Long Sunday

A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true [updated]

Having just watched the later, 60's film version of Hemingway's The Killers (after the Tarkovsky and Burt Lancaster) featuring one Ronald Reagan, I cannot help but feel I understand these comments about "time and space" in a whole new way.  Ronald was an odd duck wasn't he (the word, "stilted" seems invented just for him, back when art of faux-working class swagger and unflinching confidence was quite enough).  A common thought:  why was America always so much behind the times?  Anyway this guy Rx is saying something very much in the manner of cognitive dissonance with this mashup; perhaps usefully provoking: Download freedom101Rx.mov

Those familiar with the story and even those not may find this engaging article by Ron Berman useful reading:

Paxless in Americana

It's a match made in heaven.  One wonders if they know each other?  A commenter on the latter, one "Big Billy" asks a good question:

What if a pair of opposing hypocrits (where one says one thing and doesw [sic] the other, and the other says the other and does the one thing) team up? As a human, I find it impossible to constantly avoid hypocrasy [sic], so why not pair up and embrace out hypocritical natures, and then we can really progress, right? My partner will do my work for me while I do his work for him. We will both get our jobs done while approaching more exagerated extremes.
But then again, we're probably better off if you just call me an idiot too.

In this our quest, for the ultimate blog brevity I then leave it to you, dear eater, to draw your own excursions.  For it is a black and white world, with the Author sitting f'evern top (ever'n especially whilst claiming the bottom!) and we was only ever kiddin', once Hugh challenged e to a duel. 

A duel, e says!  At dawn, no less.  E dunno, somehow "be offended, but say so" just don't 'ave the same ring to it.    An' sometimes it be da fools who call idiots, "idiots" best.

And if charity be not charitable

"Sometimes resentment would cross our faces, sometimes wildness would fill our eyes, but we were tame apes, and we dreamt not of the savannah, but of the books we would write in imitation of others."

backlash era, how it lingers

Thomas Friedman speaks in a certain identifiable tradition of American grandeur and conceit, to be sure, often in coy or generally evasive dialogue with all the proppings of male authority and expertise that comes with such a...___ (you fill it in).  He's a sly marketeer, in that he allows himself just enough show of humility, just enough willingness to pander to ambiguity when confronted, at ease amidst a barrage of sexy soundbite talking points gleaned from cocktail parties with those "in" power, that often those who waste money on his books are the first to say, "Oh I know, it's only one opinion."  To which I often reply, as I take their money, "huh."

Such shadow-wrestling as Friedman's and countless others, not so much with big ideas as with great swaths of time poorly understood or dishonestly portrayed, betrays in its "success" a ready-made market for gross generalization and half-baked speculation just barely clever enough to appear contrarian (so long as it conforms in the end)—this much seems obvious.  I've been considering lately a bit of Walter Benjamin.  Or rather, in the words of Wendy Brown (reading also Stuart Hall) on "Resisting Left Melancholy:"