The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Right-Wing Cotton Candy

8.20.08 @ 12:01AM

(Page 3 of 6)

Game over.

Good article.
-- Glen Leinbach
Ft. Collins, Colorado

What a tremendous article...thank you and Jeffrey Lord.
-- Chet & Mary Singer

The analysis is interesting and intriguing. But how do you explain Jimmy Carter?
-- David Stanczak
Bloomington, Illinois

Jeffrey Lord replies:
As to Jimmy Carter's election, remember that candidate Carter, new on the national scene in 1976, campaigned as a Naval officer and submariner (a man of action), a successful businessman (man of action) and as an activist governor of Georgia. Gerald Ford, good soul that he was, was all-too well identified as a longtime member of Congress -- which is to say a talker. Also, the "extraordinary circumstance" of Watergate -- a huge scandal that overshadowed the entire election -- was at play. Four years later, with the nation having learned in detail about Jimmy Carter, they chose Reagan in a landslide. As to the notion that Bill Clinton is a "snake," well...never mind. Too easy.

DEATHLESS BATMAN
Re: James Bowman's The Dark Knight:

Omniscience vs. indecision, with flames engulfing the myriad dead, for 2.5 hours. A Buchenwald of a movie.

I won't be back to the theater anytime soon.
-- David Govett
Davis, California

Once more, James Bowman proves he is a pretentious bore. Perhaps you could find someone to review films who actually enjoys going to the movies for its own sake, instead of as an opportunity to take his cultural castor oil?
-- Stuart Koehl
Falls Church, Virginia

James Bowman writes that the latest Batman flick does not quite rise to the level of a "Homeric epic" because "the reality of a Homeric epic is conveyed by the fact that those who are its heroes do die," whereas in The Dark Knight, "It's the heroes who are the immortals." He uses this assertion to damn the movie as "fundamentally unserious" and "a travesty."

What in the world is he talking about? It's been a long time since I read The Odyssey but even I remember that its hero, Odysseus, went up against the longest of long odds and survived. And while I don't want to ruin too much for would-be moviegoers, the film clearly has two principle heroes: Batman and Harvey Dent. One of them doesn't make it.
-- Jeremy Lott
Lynden, Washington

Geez Louise, I read Mr. Bowman's "review" of The Dark Knight and thought, "what is he talking about?"

Mr. Lord's article about McCain being the action guy and Obama being the thinking guy is kind of like the difference between Lord and Bowman's columns. Mr. Bowman, you think too much!

The Dark Knight was an interesting movie where I thought of the Joker as the crazed Islamic radical (terrorist, islamofascist -- whatever the term is these days!) and Batman as G.W. Bush -- the guy who has to do some things he might not normally want to do in order to save "Gotham." The movie was a way of looking at our present world and the insane things going on in it and how different people might respond to that insanity (some, such as one of the characters in the movie, go to the dark side (like Darth Vader!)). As far as the Joker killing his assistants -- just look at what Al Qaeda in Iraq did to the people in the cities where they took over. This isn't rocket science, it's inhuman nature we're talking about here.

Mr. Bowman writes, "Ford (in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) was telling us that people want to believe heroism grows out of reason and law and civilization but that it really doesn't. Instead, it is a throwback to the most primitive honor cultures before there were any law or civilization, which are things that cannot be contracted for. The Dark Knight tells us the opposite: that both heroism and villainy grow out of reason and law and civilization and that, therefore, these things are mere shams and subterfuges masking a Hobbesian reality devoid even of honor, in which man is a wolf to man and there is nothing to believe in but the individual Nietzschean will, either to good or evil." I found this a bit much. The Joker gives a different excuse for why he is what he is every time he is "asked." One time he blames his father's cruelty, another time he blames something else. Just as those on the left are looking for "root causes" of terrorism and throw out poverty, U.S. action in other parts of the world or Israel's existence, when there are no root causes except the radicals' ideas of what the world should be according to them. Sometimes evil just is.

Letter to the Editor

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