100 Top Horror Movies 2009

Just in time for Halloween, the 2009 edition of the 100 Top Horror Movies of all time is out. See it here.

Great art can only truly be enjoyed by the old, because artistic sensibility is not innate, but learned, through a lifetime of study. The one exception is that genre of great art, the Horror Movie. Here, the artist depends upon the primal - and primeval - state of fear, and it is the young (and the young at heart) who are closest to this most basic ground of the human.

If you disagree, try getting a 6 year old to sit through Mozart's Don Giovanni. About five minutes into the performance, wake him up, and then take him to the greatest Horror Movie of all, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (but only a matinee; not if it's dark, never if it's dark). He will get it; boy, will he get it! As you exit the theatre, of course, a Social Services Swat Team will be waiting to take him away from you, proving that anyone working for Social Services is old, very old, to the point of senility.

A comment, however, on the list: Psycho #8? Come, come. There is no more influential horror film than Psycho, as even the website's own reviewer notes. He also states that "Psycho belongs on the classic shelf of not just the horror movie fan, but any fan of great film making (emphasis in original)." A grear horror film that is also a great film? This should have been a slam dunk, as they apparently say in the sports world.

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Most important, however, is what everyone misses watching this film after its original release. Psycho was a post-modern work before post-modernism was a gleam in Derrida's eye. Hitchcock brilliantly structured Psycho to defeat the movie-goers expectations at every turn, movie-goers who knew and loved Hitchcock's penchant for suspense, danger, and deft surprise endings. To surprise an audience educated as to his tricks, Hitchcock made a movie that was bigger than just the 1 hour, 49 minute run-time, that also included the advertising campaign, the leaked Hollywood rumors, and the unconscious buzz in the culture. All of this was carefully crafted to prepare the audience for a movie, a movie that would then be something completely different from what the movie-goer thought he was promised.

The kernel of Hitchcock's vision for Psycho was Janet Leigh. In the run-up to the premiere, the movie was promoted as Janet Leigh and Alfred Hitchcock, together for the first time! The proffered story was to be classic Hitchcock: Janet Leigh will play an ordinary law-abiding person, thrust by fate and accident into the role of a criminal and a fugitive.

But then, just 48 minutes into the movie, as the audience easily settles into the tension of Marion Crane, embezzler of $40,000.00, running from justice, Marion Crane is incomprehensibly murdered in the Bates Motel. And with her dies Janet Leigh, the great star, and the audience is left with .... what? What does all this mean? In Hollywood, the central star never dies at the beginning; they are the reason everybody has shown up in the first place!

And in the very next scene, it gets even worse for Ms. Leigh, and the audience. Norman Bates sinks not only Marion Crane's car into the swamps, but also the stolen $40,000.00. The entire set-up of the first 40 minutes of the movie, the sum and substance of Janet Leigh's entire role in the film, is gone, submerged forever in the fetid waters. From there, the audience knows exactly nothing about what will happen next, and that bewildered ignorance lasts right up to the final, ironic, comic monologue of Mrs. Bates, "....they'll see, and they'll know; I wouldn't even hurt a fly."

Brilliance, wrapped in Genius. That's what Psycho was, cinematic art rendered at its best.

So, Psycho is #1, that is clear, and I am glad we have settled that. The current #1, The Exorcist, then moves to a very solid #2, a position it ought to be very happy with. Wretching and vomiting don't usually carry a work of art to greatness.

Honduras Wins!

It looks like it's face saving time for Hillary Clinton and the State Department.

The AP reports an agreement has been reached between Honduras' interim government and ousted President, Mel Zelaya. AP reports the significance:

The agreement, if it holds, could represent a much-needed foreign policy victory for the United States, which dispatched a senior team of diplomats to coax both sides back to the table.

Let's see, Afghanistan dithering, Iranians and Norks nuking up, Israel-Palestinian impasse, Russian aggression, and Allied backstabbing on missile defense in Eastern Europe, all of these are signal failures of Administration foreign policy. So, forcing an agreement on a tiny, defenseless Honduras democracy is a "much-needed foreign policy victory for the United States?" Talk about lowering the bar.

Not to mention that this is no Administration victory. Honduras has consistently maintained that Mel Zelaya was legally impeached and an interim government appropriately installed pending already scheduled elections this November. This agreement, which Madam Secretary Clinton calls "historic," impliedly affirms the Honduran position, providing that upon the installation of the new government, all sanctions will be lifted and relations normalized with the U.S. The only "concessions" Honduras had to make on Mr. Zelaya was to agree to reinstate him if such is approved by the Honduran Congress. Since Mr. Zelaya's own party repeatedly and vehemently has denounced him, there is little likelihood that he will be reinstated. The result: point, set, and match to Honduran democracy.

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The State Department started this whole fracas because of a legal opinion of top State Department lawyer Harold Koh, purportedly concluding that the actions of the Honduran military in ousting Mr. Zelaya was illegal under Honduran law. To date, the State Department has refused to release this super-persuasive legal brief.

With the manifest capitulation of State under this agreement, it is clear that Mr. Koh's legal opinion was flawed, and as a result, State "stepped in it" at the beginning of the Honduran "crisis." Thereafter, instead of wiping off their shoes as the facts became clear, they rolled around in it for a few months before finally deciding to take a bath.

Those plucky people of Honduras. You gotta love 'em.

Click the title above for all posts on this topic.

What is Natural Law?

We have an interesting discussion over on the NewsReel Blog concerning the notion of Natural Law. For the Founders, Natural Law was a fundamental concept in forming this new country, but David Swindle says he has always had a hard time understanding this key idea. He states:

With “Natural Law” there’s nowhere to dig. With “Natural Law” it’s as though someone says, “Well that’s just the way it is” in answering an argument. It has a religious sensibility. Someone might as well be saying “It’s true because the Bible says so.” And because of that I have a hard time taking it seriously at an intellectual level.

He tells us that he is a former radical who came to conservatism late. I would suggest that his radical past might account for a good bit of his problem with Natural Law theory, although by saying that, I do not mean to sound unduly critical. I think we all suffer from the same cultural influences that brought out the radical in young Mr. Swindle, even those of us who never flirted with radicalism. And it is these all but unconscious influences that produce a certain cognitive dissonance when we try to understand ideas from 200 years ago.

Among these influences, the Western fact-value distinction has special relevance to the (mis)understanding of Natural Law. In its simplest formulation, the fact-value distinction tells us that we cannot reason from what is to what ought to be. Facts and values inhabit two entirely different categories of thought, each with its own set of assumptions and terms, and never the twain shall meet.

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As it has come down to us, though, the fact-value distinction carries a modernist skeptical twist: not only are facts and values distinct, but facts are empirical and rational (and good), whereas values are conceptual and irrational (and bad).

We see these assumptions playing out in our culture all the time, in ways large and small. Hidden behind Mr. Swindle's own quote above is the reflexive notion that Natural Law does not appear to derive from anything rationally intelligible. But that is because Natural Law is sub specie ethics and morality, and therefore within the realm of values, which we moderns are conditioned to regard with suspicion.

But this modernist twist of ours is itself a value-laden decision that facts are somehow more concrete than values, and begs the question of Natural Law. To recapture the truth of the Founding, understanding Natural Law is critical. To do so, we moderns must shuck ourselves of our prejudice against ethical and religious values, and step into 18th Century shoes.

Natural Law was based on the Aristotelian notion that the world could be understood on the basis of purpose or teleology. Dogs had a certain clearly discerned nature, that which defined it as a dog, as did other animals. And so did Man. Man was the rational animal, the animal whose distinctive teleology was to think and reason about the world around him. As Kurt Vonnegut put it in Cat's Cradle:

Tiger got to hunt, Bird got to fly, Man got to ask himself why, why, why?
Tiger got to sleep, Bird got to land, Man got to tell himself he understand.

Vonnegut's skepticism aside, there are two important assumptions in this Aristotelian notion: (1) that nature manifests order; and (2) that this order is discoverable and understandable by Man in his rational capacity. Natural Law carries these assumptions into the spheres of ethics and morality. Man's good is to be in an ordered and just society, and what that order and justice should be is both discoverable and understandable by Man in his rational capacity.

It is here that we modernists usually stop. As Pontius Pilate asked without expecting an answer, "What is truth?" so we ask, "What is order and justice?" and expect there will be no answer, too. As Mr. Swindle puts it, our experience is that "we all come to different conclusions on issues. Perfectly good, reasonable people come to polar opposite ideas on issues."

But, in fact, we do know what an ordered, just society is, in great part because our Founders showed what it is: a society based on liberty, the rule of law, and the consent of the governed. We also know a free society is more ordered and just than a non-free society because we saw the depredations inflicted on millions of people by totalitarian systems, and also the creeping dystopianism of the soft tyranny of nanny state socialism.

In all of these cases, what we are doing is discerning an order and justice in the very nature of things, which is exactly what Natural Law theory posits we can do as rational human beings. On this understanding, the problem of "good, reasonable people com[ing] to polar opposite ideas on issues" is simply a problem of education, which is precisely what Mr. Horowitz, Mr. Swindle, and many others in the conservative blogosphere are attempting to do, every day.

When confronted with an advocate of statist socialism, do Messrs. Horowitz and Swindle retreat into skepticism? Of course not. They pull out the history of the United States, the achievements of this free society over the last 200 years, the happiness of its citizens, the envy it receives from the world, and all sorts of other evidence that freedom works and socialism does not. What is this other than discerning and understanding proper order and justice in the world, just as Natural Law theory says we can?

It is true that many ethical and moral values underpinning Natural Law are also religious values. This should not be surprising. Catholic/Aquinian thinking posits that Christian truth is also rationally discernible in God's created world, not least because God the Creator was a loving, good God who would not "play dice with the Universe," as Einstein insisted. In fact, it was because of this overlap between faith and reason that the Founders (not all, but most) felt that strong religious institutions were essential to maintaining the moral virtue of the people so necessary to a free society. But that is a complex question for another day. For now, its only important to note that both faith and Natural Law reason end the same: the essentially just society is grounded in Freedom. In this sense, Natural Law is not a rational theory competing against religious faith, but more like an acceptable rationale developed for the irreligious among us.

That the ethical goodness of a free society is a concrete reality in the world, and that people can be educated about this reality is absolutely crucial to the notion of a free society. If such is not possible, then a government founded on freedom is not possible either. The Founders understood this, and rightly understood that what they were attempting was a grand "experiment" in self-government, an experiment that, thankfully for us, proved so incredibly, even outrageously, successful.

Onward Christian Soldiers

Ever since "fire and brimstone" preaching went out of favor in Christianity, the rate of increasing irrelevancy of the mainstream Churches to the broader culture has only been exceeded by the rate of the ever greater declines in membership. Apparently, however, these Churches have decided it's time to get off the sidelines.

Our esteemed mainstream Churches took a bold stand this week: Lutherans, Catholics, United Methodists, Presbyterians, and members of the United Church of Christ joined with the Islamic Society of North America and other "faith groups" in solidarity against ....... hate.

This would be fine if it was just another innocuous Church thing. However, in these degenerate spiritual times, leave it to our spiritual leaders to focus their shallow theological vision on not just hate, but Hate; specifically, Hate Speech. This particular category of speech is a pure invention of our contemporary culture, claiming that certain speech should be defined by the level or degree of hatred the speaker has towards the victim. This ties neatly into our current obsession with racism in society, and seems a good fit for other discrimination as well, like that against women, Muslims, Hispanics, Gays, and other groups to be named later by our cultural leaders. It certainly seems that bias against one or another of these groups can be described as hatred. Should speech in aid of that sort of bias be allowed?

Our spiritual leaders took a stand, and said no.

But they are taking a stand on quicksand.

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As commonly deployed, charges of Hate Speech devolve into nothing more than transparent attempts to outlaw certain political, cultural, and religious differences of opinion. The most common circumstance involves those who are anti-immigration. Never mind that their actual position is anti-illegal immigration, which ought to be uncontroversial in any nation pretending to a government of laws. Our cultural watchdogs insist on branding any such political position as Hatred of Hispanics. The Lutheran Church itself picks up this line, trotting out the usual suspects of Hatred on the Right, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, et al., and joining with others to petition the FCC to investigate these purveyors of Hate. Presumably, they want these people shut down, although they don't actually say that. But, for what other reason would you call down the investigatory powers of a powerful government agency on some of your fellow citizens?

To ascribe Hatred to a political position entails a truly amazing ability to read minds, as there is nothing in the anti-illegal immigration position per se that necessarily entails a visceral dislike of Hispanics. But, let's assume for a moment that our spiritual leaders have a special insight into these people's souls (souls being the prime brief of our Christian Churches), and find true Hatred there. Is supporting government suppression of Hate Speech really what Christian Churches ought to be about?

In a free society, the answer is a resounding no. Open debate is the sine qua non of a free society, and should be restricted on only the most narrow and concrete grounds. Personal emotional states are entirely too vague a criteria to support a rule of restraint on debate, not to mention that the presence or absence of a particular emotional state is speculative at best.

But on the grounds of self-preservation, Christian Churches ought to reject this sort of thing. Haven't they read any newspapers lately, for instance, about the attacks on the Mormon Church in California for opposing Gay marriage? The near-constant refrain was that Mormon's were perpetrating Hate against Gays, just for following the dictates of their religion and their conscience. If the mainstream Churches get what they want, how long will it be before the charge of Hate, along with legislation to back it up, will be extended against parishes and denominations that refuse, on religious grounds, to solemnize a gay marriage?

Not long. In my opinion, our Churches are not on a slippery slope with all of this trendy Hate stuff, but a sheer cliff.

Khrushchev famously said that capitalism would sell Communists the rope to hang Capitalists. With this foray into social policy, our mainstream Churches are penning the crimes upon which Christian orthodoxy - and freedom of religion and speech - will be charged, convicted, and sentenced.

Sez Who?

It's oft amazing to read some attack by the Left of the Right and realize that with very little editing, it can become an incisive critique of the Left.

Politico reports Media Matters (a "Democrat-leaning organization?") is distributing a Memo in which it slams Fox News as a "lethal 24/7 partisan political operation." Let's take just one paragraph of this Memo, swap Media Matters and Fox News, Conservative and Progressive, and see what we get. Changes are in all caps:

As our evidence demonstrates, MEDIA MATTERS has exhibited a consistent willingness to ignore any and all journalistic standards to pursue political ends. The failure to recognize MEDIA MATTERS for what it is enables IT to continue waging a massive PROGRESSIVE political campaign disguised as journalism.

I guess with the Left, it takes one partisan political operation to know one. Except in this case, the charge against Fox News is pure hackery disguised as journalism.

Pitchforks as Policy

Easy, I remember another instance that gave me pause about this Administration's competence.

It was right at the start, when the executive pay scandal first arose, and the President called in the major TARP recipient Banks to lecture them on reforming their compensation policies. At one point, the Bank CEO's offered that executive compensation was a complex affair, that the Bank's were competing for talent from around the world. And our President responded, "The public isn't buying that...My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."

There was a sense I had at the time that this was not an analysis of the American public's mood as much as a threat about what this Administration was capable of, a threat I thought quite ridiculous. Don't get me wrong; there was something cold blooded and chilling about the President's implication of public violence against the Banks, and I am sure the Bank CEO's took the message to heart. But I was also all but incredulous that the President thought that he had such power over the American public, and also that such banana republic type threats had any place in American politics.

In retrospect, it is even more clear that the President and his staff have a blind spot about themselves and their power, owing to the hubris you mentioned. They really believed, back in April of this year, that they could move the public in any way they wanted, even unto pitchfork waving mobs. They thought they could send ACORN out with its fake protesters, order up some demagogic headlines from the Major Media, inundate the Internet with shocked outrage from MoveOn.org, and the public would respond like little puppets to their manipulations.

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But American's are just not pitchfork kind of people. More than a 150 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville said something to the effect that Americans would enthusiastically congregate and applaud the latest public rabble rouser, only to quietly disperse when it appeared the speaker intended them to actually do something.

As you said, this Administration is clueless. It is clueless about the American character, about the American culture, and about how a President functions in our Republic. And it is clueless about these things because it is essentially parochial: this Administration thinks the customs of a political backwater like Chicago are universal truths.

Myth of Machiavellian Brilliance

The latest Obama Administration dust-up with Fox News is instructive. The Old and New Media is perplexed about the whole affair, primarily because they are unable to clarify just what the White House strategy is. What are the Obami's goals? What would constitute victory in this little war?

But these are the wrong questions. That the Fox News gambit is a loser for the White House is well-nigh irrefutable. Fox News is gaining viewership at the expense of the White House's allies in the Media, and at the same time, those allies are compelled by the last shreds of journalistic ethics they retain to come to Fox's defense. Additionally, among the larger electorate, the stark contrast between the truly important issues, like unemployment, Afghanistan, and a nuclear Iran, and the Administration's obsession with a news organization, further depresses the President's already plummeting poll numbers.

So, what is so instructive about the situation? It is another instance where the Administration reveals that it is clueless about how to govern the country. Take the latest incident in the Fox News war. The Obami make the new Pay Czar available for press interviews, but stipulate that Fox News will not be allowed to participate. Now, if it was the Administration's intention to marginalize Fox News, then the smart play would have been to make the Pay Czar available to specifically selected Media reps that would not include Fox News. Instead, the Obami offers the interviews to the White House press pool as a group, which has an agreement among all the participants that there will be equal access to White House events.

In other words, the Administration put their Media allies in a situation where they would have to come to Fox's aid and refuse the interviews. The result? A stunning rebuke of the White House from Major Media that heretofore has been nothing short of nauseatingly obsequious.

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That the Administration would put their own allies into such an untenable situation when there was a perfectly good alternative, indicates that this Administration is all but terminally amateurish.

Add this fiasco to the embarrassing failure to secure the Olympics for Chicago. There again, it was a failure that did not have to occur. Basic due diligence indicated that before sending the President with loud hoopla to Copenhagen, the Administration should send out a few Ambassadors to poll the Olympic committee members on Chicago's chances. That they didn't do even this minimal preparation bespeaks a naivete unprecedented in Presidential Administrations.

Other examples abound. The silly idea of having Doctors dress up in white coats for a White House photo op, (note to White House: Doctors now wear green fatigues instead of white coats); the stunning abandonment of missile defense without getting Russian concessions on Iranian sanctions; the decision to "put some daylight" between the US and Israel, thereby emboldening the hard-line Palestinians and dooming any chance whatsoever for peace talks; the attempt to defend the Administration's Afghanistan dithering by lying about the analytical and policy conclusions it had received from the Bush Administration (as if no one from the prior Administration would expose the lie); and the attacks on citizens protesting the Administration's policies.

And this only scratches the surface of the last few months. Early on this Administration decided to out-source to Congress the preparation of legislation on all of President Obama's most important objectives: the Stimulus, Cap and Trade, and Healthcare. Splintered, contentious, and beholden as it is to myriad interest groups, Congress is just not equipped to tackle hugely complex legislation like this without a strong Chief Executive leading the way. Instead, this Administration relegated the President to the role of Cheerleader in Chief, apparently thinking the President could thereby remain above the fray, unsullied by the nitty gritty of politics, and still get his major policy initiatives passed.

Unbelievable. Naivete and cluelessness, all in one Administration.

Part of the problem for the national Media commentariat is that it continues to believe the prime myth of this Administration, that it has a Machiavellian brilliance about it, moving public opinion where ever it wills. In fact, there is nothing brilliant about this Administration, Machiavellian or otherwise. It is just a bunch of typical Chicago politicians who have risen far beyond their capabilities.

But what's more, the Administration is stubbornly clueless about its own cluelessness. It believes in its non-existent brilliance, and thereby adds fatal hubris to its terminal ignorance.

There's a combination for you, hubris and ignorance. As a result, this country and the world are powder kegs waiting to explode, until we can get this Administration out of Washington and back to Chicago where it belongs.

Pay Czar

Evil Wall Street. Bailed out Bad Guys. And what's even worse, they all supported President Obama in the last election. That the Administration's Pay Czar should rule that Wall Street exec's should forfeit 90% of their compensation seems only just.

It's not as if the government doesn't have a rational basis for intervention like this into private businesses. These financial firms did accept billions of dollars of public moneys. Shouldn't the government have some input on how that money is spent? But let's look a little closer at this rationale.

Government largess always comes with strings attached, and appropriately so. But in a society of laws, any such conditions should be spelled out before hand. For instance, if an institution accepts tuition from a government student loan, it is explicit that such institution shall not discriminate against student applicants or employees on the basis of race, creed, and etc. By the same token, if you accept a tax deduction for your home interest payments, you are accepting the obligation to honestly report your actual qualifying interest payments.

However, after taking the interest deduction, if some bureaucrat demanded that you, say, house a homeless person, I think you might be a trifle outraged at such a confiscation of your property, no matter how good the cause might be. In this respect, what conditions did the government put on the bail-out funds to Wall Street? As they say these days, zip, zero, nada. What right then does the Administration have today to dictate compensation packages, ex post facto? In a nation of laws, no right whatsoever.

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Not to mention that the Administration has about zero expertise in the complicated field of executive compensation. Base salary coupled with incentive bonuses, frequently involving stock options in the firm, carries a long pedigree in the industry, and its unclear on what basis the Pay Czar deems them excessive, other than the economically illiterate contention that they are just "too large."

Which brings another problem with the Czar's diktat to Wall Street. Just what was the process that resulted in this decision? What facts and evidence were included, what industry, trade, and civic associations consulted, and what economic analysis and experts relied on in deriving this latest policy? We simply don't know, and the lack of transparency in the process behind this extraordinary new policy is unprecedented in my life time.

In truth, this move by the Administration is just the camel's nose of the extension of government into every nook and cranny of American citizens' lives. Rep. Barney Frank has already given notice of his desire to extend the concept into non-bail out industries.

Via email

The Roundup

Okay, I'm on the Roundup patrol this week because I am me and they are them, somebody has to do the heavy lifting, and, of course, I don't really have anything else to do right now.

Whenever the Republicans have a crucial job, like critiquing the Afghanistan policy of the dithering Obama Administration, they turn to their man of Ruthian proportions, if not of physical prowess, Dick Cheney. And like the Babe, the former Vice-President hit a home run last night in his speech on the Afghanistan war at the Center for Security Policy. To extend the baseball metaphor, little Rahm Emanuel, just up from a Chicago farm team, was sent out to the mound on the Sunday talk shows to defend current Administration policy, and lobbed a few jibes at the Bush Administration for handing off a disaster in Afghanistan with little help for the new Administration. Babe Cheney hit these soft, underhanded pitches from the foreign policy rookie out of the ballpark, branding him a bald-faced liar in the process.

Gallup's latest tracking polls indicate a Presidential drop in approval of Brobdingnagian proportions in the 3rd quarter of this year. It's the biggest drop in almost 60 years.

Perhaps the Pesident's poll problems stem from another setback on his signature Healthcare policy. Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid attempted to reduce the cost of the new Healthcare Bill by simply reassigning $250 billion dollars out of the proposed Healthcare Bill and into the already massive debt of Medicare/Medicaid. He lost the vote against a coalition of Republicans and a whopping 12 Democrats and 1 Independent. Hey, President Obama really is bringing us bi-partisanship, just like he promised!

Two young guns at National Review Online are taking aim at the important stuff. Mark Steyn posts in The Corner a report on the advantages of eating dogs, and Jonah Goldberg let's us know about three more Timewasters, here, here and here. I would have gotten this Roundup done sooner, but got caught up killing zombies.

Headlines You Won't Ever See

Obama Administration
Nixes Black Majority Rule

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In a stunning blow to Black aspirations, the Obama
Justice Department overturns the voter's decision
in majority Black community, Kinston, N.C., to have
elections without partisan party labels. Explained a
Justice Department spokesman,"We give out free
healthcare and walking around money, and they
want to eliminate Democrat labels on the ballot?" ---------------------------------------------------------

"Sheesh," he continued. "This makes us pine for the Bush
days when all we had to watch were the white voters."

Major media story here.