Positive Liberty

Ever since Christopher Hitchens left The Nation, I’ve been hard pressed to find a reason to frequent their website. My personal politics are probably equidistant from the Weekly Standard, as far as that goes, but as long as they keep publishing Matt Labash and Andrew Ferguson, I’ll keep checking back in.

Ferguson has the Standard’s cover story this week, “The Wit & Wisdom of Barak Obama,” wherein you will find such nuggets as:

There’s still room for whimsy at the New Yorker magazine, I don’t care what you’ve heard. Just the other day two of the New Yorker’s bloggers (now there’s a phrase to send Harold Ross spinning) were chewing over the widely noted eloquence of Barack Obama.

And:

The overarching theme of Obama’s speeches, and of his campaign, is that America is a fetid sewer whose most glorious days lie just ahead, thanks to the endless ranks of pathetic losers who make it a beacon of hope to all mankind.

Sure it’s a hit piece. But it’s a funny hit piece, damnit! Enjoy.

Joseph Story is a seminal figure in American legal history. He was a member of the US Supreme Court in the early 19th Century, helped start Harvard Law School and wrote commentaries on the law that provide great weight in determining the original understanding of the American Constitution and common law. He is often cited for a conservative reading of the religion clauses, and has some quotations which, taken out of context, could support the “Christian Nation” ideal. For instance, a quotation that the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist invoked, and currently invoked by this conservative historian, informs:

The real object of the amendment was not to countenance, much less to advance, Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment which should give to a hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government. It thus cuts off the means of religious persecution (the vice and pest of former ages), and of the subversion of the rights of conscience in matters of religion, which had been trampled upon almost from the days of the Apostles to the present age. [Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, 5th ed. (Boston: Hilliard, Gray & Co., 1833), 701]

Continue Reading »

Heads up, I will be on the Gary Sutton Show, tomorrow, March 17 at 10:00am. My buddy Jay is guest hosting and will interview me on religion and the Founding Fathers. You can listen live here.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is a charmingly quirky and semi-screwball romantic comedy with an oddly bittersweet ending. Set as a period piece in England between the world wars, we find Guinevere Pettigrew (the wonderful Frances McDormand), a frumpy working class spinster with an empty stomach, passing herself off as a social secretary to songstress and would-be starlet Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams), herself a poseur with little more to her name than the dress on her back and two dozen pair of shoes. As Delysia bounces cheerfully among the many men in her life in the course of a single day, Miss Pettigrew’s comparatively vast sense and sensibility manages to rescue her from herself and, in the process, Miss Pettigrew manages to stumble into what looks like a much better prospect than a mere full stomach, too.

The film is a bit slow starting and, truth be told, the pace slackens a bit and almost stalls from time to time. Well, it’s a small movie, after all, and the somewhat erratic directing inadvertently adds to its also sometimes strained sense of style. More significantly, though, the looming threat of World War II adds a melancholy element to the story, especially in its resolution. We are all of us too sophisticated to believe in happily-ever-afters any more even at the conclusions of our romantic comedies, but we leave the theater this time worrying that Miss Pettigrew’s happily-for-a-while might be cruelly cut short once again. Hollywood, CV can assure you, would never leave us feeling so queasy. Which is another way of saying that Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is better than typical Hollywood fare.

No matter where you turn, this whole church and state business just seems to keep popping up like a run-amok game of whack-a-mole, doesn’t it?

I have spent much of my adult life among a number of very bright people whose attitudes toward the claims of theists range from indifference to hostility. The latter is on the ascendancy, in case you haven’t noticed, in what passes in America for its intelligentsia; and I can’t help but chuckle whenever I hear from such quarters the tentative suggestion that it is at long last the atheist’s turn to claim the full panoply of benefits and entitlements entailed by demographic victimhood in Our Fair Land.

Still and all, I can’t deny they have a point when they call B.S. on the daftness of what also passes for American religious leadership these days. And, no, I’m not talking about Obama’s former pastor, although I am happy to learn that Obama has apparently been sleeping through the sermons for decades just like the rest of us.

Instead, I recently found myself reading Christopher Hitchens’ splendid critique of the latest lunacy from Rowen Williams, better known as the current Archbishop of Canterbury. Williams has advocated, in a very nuanced way, mind you, and phrased in many of the cant terms of the progressively postmodern intellectual, that all this business about “one law for everybody” is an idea whose time has not only come but also passed.

Now you have to be an insider to understand why all this is so deliciously funny coming from Williams in particular or why this makes it all the more funny that it is the conservatives and traditionalists within the Episcopal Church, the American branch of the Anglican Communion, who are striving to remain a part of that communion, titularly headed by Williams, even as the denomination tears itself apart nationally over the role of homosexuals in the church.

Hitchens is technically correct when he calls Williams Great Britain’s “official spiritual authority,” but his tongue must be firmly planted in his cheek as he writes the phrase. There are only a few dozen active members of the Church of England left and over half of them are clergy. Okay, so maybe that last statement is a tiny bit of an exaggeration, but not much more of an exaggeration than to claim that Williams is any sort of real spiritual authority to the vast majority of the British, most of whom see the Church of England to be, at most, a convenient place to be ceremonially hatched, matched and dispatched.

To call the Anglican Communion anywhere among white folks to be much more than a remnant (and not of the righteous variety) of the erstwhile WASP empire is to give it far more credit than it deserves. That said, it isn’t so much that God abandoned the Church of England or the Episcopal Church as that more and more of their members opted instead for the ranks of those bright people mentioned at the beginning. If it weren’t for the social gospel they’d have no gospel at all. In increasing numbers, having realized this, many simply left. In Africa and elsewhere outside England and North America, by contrast, the Anglican Communion remains vibrant and largely both orthodox and conservative. It is also in a genuine contest with Islam in those parts of the world. By contrast, the Episcopal Church seems hellbent on becoming the first mainstream Protestant denomination in America to shrink to mere sect if not cult status.

Those who are insiders in this current crisis in the Anglican Communion might easily assume from what I’ve written that my sympathies lie with the conservatives. In fact, they originally lay with the liberals on the substantive issues in dispute but I’m increasingly inclined to take a “pox on both their houses” attitude toward the whole imbroglio. The Episcopal Church is, if I recall my history correctly, the only mainstream Christian denomination in the United States that didn’t schism over the issue of slavery and secession during the Civil War. That it is doing so now over sexual politics is frankly laughable. An Episcopal bishop I know took some offense when I made this same observation a while back, but he really didn’t have much of a substantive reply beyond his pique. Then again, Episcopal bishops tend to avoid substantive replies whenever possible.

Every ten years the leadership of the worldwide Anglican Communion gets together at Lambeth Palace and this is the year. Sadly enough, the chances that this summer’s Episcopolooza will devolve into a pie throwing contest are not high. Even so, there should be at least a few Entertainment Tonight quality stories to report, and I hope to pass some of them along here.

I am always interested in how other people do their jobs. Sometimes you can steal a good idea from another industry and use it to promote your own career or venture.

Chris Sligh was one of the American Idol, Top 10 contestants from last season. At his blog he weighed out-loud the pros and cons of signing with a major record label, or holding out and going “indie.” (I think he ultimately chose to go independent in Christian Contemporary Music).

At the beginning of Sligh’s post is a link to a short MTV News video on the Future of the Music Business, with more on the subject.

The Internet services many new, deeper niches. Yet how many industries are getting flattened by the Net? In the MTV news vid, one record promoter explains that they can now make a profit with 1% of the sales major labels need to break-even.

It seems to me that,for the new age we’re in, opportunity abounds (in a variety of industries) for many more people to get in on the lower rungs and do what it is that they enjoy doing as a part-time or full-time career (if it weren’t for the Internet, I wouldn’t have my current jobs). But making it “big” may be harder than ever.

Jim Babka leaves an excellent comment criticizing Walter Berns’ position that traditional Christianity is incompatible with the natural rights philosophy of the American Founding. In particular Babka writes:

First, Locke pretty much starts with a man named Adam, living in a garden — THE BIBLICAL NARRATIVE. And whether or not Rousseau had influence on our Founders, particularly Jefferson, no one doubts Locke had anything short of tremendous influence.

Second, whether or not our Founders were predominantly Theistic Rationalists, as Jon Rowe keeps illustrating, they still had to sell their idea in an orthodox, Christian milieu. If Natural Rights was so explicitly counter-Biblical, please tell me how a culture that actually owned and read Bibles, stood for rights? …and why Christians, even the most fundamentalist of them, endorse the notion of rights as found in the Declaration of Independence?

The Straussians explain at great length this interesting dynamic of traditional Christians going along with ideas that were not authentically Christian, perhaps anti-biblical. Continue Reading »

From Brayton. Steven Waldman has two essays on TPMCafe that illustrate the nuanced middle ground position of America’s key Founders on religion for which I have been arguing over the past few years. The first shows why America’s key Founders weren’t strict Deists. The second shows why they weren’t orthodox Christians.

Regarding the proper term to call America’s key Founders, as I commented on Brayton’s blog:

If we define both Christianity and Deism broadly, then America’s key Founders were both Christians and Deists at the same time or to use David L. Holmes’ term “Christian-Deists.” If we define Christianity and Deism narrowly, then they were neither; hence Gregg Frazer’s term “theistic rationalists.” What is unfair is when either the secular left or the religious right try to define one term broadly and the other narrowly to “capture” each Founder in its own group.

Most annoying kid ever!

Arguably No. At least according to Walter Berns. Or Thomas West’s understanding of Walter Berns. Berns does argue that Rousseau did have more of a profound effect on America’s Founding that most people are aware (indeed, Rousseau’s notion of the “civil religion” is almost identical to the generic theism that Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin et al. posited when they connected religious and political principles).

Here Thomas West notes what Rousseau’s social contract teaches when war breaks out [quoting Rousseau]:

The citizens march readily to combat; . . . they do their duty, but without passion for victory. They know how to die rather than to win. . . . Christianity preaches nothing but servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favorable to tyranny that tyranny always profits from it. True Christians are made to be slaves” (Masters trans. 129-30).

Then West notes Walter Berns’ take on the matter:

Rousseau’s nasty remarks are supported, surprisingly, by respectable conservative scholars such as Walter Berns, who maintains, “The very idea of natural rights is incompatible with Christian doctrine.” According to Berns, if you don’t put your neighbor’s good ahead of your own, you are a bad Christian. But the natural rights doctrine of the founding says that you may put your own preservation first if it conflicts with another’s.

If Berns and other scholars like him are correct, you cannot be a good Christian and a good American. George Washington’s 1789 letter to the Quakers tactfully but firmly criticizes their refusal to serve in the armed forces. Good citizenship, Washington implies, requires that you be willing to kill the enemies of your country.

As I noted in my last post, Berns goes farther than I do in asserting the incompatibility between Americanism and Christianity. I would simply note that Americanism and Christianity are not the same thing; Christianity is compatible with American style republican government because Christianity is compatible with almost any form of government, even and especially tyrannical government that is hostile to Christians (indeed, the very government in which Christianity was born!).

Berns, after Leo Strauss, correctly notes that whenever you read about the notion of “state of nature” and contracts and rights, be it Hobbes’, Locke’s or Rousseau’s version of the concept, you are reading an account of the origin of man that is “wholly alien to the Bible.”

At Cato Unbound, Walter Berns has responded to George Kateb’s essay on patriotism. Though I have strong disagreements with Berns’ conservative politics, I always enjoy reading his work. He is brilliantly learned on the political philosophy of America’s Founding and, interestingly, argues America’s Founding philosophy is secular and non-Christian at its core (he goes even further than I do in asserting the American Founding’s incompatibility with orthodox Christian doctrine). Yet, even though America and France were founded on the same (or a very similar set of) Enlightenment principles, because America took a different approach to implementing those principles — i.e., America didn’t sweep everything away and remake society in accord with those ideals, but rather enacted compromises, where changes would occur slowly, over time, through democratic and republican mechanisms — Berns reaches a very conservative, Borkian even, constitutional Founding, out of ideals that were liberal and subversive of the traditional Christian order.

Here is a taste of Berns’ essay that illustrates what I’ve just noted above:

For this reason patriotism became linked with the rise of popular sovereignty. This development, in turn, depended on the discovery or pronouncement of new universal and revolutionary principles respecting the rights of man — see Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690). From these new principles came new governments, first in America, then in France, and with them came a new understanding of patriotism, or an understanding other than, or in addition to, love of country, or the sort of filial piety associated with classical Sparta.

Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to recognize this new form of patriotism, or at least to speak of it. In his Democracy in America, he argued that this patriotism was more rational than the simple love of one’s native land. It was Aborn of enlightenment, he said, “and grows with the exercise of rights.” A few years later, Abraham Lincoln referred to the Founders of this country as “the patriots of ‘76,” not, I think (or as Professor Kateb would have it), because they killed their erstwhile “British brethren,” but, rather, because they established this free country. Lincoln said it was “the last best, hope of earth.” Thus, he eulogized Henry Clay by saying that Clay loved his country “partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country; and he [worked zealously] for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such the advancement, prosperity and glory of human liberty, human right and human nature.” In a word, the patriotic Clay loved the idea of his country, or its principles.

Another great interview on Fresh Air with comedian Robert Schimmel. Schimmel is one of the funniest men on the planet. And though the Fresh Air interview is work safe the following excerpts of his shows are not.

This context-plucked snippet of a phrase is from the ‘pen’ of David Mamet, surely one of the finest playwrights / screenwriters of our age. It is not, however, from any of his dialog overlapping, cynical 1.5 dimensional character cluttered literary efforts but from a longish essay in, of all places, the Village Voice. Herewith, Mamet the formerly “brain-dead liberal” (his phrase, folks, not mine) and still master wordsmith:

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.

Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.

Good stuff (though not, by the way, all that much different from the slant one gets from P.J. O’Rourke’s brilliant Parliament Of Whores). Perhaps one shouldn’t be all that surprised to hear such comments from someone whose political sensibilities were sufficiently well honed to have written Oleanna back in 1992. Alas, there doesn’t appear to be a role here for Mamet perennial favorite, Ricky Jay. Even so, well worth a read.

From the comments, Matt writes,

Completely off topic but yesterday I caught part of a radio programme that made me think of you guys. The part that fascinated me was Professor Frank Trentmann’s claim that advocating free trade was in the 19th century a *working class* movement. This certainly challenged my previous impression that avowedly working class political movements tend to be some variant of socialism. Anyway just thought I’d throw it in and see if anyone can make something of it. The programme website is [here].

Matt is absolutely right. The working-class appeal of free trade in the 19th century is maybe the biggest untold story in the history of free trade. It’s particularly ironic that today free trade is seen as benefiting chiefly the upper classes, because a thorough and principled free trade would I think not benefit the rich very much, while in the long term, it would raise living standards for the poor more than any other group. The great liberalization of the 19th century is instructive here.

In Britain, the Corn Laws set high tariffs on imported grains, making bread artificially expensive. The poor were particularly hard-hit, since a greater proportion of their overall income went to bread — and thus to the tax collectors. Similar duties existed on many staple products, and they were widely disliked by the liberals of the day.

The Anti-Corn Law League’s successful campaign to repeal the Corn Laws is therefore a textbook classical liberal success story. Wikipedia’s page on the ACLL is pretty poor, but this one at the city of Manchester is very good.

Yet the ACLL’s work was too little and too late to save Ireland from the famine of the 1840s. The Irish lived and died by the potato harvest in part because bread was not an economical substitute; added to this, restrictions on land ownership by ethnic Irish meant that English landowners had the final say in where the remaining food products went, and these often ended up in England. The result was the first modern famine, that is, the first famine produced not by natural dependence on weather and growing conditions, but by misplaced economic incentives. Or, to be frank, by the laws. Yes, there was a blight on potatoes in Ireland during the 1840s. But there was a blight on potatoes everywhere in Europe at the same time. Only Ireland starved.

In our day, tariffs and other measures restricting free trade still hurt the poor more than any other group, because the poor still have smaller savings and less ability to reduce luxury consumption in response to rising prices on necessities. With regard to consumer goods like clothing, housewares, and electronics, tariffs will result in less consumption by the working class. These goods tend to be imported, and threats to raise tariffs against China, for instance, are really threats to make everyday products more expensive for everyone — a step that the poor will notice more than any other group.

The difference is that today, working-class people don’t face starvation as the marginal method by which they reduce their consumption, and they are therefore much more willing to, in effect, “purchase” protectionism — at the cost of fewer or more expensive shoes, televisions, and the like. (Even if there were a tariff on imported foods, the result would not be a drop in food consumption, at least not to the point of starvation; these other goods would be purchased less often as food budgets rose and took up a higher share of income.)

Protectionism, ultimately based on an economic fallacy, is still intuitively appealing, and if it can be purchased so cheaply, well, the case for free trade is that much harder to make.

Hear Steven Waldman of Beliefnet promote his new book on the Founding Fathers and Religion on Fresh Air.

Or so says A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles. No surprise, Duffy approves of a California appellate court ruling effectively against home schooling. As the Los Angeles Times reports:

“Parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children,” wrote Justice H. Walter Croskey in a Feb. 28 opinion signed by the two other members of the district court. “Parents who fail to [comply with school enrollment laws] may be subject to a criminal complaint against them, found guilty of an infraction, and subject to imposition of fines or an order to complete a parent education and counseling program.”

I’m sure the parent education and counseling program must be conducted by a ‘credentialed’ teacher, too. Ah, California!

“Big” can be a real problem here in the United States. Big Labor. Conglomerate Corporations. Military-Industrial Complex. Institutional Media. These are all part of that amorphous blob populists fear called, “Big Business.”

And the populists, particularly of the more progressive stripe, have a point: Big Business uses our Monopoly Government to spy on, suppress, and even, occasionally, destroy competition. Sometimes, Big Business even gets new laws passed that impose new inconveniences, restrictions, or taxes on all of us. The coming “Real ID” is a boon for companies who make various “security products.”

But Big Business has a specific tool that makes some of their bigness (and resulting treachery) possible. It’s Big Government. That is to say, if we reduced the size of government, Big Business would, by necessity, become leaner and more customer oriented. Big Business would be largely de-fanged if we Downsized DC.

Americans understand that OPEC provides a method for artificially increasing the revenues of Middle Eastern oil producing nations. It’s a cartel.

Cartels are the inevitable step-children of government bureaucracies. These boards Continue Reading »

With an extra helping of schadenfreude. And a side order of irony, too. TheSmokingGun has the dirt. You know you want to see it.

Tomorrow: Nothing but economic history, I promise. Dry. As. Dust. I promise. But today: Whores!

I’m not quite sure I understand the point of George Kateb’s “On Patriotism” in the current issue of Cato Unbound. It seems he builds an elaborate argument on a purely metaphorical foundation: Yes, the love of the nation-state is supposed to be just like the love for a father or a mother, or at least that’s what nationalists like to say. But no, fathers and mothers do not often butcher their children. Kateb seems to think that this proves something important about patriotism, but I’m less convinced.

On one level, he’s absolutely right — the distinction between love of family and love of nation is obvious, and it’s a little absurd when you state it in just those terms. And yet, on another level, you don’t argue with these things. It’s improper. Impolite, even. It’s like arguing with Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland: Sometimes, the Fatherland most certainly will ask you to die for it. And at other times, you’re its dear, sweet, beloved children. Words mean what I say they mean, and them’s the breaks.

The whole discussion might benefit from some methodological individualism. This name is given to the approach to social sciences that ascribes intention, moral agency, and causality only to individuals, and never to groups. A methodological individualist will not deny the existence of groups, and will not deny that people often feel powerful allegiances or antipathies to them. But he will say that ultimately, “the Fatherland” isn’t asking anything. Only individuals make demands, because only individuals have agency.

After that, there’s no sense sugar coating the truth. Other people — other individuals — are asking you to die so that they may parade down the streets in triumph, award themselves fat pensions, and live on your orphaned children’s tax money. That’s what nationalism is, no more and no less. To make it all cohere as a political platform, these people, these other individuals, are trying to co-opt the feelings that you have for your very own family.

It should be no big mystery why libertarians are suspicious of nationalism. The methodological individualist sees nationalism as a request for a highly inefficient transfer payment from one person to another, repeated a few billionfold in the last century. The deadweight loss of nationalism is the mother of all deadweight losses. (Thought experiment: What if we held the parade, awarded the pensions, and levied the taxes without physically hurting anyone? Doesn’t this leave no one any worse off, and quite a few better, than in all wars that end up status quo ante? What, you mean to tell me it wouldn’t feel the same?)

I guess my real question is quite simple: Why pull punches? Why talk about metaphors, when the real thing is horrible enough?

As Kateb notes, “the theorists of [social] contract knew that consent would not supply the passionate energy that is required to discharge the obligation to die.” He’s right. Love for a country has to be welded – awkwardly – onto the contractual account of government. Love for a contractual system feels strange. Yet this is not a bug but a feature of social contract theory. As I’ve said in the past, I’ll take a government that rules with all the majesty of an insurance company. Like good governments, insurance companies protect our lives and property, after a fashion. Yet virtually no one offers to kill or die for an insurance company.

Methodological individualism also takes much of the sting out of Kateb’s late-in-the-essay gender analysis. He writes,

The brute fact of patriotism is made brute by the inveterate inclination in men to associate virility with the exertion involved in killing and risking death. No theory can ever defeat or discredit this inclination, which helps to engender the fantasy that the competition of political units is the highest kind of team sports. Men love teams, love to live in a world where they are called on to back or play for their team against other teams, even though the sport of war is soaked in blood. . . Men can become peace-loving for a while, but not forever. The women who love them encourage their inclination to see team sports as the essence of their masculinity, and to call patriotic this inclination when it is projected into politics. The pity is that men lend their energies to a state that sooner or later embarks on an inherently unjust imperialist career and thus gets constantly engaged in policies that are deliberated in secrecy, and sustained by secrecy and propaganda, and removed from meaningful public deliberation. Patriotism is indispensable for sustaining this career of anti-democracy.

Now, many men certainly do associate virility with killing and dying. No argument there. Yet it’s hardly clear that “no theory” can ever change their minds. Deductively, the claim is impossible to prove. Empirically, many similar statements have been falsified. After all, men once associated virility with scholarly aptitude, and women – acting on the theory that all people are created equal – have disproven them.

The rest of the blockquote is also empirically troubling. Men can become peace-loving forever, as millions of lifelong pacifists will attest. We would not be worse off if the most militant among us adopted this course instead. Those of us in the middle will be happy to keep civil order in the meantime. And women, far from encouraging men’s tendencies toward violence, stereotypically discourage them instead. They sigh, and smirk, and roll their eyes at the silliness of men’s violent side. (They probably do us a service here.)

But I can’t be too harsh on Kateb. After all, he writes, “The support of one’s team is not the defense of the Constitution,” and I do wish many more people would take this maxim to heart.

The Bank Job is a better than average heist movie but, alas, not much better. Invoking the five most meaningless words in cinema, “Based on a true story,” the movie riffs on possible subplots behind a real enough 1971 English bank robbery. The basic theory here is that embarrassing evidence of Royal family sexual scandal led the government actually to recruit some second-rate villains to rob the bank and retrieve the naughty pictures. When even naughtier pics of prominent politicians and evidence of police corruption are also discovered in other safe deposit boxes, things quickly get ugly.

CV thinks Jason Statham was sensational in some of his earlier work, especially in Crank, and continues to wonder why he hasn’t broken through as the next major action hero. There is little in The Bank Job, however, to support CV’s case. While Statham’s character gets caught up in a fair amount of acceptably choreographed and filmed but largely uninspired action toward the end, most of the movie plods along making sure the some half dozen plot threads get adequate attention.

Heist or caper films follow a predictable story arc: the mastermind devises the caper, the crew is assembled, preparations are made, the crime is committed but, of course, obstacles arise and complications ensue, all of which must be resolved. Much of the fun in most such flicks frankly comes from the first three elements, but these are largely ignored in The Bank Job to make time for the almost overwhelmingly convoluted and, in CV’s opinion, unnecessarily protracted complications. Unlike the motley band of criminals in The Bank Job, everyone involved from cast to crew are entirely competent in their performance. Mere competence, however, simply doesn’t suffice here.

* * * * *

Constant Viewer really wanted to give Honeydripper a favorable review. A fan of John Sayles’s quirky tastes and sensibilities for many years, CV also loved the set-up – in 1950 the black owner of a nearly bankrupt roadhouse in rural Alabama gambles everything on the emergent popularity of electric guitar based rhythm & blues. Rock & Roll may never die, but it still had a birth time and place and the South of the early 50s is that time and place.

This is, if you will, the flip (or B) side to a pivotal moment in the history of popular music. It was, by the way, wonderfully portrayed in a scene in Bird when jazz giant Charlie Parker (possibly Forest Whitacker’s greatest performance) grabs the saxophone from a former colleague who now struts on stage in a sequined tuxedo, playing up tempo R&B to adoring fans. “I just wanted to see if this thing could still play in more than one key,” the despondent Parker tells the vastly more successful musician.

Don’t get CV wrong, he loves the Rock & Roll. Market forces and all that and blah, blah, blah, too. The thing about Honeydripper, though, is that the market forces of the film industry checked out the movie and, correctly, found it wanting. Sayles & co. are self promoting and self distributing the movie, and while it’s entirely possible for an indie movie to be produced independently and go on to be a commercial success, it’s next to impossible for it to be distributed independently and make any money. If you want to see this move before its eventual DVD release, you may have to arrange a private showing, yourself.

Honeydripper is a nice enough little movie. Danny Glover and the rest of the cast, especially including newcomer and rising blues star Gary Clark Jr., are all engaging enough. The plot, while entirely predictable, nonetheless holds our attention and the art direction and cinematography are excellent. But the movie meanders too much in the first half and, worse yet, it fails to explode with music as CV believes it absolutely must if it is to work at all at the end. In fact, CV would go so far as to suggest this film’s soundtrack be remixed before DVD release lest it quickly fade yet again into oblivion.