenance and rescue workers. There will be a more formal dedication in the Spring.

The climb was made in the company of several city officials and members of the MERIT advisory board. We strapped into safety harnesses, got a quick orientation from professional instructors, and up we went two-by-two on the two interior ladders. That’s about 70 feet to the nacelle simulator, then from there you get to climb up onto the roof and take in the view.

I stress we were attached to the ladder all the way up, and clamped onto the tower at all times on the roof. These guys do take safety seriously.

Of course, with all the guys and ladies around, nobody was about to chicken out in front of everybody else. Though heights are not my favorite thing I did it hand over hand, foot over foot, staring fixedly at the wall opposite me and never looking up or down.

When I got down my arms were aching slightly from clinging to the ladder with more force than was strictly necessary. I then reminded my boss of a little-known rule in journalism: whenever you climb a 70-foot tower for an assignment you get to take the afternoon off.

But all in all, it was an exhilarating experience, one I’ll not soon forget.

The irony of it was though, we didn’t use any of the pictures I took from the top. So here’s one for you, loyal readers.

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I recommend Sarah Palin’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal, “How Congress Occupied Wall Street.”

If you want to dismiss Palin as an intellectual lightweight, go ahead. This may after all be basically a book report on something written by one of her staff – but Palin had the sense to first employ the guy, then promote his book.

The staffer is Peter Schweizer, and the book is “Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison.”

And incidentally I can’t think of anything that illustrates the corruption of our media and political culture more than the comparison between how the Tea Party demonstrations were treated, versus the Occupy Wall Street, Oakland, etc.

On the one hand you had huge crowds of largely middle-aged, working, successful, well-educated people, come together to protest the bankrupting of our country by an out-of-control government. They assembled peacefully, left property intact and no trash behind, then went back to their homes and their jobs.

On the other hand you had affluent kids supported by their parents, no jobs – or how else could they afford to camp out in public places for weeks? They vandalized the places they occupied, and the surrounding businesses, and had a significant interpersonal crime rate, disturbed the peace of the neighborhoods, and left the places filthy. Insofar as they had any coherent message at all, they were against “greed” but wanted the government to forgive the massive loans they took out to subsidize years of idleness while acquiring indoctrination miscalled “education” after realizing it left them with no employable skills or even work habits.

The first were vilified as “racists” on no evidence at all, labeled with an obscene name “teabaggers,” and dismissed when they were not simply ignored.

The second were treated with sympathy by the mainstream press, courted by leftist politicians, and taken seriously as a “movement” although there was no evidence of ideological coherence or any broad-based support at all.

Indeed, it seems more than likely any initial sympathy in the areas they occupied has vanished by now.

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Note: My personal blog is on indefinite hiatus, however I am cross-posting from my newspaper blog at The Marshall Independent and the print-only TV Guide.

Michael Moore recently tried to deny the blindingly obvious on Piers Morgan’s TV talk show.

Moore said he is not one of the “1 percent” of “fat cats” the Occupy (blank) crowd are protesting in various venues across the country.

“I’m not,” Moore denied. “I am devoting my life to those who have less and who have been (bleeped) upon by the system.”

To begin with, that wasn’t the question. A rich person can spend his or her life helping the less fortunate, and many have. But I believe the question was about whether Moore was in the top 1 percent of individual net worth, and Moore’s $2 million home on Michigan’s toney Torch Lake and estimated net worth of around $50 million put him, if not in the top percentile then certainly within spitting distance of it.

I find Moore’s attitude irritating.

Moore is coming off like the kind of people we used to call “parlor pinks” or “limousine liberals,” i.e. well-off people who wear their concern for the poor on their sleeves. Who’d do anything for the working class – except join it.

Don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely nothing against wealthy philanthropists, and in fact have a great deal of admiration for many of them and their not inconsiderable contributions to society.

What irritates me is “poor mouthing.” That “I’m really one of you” posturing.

With $50 million in the bank, Moore is manifestly not one of me. Furthermore, all indications show that he came by his fortune honestly, by creating a product people were willing to pay for. Not one to my taste, but enough folks liked what he sells to make him rich, so more power to him. So obviously, “The System” has worked pretty well for him.

(OK, so he got the seed money to make “Roger and Me” by suing his former employer Mother Jones, which is not technically illegal but…)

Quite frankly, from seeing interviews with Moore, I don’t think he’s any smarter than I am. He certainly isn’t more handsome than me, and I’m obviously in lots better shape. I generally dress better for work too.

There is the question of talent of course. Whatever one thinks of the content of Moore’s documentaries, they are visually brilliant. I don’t know if that’s innate talent for camera work or something I could learn. I suspect I could, I take pretty good pictures and digital photography makes it easy and cheap.

Where the really irritating subtext of Moore’s message comes in, is the whole assumption behind his railing against The System that Poops on Us is that he could get rich through hard work and brains, but I couldn’t possibly. That calm assumption of superiority that just chaps my (bleep.)

Mr. Moore, I don’t mind that you’re rich, I’m not the least bit envious of your good fortune. Just hold the patronizing attitude if you please.

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