It’s time to close out some of the tabs I’ve had open for a bit.
:: This first grouping is about the recent murder of Charlie Kirk, which I have been reluctant to address in any major way, and I suppose I’m going to keep not much addressing it. It’s phrasing things mildly to say that I was not a fan. I do not think that Kirk injected any particular level of intelligent insight into the national conversation; I found his views to be a typical MAGA blend of virulent toxicity, white supremacy, sexism, creepy evangelicalism, and a general lack of factual correctness. I also think Kirk was Exhibit A in my ongoing belief that debates, as we generally see them in American discourse, are a complete and utter waste of time that reward talking-point facility, quick speaking, and general loudness over developing and advancing serious argument. (I differentiate greatly between debate and argument.) In short, I do not believe that Kirk made America a better place; rather, he played a starring role in the political forces that I believe are relentlessly making everything that has ever been good about America worse.
But I am appalled and disgusted by his murder. The man should be alive. His wife should still have a living husband. His children should still have a living father. And the person who murdered him should never have been able to get hold of the tool he used to do it. (Assuming that the person in custody truly is the one who committed the act, an assumption that I see no reason to question.)
Here are several pieces that I read in the days following Kirk’s murder (which, in a sign of the times, I learned about on Tiktok):
It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning. As this thinking goes, there might be real belief, somewhere, in the provocations of our pundits, but much of it is just performance, and it doesn’t seem fair to condemn someone for the skill of putting on a good show.
But Kirk was not just putting on a show. He was a dedicated proponent of a specific political program. He was a champion for an authoritarian politics that backed the repression of opponents and made light of violence against them. And you can see Kirk’s influence everywhere in the Trump administration, from its efforts to strip legal recognition from transgender Americans to its anti-diversity purge of the federal government.
Many of the facile defenses of Kirk and his legacy are predicated on the idea that it’s acceptable to spread hateful ideas advocating for the persecution of perceived enemies as long as you dress them up in a posture of debate. This is just class privilege. The man who smeared Black women like Ketanji Brown Jackson and Michelle Obama, whom he claimed had benefited from affirmative action, saying, ‘you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously,” said it while wearing a nice shirt and a tie on a podcast instead of tattered overalls in the parking lot of a rural Walmart. That does not make it any less racist.
AR Moxon, The Die-ers. (This piece is not specifically about Kirk, and was written two years ago. I think it still applicable to the current moment.)
Supremacy is a belief system that rests on what I’ve called foundational lies: the lie of separation, which insists that we bear no relation to one another; the lie of scarcity, which insists that life must be earned; and the lie of redemptive violence, which insists that those who have not earned life owe a debt to those who have earned life; a debt that is best paid with violence and hard use.
It’s a belief system that lets me believe that other people don’t exist in the same way that I do—that they aren’t people, in fact—and makes that case so subtly, I don’t even have to tell myself that’s what I actually believe; makes it so subtly, I can be outraged and offended when I reveal this belief to others without even knowing I’ve done so, and people who have learned to detect the assumptions behind my mountainous inhumanity inform me that they’ve detected mountainous inhumanity in me.
Words are not violence, nor are they powerless. Burying the truth of the Confederacy, rewriting its aims and ideas, and ignoring its animating words allowed for the terrorization of the Black population, the imposition of apartheid, and the destruction of democracy. The rewriting and the ignoring were done not just by Confederates, but also by putative allies for whom the reduction of Black people to serfdom was the unfortunate price of white unity. The import of this history has never been clearer than in this moment when the hard question must be asked: If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?
Debate is a sport, and some people are very good at it, aand it is not a reliable route to truth or clarity or anything else except who is more ruthless, relentless, has more rhetorical chops, etc. I mean it’s dueling by verbiage and vehemence, and just like dueling with pistols or jousting with lances, all it settlesis better at the sport. (I know there is debate with rules in high schools and colleges, and then there’s the free-for-all versions….)
Was he good at it? He let college students pose questions and then (often, not always; see first comment) trounced them and somehow that was very appealing to a lot of people, which says a lot, but not that he was right or had his facts in line. Someone better than him at the sport–a top-notch courtroom lawyer, a lot of grownups–could have probably destroyed him in a debate not corrupted by interruptions and crowd roars, because he repeated a lot of MAGA nonsense. Adding a link in the comments of him being solidly trounced at Cambridge, thanks to Christopher Knight. Where the Brit is actually using facts and logic and kind of showing what debate should be, and Kirk is flailing.
Laurie Penny: “No, I will not debate you.” (Another older piece, but one which speaks directly to my personal distaste for “debate” as it’s mostly framed these days.)
There are some stupid mistakes that only very smart people make, and one of them is the notion that a sensible argument seriously presented can compete with a really good piece of theatre.
Every day, people on the internet ask why I won’t “debate” some self-actualizing gig-economy fascist or other, as if formal, public debate were the only way to steer public conversation. If you won’t debate, the argument goes, you’re an enemy of free speech. You’re basically no better than a Nazi, and certainly far worse than any of the actual Nazis muttering about not being allowed to preach racism from prestigious pulpits. Well-meaning liberals insist that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” anti-fascists disagree, the far right orders more popcorn, and round and round we go on the haunted carousel of western liberal thought until we’re all queasy.
Ezra Klein’s argument that Kirk was “practicing politics in exactly the right way” perfectly embodies this destructive thinking. Klein celebrates Kirk’s willingness to “show up and debate” as if the form of engagement somehow sanctifies whatever gets said, regardless of its content or effects. This is the abandonment of democratic values — or, at the very least, an ignorance of them — in favor of procedural worship. It’s a genuflection at the altar of democracy as ritual.
What’s most striking about Klein’s position—and the broader discourse around Kirk’s assassination—is how it reveals our complete abandonment of the contested tradition that once defined American approaches to speech and power. Contemporary commentators treat absolute free speech as if it’s some foundational American principle, when in fact it represents a radical departure from centuries of ongoing struggle over what speech deserves protection and why.
When the machinery of the state chooses to grieve selectively, it teaches the public whose humanity is recognized and whose is disposable. That hierarchy is not new. It is deeply familiar to those of us who live at the intersections of fate, race, gender and justice.
The rush to sanitize Kirk’s legacy is not an isolated phenomenon. America has a long history of smoothing over the sharp edges of those whose influence was harmful. Confederate generals who fought to preserve slavery were reimagined in textbooks as honorable men defending “states’ rights.” Richard Nixon, forced to resign in disgrace, was later eulogized by political elites as a statesman whose “legacy will endure,” with Watergate reduced to a footnote. Even George Wallace, who once pledged “segregation forever,” was later softened in memory as a “complex” figure rather than a lifelong architect of racial terror.
:: Setting aside Mr. Kirk (and honestly, I plan to never speak of him again, as I assume his memory will fade until no one will think of him any more than anyone really thinks about Rush Limbaugh these days), but the news is still depressing: How the Current Administration is dismantling American cancer research. In the long run, the most damaging thing about the current administration may well be Robert F .Kennedy Jr. and his ongoing jihad against vaccines and health in general.
Since 2018, “Nancy” has been penned by an enigmatic cartoonist who uses the pseudonym Olivia Jaimes. The reclusive creator modernized the strip, which has been in print since 1922, and its characters: the always sassy, sometimes grouchy Nancy Ritz, her aunt Fritzi, and best friend Sluggo.
But last week, we noticed black-and-white reruns on GoComics running in place of Jaimes’ bright, spare colored panels. These were “Nancy” strips from the Ernie Bushmiller days, who wrote and drew the comic from 1925 until his death in 1982. Wait. Where’s Olivia?
True to her mysterious ways, Jaimes quietly exited the strip and officially announced her retirement.
This makes me sad, though I’m happy to note that Jaimes leaves behind a seven-year-long body of work that is compelling and artistically interesting in the best Nancy way, as well as being often downright funny, which is the whole point, isn’t it? During Jaimes’s run, Nancy introduced a new cast of schoolmates for Nancy, as well as modernized her interests (Nancy was a member of her school’s robotics team!) without ever leaving behind Nancy’s trademark self-centered, but still somehow kind-hearted, nature. (Esther, Nancy’s new-ish best friend, had better make the transition to the new artist!) I also noticed that Jaimes played with the comic strip’s relationship with time: in a daily strip, obviously time passes (you can’t have Blondie and Dagwood just living in the 1940s forever), but you can’t have the characters aging while time passes. Jaimes observed this with great facility, allowing her characters to subtlely change and even mature over time (witness Nancy’s relationship with Mildred, her counterpart at the local magnet school) while no, nobody ever aged in the strip.
Olivia Jaimes’s true identity has thus far not been revealed, and while I am not clamoring for that to happen (unless Jaimes wants it to be so!), I am clamoring for Olivia Jaimes to have many successful future projects that are at least somehow clearly indicated as being Jaimes’s, if they choose to do any. I’d like to follow their work. (I also want a collection of all of Jaimes’s Nancy strips!)
That’s all for now…and my tabs are STILL overflowing, fancy that….
I mean, sure, it’s been autumn, technically, for about two weeks now. But still, it’s autumn!
And sure, “meteorological autumn” started a month ago, but this is different. This is October. So, we have Meteorological Autumn, which starts September 1; we have Astronomical Autumn (the traditional Autumn), which starts roughly September 20 or 21, depending on when exactly the Autumnal Equinox happens; and then I would posit we have Emotional Autumn, which for me starts either October 1 or whenever the Ithaca Apple Harvest Festival happens, whichever comes first. So now we’re really into Emotional Autumn, when the leaves start turning and the football season is heating up as teams shake off the preseason jitters and as baseball is getting exciting (unless you’re a Pirates fan, in which case you’re annually shocked to learn that they let the good teams keep playing baseball after the season ends) and as hockey is doing…whatever it is that hockey does, I guess.
So, let’s spend October listening to autumn songs! And who better to lead off than Nat King Cole?
Yes, we’re still here! I’ve been posting more on social media lately than here, but a return to the longer-form thing is definitely in the offing. Basically the last several weeks have seen a whole bunch of things all come to a head at the same time: a hugely busy period at work as we prepped The Store for a visit from the folks whose name is on the front of the building, followed by my annual getaway with The Wife to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes, and then followed by a surgery for The Wife, which we hope will alleviate some pain and mobility issues that she has been suffering for a while now. And before that was an infamous violent act that dominated the American conversation for a bit (I still haven’t figured out if I want to say anything about that at all in this space).
I’m off from work all this week, partly a vacation and partly a LOA to help care for The Wife in her post-surgery existence. (Oh, she’s doing great, by the way, thanks for asking!) Hopefully this will translate also into a bit more time to pivot my brain back toward some creativity and expression. We’ll get back to my “Moon Music” theme for this series, probably next week. For now, though, here’s a piece I have definitely featured here before and have shared on social media, but I don’t think I’ve shared it here in a while. It’s the concluding track from Hans Zimmer’s score to the 1997 rom-com As Good As It Gets.
Hans Zimmer’s music seems to be achieving higher and higher regard these days, and it definitely seems like the younger set is embracing him as basically their generation’s John Williams. I definitely love a lot of Zimmer’s work, though my John Williams is actually John Williams, so there’s that. I also am not as big a fan of Zimmer’s shift the last decade toward atmospheric music and less melody-driven work. I also miss his scoring of quieter, more intimate films like this. If there was to be a rom-com based in some weird way on my life, I’d want it to sound like this. I love when rom-coms set in NYC use music like this, that make the place sound like the kind of place for Parisian love-magic can happen amidst all the bustle.
Here, from As Good As It Gets, is “The Greatest Woman On Earth”, by Hans Zimmer.
Regular posting still isn’t resuming (I just finished up an extremely busy work week, and now The Wife and I are getting out of town for a short getaway, and then next week has some other challenges forthcoming but we’ll get to those in good time), but hopefully next week we’ll start to settle down a bit…meantime, today we celebrate the anniversary of the birth of one of America’s greatest musical voices, George Gershwin, who was nice enough to be born exactly 73 years before I was, so that’s cool!
Like I said the other day, there’s a kind of perfect storm of STUFF all coming to a head at once that isn’t leaving me with a ton of time for posting, so posting much, I have not. This is likely to continue for the next week, maybe even two, depending on how things transpire. None of this is bad, by any means: we have a big work event that’s taking up tons of time to prep coming up, and then next weekend is our annual getaway to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes, and right after that, The Wife has a medical procedure that will occupy a lot of mental cycles and energy.
But, I do need to get something up here at least once in a while, don’t I? And I’m still saddened by the passing earlier this week of Robert Redford, so I’ll discuss my personal favorite Redford movie, to which the title of this post alludes. The film is the 1992 caper film Sneakers.
Here’s the text of a post I wrote some years ago about the film, and then I’ll come back and say a few things more about it:
COSMO: You could have shared this with me.
MARTIN: I know.
COSMO: You could have had the power.
MARTIN: I don’t want it.
COSMO: Don’t you know the places we can go with this?
MARTIN: Yeah, I do. There’s nobody there.
COSMO: Exactly! The world isn’t run by weapons anymore, or energy or money. It’s run by ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It’s all just electrons!
MARTIN: I don’t care.
COSMO: I don’t expect other people to understand this, but I do expect you to understand this! We started this journey together!
MARTIN: It wasn’t a ‘journey’, Coz. It was a prank.
COSMO: There’s a war out there, old friend, a world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information: what we see and hear, how we work, what we think. It’s all about the information!
MARTIN: If I were you, I’d destroy that thing.
I saw Sneakers when it first came out, back in 1992 or thereabouts. It quickly became one of my favorite movies, and I saw it several more times theatrically before it became a fixture in my rotation of movies to rent on occasion, and later, when I had a sizeable collection of movies on VHS. But for one reason or another – mainly because I just never got around to it – Sneakers never got into my DVD collection, so I haven’t seen it in…holy crap. More than ten years. That seems rather wrong to me now, in retrospect, but never fear – I finally watched it recently, with some fear and trepidation that, like many a techno-thriller made more than a decade ago, it wouldn’t hold up very well.
Surprisingly – and satisfyingly – it does hold up, very well. And more than that: it’s striking to me now, twenty years later, just how eerily prescient this movie was.
Sneakers is one of the most entertaining cyberthriller-espionage movies I’ve ever seen. Robert Redford stars as Martin Bishop, the head of a security firm consisting of a group of men whose backgrounds mostly include shady dealings or outright brushes with the law. Their main job is simply to break into places that are supposedly highly secure, in order to demonstrate the lax areas in the security. They seem to be mostly just eking by: when they complete a job for a bank early in the film, a bank officer fills out the payment check, looks at it, and comments that it’s not a very good living. The team gets hired for another job, this time by two men claiming to be NSA agents, who happen to know who Martin Bishop really is (for which he could go to jail). They are to steal a device that decrypts codes which are supposedly unbreakable, which they do, and then give to the NSA guys – only to learn that they’re not NSA guys at all, and that they’ve murdered the mathematician who invented the device.
In a deeply eerie scene, Bishop’s hacker buddies start probing around with the little black box, just to see what it can do – and they discover that it can allow anyone to hack into extremely sensitive computer systems. The power grid of the entire Northeast…the Federal Reserve…air traffic control. They couldn’t have known it, writing this movie ten years before 9-11, but hearing one of the hackers jokingly say, “Anybody want to crash a few passenger jets?” is deeply chilling.
The entire movie is about security in an increasingly digital world, and at the end of the film, the exchange quoted above takes place, between Bishop and his onetime college buddy Cosmo, who has become a villain since doing time in prison for a crime that he committed with Martin at his side (but who eluded capture by the police simply by going out for pizza when they showed up with the guns). The idea of the world become increasingly governed by, and even defined by, the processing of data was a pretty bold one back in 1992. When I saw this movie, I had not yet even heard of the Internet, and the digital infrastructure that Sneakers portrays – with dial-up modems and not a cell phone in sight – seems utterly quaint. And yet, the movie is somehow fresh, despite all that, largely owing to the charm of the cast, the sparkling dialogue, the engaging direction, the brisk pacing, and – in terms of the technology – the nicely non-specific way the technology is depicted.
There are a lot of very clever touches in Sneakers: the reverse ‘race against time’, for example, in which Martin Bishop has to get a job done and yet literally can only do it at a very slow pace, lest the motion detectors notice his presence. Also the way they enlist Martin’s former (and yet still friendly) girlfriend to help with the problem of recording a particular scientist’s voice for use against the voice-print ID gizmo. (If the phrase “My name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify me.” is in your geek lexicon, then you are my kind of people.) I also like how vague the movie is about Cosmo’s villainy. We never learn who he works for, or if he is the main ringleader; we never learn what exactly it is that he wants to accomplish with the little black codebreaking box. In fact, it’s entirely possible that Cosmo doesn’t even have a specific plan in mind at all, and that he just wants the codebreaker because it will give him power that he as yet doesn’t really know how he intends to use it. He’s almost purely a theoretical villain, which is what makes him even scarier — as well as the sheer optimism of his villainy, which is what makes the quote above so memorable. It’s not about making threats or committing crimes or any of that dirty stuff. It’s about the possibilities inherent in controlling the world’s data.
And that is really makes this twenty-year-old film stay relevant.
OK, that’s the old post. I notice that I didn’t mention the film’s acting much in my original post, so I’m addressing that now, because Sneakers is one of the best-cast movies ever made, in my opinion. If they handed out Oscars for casting, Sneakers would have won it that year. You have River Phoenix as a young hacker, and Dan Aykroyd as an old hacker who is deeply invested in paranoid conspiracy theories. (This was a considerably more charming and entertaining character trait thirty years ago. Now, not so much.) You have Sidney Poitier as a retired CIA spook who hasn’t given up the game just yet, and David Strathairn as a blind hacker. Leading them all is Mr. Redford, a hacker with a past that has led him to assume a false identity. Joining them is Redford’s old girlfriend, played by Mary McDonnell, and the villain is Ben Kingsley as an old friend of Redford’s who went to jail for their escapades while Redford did not.
It’s really something to watch this movie and note the complete chemistry among the cast. At no point is there any break in the illusion; we really believe that this motley crew of hackers and law-benders has spent years working with one another at the weird intersection of legality and morality and…neither of those things. And they really do seem to enjoy doing it; they’re having fun, up until the moment when they realize that they have somehow become embroiled in something very real and very dangerous. But even then, once they sense that the winds have shifted in their direction again…the sense of fun returns.
Speaking specifically of Mr. Redford’s performance, he is doing more than having fun. There’s a sense right from the start that he’s been at this longer than anyone else, and that he’s starting to get a bit weary of the whole business. Redford shows us a Martin Bishop who is genuinely sorry for what happened to his old friend back in college, and who does want to move past the hackery part of his life. He’s also skeptical of what is to come and what Cosmo seems to be embracing, as shown in the exchange quoted above; Bishop’s hesitance to embrace a world where everything is determined by information and who controls it is notable, and in Redford’s hands, very, very real. Redford does things in this film with simple facial expressions that are just wonderful: a rolling of his eyes when he’s told to hurry up when doing a job where moving as slowly as possible is required, or a sudden snarl when he decides to punch out the thug who has been inconveniencing him all movie long. Or his mischievous smile that lets us know he’s pulled a fast one on somebody.
Most of all, though, Redford captures that Bishop is the brains and the heart of this whole operation. He’s the one who suspects first that this whole business with the code-breaking machine is more than he bargained for and that he and his team are involved in something more deep and sinister than they have ever dealt with before. This is something that Robert Redford was always great at, something that made him one of the best. He was always able to suggest, often without even saying anything, the emotional and intellectual lives his characters were leading.
And he was just so damned cool about it. Who wouldn’t want to be Robert Redford, after all?
Oh, this is a delayed Something for Thursday post as well, so here’s a nice suite culled together from the soundtrack to Sneakers, with music composed by the late, great James Horner. This is one of the great “caper film” scores of all time.
Lots going on right now, so I’m putting the Moon Music series on pause. Here, as is my tradition when I haven’t had time to vet something new, is an overture by Franz von Suppe.
Tabular Enclosification
It’s time to close out some of the tabs I’ve had open for a bit.
:: This first grouping is about the recent murder of Charlie Kirk, which I have been reluctant to address in any major way, and I suppose I’m going to keep not much addressing it. It’s phrasing things mildly to say that I was not a fan. I do not think that Kirk injected any particular level of intelligent insight into the national conversation; I found his views to be a typical MAGA blend of virulent toxicity, white supremacy, sexism, creepy evangelicalism, and a general lack of factual correctness. I also think Kirk was Exhibit A in my ongoing belief that debates, as we generally see them in American discourse, are a complete and utter waste of time that reward talking-point facility, quick speaking, and general loudness over developing and advancing serious argument. (I differentiate greatly between debate and argument.) In short, I do not believe that Kirk made America a better place; rather, he played a starring role in the political forces that I believe are relentlessly making everything that has ever been good about America worse.
But I am appalled and disgusted by his murder. The man should be alive. His wife should still have a living husband. His children should still have a living father. And the person who murdered him should never have been able to get hold of the tool he used to do it. (Assuming that the person in custody truly is the one who committed the act, an assumption that I see no reason to question.)
Here are several pieces that I read in the days following Kirk’s murder (which, in a sign of the times, I learned about on Tiktok):
Jamelle Bouie, New York Times: Charlie Kirk didn’t shy away from who he was. We shouldn’t, either.
Elizabeth Spiers, The Nation: Charlie Kirk’s legacy deserves no mourning.
AR Moxon, The Die-ers. (This piece is not specifically about Kirk, and was written two years ago. I think it still applicable to the current moment.)
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Vanity Fair: Charlie Kirk, redeemed: A political class finds its lost cause. (Amazing piece. You may need a paywall-bypass site to access it.)
Rebecca Solnit on debate (link is to a Facebook post):
Laurie Penny: “No, I will not debate you.” (Another older piece, but one which speaks directly to my personal distaste for “debate” as it’s mostly framed these days.)
Tad Stoermer, “The Absolutist Trap: How free speech became anti-Democratic” (paid Substack):
Nekimi Levy Armstrong, The Minnesota Star Tribune: “The blunt truth about Charlie Kirk’s legacy“.
:: Setting aside Mr. Kirk (and honestly, I plan to never speak of him again, as I assume his memory will fade until no one will think of him any more than anyone really thinks about Rush Limbaugh these days), but the news is still depressing: How the Current Administration is dismantling American cancer research. In the long run, the most damaging thing about the current administration may well be Robert F .Kennedy Jr. and his ongoing jihad against vaccines and health in general.
:: Finally, because this is getting long, a tip of the hat to a voice I’m sorry to see retiring: Olivia Jaimes, the pseudonymous creator of the comic strip Nancy over the last seven years, is stepping down.
This makes me sad, though I’m happy to note that Jaimes leaves behind a seven-year-long body of work that is compelling and artistically interesting in the best Nancy way, as well as being often downright funny, which is the whole point, isn’t it? During Jaimes’s run, Nancy introduced a new cast of schoolmates for Nancy, as well as modernized her interests (Nancy was a member of her school’s robotics team!) without ever leaving behind Nancy’s trademark self-centered, but still somehow kind-hearted, nature. (Esther, Nancy’s new-ish best friend, had better make the transition to the new artist!) I also noticed that Jaimes played with the comic strip’s relationship with time: in a daily strip, obviously time passes (you can’t have Blondie and Dagwood just living in the 1940s forever), but you can’t have the characters aging while time passes. Jaimes observed this with great facility, allowing her characters to subtlely change and even mature over time (witness Nancy’s relationship with Mildred, her counterpart at the local magnet school) while no, nobody ever aged in the strip.
Olivia Jaimes’s true identity has thus far not been revealed, and while I am not clamoring for that to happen (unless Jaimes wants it to be so!), I am clamoring for Olivia Jaimes to have many successful future projects that are at least somehow clearly indicated as being Jaimes’s, if they choose to do any. I’d like to follow their work. (I also want a collection of all of Jaimes’s Nancy strips!)
That’s all for now…and my tabs are STILL overflowing, fancy that….