The latest from Seymour Hersh, "The Iran Plans," has me a bit freaked out. Particularly when I read elsewhere that the only country to ever use nuclear weapons isn't willing to rule out using them again.
This is insane. And horribly familiar. And later, after I've processed things a bit more, I'm sure I'll have more to say on the subject.
Like all good Americans I watch too much TV. My country is in the middle of one unnecessary and unwinnable war and seems to be galloping toward another, so I probably ought to be doing … something. I should be writing letters to the editor, calling my members of Congress and volunteering for Joe Sestak's campaign in the hope that someday calling my members of Congress might do some good. I should be raging against the machine instead of lolling in front of the boob tube.
But if we give up entirely on indolent escapism, doesn't that mean that the terrorists have already won? Frivolous, time-wasting, fiddling-while-the-nation-burns commentary after the jump.
Last night brought the welcome surprise of a Rose/Bernard episode of Lost — echoes of Shadowlands, plus a Wolfram & Hart reunion on the beach.
Lost has captured the imagination of several of my friends, who keep asking me questions like whether or not I think Locke's con-man father might prove to be the real Sawyer. (That's an interesting question, but not as interesting as whether or not the bus crash has something to do with Woody's incorporation plans for Neptune, Calif. But I can't seem to get my friends hooked on that show.)
I'm still enjoying Lost — they've proven they know how to tell a story well. I'm just not entirely confident they know what story it is they're telling. I'm starting to get a whiff of late-season-two Twin Peaks. The plane-crash survivors may not know or care that they all seem to share these mysterious connections, but it matters to me as a viewer. I wish I were more sure that J.J. Adams & Co. had a particular explanation in mind and that they're not just making this up as they go along.
I am confident that Rob Thomas & Co. are telling a thematically and logically consistent story on Veronica Mars, the show that deservedly earned Joss Whedon's blessing as an Heir to Buffy. Mathesar (Enrico Colantoni) is delightfully goofy as our prickly heroine's watcher father. And Jason Dohring has earned the right to play Alyson Hannigan's brother (I mean this as the highest praise).
One recurring theme on Veronica Mars is this: The 09ers are not your friends. They are careless people, these 09ers, they smash up things and creatures and retreat back into their money and their vast carelessness and let other people clean up the messes they make. We haven't seen this explicit a portrayal of high school as class warfare since John Hughes' Ringwald Cycle.
Speaking of seasonlong story arcs, I should have waited on Prison Break. Like 24, this is the kind of show that's best watched via Netflix. So don't tell me about anything that's happened after the hiatus — I plan on watching the second half of this story all at once after the DVD comes out.
Not having read any of Kathy Reichs' books, I mainly starting watching Bones out of a sense of Josstalgia, but the show quickly establishes its own identity and soon it didn't seem strange to see David Boreanaz standing in full sunshine. And Emily Deschanel is a deadpan delight.
"The book was better" is an easy way to strike a high-brow pose while criticizing any movie. The exception is movies — or TV shows — adapted from comic books. In such cases the insistence that "the book was better" doesn't make you sound high-brow, just a bit geeky.
My standing joke about Smallville is that I'm waiting to see which happens first: Clark learns to fly, or Tom learns to act. But still, let me defend my affection for the show by saying that I always liked the book(s). That and Michael Rosenbaum's multiplicitous, doomed Lex Luthor. (Plus, of course, my distant family connection with our hero's namesake, the former Martha Clark.)
Even when the show gets bogged down in Dawson territory, it still works on the mythic level of its iconic hero. At its best, the Superman story reminds me of some of my favorite lines from Wislawa Szymborska's "Turn of the Century":
God was at last to believe in man:
good and strong,
but good and strong
are still two different people.
Superman's appeal is the fantasy of good and strong being one person. The danger of this fantasy is the dubious idea — embraced wholeheartedly by, among others, the Project for a New American Century — that virtue is a sufficient check on the otherwise unrestrained might of a Superman or a superpower.
All of which is to say I was glad to see that non-canonical Chloe keeps a chunk of kryptonite in her desk drawer, just in case.
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