Lost In Translation

Word from Hollywood via NPR:

There's a backup plan: If U.S. movie audiences don't buy tickets to see The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in Swedish, Hollywood is already gearing up for an English-language remake.

IOW, if Americans don't like the original then Hollywood will bowdlerize it. And since Dragon Tattoo is not going to open in my local cinema, this will very likely happen. There's nothing "liberal" about the destruction of culture by translation. I can already see where Hollywood can go wrong just by watching the trailer.

My favorite semester at college was spent in International Studies 120 and 220, Culture Through Cinema I and II. The professor was very, very good at teaching the signs and signals we needed to really appreciate a film like Nobody Loves Me. It was because of Dr. Adler that I was able to appreciate the best moments in Seven Samurai for the very first time and actually understood the cultural existentialism of Lost In Translation.

Which is the operative phrase, because all of this is destroyed when Hollywood translates. Their version of Dragon Tattoo will inevitably disappoint me after seeing the original with subtitles. As our good friend Dr. Joseph Suglia put it to me in an email today:

Films such as Takashi Miike's One Missed Call, Open Your Eyes, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc. irritate the American entertainment industry. There is only one thing to do: neutralize the irritation by homogenizing everything in those films that is heterogeneous, familiarizing everything within them that is strange. That is the purpose of a "remake": to domesticate the foreign.

And how. City of Angels seems incredibly pretentious when you've seen Wings of Desire. There is a segment of America that is aware of books it has not read but chooses to read them after seeing the movie to avoid disappointment. Having worked in bookstores and spent far too much time in libraries, I cannot count the number of times I have heard this said.

Hollywood is quite aware of this. My local cinemaplex will not be showing the Swedish version of this movie. As usual, I must travel at least an hour, probably three, to witness it in an actual theatre. This is because Hollywood obeys Barnum's dictum of lowest common denominator: no one in Tinseltown ever went broke underestimating taste. Art is inevitably made artifice. Characters are recast as comic relief. A fart joke must be inserted.

And there must always be more violence.

I maintain that Inglourious Basterds is a meta-narrative about this very phenomenon. It isn't about the Holocaust of World War II, but the cinematic holocaust of Hollywood. Language is indivisible from culture; when Hollywood translates, it adopts spectacle to give the masses blood. What makes me say all this is the amazing passage I found at the beginning of Steig Larrssen's novel:

The policeman was a hardened veteran...He had been involved in nine murder or manslaughter cases.

Nine. In a long career of urban policing.

This is one way America stays stupid about the world.

Adding: I have just remembered I wrote a short story called "Lost In Translation."

The High-Tech Lynching of ACORN

Warning: music is appropriately modern, angry, and loud. Video can still be educational with the sound off.

And who is my neighbor?

Look out your window, baby, there's a scene you'd like to catch
The band is playing "Dixie", a man got his hand outstretched
Could be the Führer
Could be the local priest
You know sometimes Satan, you know he comes as a man of peace.

-Bob Dylan-

It hard not to think of the parable of the good Samaritan when you read about the anti-health care reform protesters in Columbus Ohio. Seems that Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy (D-OH) is still undecided and so competing groups showed up outside her office Tuesday last to express their opinions as loudly as possible.

A wrinkled, kneeling man holding a stick crawled up to a group opposing the effort with a sign saying he has "got Parkinson's" and needs help, say Raw Story's David Edwards and Sahil Kapur. Will any of us be surprised at the reaction?

"If you're looking for a handout you're in the wrong end of town," one man yelled at him.

"Nothing for free over here, you have to work for everything you get."

Something smells bad in Columbus and I don't think that stench is called Christian values.

Of course the health care reform under consideration isn't about handouts, it's that some people's greatest fear is that not only will someone get something he himself isn't getting, but that it might cost him some money. Insurance, by nature is about dividing risk amongst participants and so those who suffer losses will be covered while others pay a smaller amount. This seems to be fine with Republicans as long as some third party is skimming off 40% while keeping those at greatest risk out of the pool. This seems to them perversely to be Communism when individual risk is minimized by maximizing the pool and cost minimized by self administration by public ownership.

Is it a coincidence that people who don't seem to get this are the same people so mean spirited that they will mock someone with a terminal and debilitating disease and tell him to "work?" Is it that such people fear someone who could challenge their own self-pity that they must hate those really deserving of it? God knows who the Christians in Columbus are, but no one else seems to.

Even so, health care reform isn't about being a good Samaritan, it's about the most economical and efficient method of minimizing the burden on any individual participant by making us all participants, so whether there is a God who punishes nasty, malicious, selfish greedy bastards or some other principle of Nature that punishes the intellectually unfit and self defeating Conservative, it may be time to get out of Columbus and not look back.

Victory at last?

Newsweek insists that the mission is accomplished and democracy has succeeded in Iraq -- just like Bush predicted. It good to know that Democracy consists of holding an election in an ethnically cleansed country where only a few dozen people are killed and while occupied by a foreign invader. How much more democratic must Venezuela be then, or Cuba or Iran? Bush predicted that? He also predicted mobile chemical weapons factories, Qaeda training camps, stores of WMD's and a nuclear weapons facility -- that it would all be on the cheap and take only a few weeks. I do hope there's a tongue deeply embedded in some editor's cheek.

And now Maliki is suggesting that election returns have been tampered with and there have been hundreds of accusations of fraud. But never mind, it's mission accomplished and Nixon wasn't a crook.

STRANGERS

The realm of possibility

I wonder if I could convince the IRS that I never was an American Citizen. Perhaps I could try the method that convinced the100 million or so of America's stupidest that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. After all my birth certificate looks no different from his, save for the name and State. Send for your certificate as you will have to do if you want a passport or to apply for Social Security benefits and see for yourself. Odds are it will look pretty much the same and not like the old handwritten things one used to get once upon a time when the coloreds knew their place or else.

"I mean, someone is going to have to come forward with nailed down testimony that he was born in place B, wherever that is. You know, the speculation is Kenya. And that doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility."

And by "nailed down" testimony we mean a valid birth certificate, confirmed by the vital statistics department of any state -- just like the one Barack Obama has shown us and that Hawaii attests to, Says Virginia's new Attorney General.

Yes, I know, you don't have to be a genius to be an Attorney General in the State of Virginia and as AG Ken Cuccinelli proves, you don't have to be much smarter than what you'll find in the Richmond zoo -- and no I'm not talking about the keepers. If your head's way up "place B" you'll do fine. It's within the realm of possibility that Obama was born in Kenya, says he and I don't think he's referring to the realm of quantum physics wherein there is also a possibility that he will disappear and be reassembled on Alpha Centauri.

Why even consider the possibility, seeing that the State of Hawaii's official records and official record keepers and the Honolulu newspapers affirm he was born there: seeing as it's been checked and re-checked and confirmed? Because, as some would tell you "where there's smoke, there's fire" and as others would say: "people are saying." Of course where there's smoke, it could be a smokescreen and "people are saying" because they're desperately in denial that a black man could be President and because the media are feasting on that bit of carrion and won't give it up. All in all, the odds are about the same that young Cucchi and I were born in Nairobi as that the President was, and those odds are close enough to zero to be zero.

Of course the dapper young Cuchster was happy to add to the insanity by proposing that someone break a law that the President signed and then take it to court on the basis that the President isn't the President, but probably unbeknownst to him it's been tried, was thrown out of court and the attorney found in contempt. As I said you don't have to have anywhere near three digits in your IQ to rise to the top in Virginia. Put Gucci loafers and a swank suit on a blue-assed baboon and he'll do fine as long as he flings shit at the president of the United States.

The more we lie, the truer it gets

What happened never happened and the election that ousted the Republicans from office all around the country had nothing to do with public sentiment and even if it did, that sentiment did not include a desire for sweeping reform of health care in America. Or so says Sarah Palin, trying to emulate the rest of the Republican flim-flam artists and voodoo historians like Karl Rove and the dynamic Cheney Family Circus. True to American form, being the worst of them at this game, she may have the most followers.

Please ask yourself: who will be left behind? And who will decide – what kind of panel will decide – who receives the health care that government will obviously have to ration?

Yes, although every reputable source including this one insists that there is nothing in any way suggestive of rationing or "death Panels" as she used to call it, in the House or Senate health care reform bills, she goes on as though there obviously are and as though nobody ever asked for reform in the first place and as though all we ever needed is protection for doctors against malpractice suits.

Palin reveals in her Facebook page, which after all is a fine place to self-publish things no reputable source will touch, that yes, America is wildly against reform and the "Democrat" cabal is forcing it all into one orifice or another against our collective will -- and of course there are death panels and rationing and all kinds of other evil things lurking in that huge document she hasn't got round to reading yet. It takes so long to sound out all those words, you know.

HEALTHCARE REFORM CRUNCH TIME

My local Congressional Representative is Suzanne Kosmas (D), who voted ‘no’ last time on the House healthcare reform bill.  Her website lists 3 offices with a telephone number and fax line at each location. This morning, I called each office and spoke with a staffer and sent a letter to each fax line, making myself absolutely clear that this is the ONE VOTE that will determine whether or not I support Kosmas in November.  Lets just say, I was very determined to make my voice heard ... and let her know that, if she disappoints me twice, I will do everything possible to insure her defeat in November.

Shock and Awe

"It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself. The oil revenue of that country could bring between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the course of the next two or three years. We're dealing with a country that could really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

Maybe you heard Paul Wolfowitz's words to Congress on the Daily Show 5 years ago when George Bush decided to pawn him off on the World Bank and everyone was laughing at the ridiculous bastard and e-mailing the clip to their friends.

Maybe the video of Karl Rove saying that what happened never happened will make the same rounds. Rove has always been able to rely on the gullibility of strangers -- and of course their defective and selective memories. Whether we write such things off to psychotic partisanship or bald stupidity or plain old evil is anyone's call but here's Karl on Meet The Press Yesterday saying the Bush Administration didn't say what the Bush administration said and even though you were an enthusiastic patriot for believing it then, you're a liar for believing it now.

"Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove’s memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine invented by Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz and the inevitable William Kristol. This gang’s rewriting of history knows few bounds."

wrote Frank Rich the day before. He hadn't yet had the joy of hearing this latest jewel of denial.

Of course you know I'm not an optimist. I've won many bets by gambling that the American public will make the most ridiculously inappropriate choices in public policy and my money is on the prediction that before long the Bush administration will never have said the war will be over in weeks, that we will be greeted as liberators, that there will be almost no casualties, that reconstruction will be swift and cheap, that there were al Qaeda training camps, mobile chemical weapons factories, nuclear facilities only weeks away from making deliverable bombs and that "freedom" will burst out all over the Middle East and the silly Liberal losers who doubt it are flirting with treason for doubting it.

Truth having caught up with the men who murdered America, they're forced to retreat into an imaginary world where they never said what they said, or did what they did and where a minimalist government presided over 8 prosperous years of freedom and peace - just like the theory says. Too bad we can't lock the door behind them.

DUNCE SCOTUS

It seems the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has started her own Tea Party PAC, according to this report in the Los Angeles Times:

"I am an ordinary citizen from Omaha, Neb., who just may have the chance to preserve liberty along with you and other people like you," she said at a recent panel discussion with tea party leaders in Washington. Thomas went on to count herself among those energized into action by President Obama's "hard-left agenda."

But Thomas is no ordinary activist.

She is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and she has launched a tea-party-linked group that could test the traditional notions of political impartiality for the court.

In January, Virginia Thomas created Liberty Central Inc., a nonprofit lobbying group whose website will organize activism around a set of conservative "core principles," she said.

The group plans to issue score cards for Congress members and be involved in the November election, although Thomas would not specify how. She said it would accept donations from various sources -- including corporations -- as allowed under campaign finance rules recently loosened by the Supreme Court.

Read the rest of the story here.