In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

An offhand remark by Robert Barnes a week ago planted a seed in my thinking: he said the current contested election cycle should be compared to the contested elections of 1824 and 1876. Now, maybe I wasn't paying attention in American History class, but I don't think much was ever said about either of these elections. In the 1824 election, none of the candidates, led by John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, achieved a majority in the Electoral College. Under the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the US Constitution, the election went to the House of Representatives, where Adams was selected. I may discuss this separately in greater depth. The 1824 lection was the only contested election to go to the House. A similar disputed electoral result of 19 votes in 1876 was resolved by an ad hoc commission. Rutherford B Hayes, who had already been nominated as a compromise candidate by the Republicans in 1876, was awarded the 19 disputed votes, plus an additional vote from a disq...

So far, the single best commentator on the current election cycle and its potential aftermath is the attorney Robert Barnes, who by his account for much of his life has had a sideline of betting on elections. He doesn't have a blog, he doesn't normally write for independent media, and he doesn't have his own YouTube channel. However, he regularly appears in joint YouTube videos with Richard Barris, an independent pollster and under-the-radar pundit who has a YouTube channel called People's Pundit Daily. Barnes also appears in joint YouTube videos with a Montreal attorney on a channel called Viva Frei. Before the current election cycle, Barnes also offered insights there into well-publicized cases involving the Covington, KY Catholic schoolboys and General Michael Flynn. The Viva Frei commentator, as in the video above, also offers independent commentary on the current election cycle without Barnes. However, for the past several days, Barnes has gone silent, which...

I've already noticed that the Jason Bourne-Robert Ludlum trilogy of films goes against the Hollywood grain of woke-ing cultural history. Just the other night, I discovered another film of this type, the 2016 Magnificant Seven, which in some ways pays lip service to wokeness, but it reverts to the Western genre, which is older than superhero comics and perhaps less vulnerable to revisionism. It follows a plot paradigm of the genre, the oppressive rancher who tries to force law-abiding settlers out of their town by hiring thugs to harass them. This is the situation we see addressed in classic films like Shane and historical episodes like the gunfight at the OK Corral. The hero is the man of integrity, bravery, and skill who stands up to bullies but, like George Washington, renounces power once he's done it. The problm in the film is the nature of the bully. Somewhere in the American character, it's possible to see the government as the bully, and once this Pandora'...

Ever since I read The Rich and the Super Rich: A Study in the Power of Money (1968) in the 1970s, I keep wanting to discuss it in various forums and chat rooms, but I'm always dismissed as a paranoid nut. The problem is that Lundberg's thesis is played out in plain view in daily life. It's encapsulated in the quote in the background of the photo at right (click on the image for a larger copy). His thesis is that America is dominated by a clique of 60 highly influential families -- let's stop right there. Critiques of his America's 60 Families (1937) complain that he never lists the 60 families he's talking about. This misunderstands Lundberg. He's a rhetorician, not a sociologist. His writing is brilliantly outrageous hyperbole -- the American people he characterizes as sansculottes and descamisados , which of course isn't literally true at all; many wear designer clothes, even the poor. He's speaking of their relative political power, which in ...

This was the title of Buckley associate Jeffrey Hart's obituary in the Washington Post in early 2019. Dartmouth classmates contacted me as soon as the news broke. I think it's fair to say that for the time he taught there, from the early 1960s to 1995, Hart in many ways was Dartmouth. By the time of his retirement, his lectures had to be held in the largest auditorium facilities available. I was always more ambivalent. I went to graduate school in English at the University of Southern California, where partly under Hart's influence, I specialized in eighteenth century. But early in my time there, the professors who became my mentors took me aside. They'd been looking at my Dartmouth transcripts and had seen all the courses I'd taken from Hart. They explained to me in not quite the same words that Hart was a public dilettante, someone not to be taken seriously. Indeed, one of those who spoke to me was Donald Greene, acknowledged at the time to be Mr Samuel Johnson...

Buckley died in early 2008, before the Obama phenomenon, but my fast answer is "yes".The more considered answer will take this post, one tomorrow, and possibly more. With his contemporary Hugh Hefner, he developed a new kind of persona in the 1950s, the publisher as public dilettante. His depictions in media rotuinely show him vamping and mugging for the camera to a remarkable degree, but it's always a question of tone and style, not substance. He espoused Catholicism, but he never did it with any particular rigor, and it's difficult to know if the Buckleys were Catholic in any readily distinguishable way from, say, the Kennedys. By the same token, the intellectul figures the National Review embraced included Edmund Burke, whom I've always tended to regard as another public dilettante. While his political writings are best known, he also wrote on the sublime (an essay that I think is better and more important than the other stuff). But he had no center, which i...

The proximate cause of my starting this blog was when, last Sunday night, A&E ran the Jason Bourne trilogy of films based on the Robert Ludlum novels. I never took any interest in Ludlum as a writer, and it wasn't until a few years ago when I saw The Bourne Ultimatum for the first time and recognized that, at least, with all the fights and explosions and car chases and stuff, it wasn't bad entertainmnet. But that was before Crossfire Hurricane and the peeing Russian hookers reached the national consciousness. We decided to record the whole trilogy when A&E ran it and watched all three over the next nights. What struck me was the image portrayed of the CIA throughout the three films, The original Ludlum novels appeared between 1980 and 1990, while the film trilogy we watched appeared between 2002 and 2007, long before Donald Trump was anything but a playboy billionaire and reality TV star. Yet the image of the CIA and its fictional director, Martin Marshall, is th...