Category Archives: Books and movies

Movies and the absence of truth

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My favourite story about the film “Mary Poppins” was told to me by one of my housemates in London. He was acutely embarrassed at 15 by being asked to take his eight year old cousin to see the movie but from the moment he heard Dick van Dyke’s cockney accent, it was his cousin who ended up embarrassed because of my friend’s hysterical laughter through the whole of the rest of the film. It’s a movie I have never warmed to and even seeing parts of it again in “Saving Mr Banks” did nothing to make me think different. But “Saving Mr Banks” we did like as we watched it, and the Australian scenes were better than you might have hoped, but now that I have learned a bit more, it is quite a disgusting event we have been party to.

As for the accuracy of the story, it’s a Disney movie about Walt Disney, so it was never going to be an honest portrayal. But there is a level of accuracy that is a minimal requirement. Because having seen the film I have now read this, Nine ‘Mary Poppins’ facts ‘Saving Mr. Banks’ did not get right. The first one, though, is the most compelling and makes you see the film in such a very different light that the real question is why did they even pretend they were dealing with an actual event of any kind. The story is about how Walt Disney finally gets P.J. Travers to sign the rights to her book over to the studio. Interesting story if it were true. But this is the first of the facts that the movie did not get right:

Disney already owned the rights when Travers went to L.A.

Yes, the central conceit of the film is fictionalised. Travers had already handed over the rights when she traveled to Los Angeles to consult on the script. Saving Mr Banks screenwriter Kelly Marcel also admits that the conversation Disney has with Travers, when he convinces her to hand over control based on their shared experiences with troubled fathers, is total fiction (although the stories about Disney’s childhood are true).

You go to the movies expecting at least some integrity – not a lot but at least some. How really strange this film now looks to me. We now live in a virtual world in almost nothing beyond what we see, hear and do ourselves – the kinds of things we read in the news or watch on TV – has much of any basis in reality. If this is what they do to P.J. Travers, imagine how much the true story has been distorted, covered up and ignored in the film about Nelson Mandela. A communist, revolutionary Marxist murderer as secular saint. Find the truth about any of it, if you can. You certainly must not expect to find out about it in the film.

DHT – a sensible review of the book

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A review of Defending the History of Economic Thought by someone who is not involved in the issues and therefore sees the common sense point of the book and its arguments.

The Economic Studies Shelf
Defending The History Of Economic Thought Steven Kates
Edward Elgar Publishing
9 Dewey Court, Northampton, MA 01060-3815 http://www.e-elgar.com
9781848448209, $99.95, http://www.amazon .com

The principle focus of “Defending the History of Economic Thought” is the crucial importance of the history of economic thought in the study of economics itself; without its history at the core of the curriculum, academician and economist Steven Kates (School of Economics, Finance and Marketing, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia) persuasively contends that economics is “a lesser subject, less penetrating, less interesting and of much less social value” . A 160 page treatise, “Defending The History Of Economic Thought” is organized and presented in five major chapters (Preliminary thoughts; Why study the history of economic thought; Debating the role of the history of economic thought; Teaching the history of economic thought; and Defending the history of economic thought. As informed and informative as it is thoughtful and thought-provoking, “Defending The History Of Economic Thought” is enhanced with an bibliography and a comprehensive index, making it an impressive contribution to professional and academic library Economic Studies collections and supplemental reading lists.

The Roman Empire really did fall

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My favourite statistic, which may be entirely wrong but it has been said, is that the Roman Empire reached its highest living standard during the reign of Marcus Aurelius and from his death in 180 A.D., and the ascension of his son Commodus (i.e. Joaquin Phoenix, the emperor in the film Gladiator) it took until the middle of the 16th century for living standards to reach where they had been 1500 years before. Some corroboration from the latest IPA Review:

In the next IPA Review, Chris Berg will review The Roman Market Economy by Peter Temin – a fascinating new book which shows just how extensive the Roman market economy was. You can read the review here.

Rome was an extremely wealthy society. It had a complex market economy. People living in Britain could easily purchase products made in Anatolia, and vice-versa. Large cities flourished, and would not be outsized in Europe until Industrial revolution. There is even evidence that Roman pottery factories adopted quality control measures.

This changed after Rome fell. Brian Ward-Perkins published this controversial book in 2005, showing just how catastrophic the fifth and seventh century crises were. Here is an excellent review of it by Canada Free Press. And here is an interview with Ward-Perkins on Historically Speaking.

Based on a range of evidence – including the size of Roman cows, the size of cities, building activity and the dispersion of farms outside Rome – he concluded that there was indeed a catastrophic economic collapse between the fourth and seventh centuries.

On both sides of the Mediterranean, cities declined or were abandoned altogether. Factories disappeared. Domestic animals were smaller due to lack of nourishment. In some regions, quality-controlled, factory-made pottery was replaced with poor-quality hand-moulded pots. Different regions were impacted at different times, and some were more hard-hit than others, but as a general rule economic activity declined everywhere.

Overall, ‘Late Antiquity’ would hardly have been a time of ‘peaceful’ transition for anyone involved.

Any parallels with the world today is, of course, strictly coincidental.

The world does ever so slowly change, sometimes for the better

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A story that overlaps culture, politics and the movies. It’s about someone named Patrick Millsaps, the man who was Newt Gingrich’s campaign chief of staff. This is the story how he has become the agent for this very brave movie star, Stacey Dash, who took an enormous amount of flak because, although black, she came out in public for Mitt Romney during the election. The Romney campaign wasted the opportunity to have her speak on their behalf, and thereby hangs a tale.

After the election and Romney’s loss, Millsaps wrote Dash a letter. He found her agent’s name online and put pen to paper, explaining that he’d had a unique experience as Gingrich’s chief of staff and said if she ever wanted to get more involved in politics to let him know.

He never expected a response. But Dash emailed Millsaps and said thanks. Not long after, Millsaps was headed to Los Angeles for a Republican National Committee meeting, emailed Dash and asked to go to lunch and offered to take her to the RNC meeting.

At lunch, not at the Chateau or the Ivy or some other famous celebrity spot, the two met at a nondescript Italian restaurant and talked for hours.

They kept in touch. Finally, Dash wanted to fire her agent but didn’t want to do it herself. She asked Millsaps to do it. In L.A. for business, he agreed.

It’s a great story and I really like them both.

Philomena – a feel bad film about all the standard enemies of the left

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The left will have its villains and nothing will stop them. Philomena is a feel bad film in which nothing positive can possibly be said about its chosen enemies, in this case organised religion, specially the Catholic church, and the Republican Party in the US, and especially Ronald Reagan.

But in this case, because there is a true story of some kind that lies beneath the plot, the film is forced to hold onto some actual facts that are obstacles to its heavy-handed lessons. I won’t say there would have been no bad actions taken by anyone in real life since who can know, because there are some pretty mean-minded people around and you find them everywhere. But let’s start with a few bits.

I don’t wish to be judgmental, but not to put too fine a point on it, the young Philomena is something of a tart. She meets a boy at a fair around age 14, goes off into the bushes and never sees the lad again. Even in our more permissive times, that seems unacceptable. What parent today would find that OK? And that fifty years later she can reminisce about how wonderful that moment was, makes me wonder whether that could have been her first occasion since she has no memory of a painful deflowering moment.

The idea that an unwed mother back in the 1950s would keep her child back has a probability in the range of zero or perhaps less. Few abortions, some unwed mothers and therefore many adoptions. So the very premise of the film, that her son was adopted out, is hardly a tale of horror since it was standard. There is so little likelihood that she would have been allowed to keep her son that it is ridiculous even to set that up as a premise. But a bit of an anachronism and we can rage at the attitudes of those who ran the orphanage as if it were the year before last.

But then there are the kinds of things that Philomena could not possibly know, such as when she is in the middle of a breech birth, that they decide to let her suffer and not offer any medical assistance. If you are in the middle of labour pains, you don’t know what conversations are being held somewhere else, and no one was going to tell her later.

The son is adopted out but those at the centre of the storyline work out that he has been adopted by an American family. Moreover, the son turns out to be (1) gay and (2) a high official in the Reagan and first Bush administrations. A nice chap, very accomplished. Therefore, he is a “closet” gay since no one in the Republican Party can be seen to have accepted his sexual orientation. Except that everyone you meet is perfectly aware, especially since he dies of AIDS.

But since it goes against the Code of the Left that amongst Republicans no one cares, they have to make it out that he has had to hide this side of his life because otherwise you would have to think that someone like Ronald Reagan – and therefore Republicans in general – are indifferent. Which is the case but cannot be allowed to be shown.

Then, finally, there is the scene at the end when Sister Hildegarde is confronted with her hatred of the sin of carnality. The scene is so perfect as a concluding statement, so nicely framed and to the point, that there can be no doubt that it is entirely made up. If it’s in the book, I don’t believe it’s true. But the narrative is all, and this gives us the high point finale in which all views are satisfied, except perhaps my own.

A clever and manipulative film that you enjoy in spite of yourself, and to a large extent because Judy Dench does stand up for the church until the very last moment. Being aware in the confines of the theatre of how everything is structured doesn’t quite protect you because you are driven by the story. They set the stage and there is little chance to resist as you sit and absorb the plot. But a sign of our decadent times that such an anti-Catholic film is even possible never mind a box office sensation. Try it out with some other religions and see how you go.

Herbert Hoover on the Great Depression

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One of the most extraordinary sentences I ever came across, and I no longer have any idea where, was from something written in around 1939 where whoever it was wrote that the 1930s are going to be completely mis-remebered, and this had entered his head because he’d heard someone the other day refer to “The Hungry Thirties”. He thought such a notion was preposterous and could say so then because everyone would have understood what he meant. Now “The Hungry Thirties” is exactly how the period is remembered and my political education began at the hand of my Father for whom the Great Depression was the most important personal landmark of his life. His socialism had arisen then and it stayed with him till his last days on earth.

The following passage, though, is from Herbert Hoover who was enraged by the way the 1930s have entered into our common consciousness. He, of course, has his own reasons for wishing our historical memory was other than it was, but he couldn’t write what he wrote if it were so off centre that everyone who was there then would see it for themselves. The first para in the quoted passage below is from the editor but the rest is Hoover himself. It is from an excerpt contained in a review of a manuscript that was discovered in 2009 of Hoover’s writings during his post-presidential period. The book is The Crusade Years, 1933–1955 and edited by George H. Nash.

In the presidential contest of 1944, Hoover’s indignation boiled over. Democratic Party leaders and pro–Roosevelt campaigners repeatedly sought to discredit the Republican presidential nominee, Thomas Dewey, by portraying him as an intellectual lightweight who would be a puppet and “mouthpiece” for Hoover and reactionary ‘Hooverism’ if elected. Unwilling to countenance any longer the Democrats’ attacks upon his record, Hoover composed the scathing rejoinder printed here.
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The greatest lie told in this whole campaign has been that the Depression of 1930–32 was caused by the Republican Party; that the Republicans did nothing about it; that the people were allowed to starve and were compelled to sell apples; that the country was in ruins; and that Roosevelt rescued it from complete wreck.

This lie has been promulgated in a thousand speeches, in millions of scurrilous pamphlets and circulars. Mr. Roosevelt has himself given currency to it. . . .

The broader facts are and history will record that the depression was world-wide; that its major origins were in Europe; that it swept in on the United States like a hurricane; that it originated from the aftermaths of World War I, including the Treaty of Versailles; that by action of the Republican Administration 18,000,000 people were under organized relief and that any consequential hunger and cold were prevented; that the Republican Administration took drastic measures to protect the peoples’ savings from the storm by creating the R.F.C., the Home Loan Banks and by expanding agricultural credit institutions. There were failures mostly in State Banks not under Federal control.

History will also record that the depression was turned world-wide in June and July of 1932; that we were on our way out with employment increasing but that recovery was halted when business confidence was shaken by the impending election of the New Deal; that with the election the whole country further hesitated awaiting the new policies; that rumors quickly spread that Mr. Roosevelt would devalue the currency; that in consequence, people tried to get their money from the banks and that speculators tried to ship it out of the country; that Mr. Roosevelt upon Mr. Hoover’s request refused to reaffirm the promises he had made the night before election not to tinker with the currency; that Mr. Roosevelt refused to cooperate in other directions with Mr. Hoover to stem the tide of fear—fear of what? It was of the New Deal, not of a retiring administration. It was a panic of bank depositors induced by the New Deal and Mr. Roosevelt. After the banks were reopened it was found that 98% of their deposits were good.

History will also record that the rest of the world, not having a “new deal,” went straight out of the depression and recovered its employment by 1934–35; that unemployment here in the United States continued on a vast scale for six years of the New Deal; and that it took a war to get us out of it.

The whole of the story put over by the New Deal orators is the most gigantic dishonesty ever known in American politics.

Nothing Hoover wrote here is contradicted by anything I know and quite a bit fits into what I have seen for myself. Literally every other market economy emerged from the Great Depression in 1932-33 with the sole exception being the United States. But Hoover himself has a lot to answer for, including the public spending, his wages policy, the higher interest rates and the Smoot-Hawley tariff. But that Roosevelt might have created the very uncertainty he needed to win the election, and then brought along with him the far left ideologues who ran his policies for him, the truth about the New Deal is far different from what you might otherwise have thought from looking at the standard histories.

Herbert Hoover and the New Deal

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Herbert Hoover’s memoir written in the 1940’s and 50’s had lain in vault until discovered in 2009. It is now being published under the title, The Crusade Years, 1933–1955. This is from a review of the book:

Now came the final phase of Hoover’s career: his remarkable ex-presidency. For the next thirty-one and one-half years, in fair political weather and foul, the former chief executive became, in his self-image, a crusader—a tireless and very visible castigator of the dominant political trends of his day. He behaved as a committed ideological warrior more persistently and more fervently than any other former president in our history.

Why? Most of all, it was because Hoover perceived in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt not a moderate and pragmatic response to economic distress but something more sinister: a revolutionary transformation in America’s political economy and constitutional order. Having espied the unpalatable future, Hoover could not bring himself to acquiesce.

Here is an excerpt from the review. The first paragraph is by the editor, George Nash, the remainder is Hoover himself.

Editor’s note: The paragraphs below are taken from the earliest extant fragment of Hoover’s memoirs relating to his post-presidential years. He probably composed it by hand in September 1944. In this brief essay he identified the poisonous ‘philosophical error’ that had come to dominate American politics during the New Deal years, an error he deemed it his moral duty to combat.
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The period from 1933 to 1938 in America was dominated by a clash in philosophical ideas to which I felt it was my duty to apply every bit of strength I possessed. I was convinced that a great error had come into liberal thinking, which threatened to destroy the magnificent civilization which intellectual and spiritual freedom had builded and which was its impulse to progress. . . .

The error in ideas came first in the form of Socialism but had made little progress prior to the first World War. The root of the error was that government operation of economic instrumentalities, or government direction of their operation other than establishment of rules of conduct, could short-cut all human ills and produce immediate Utopia. This gigantic poison of liberty received a great impulse from the government agencies created to mobilize the whole energies of peoples in total war. Here the impulses of patriotism to produce and labor and the fear of the enemy were substituted for free will. After the war the inevitable flood of misery, of impoverishment and frustration furnished the hotbed for the growth of this gigantic error. It developed over Europe in various forms—all from the same root. Communism, Fascism, and the milder forms of Statism, were heralded by well-meaning and generous-minded men as to the new road to life. They were joined by demagogs and seekers-for-power. The ultimate end was slavery, whether in Communistic or Fascist form. This philosophic error had spread mildly in American thinking, but attained no dangerous proportions until the world-wide depression struck us with all its violence, misery and exposure of wrong-doing.

It was certain in my mind that the New Deal was but one form of this same error in ideas and that it was my job to fight it. But fighting a philosophic idea among a people who had never thought in these channels was not only a difficult thing in itself, but one must contend with demagogic promises of Utopia to a suffering people and the obvious needs of reform in the system itself.

The American people at large had scarcely heard the word ideology. They had developed and they had lived and breathed a way of life without defining it as an ‘ideology.’

Talk about a con

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American Hustle is a small representation of the extent to which critical standards have fallen. A five star movie, 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, recommended by a number of people and highly rated in the papers was nevertheless an incoherent mash. Lots of events, bit of a character study, but no plausible central thread, no storyline to hold the bits together.

It was kind of a brew of Broadway Danny Rose meets The Sting which really were 70s movies or thereabouts (BDR 1984). But what held them together, specially The Sting, was how cleverly they were plotted. I think the charm for many was that American Hustle brought back the 1970s but only in ways that would resonate with people who weren’t actually there.

Don’t let me put you off since everyone seems to like it except me. But far from being charmed, I was happy to see the film come to an end, which was about half an hour later than it ought to have been.

Much too implausible

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The Rob Ford story has an enchantment about it that is hard to beat. But this, from Eye on a Crazy Planet, add such merriment to the whole enterprise to get rid of an honest politician:

When I used to work in Hollywood for a production company that’s films garnered a slew of major Oscar nominations, one of my jobs as a Creative Executive was to decide whether or not to recommend screenplays for production and to write notes on them.

With the news that The Toronto Star‘s City Hall reporter Daniel Dale is planning, with the enthusiastic support of his employer, to sue Toronto Mayor Rob Ford for libel in a lawsuit of dubious merit, an analogous thought occurred to me, particularly after reading this in The Torontoist:

Dale will continue covering municipal politics, he also explains. ‘With the full support of the Star, I will stay on the City Hall beat while pursuing this action – I can easily imagine the mayor and his brother attempting to turn the tables on the Star and calling for me to take a leave of absence…I will not let this affect my job. I will not be bullied off of my beat.’

I thought of my reaction if I had received a screenplay in which part of the plot involved a City Hall reporter, for a newspaper with the largest circulation in a major city, suing a mayor for libel and continuing to cover the City Hall beat while pursuing the suit.

The ensuing conversation in that imaginary scenario would have gone something like this:

ME: The gags need to be punched up a bit, but on the whole it’s a pretty good premise for a comedy.

WRITER: Comedy? This is a serious political drama.

ME: I love your sense of humor! It’s great, we’ve got the John Goodman-type regular guy slob, and all the stuck-up elitists are out to get him, like King Ralph, but at City Hall. But seriously, we need some more gags with the reporter and the mayor encountering each other. Oh, and that flaky female reporter that made a name for herself by stalking the mayor, I think her motivation should be that she has this sexual fixation on him, like she’s a chubby chaser or something. Here’s a scene you might want to consider: maybe she could corner him in private and flash her beaver and demand she eat her out. She could say something like, “You look like you know how to eat a lot of pussy!” And he’s squirming to get away and says, ‘I’ve got plenty to eat at home!’

WRITER: You don’t understand! I mean it, this is a serious political drama about an oppressed reporter seeking justice from an evil politician!

ME: Seriously???

WRITER: Yes! My sympathies are completely with the newspaper and its reporters.*

ME: Okay. You realize that changes everything. Here’s why that’s not going to work. First off, You’ve got who are the villains and who is the hero mixed up. You have this guy who was elected, and he’s this silly doofus who tells ridiculous lies about his personal life, but when it comes to serving the public, is scrupulously honest. The guy even coaches underprivileged kids and takes them into his own home. And that’s your villain.

On the other side, you have a newspaper run by hypocritical snobs who support a corrupt government that misappropriated billions of dollars in public funds. And they lie about this mayor character, they hate him mainly because he’s not part of their ‘in’ crowd, they obsessively stalk and harass him, and support every undemocratic effort they can think of to get him out of office. And those are supposed to be your heroes??

WRITER: But this terrible mayor has made the city a laughingstock!

ME: That’s pretty harmless, and again, it’s what makes this all more of a comedy.

WRITER: But the real drama comes when this detestable mayor slanders one of the hero reporters by implying he’s a pedophile, potentially destroying his life!!

ME: Yeah. Well, here’s your problem with that. The way you describe it, in the first place, the Mayor never said he was a pedophile, he was talking more about his own state of mind when he heard that some guy was peeping in his back yard. In fact, this mayor character explicitly says he doesn’t know if the reporter was taking pictures of his kids. He was talking about how a father feels when he hears someone might be invading his privacy and taking pictures of his young kids. That doesn’t sound like slander to me and there’s no threat to the reporter’s reputation because quite reasonably, nobody takes seriously the possibility that the reporter could actually be a pedophile.

WRITER: No! Wait, you’re wrong about something! I never had the reporter peeping in the back yard!

ME: Alright, then here’s where you’ve got some more problems with your storyline. After a neighbor calls him, the mayor comes charging out to confront the reporter, who freaks out and runs away.

WRITER: That’s right, the Mayor is a bully!

ME: Okay, so let’s assume your reporter never peeps in the mayor’s back yard. How does the mayor know he’s there? Why would a neighbor call the mayor to tell him someone is walking around on public land? The only way your story makes sense is if, even if he wasn’t taking pictures of it, he was at least peeping in the mayor’s back yard. I still think you should give some thought to the comedy angle. Maybe have the reporter be a bit like Jim Carrey’s character in The Cable Guy…

WRITER: No! It’s not a comedy and no, the reporter was never standing on cinder blocks and peeking in the mayor’s back yard!!

ME: Well, it’s your story.

WRITER: That’s right! I think every decent, social justice-seeking person in the audience is going to identify with the crusading newspaper and its heroic journalists!

ME: Interesting. The way I read it, in your story, the only people you’ve got siding with your newspaper are pompous douchebags and sanctimonious nitwits. But aside from that, we get to the most blatant problem with your story…

WRITER: Which is?

ME: Well, while this reporter is suing the mayor, he still is doing City Hall coverage for the newspaper.

WRITER: Yes, so?

ME: So? So that’s completely implausible. There’s no way a real newspaper could ever allow that to happen. It would undermine any shred of credibility even as biased a newspaper that you’ve written about could even pretend to have. I mean, how could there even be a pretense of objectivity and fair journalism when you allow a guy who is suing the mayor to be writing City Hall coverage!? It’s like committing suppuku as far as all credibility goes. There’s no way an audience would believe that even a third rate rag of a newspaper would do that.

WRITER: That’s the way I’ve written the story and that’s the way I’m keeping it. So when will I hear about whether we go into production?

ME: Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

* Actually, this is the point where I would have thought I was dealing with a lunatic and would have edged the meeting to a quick conclusion.

This was found at the great Canadian website, Five Feet of Fury.