Josef Mengele's Manifesto

Alexander Autographs explains that the notebook is a ‘political and personal manifesto, a stream-of-consciousness ramble offering an incredible view into the mind of an obviously unrepentant and quite insane murderer still on the run fifteen years after escaping his crimes in collapsing Nazi Germany’. Interspersed with his lengthy diatribes on eugenics, political theory and the superiority of the German race, the auction company adds, are routine references to his childhood, the local flora and fauna in the area, and other more mundane subjects.

The Mengele document was put up for sale at an auction on 20-21 January, but, apparently, failed to meet its reserves. Soon after, however, the company confirmed that it had secured a private sale to an anonomous buyer - an ‘East Coast Jewish philanthropist’ whose grandmother had once met Mengele. Many of these news reports - though not all - refer to Mengele’s notebook as a ‘diary’: Nazi doctor Josef Mengele’s diary up for sale (The Daily Telegraph); Grandson of Auschwitz survivor buys Mengele's diary (Haaretz); ‘Angel of Death’ Diary Shows No Regrets (Der Spiegel); Family of Auschwitz Survivor Buys Mengele Diary (US News).

However, it is clear that the Mengele notebook is not a diary at all but, as the auctioneers say, more of a manifesto. Here are some extracts as translated and made available by Alexander Autographs.

‘I arrived in this house exactly a year ago. However, this anniversary gave me no reason to celebrate. . . I was solely responsible for my decisions. I hope that people close to me show some patience, and I hope they don’t endanger things.’

‘Beauty is a primary force of selection.’

‘There’s no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in nature. There’s only ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’ . . . The ‘inappropriate’ elements are kept from reproducing.’

‘What is ‘good’ is built out of many different fundamentals, which are all elements of the immortal soul. Maybe these values aren’t limited to our ‘human existence.’ Think about loyalty! It’s a result of breeding, as for example in dogs, man’s oldest companion. But you cannot breed qualities that weren’t there all along!!’

‘The youth movement honored the traditions of our ancestors while remembering our primary cultural values. We had to remember our inner strength, and this was of utmost importance after World War I and the shameful peace that followed. This burden was designed to keep our people in a constant condition of decay. We had to find the deepest sources of German strength to make our restoration possible. We could not expect other people to help us, and we couldn’t rely on religion. . . What has the Catholic Church done to amend or get rid of the absurd Treaty of Versailles? They had a chance to influence the synods of the Protestant Churches, which make up two thirds of the German people. The new strength had to come from the Germans themselves, and this is exactly where it came from. The youth movement laid the spiritual foundation for the national uprising that was to follow World War I. Later on, the youth movement became part of the great political organization, the Hitlerjugend. . . We had to liberate Germanic history from Roman and Catholic influences. . . We were ready for another attempt to change the empire’s shameful history. In the end, this heroic way of life prevailed, and ten years later all of Germany embraced it.’

‘British rule in India wasn’t that bad. . . The casts are gone, and everything turns into a gooey mass. This new society can be ruled easily through Bolshevik doctrine and ideology. . . Brahmans are built nicely; some of them even have blue eyes. . . And this is because Brahmans used the highest cast to preserve their noble blood. They are the descendants of Nordic peoples who once conquered and ruled India . . . They have managed to protect their racial traits through thousands of years . . . This cannot be achieved by mixing the highest with the lowest class. It can only be done by selecting the best. I don’t think I’ll have to explain how incredibly difficult this will be . . . Books and education can foster existing qualities, but they cannot produce them.’

‘We will need an army of chemists, physics, biologists, doctors, mathematicians, engineers and administrators to master this giant energy problem that is coming.’

‘However, there’s no school on this planet that will turn a moron or some other simpleton into a gifted human being. You can promote natural tendencies that are already genetically present, but nobody can create intelligence or higher abilities.’

‘If we don’t want the physically or mentally disabled left to their natural fate, and if we want them to be a burden on society, we should at least be ethical enough to make sure that their inferior genes aren’t passed on . . . The real problem is to define when human life is worth living and when it has to be eradicated. The age of technology has created new conditions. (Idiots can get jobs in factories, and they can now make a living raising a family by moving sheet metal strips around and punching buttons.) They want a higher birthrate and to promote families with many children. They actually make sure that an idiot with many kids gets a continuous pay raise. . . The feeble minded person (‘village idiot’) was separated from farmers because of his social status and low income. This separation is no longer the case in the age of technology. He is now on the same level with the farmer’s son who went into the city.’

‘We have to prevent the rise of the idiot masses. This goal isn’t new at all, and some countries started implementing political measures to reach this goal. They were stopped for political and ideological reasons; even though they showed promising results.’

‘The law to prevent genetically deficient offspring has to be reinstated. However, the law will lose its edge if marriages with only one genetically sufficient partner are legal.’

‘Abandon feminist ideology; biology doesn’t support equal rights . . . Women shouldn’t be working in higher positions. Women’s work has to depend on fulfilling a biological quota.’

‘Birth control can be done by sterilizing those with deficient genes. Those with good genes will be sterilized when the number of 5 children has been reached.’

Clinging to religion

"And it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations," Obama said.

The Silent Generation

For the album, see The Silent Generation (album).
Silent Generation is a label for the generation born from 1925–1945 notably during the Great Depression (1929–1939) and World War II (1939–1945).[1] While the label was originally applied to people in North America, it has also been applied to those in Western Europe and Australasia. It includes most of those who fought during the Korean War.

Contents  [hide] 
1 Etymology
2 Demographic justification
3 Silent or not?
4 Famous members
5 See also
6 References
7 External links
[edit]Etymology

The label "Silent Generation" was first coined in the November 5, 1951 cover story of Time to refer to the generation coming of age at the time, born during the Great Depression and World War II, including the bulk of those who fought during the Korean War. The article, (which defined the generation at the time as born from 1925 to 1945), found its characteristics as grave and fatalistic, conventional, possessing confused morals, expecting disappointment but desiring faith, and for women, desiring both a career and a family.[1] The article stated:

Youth today is waiting for the hand of fate to fall on its shoulders, meanwhile working fairly hard and saying almost nothing. The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence. With some rare exceptions, youth is nowhere near the rostrum. By comparison with the Flaming Youth of their fathers & mothers, today's younger generation is a still, small flame. It does not issue manifestos, make speeches or carry posters. It has been called the "Silent Generation."

The phrase gained further currency after William Manchester's comment that the members of this generation were "withdrawn, cautious, unimaginative, indifferent, unadventurous and silent." The name was used by Strauss and Howe in their book Generationsas their designation for that generation in the United States of America born from 1925 to 1941.[2] The generation is also known as the Postwar Generation and the Seekers, when it is not neglected altogether and placed by marketers in the same category as the G.I. or "Greatest" Generation.

In England, they were named the "Air Raid Generation" as children growing up amidst the crossfire of World War II.

[edit]Demographic justification

It must be noted that the lowest birth years from 1929-1945 in the US were 1944 and 1945.[citation needed]. And as a result of World War II, the US birth rate in 1945 was almost as low as 1944's[citation needed]. However, for some reason, children born from 1942 to 1945 seem to have been excluded by many demographers[who?] from this Silent Generation. These children did not grow up during the Great Depression, and neither are they part of the Baby Boom Generation.

The Silent Generation was smaller than the WWI generation before them and the Baby Boom Generation afterwards due to the lower birthrate of the 1930s and '40s. As a result, members of the Silent Generation were uniquely poised to take advantage of economic opportunities, thanks to the reduced competition. Many of them went on to harness the scientific and technological advances of the Second World War, developing innovative inventions which laid the groundwork for even more technological progress in the late 20th century. The Silent Generation had a tendency to be better educated than the WWI generation because of not having their schooling interrupted by the Depression and the war.

Silent Generation members are generally the offspring of The Lost Generation (sometimes WWI generation) and the parents of boomers and Generation Xers. Many of them currently have grandchildren that are Generation Y and Generation Z. They are said to be born on the cusp of the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boom Generation, at times possessing characteristics of both while at other times, evading grouping into either camp. The earlier Silent Generations tended to identify more with the WWII generation and the later ones with the boomers.

[edit]Silent or not?

In Generations, William Strauss and Neil Howe define this generation as an Artist/Adaptive generation. An Artist (or Adaptive) generation is born during a Crisis, spends its rising adult years in a new High, spends midlife in an Awakening, and spends old age in an Unraveling. Artistic leaders have been advocates of fairness and the politics of inclusion, irrepressible in the wake of failure.

In a broad view, their labeling as an "Artistic" generations seems apt and the term "silent" might even be applied ironically. Most counterculture figures were Silent Generation, including rock singers and individuals such as Ken Kesey, George Carlin, Allen Ginsberg, and Abbie Hoffman. If the last birth year of the Silent Generation was 1942, it would contain bands such as the Beatles as well as rock stars such as Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, and Jimi Hendrix. Elvis Presley was also of this generation, as were some of the most famous movie stars of all time such as Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Clint Eastwood and James Dean. This generation contributed greatly to African American music, like soul music and rhythm & blues, producing singers like Ray Charles, Little Richard,James Brown, Marvin Gaye, guitarist B.B. King, producer Quincy Jones, and Tina Turner. Keeping to the "Artist's" advocacy of fairness and the politics of inclusion, many leaders in the civil rights movement came from the Silent Generation, along with a wide assortment of artists and writers who fundamentally changed the arts in the United States. The Beat Poets, for example, were members of the Silent Generation, as were Martin Luther King, Jr and Gloria Steinem. In France, members of this generation became leading intellectuals and philosophers in the wake of the May 1968 protests, including Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou, contributing to the phenomena known as "French theory" in US academia in the 1980s and 1990s.

The continued use of “Silent Generation” as a label has been justified by the lack of influential political leaders born into this generation. For example, using the Strauss and Howe definition, no US President has come from the Silent Generation; the few from the generation who ran for President include: Walter Mondale, Ron Paul, John McCain, Michael Dukakis, Ralph Nader, Jack Kempand Rev Jesse Jackson. Some other notable Silent Generation political figures include Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi.

[edit]Famous members

Mick Jagger
Keith Richards
Charlie Watts
John Lennon
Paul McCartney
George Harrison
Ringo Starr
James Brown
Bob Dylan
Peter, Paul & Mary
George Carlin
Patrick J. Buchanan
Michael Savage
Ray Charles
Chuck Berry
Noam Chomsky
Richard Dawkins
James Dean
Michael Dukakis
Clint Eastwood
Marvin Gaye
Hugh Hefner
Jimi Hendrix
Jesse Jackson
Quincy Jones
Robert F. Kennedy
B.B. King
Freddie King
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Marilyn Monroe
Joe Paterno
Ron Paul
Elvis Presley
Little Richard
Gloria Steinem
Tina Turner
Frank Zappa
Harrison Ford
Newt Gingrich
Smothers Brothers
Brian Wilson
Neil Armstrong
Buzz Aldrin
Pete Conrad
Alan Bean
Edgar Mitchell
David Scott
James Irwin
John W. Young
Charles Duke
Eugene Cernan
Harrison Schmitt
Frank Borman
Jim Lovell
William Anders
Tom Stafford
Michael Collins
Dick Gordon
Jack Swigert
Fred Haise
Stuart Roosa
Al Worden
Ken Mattingly
Ronald Evans
John McCain
Grace Kelly
Audrey Hepburn
Chevy Chase
John Hunter
Bart Starr
Wilt Chamberlain
Bill Russell
Mike Ditka
Dick Cheney
Barbara Walters
Joy Behar
Joan Van Ark
Jacqueline Kennedy
John Keegan
Rick Rescorla
[edit]See also

List of generations
[edit]References

^ a b The Younger Generation, Time Magazine, 1951
^ The silent generation
[edit]External links

TIME Magazine, The Younger Generation, 1951
TIME Magazine, The Silent Generation Revisited, 1970
[hide]v · d · eCultural Generations of Western Society
Lost Generation • Greatest Generation • Silent Generation • Baby Boom Generation • Generation X • Generation Y • Generation Z

Hating AI

The Brooklyn audience with whom I saw A.I. was laughing uncontrollably by the end.

THE WHOLE HORRIBLE MOVIE IS A MASTERPIECE OF INCOHERENCE. 


Steven Spielberg wants to be a Real Boy

By Jonathan Wallace jw@bway.net
I didn’t know he was a genius. Frankly, I didn’t know what the hell he was.-- Steven Spielberg's mother

From the recollections of Leah Adler, Spielberg's mother: "He used to stand outside his sisters' windows at night, howling, "I am the moon. I am the moon."
This is the third essay I have written savagely criticizing Steven Spielberg. I have never written so much personally vituperative prose about anyone other than Newt Gingrich. Its reached a point where family members roll their eyes when I say I didn't like a Spielberg movie. Why do I do it? 



Its mostly because he's a vastly over-inflated man of mediocre talent. He is in his person the very crystallization of the phenomenon I have written about frequently: the reason why Hollywood spends hundreds of millions of dollars making very bad movies. He is an emperor without clothes, a huge opportunity cost; the money that went to make A.I. could have made fifty or even one hundred better movies.

Steven Spielberg also represents to me a sickness of the American soul: a belief in short-cuts and easy fixes, that the Second Law of Thermodynamics does not exist, that anything is possible in a movie minute if you desire it enough. Your mom has been dead two thousand years? You can bring her back, if you want her badly enough.



A.I. fails on every level: as hard science fiction (which it pretends to be but isn't). As satisfying fantasy. As fairy tale. As a drama. And it fails not as an honorable attempt but because of the easy fixes and short-cuts that have come to infect all Spielberg's movies.

First, nothing in A.I. makes any sense. At the center of the movie is David, a robotic child, played capably by Haley Joel Osment, who was excellent in The Sixth Sense and may be one of those child actors who comes along once in a generation. But there's no role here for him to play--no character to get inside, just a collection of attitudes. The robot child--"mecha", in the movie's trite attempt at hard sci fi lingo--is a new model, one capable of love. There is a password--a random collection of words. If you say them to David, he "imprints" on you (like a baby duck) and loves you forever. If you ever decide you don't want him, he will have to be destroyed, because he will not be able to adjust to love anyone else.

But of course no-one would ever incorporate such a ridiculous design element in a robot.

 There wouldn't be any reason to do it that way. Its a major waste of hardware. A better approach would be: say the password again later, imprint him on someone else.

Also, this new model will only imprint on one parent. There's another major design error--David adores his mommy and is only polite to his father. If you're manufacturing (as a commercial product, remember) a robot child for people who cannot have real ones, wouldn't you want it to be able to love both parents?



EXACTLY.  THE MOVIE FAILS AS SCIENCE FICTION BECAUSE IT'S JUST INTELLECTUALLY LAZY. 

Finally, the concept of a robot child is rather strange. David can never grow. He appears to be about ten years old. Who would want to have a permanent ten year old? Why make him ten, rather than five or three? Perhaps it would have made more sense to design a series of mechas representing different ages. Every year or two, you would trade David in for a larger model, and transfer his memories over. Or perhaps (since in Spielberg-world, deus ex machina is not a problem) the company (Cybertronics, what an original name!) could have designed a mecha that actually grows.

David's parents acquire him because they live in a world where you have to be licensed to have a child; they already have one, who has an incurable disease and is in cold sleep. The father works for Cybertronics, and is picked to provide a beta test for the new model. His boss is Dr. Allen Hobby, played ably by William Hurt, who is good at this kind of role. In the opening moments, we see Hobby addressing a group of people, telling them that the new mecha will be capable of "dream and metaphor". 



For a moment, there hung lambent in the air the movie I really wanted to see.

EXACTLY.  ME TOO. 

 But "dream and metaphor" must have carried over from Kubrick's original concept; to Spielberg, dreams are only the blueprint for a reality that will manifest itself a moment later; and he wields metaphors like sledgehammers.

The little family drama, then, doesn't make sense--the heartbroken parents who receive this untested product, then don't love it-- but neither does the framework in which it hangs. The world is in trouble; an unusually hammy narrator tells us in the opening shot that the oceans have risen, that New York City has been drowned. But the Cybertronics facilty and the family home both appear to be in a tranquil Westchester.

Who rules this world? The police force needed to enforce a babies-by-license-only law would be immense, but we don't see them. If there's order, there must be a government involved in every detail; if New York was drowned only recently, there must be hordes of hungry Brooklynites encamped everywhere, presenting a real threat to peace. But when Monica, David's mother, sends him away, she takes him to the woods alone in her  tricycle car, unafraid of desperate starving displaced human trash.



EXACTLY.  NO WHOLE WORLD REALITY.

Spielberg hasn't given any thought to the social context of his story: he has it both ways. Some years ago, in an essay on the future, I wrote that science fiction movies present us with two irreconcilable futures: what I called the "World's Fair" version (everyone in white robes, happy clean and hygienic, flying personal helicopters) and the "Mad Max" version (everyone in leather, horses pulling cars because there is no gasoline). The world of A.I. portrays both: on this side of the woods into which Monica sends David, its the world portrayed in the GM Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair, complete with the tricycle cars and the personal aircraft; on the other side of the woods, its Beyond Thunderdome. Sure, you could have a wealthy quiet world threatened by a chaotic one next door--but where are the troops to secure it, the electric fences, the ruffians slipping about in the woods? 





At this point, David simply walks out of one world into another.



AGAIN, NO SENSE OF A REAL WORLD.  ONLY PHILISTINES DON'T NOTICE THIS; AREN'T OFFENDED.

Stanley Kubrick in conversation used to refer to this project, which he worked on, on and off for more than fifteen years, as "Pinocchio". But the fairy tale had much more development and transition than this version does. Pinocchio makes mistakes, learns, and is ultimately transformed into a real boy. David, in a surprising absence of judgement by Spielberg, changes only once: when Monica reads him the password. He has been very robotic (good strange performance by Osment), now (as determined by his programming) he becomes much more "human". But, after that, he never changes again. He doesn't learn, or respond to his circumstances, or adapt; he simply goes on a quest for Monica, while the evil around him seems to slide off his back. He's a little robot Andy Hardy.

In the woods, we have a few mildly enjoyable science fiction set pieces, except that we've seen them all before in better movies and even in better bad ones, going back to Westworld, Saturn Five, Blade Runner and the original Alien. Mechas scavenge a pile of junked mechas, looking for replacement parts. A nanny mecha attaches herself to David: she has a face but no head. A scary vehicle, which looks like the moon, comes and captures David. Afterwards, when David and his new friend, Gigolo Joe, have escaped again, they are frightened of the full moon. 

GIGOLO JOE?    IT'S A CHILD ORIENTED FILM.  BUT REMEMBER ET AND BAD BREATH. SPIELBERG IS A PHILISTINE. THROUGH AND THROUGH. 

The captured mechas are taken to a "flesh fair", a barbaric demolition derby where they are shot from cannons or destroyed with acid. We are in fullMad Max world now, but only for a moment; when the crowd sees David pleading for his life, they start throwing vegetables at the master of ceremonies (fine spooky performance by Brendan Gleeson) and David and Gigolo Joe are set free. In Spielberg-world, people (even some of the Nazis in Schindler) are essentially good, and more than that, sentimental; a crowd that was just howling for the destruction of the very pretty and human looking nanny mecha is freeing David a moment later, with no transition.



TYPICAL.  NO TRANSITION. NO FINESSE. 

By the way, was it necessary to have the tap-dancing black mecha, humorously pleading for his life as they put him into a cannon? "I think I'd like to be fired over the blades, not into them". Was it a tip of the hat to Spike Lee and Bamboozled? It came across more like a swing of the Spielberg sledgehammer.



YEP. THE SPIELBERG SLEDGEHAMMER. CREEPY TASTELESS COMEDY RELIEF. 

Gigolo Joe is another really bad conception. At certain points in the movie, it may be Kubrick, not Spielberg, who is really at fault; Kubrick is another over-rated filmmaker, who made some extremely bad movies later in life. Anyway, someone thought that Gigolo Joe, with his plastic slicked back hair and his trick of playing corny old songs, would be attractive to young or even middle-aged women. For that matter, why would a robot have to slap himself in the head in order to play music?

Then we have the porn palace city, "Dr. Know" the world-wide database with the silly animation of Dr. Einstein as a front end, and the personal helicopter in which David and Joe escape to New York City. The scene where Dr. Know tells them to go to New York is a masterpiece of incoherence.

THE WHOLE HORRIBLE MOVIE IS A MASTERPIECE OF INCOHERENCE. 



 The doctor's categories conveniently include "Plain Facts" and "Fairy Tales", and Joe (Spielberg giggling in the background at his own cleverness) tells the doctor to combine them.



SPIELBERG IS ALWAYS GIGGLING IN THE BACKGROUND.  

Then we arrive in ruined New York, another good special effect that we've seen before (reminiscent of Planet of the Apes and the asteroid movies We meet Dr. Hobby, who tells David that the whole experience was a test. They wanted to see whether he had enough of that "dream and metaphor" programming to go off on a quest and find his way back, not to Monica, but to the Cybertronics office sticking above the waves in Manhattan. David kills a replica of himself, for no particular reason while waiting for Hobby--a scene Spielberg shows us without any comment as to its rather startling implications.



Because David is such a cipher, we understand very little about the way he works. Several times, when challenged by his new brother (Monica's real son, now cured and back from cold sleep) to commit wrong acts like breaking a toy, he hesitates and says, "I'd better not." What we are seeing here is, just possibly, a sophisticated computer reviewing a complex set of rules to make a decision--in other words, a portrayal of rules-based artificial intelligence as actually conceived in today's universities and laboratories. When the brother finally gets David to commit the act which ultimately leads to his exile--sneaking into Monica's room to clip a lock of her hair-- we get a hint of sophistic reasoning confusing the mecha intelligence (clipping her hair will show his love for Monica and will cause her to love him more, and therefore sneaking into her room at night with a scissors is not a bad thing to do.)

So there is possibly a little bit of a theme about the way mechas are programmed for morality, shades of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, and there would have been a good movie there. (2010 contained a rather interesting explanation of how conflicting instructions overcame HAL's restrictions against violence.) However, in Dr. Hobby's office, the David who wouldn't even break a toy picks up a lamp and smashes another David. Did his programming break down? Spielberg never explains, Dr. Hobby doesn't seem to care, and David immediately reverts to being cherubic.

By this point, we are inured to nothing in the movie making any sense,

 so we shouldn't be surprised when Dr. Hobby, after a dull explanatory conversation, leaves David alone long enough for David to jump from the ledge into the ocean. Gigolo Joe rescues him in the helicopter which (gee whiz) is also a submarine (shades of Tom Swift). A moment later, Gigolo Joe is abducted by a magnetic force which pulls him away into the sky but does not affect David. David, announcing he has "seen it", immediately drives the sub to Coney Island, where he finds an underwater replica of the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio (the one who turned the puppet into a real boy).

David and Teddy, the robot teddy bear who has accompanied him through-out his adventures, settle down to stare at the Blue Fairy, which they do for two thousand years while the ocean turns to ice around them. During these two millenia, as we learn a few moments later, the human race also ceases to exist.

Here is where we learn that, in effect, there is no second law of thermodynamics. In fact, no laws of physics at all. The ice doesn't shift and crush the helicopter-sub, and there is no wear and tear on David or Teddy at all. When the silver beings dig them up two thousand years later, they are as fresh as the day they were canned!

These creatures are also a very familiar special effect, combining elements of the aliens from Close Encounters, E.T. and the "Russian water tentacle" from The Abyss. We are never told if they are a form of mecha or alien visitors from off-planet. They explain to David (in an incoherent passage worthy, as the Village Voice reporter pointed out, of the best ravings of Ed Wood in Plan 9 From Outer Space) that they can bring back people only if they have some DNA....and the returnees then have their original memories, grace of something about the space-time continuum....but they only live for one day, grace of something else about the space-time continuum. Golly gee, Teddy has kept the strand of hair David clipped! Monica is recreated, wakes up, spends a day playing with David, bakes him a birthday cake, falls asleep and expires....and David, who is incapable of sleep, closes his eyes, and returns (explains the plummy narrator from the movie's beginning) "to the place where all dreams begin."



A LINE ONLY A PHILISTINE COULD LOVE. 

Question for Mr. Spielberg: what the fuck does that mean? What is the place all dreams begin? The womb? Death? A place with red smoky light where the souls go to be reincarnated? The graveyard of bad new age movies like What Dreams May Come? The ghost's waiting room inBeetlejuice? Does Spielberg even know what he means?



OR CARE?  



The Brooklyn audience with whom I saw A.I. was laughing uncontrollably by the end,  not  the reaction Spielberg wanted, but one I wish he could have heard. "He's got that Kubrick pacing down perfectly," said one audience member as we left-- not a compliment.

What did I take away from this movie? Its hard when you feel marginal and your mommy doesn't love you. But if you want something badly enough, you can make it happen! This from a movie which The Times and many others called an adult movie, stirring with ideas.

Rock Bands

The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Eagles, The Allman Brothers, The Byrds, David Bowie, Simon and Garfunkle, Queen, Steely Dan, The Kinks, The Everly Brothers, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison,  Earth Wind and Fire, Rod Stewart, Blondie, The Cars, Prince, U2, The Bee Gees,  Jimmy  Webb, The Doors, Carole King, Phil Spector, The Ronettes,  The Ramones, T. Rex, Yes, Cindi Lauper, AC/DC,  War, The Animals,  Journey, Elvis Costello, The Pretenders, Black Sabbath, Jackson Brown, Blind Faith, B.B,King, Seals and Croft, Ohio Players, Diana Ross, The Stylistics, The Marvelettes,  Ray Charles, Black Oak Arkansas, The Four Tops, Love, The OJ's,  Los Lobos, Robert Cray, Janis Joplin, Kris Kristofferson,  Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Strawberry Alarm Clock, The Left Banke, Jackie Wilson, George Michael, Traffic, Bob Marley, Stevie Ray Vaughn, The Gap Band, 

Donovan,  Barry Manilow,  America,  Randy Newman, Foreigner, Cheap Trick, Pablo Cruise, Average White Band, Barry White, Smokey Robinson, Rita Coolidge, Glen Campbell, Curtis Mayfield, The Jackson 5, Rick Springfield, Wham, Bonnie Rait, Styx, R.E.M., Peter Gabriel, Chaka Khan, Creedence, Isaak Hayes, Lionel Richie, INXS, Rick James,  Warren Zevon, Billy Preston, Lou Reed, Eric Burden, The Allman Brothers, Tears For Fears, The Commodores, Tom Petty, ZZ Top, The Spinners,  Canned Heat, Bad Company, Sade, Heart, Don Henley, Anita Baker, Bobby Womack, Kool and the Gang, Joe Cocker, Carole King, Peaches and Herb,

Norman Greenbaum, Leonard Cohen, Tracy Chapman, Motley Crüe, The Spinners, Kenny Rogers, Edgar Winter, Deep Purple, Stevie Winwood, Rush, Donna Summer, Simply Red, Cock Robin, Abba, Bill Withers, Johnny Cash, Sam Cooke, Chris Isaak, The Carpenters, John Denver, Roberta Flack, Bill Withers, Procul Harem, The Righteous Brothers, Buffalo Springfield, King Crimson, Chubby Checker, Fats Domino, The Association, Ray Charles,  The Turtles, Otis Redding, Neil Diamond, Roy Orbison, Sam and Dave, Van Morrison, Jim Croce, Grand Funk, The Captain and Tennielle, The Four Seasons, Von Jovi, Duran Duran, Run DMC, Van Halen, 

The Who,  K.D. Lang,  The Band, The Monkees, The Zombies,  Michael Jackson,  Eric Clapton, The Supremes,  The Mamas and the Papas, Tina Turner, Lynard Skynard,  Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, Sting,  Cream,  Jimi Hendricks, Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, Sly and the Family Stone, Judy Collins, Devo,  Niel Young,  Emerson Lake and Palmer, The Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen, The Clash, 

Wall of Voodoo,  Crosby, Stills and Nash, Jethro Tull, Iron Butterfly,  Tom Waits, Leon Russell,  Bob Seeger, Parliament, Nirvana, The Kingsmen, Herman's Hermits, The Eurythmics, The Stray Cats, Brian Setzer,  Stone Temple Pilots, Deep Purple, Ozzy Osborne, Twisted Sister, Alice Cooper, Kansas, Muddy Waters,  The Pretenders,  Ted Nugent, Nielson, Sammy Hagar, Three Dog Night, Guns and Roses, Def Leopard, Rare Earth, Bootsie Collins, Parliament, Madonna, John Cougar, Gloria Estefan, Pat Benatar, Linkin Park, Janet Jackson, John Lee Hooker, Brian Eno, Morris Day, Muddy Waters,

The Staple Singers, Laura Nyro, Eddie Money, Johnny Rabbit,  
The Turtles, Rod Stewart, Kansas, Joe Walsh, Chuck Berry,  Dion, Captain and Tenielle,  Gloria Gaynor, Eric Carmen, Peter Frampton, Johnny Cash,  Leonard Cohen,  Kansas, Neil Diamond,  The Four Seasons, Van Morrison, Poco, Gram Parsons,  Paul Revere and the Raiders, The Lovin' Spoonful, The Grassroots, Tim Hardin,  Judy Henske,  Tom Waits, 

Gordon Lightfoot, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, The Doobie Brothers, the Moody Blues, the Electric Light Orchestra, Toto,  Hall and Oates, Boz Scags, Chicago,  Boston, Aerosmith, Fleetwood Mac, the Isley Brothers, Phil Oaks, Phil Collins, Genesis,  Elton John,  scores of one hit wonders...

Three D

MARTIN SCORSESE ON 3D
Martin Scorsese has embraced 3D as a filmmaking tool and has called the format liberating.

In an interview with the Guardian (and spied by SlashFilm), Scorsese explains how he is using 3D in his latest movie Hugo Cabret and how it is changing the way he makes movies.

"Every shot is rethinking cinema, rethinking narrative – how to tell a story with a picture," explains Scorsese.

"Now, I'm not saying we have to keep throwing javelins at the camera, I'm not saying we use it as a gimmick, but it's liberating."

Sculpting 3D

This liberation also adds to complication, with the legendary director saying: "It's literally a Rubik's Cube every time you go out to design a shot, and work out a camera move, or a crane move.

"But it has a beauty to it also. People look like… like moving statues. They move like sculpture, as if sculpture is moving in a way. Like dancers…"

It's great to see someone like Scorsese using the format and his take on 3D will be a wholly different beast from Avatar.

Tree D

MARTIN SCORSESE ON 3D
Martin Scorsese has embraced 3D as a filmmaking tool and has called the format liberating.

In an interview with the Guardian (and spied by SlashFilm), Scorsese explains how he is using 3D in his latest movie Hugo Cabret and how it is changing the way he makes movies.

"Every shot is rethinking cinema, rethinking narrative – how to tell a story with a picture," explains Scorsese.

"Now, I'm not saying we have to keep throwing javelins at the camera, I'm not saying we use it as a gimmick, but it's liberating."

Sculpting 3D

This liberation also adds to complication, with the legendary director saying: "It's literally a Rubik's Cube every time you go out to design a shot, and work out a camera move, or a crane move.

"But it has a beauty to it also. People look like… like moving statues. They move like sculpture, as if sculpture is moving in a way. Like dancers…"

It's great to see someone like Scorsese using the format and his take on 3D will be a wholly different beast from Avatar.

Like a Rolling Stone

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?
People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall"
You thought they were all kiddin' you

You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin' out
Now, you don't talk so loud, now, you don't seem so proud
About havin' to be scrounging around for your next meal

How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
With no direction home, like a complete unknown
Just like a rolling stone?

You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss. Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street
And you find out now you're gonna have to get used to it

You said you'd never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He's not sellin' any alibis, as you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And say, " Would you like to make a deal?"

How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
With no direction home, like a complete unknown
Just like a rolling stone?

You never turned around to see the frowns
On the jugglers and the clowns
When they all came down to do tricks for you
You never understood that it ain't no good
You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you

Used to ride the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain't it hard when you discover that he really wasn't where it's at
After he's taken everything he could steal

How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
With no direction home, like a complete unknown
Just like a rolling stone?

Princess on the steeple and all pretty people
They're all drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made
Exchanging all precious gifts and things
But you'd better take your diamond ring, down and pawn it, babe

You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse
When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible, you got no secrets to conceal

How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
With no direction home, like a complete unknown
Just like a rolling stone?

Devil's Advocate

THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE

The Devil's Advocate

God's your prankster, my boy.Think of it. He gives man
instincts. He gives you this extraordinary gift and then, I swear to you -- for his own
amusement -- his own private, cosmic gag reel -- he sets the rules in opposition.



Meet Faust in fancy cowboy boots: Kevin Lomax, the lawyer played by Keanu Reeves in Taylor Hackford's unexpectedly seductive ''Devil's Advocate.'' Kevin is at the heart of a high-concept sentence (''Slick yuppie is co-opted by slicker New York Satan'') that has been spun into a lavish-looking, cleverly entertaining morality play with shades of ''Rosemary's Baby,'' ''Wall Street'' and countless other tales of selling out to Manhattan's temptations. 

This time it's the devil as head honcho at a law firm, with Al Pacino having great, wily fun with the screenplay's bons mots. ''Look at me, underestimated from Day One!'' bellows this executive, who has a taste for fashionably urbane black. ''You'd never think I was a Master of the Universe, now wouldya?''

His idea of such mastery definitely goes beyond Tom Wolfe's.

With a gratifyingly light touch, the screenplay by Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy (adapted from a novel by Andrew Neiderman) names Mr. Pacino's character John Milton, since he knows a thing or two about paradise lost. And it is in Gainesville, Fla., that they first find the ambitious Kevin, who thinks he has much to gain. Kevin, played with uncharacteristic sharpness by Mr. Reeves as a smart and debonair hotshot, is first seen successfully defending an unsavory schoolteacher against a charge of molesting a student (Heather Matarazzo of ''Welcome to the Dollhouse''). Then, with his gorgeous and sultry wife, Mary Ann (Charlize Theron), he celebrates this dubious victory. High on his own career trajectory, Kevin is in a mood to say yes when a strange lawyer flashes a big check and tries luring him to Manhattan.

The firm that summons Kevin has business in places like the Middle East, the Balkans, Central America and West Africa. It has a receptionist named Caprice. It has a witchily beautiful temptress called Christabella (Connie Nielson). And it has the devilish penthouse lair of Milton, complete with Purgatory artwork and a big roaring fire. Bruno Rubeo's deft production design, handsomely photographed by Andrzej Bartkowiak with the same burnished look he has given many Sidney Lumet films, gives this place a stark minimalism that is one part sleek efficiency, one part torture chamber. Running water cascading off the open edge of a terrace is one of the film's many ways of suggesting souls on the brink.

The Lomaxes are given a big apartment and Mary Ann stays home the way Rosemary did, painting the place while her husband advances his career. Meanwhile, Kevin stays preoccupied and becomes increasingly seduced by the cases that come his way. One involves Delroy Lindo as a mysterious figure accused of sacrificing goats in his ghetto basement. Another features Craig T. Nelson as a developer living in Trump-like, gilded splendor. The film's more mischievous tricks include using Donald Trump's real apartment as a set, since Versailles was perhaps unavailable, and producing Senator Alfonse D'Amato at a party scene for the Devil's law firm.

Meanwhile, Mary Ann starts having trouble. She misses her husband. She is pursued by Milton, who talks her into doing something drab to her beautiful blond hair. She receives equally unhelpful decorating advice from fellow corporate wives and abandons her favorite color, though Mary Ann's bright green figures sadly in a later hospital scene. During one outing with these women, complete with shopping, chardonnay and talk of plastic surgery, Mary Ann suddenly sees a terrifying vision.

The film uses morphing and Rick Baker's monster effects strikingly, but it also keeps its gimmicks well tethered to reality: an afternoon like Mary Ann's might be enough to make anyone see demons. Later on, Kevin's wandering eye yields an unsettling sex scene in which two different women in his life are suddenly made indistinguishable. Mr. Hackford uses diabolical editing at strategic moments to confuse identities in this way. While there is no small irony in a big Hollywood film's finger-wagging about the seductions of wealth and power, ''Devil's Advocate'' does avoid clumsy moralizing and old-hat notions of good and evil. It helps that Kevin is no naif, and that his churchgoing Mama (Judith Ivey) sees Manhattan as ''a dwelling place of demons'' well before that perception becomes unavoidable. It helps that the film finds Faustian deal making and yuppie ambition not very different. And it also helps that in this, the ultimate lawyer joke of a movie, it becomes so clear why Kevin's legal talents are the Devil's instruments of choice. Mr. Pacino's mischievous Milton eventually notes that nobody on earth could do his bidding better than a well-trained band of attorneys. If those attorneys are as pampered as Kevin threatens to become, so much the better. As Milton likes to point out, ''Vanity is definitely my favorite sin.''
(Special trailer note: Lurid advance ads for ''Devil's Advocate'' make it look ridiculous. It's not.)







.
Look but don't
touch. Touch but don't taste.
And while you're jumping from one foot
to the other he's laughing his
ass off! He's a
tight-ass. He's a sadist. He's
an absentee landlord!
(incredulous)
Worship that? Never..
Vanity is definitely my favorite
sin. Self love. It's so basic.
What a drug. Cheap, all-natural,
and right at your fingertips.
Pride. That's where you're
strongest. And believe me, I 
understand. Work for someone
else? -- Hey, I couldn't hack it.
'Better to reign in Hell than
serve in Heaven.

Moby Dick chapter 9

CHAPTER 9

The Sermon.

Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered the scattered people to condense. "Starboard gangway, there! side away to larboard larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!"

There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a still slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and all was quiet again, and every eye on the preacher.

He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit's bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.

This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog in such tones he commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy

"The ribs and terrors in the whale,
Arched over me a dismal gloom,
While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by,
And lift me deepening down to doom.

"I saw the opening maw of hell,
With endless pains and sorrows there;
Which none but they that feel can tell
Oh, I was plunging to despair.

"In black distress, I called my God,
When I could scarce believe him mine,
He bowed his ear to my complaints
No more the whale did me confine.

"With speed he flew to my relief,
As on a radiant dolphin borne;
Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone
The face of my Deliverer God.

"My song for ever shall record
That terrible, that joyful hour;
I give the glory to my God,
His all the mercy and the power.

Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon the proper page, said: "Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah 'And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.'"

"Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters four yarns is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah's deep sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish's belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed which he found a hard command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do remember that and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.

"With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men will carry him into countries where God does not reign, but only the Captains of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that's bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city than the modern Cadiz. That's the opinion of learned men. And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee world-wide from God? Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So disordered, self-condemning is his look, that had there been policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a deck. How plainly he's a fugitive! no baggage, not a hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag, no friends accompany him to the wharf with their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he finds the Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he steps on board to see its Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger's evil eye. Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and confidence; in vain essays his wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the man assure the mariners he can be no innocent. In their gamesome but still serious way, one whispers to the other "Jack, he's robbed a widow;" or, "Joe, do you mark him; he's a bigamist;" or, "Harry lad, I guess he's the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike, one of the missing murderers from Sodom." Another runs to read the bill that's stuck against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship is moored, offering five hundred gold coins for the apprehension of a parricide, and containing a description of his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill; while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay their hands upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles, and summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so much the more a coward. He will not confess himself suspected; but that itself is strong suspicion. So he makes the best of it; and when the sailors find him not to be the man that is advertised, they let him pass, and he descends into the cabin.

"'Who's there?' cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making out his papers for the Customs 'Who's there?' Oh! how that harmless question mangles Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee again. But he rallies. 'I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish; how soon sail ye, sir?' Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up to Jonah, though the man now stands before him; but no sooner does he hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance. 'We sail with the next coming tide,' at last he slowly answered, still intently eyeing him. 'No sooner, sir?' 'Soon enough for any honest man that goes a passenger.' Ha! Jonah, that's another stab. But he swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent. 'I'll sail with ye,' he says, 'the passage money how much is that? I'll pay now.' For it is particularly written, shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be overlooked in this history, 'that he paid the fare thereof' ere the craft did sail. And taken with the context, this is full of meaning.

"Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. So Jonah's Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah's purse, ere he judge him openly. He charges him thrice the usual sum; and it's assented to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the same time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold. Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still molest the Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage. 'Point out my state-room, Sir,' says Jonah now, 'I'm travel-weary; I need sleep.' 'Thou lookest like it,' says the Captain, 'there's thy room.' Jonah enters, and would lock the door, but the lock contains no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling there, the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about the doors of convicts' cells being never allowed to be locked within. All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth, and finds the little state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead. The air is close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship's water-line, Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him in the smallest of his bowels' wards.

"Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah's room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far successful fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry. 'Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!' he groans, 'straight upwards, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!'

"Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of the Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into him; as one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns in giddy anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed; and at last amid the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over him, as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in his berth, Jonah's prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep.

"And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening, glides to sea. That ship, my friends, was the first of recorded smugglers! the contraband was Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not bear the wicked burden. A dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to break. But now when the boatswain calls all hands to lighten her; when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard; when the wind is shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every plank thunders with trampling feet right over Jonah's head; in all this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees no black sky and raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he the far rush of the mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is cleaving the seas after him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship a berth in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast asleep. But the frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead ear, 'What meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!' Startled from his lethargy by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling to the deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea. But at that moment he is sprung upon by a panther billow leaping over the bulwarks. Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship, and finding no speedy vent runs roaring fore and aft, till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat. And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward again towards the tormented deep.

"Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his cringing attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known. The sailors mark him; more and more certain grow their suspicions of him, and at last, fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter to high Heaven, they fall to casting lots, to see for whose cause this great tempest was upon them. The lot is Jonah's; that discovered, then how furiously they mob him with their questions. 'What is thine occupation? Whence comest thou? Thy country? What people? But mark now, my shipmates, the behavior of poor Jonah. The eager mariners but ask him who he is, and where from; whereas, they not only receive an answer to those questions, but likewise another answer to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited answer is forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him.

"'I am a Hebrew,' he cries and then 'I fear the Lord the God of Heaven who hath made the sea and the dry land!' Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well mightest thou fear the Lord God then! Straightway, he now goes on to make a full confession; whereupon the mariners became more and more appalled, but still are pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet supplicating God for mercy, since he but too well knew the darkness of his deserts, when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him and cast him forth into the sea, for he knew that for his sake this great tempest was upon them; they mercifully turn from him, and seek by other means to save the ship. But all in vain; the indignant gale howls louder; then, with one hand raised invokingly to God, with the other they not unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah.

"And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea; when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth water behind. He goes down in the whirling heart of such a masterless commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison. Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord out of the fish's belly. But observe his prayer, and learn a weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah."

While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking, slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who, when describing Jonah's sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself. His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed the warring elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from off his swarthy brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all his simple hearers look on him with a quick fear that was strange to them.

There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the leaves of the Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless, with closed eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God and himself.

But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly, with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake these words:

"Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads me that other and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to me, as a pilot of the living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along 'into the midst of the seas,' where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and 'the weeds were wrapped about his head,' and all the watery world of woe bowled over him. Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet 'out of the belly of hell' when the whale grounded upon the ocean's utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and 'vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;' when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean Jonah did the Almighty's bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!

"This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonour! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!"

He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly enthusiasm, "But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him a far, far upward, and inward delight who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight, top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath O Father! chiefly known to me by Thy rod mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?"

He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed, and he was left alone in the place.

Hitler's Secret Library

Chapter One

The Man Who Burned Books
FOR HIM THE LIBRARY represented a Pierian spring, that mataphorica source of knowledge and inspiration. He drew deeply there, quelling his intellectual insecurities and nourishing his fanatic ambitions. He read voraciously, at least one book per night, sometimes more, so he claimed. "When one gives one also has to take," he once said, "and I take what I need from books."

He ranked Don Quixote, along with Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Gulliver's Travels, among the great works of world literature. "Each of them is a grandiose idea unto itself," he said. In Robinson Crusoehe perceived "the development of the entire history of mankind." Don Quixote captured "ingeniously" the end of an era. He owned illustrated editions of both books and was especially impressed by Gustave Doré's romantic depictions of Cervantes's delusion-plagued hero.

He also owned the collected works of William Shakespeare, published in German translation in 1925 by Georg Müller as part of a series intended to make great literature available to the general public. Volume six includes As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, and Troilus and Cressida. The entire set is bound in hand-tooled Moroccan leather with a gold-embossed eaglev flanked by his initials on the spine.

He considered Shakespeare superior to Goethe and Schiller in every respect. While Shakespeare had fueled his imagination on the protean forces of the emerging British empire, these two Teutonic playwright-poets squandered their talent on stories of midlife crises and sibling rivalries. Why was it, he once wondered, that the German Enlightenment produced Nathan the Wise, the story of the rabbi who reconciles Christians, Muslims, and Jews, while it had been left to Shakespeare to give the world The Merchant of Venice and Shylock?

He appears to have imbibed his Hamlet. "To be or not to be" was a favorite phrase, as was "It is Hecuba to me." He was especially fond of Julius Caesar. In a 1926 sketchbook he drew a detailed stage set for the first act of the Shakespeare tragedy with sinister façades enclosing the forum where Caesar is cut down. "We will meet again at Philippi," he threatened an opponent on more than one occasion, plagiarizing the spectral warning to Brutus after Caesar's murder. He was said to have reserved the Ides of March for momentous decisions.

He kept his Shakespeare volumes in the second-floor study of his alpine retreat in southern Germany, along with a leather edition of another favorite author, the adventure novelist Karl May. "The first Karl May that I read was The Ride Across the Desert," he once recalled. "I was overwhelmed! I threw myself into him immediately which resulted in a noticeable decline in my grades." Later in life, he was said to have sought solace in Karl May the way others did in the Bible.

He was versed in the Holy Scriptures, and owned a particularly handsome tome with Worte Christi, or Words of Christ, embossed in gold on a cream-colored calfskin cover that even today remains as smooth as silk. He also owned a German translation of Henry Ford's anti-Semitic tract, The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem, and a 1931 handbook on poison gas with a chapter detailing the qualities and effects of prussic acid, the homicidal asphyxiant marketed commercially as Zyklon B. On his bedstand, he kept a well-thumbed copy of Wilhelm Busch's mischievous cartoon duo Max and Moritz.


WALTER BENJAMIN ONCE SAID that you could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps-his tastes, his interests, his habits. The books we retain and those we discard, those we read as well as those we decide not to, all say something about who we are. As a German-Jewish culture critic born of an era when it was possible to be "German" and "Jewish," Benjamin believed in the transcendent power of Kultur. He believed that creative expression not only enriches and illuminates the world we inhabit, but also provides the cultural adhesive that binds one generation to the next, a Judeo-Germanic rendering of the ancient wisdom ars longa, vita brevis.

Benjamin held the written word-printed and bound-in especially high regard. He loved books. He was fascinated by their physicality, by their durability, by their provenance. An astute collector, he argued, could "read" a book the way a physiognomist decipheredt he essence of a person's character through his physical features. "Dates, placenames, formats, previous owners, bindings, and all the like," Benjamin observed, "all these details must tell him something-not as dry isolated facts, but as a harmonious whole." In short, you could judge a book by its cover, and in turn the collector by his collection. Quoting Hegel, Benjamin noted, "Only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight," and concluded, "Only in extinction is the collector comprehended."

When Benjamin invoked a nineteenth-century German philosopher, a Roman goddess, and an owl, he was of course alluding to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's famous maxim: "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk," by which Hegel meant that philosophizing can begin only after events have run their course.

Benjamin felt the same was true about private libraries. Only after the collector had shelved his last book and died, when his library was allowed to speak for itself, without the proprietor to distract or obfuscate, could the individual volumes reveal the "preserved" knowledge of their owner: how he asserted his claim over them, with a name scribbled on the inside cover or an ex libris bookplate pasted across an entire page; whether he left them dog-eared and stained, or the pages uncut and unread.

Benjamin proposed that a private library serves as a permanent and credible witness to the character of its collector, leading him to the following philosophic conceit: we collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector. "Not that they come alive in him," Benjamin posited. "It is he who lives in them."

FOR THE LAST HALF CENTURY remnants of Adolf Hitler's library have occupied shelf space in climatized obscurity in the Rare Book Division of the Library of Congress. The twelve hundred surviving volumes that once graced Hitler's bookcases in his three elegantly appointed libraries-wood paneling, thick carpets, brass lamps, over-stuffed armchairs-at private residences in Munich, Berlin, and the Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden, now stand in densely packed rows on steel shelves in an unadorned, dimly lit storage area of the Thomas Jefferson Building in downtown Washington, a stone's throw from the Washington Mall and just across the street from the United States Supreme Court.

The sinews of emotional logic that once ran through this collection-Hitler shuffled his books ceaselessly and insisted on reshelving them himself-have been severed. Hitler's personal copy of his family genealogy is sandwiched between a bound collection of newspaper articles titled Sunday Meditations and a folio of political cartoons from the 1920s. A handsomely bound facsimile edition of letters by Frederick the Great, specially designed for Hitler's fiftieth birthday, lies on a shelf for oversized books beneath a similarly massive presentation volume on the city of Hamburg and an illustrated history of the German navy in the First World War. Hitler's copy of the writings of the legendary Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, who famously declared that war was politics by other means, shares shelf space beside a French vegetarian cookbook inscribed to "Monsieur Hitler végétarien."

When I first surveyed Hitler's surviving books, in the spring of 2001, I discovered that fewer than half the volumes had been catalogued, and only two hundred of those were searchable in the Library of Congress's online catalogue. Most were listed on aging index cards and still bore the idiosyncratic numbering system assigned them in the 1950s. At Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, I found another eighty Hitler books in a similar state of benign neglect. Taken from his Berlin bunker in the spring of 1945 by Albert Aronson, one of the first Americans to enter Berlin after the German defeat, they were donated to Brown by Aronson's nephew in the late 1970s. Today they are stored in a walk-in basement vault, along with Walt Whitman's personal copy of Leaves of Grass and the original folios to John James Audubon's Birds of America.

Among the books at Brown, I found a copy of Mein Kampf with Hitler's ex libris bookplate, an analysis of Wagner's Parsifal published in 1913, a history of the swastika from 1921, and a half dozen or so spiritual and occult volumes Hitler acquired in Munich in the early 1920s, including an account of supernatural occurrences, The Dead Are Alive!, and a monograph on the prophecies of Nostradamus. I discovered additional Hitler books scattered in public and private archives across the United States and Europe.

Several dozen of these surviving Hitler books contain marginalia. Here I encountered a man who famously seemed never to listen to anyone, for whom conversation was a relentless tirade, a ceaseless monologue, pausing to engage with the text, to underline words and sentences, to mark entire paragraphs, to place an exclamation point beside one passage, a question mark beside another, and quite frequently an emphatic series of parallel lines in the margin alongside a particular passage. Like footprints in the sand, these markings allow us to trace the course of the journey but not necessarily the intent, where attention caught and lingered, where it rushed forward and where it ultimately ended.

In a 1934 reprint of Paul Lagarde's German Letters, a series of late-nineteenth-century essays that advocated the systematic removal of Europe's Jewish population, I found more than one hundred pages of penciled intrusions, beginning on page 41, where Lagarde calls for the "transplanting" of German and Austrian Jews to Palestine, and extending to more ominous passages in which he speaks of Jews as "pestilence." "This water pestilence must be eradicated from our streams and lakes," Lagarde writes on page 276, with a pencil marking bold affirmation in the margin.

"The political system without which it cannot exist must be eliminated."

British historian Ian Kershaw has described Hitler as one of the most impenetrable personalities of modern history. "The combination of Hitler's innate secretiveness," Kershaw writes, "the emptiness of his personal relations, his unbureaucratic style, the extremes of adulation and hatred which he stirred up, and the apologetics as well as distortions built upon post-war memoirs and gossipy anecdotes of those in his entourage, mean that, for all the surviving mountains of paper spewed out by the governmental apparatus of the Third Reich, the sources for reconstructing the life of the German Dictator are in many respects extraordinarily limited-far more so than in the case, say, of his main adversaries, Churchill and even Stalin."

Hitler's library certainly contains its share of "spewed" material; easily two-thirds of the collection consists of books he never saw, let alone read, but there are also scores of more personal volumes that Hitler studied and marked. It also contains small but telling details. While perusing the unprocessed volumes in the rare book collection at the Library of Congress, I came across a book whose original contents had been gutted. The front and back boards were firmly secured to the spine by a heavy linen cover with the title, North, Central and East Asia: Handbook of Geographic Science, embossed in gold on a blue background. The original pages had been replaced by a sheaf of cluttered documents: a dozen or so photonegatives, an undated handwritten manuscript titled "The Solution to the German Question," and a brief note typed on a presentation card that read:

My Führer

On the 14th anniversary of the day you first set foot in the Sternecker, Mrs. Gahr is presenting to you the list of your first fellow fighters. It is our conviction that this hour is the hour of birth of our wonderful movement and of our new Reich. With loyalty until death. Sieg Heil!

The Old Comrades


The card bore no date and the list of early Nazi Party members was missing, but the mention of "Mrs. Gahr," presumably the wife of Otto Gahr, the goldsmith, whom Hitler charged with casting the first metal swastikas for the Nazi Party, as well as the reference to the fourteenth anniversary of Hitler's first appearance in the Sternecker Beer Hall, preserves in briefest outline the trajectory of Hitler from political upstart in 1919 to chancellor of the German Reich in 1933.

For this book, I have selected those surviving volumes that possessed either emotional or intellectual significance for Hitler, those which occupied his thoughts in his private hours and helped shape his public words and actions. One of the earliest is a guidebook he acquired for four marks on a dreary Monday in late November 1915 while serving as a twenty-six-year-old corporal on the western front. The last is a biography he was reading thirty years later in the weeks leading up to his suicide in the spring of 1945. I have attempted to be judicious in my choice of Hitler volumes, selecting only those books for which there is compelling evidence that Hitler had them in his possession. I have exercised similar caution when it comes to the marginalia since the "authorship" of penciled intrusions cannot necessarily be determined definitively. Once again, I have relied on corroborating evidence, and I discuss individual cases in the text, drawing when available on the determinations of previous scholarship. To make titles accessible to the non-German reader, I generally use English translations of the original titles except in such obvious cases as Hitler's Mein Kampf, or My Struggle.

Individually, these books help illuminate those issues that occupied Hitler in his more private hours, often at pivotal moments in his career. Collectively they make good on the Benjamin promise, allowing us to glimpse the collector preserved among his books.

(Continues...)

The concepts which we find it impossible to relinquish when we assess human relations and human connectedness are irremediably unstable, riven with internal contradictions whose effects we live with but can never master. 

Everyday life contains many truth games. The social processes and institutions that establish power, expertise, and authority also generate truths. In deference to their formal structure and their internal rationality, but in a spirit of agnosticism concerning their claims, one against the other, to the Truth, we can call these procedures truth games. We seek the truth through the courts, in scientific laboratories, in our religious institutions, and in private from those we love. Each of these processes gives rise to truths, more or less generally accepted but not necessarily compatible with one another. In large part, we accept the differences between them and, once we have been acclimatized, we know reasonably well the different rules, the different answers, the different prohibitions and failures of courtesy, taste, and etiquette proper to each.

Our own good behavior does not prevent us from enjoying the spectacle of transgression of the rules defining each of these games. This enjoyment often embodies the hope that a transcendent truth will, under the pressure of these transgressions, eventually break through, revealing something beyond the earthbound truths whose human failings and limitations we are, on those rare occasions when we want to be, only too well aware of So, the spectacle of the scientist uncomfortably cornered by a terrier-like journalist, or a prelate confessing his sexual predilections over the dinner table, or a judge who reveals her ignorance of the latest fashion--whether it is a sophisticated new forensic laboratory technique or the name of a rock group--all of these give us a social delight arising out of the carnivalesque transgression of the rules of the game. We know full well that, in the morning, things will go back to normal: scientists will have an unquestioned authority over their specialized domains of expertise; priests will incarnate moral authority over matters public and private; judges will have dominion over matters of life and death, criminality and liberty. None of this prevents truth games from changing their rules, often more rapidly than we would like, and almost always without our agreement.

In the normal run of things, we take the plurality of truths for granted. We inhabit the games that generate them without any feeling of outlandishness or oddity. The fact that these games are often allied to an array of institutions, each with uncontested authority over truth claims made in its name--among them the law, medicine, the churches, the sciences, the central bank when allied with the arms-bearing state--does not strike us as perverse. It seems natural that banks should control money rather than pass judgment, and equally natural that being proficient at controlling money confers no authority over the conduct of surgery. However, it has been argued with great persuasiveness that this separation of institutional powers and authority is the distinctive and unusual feature of Western societies as they have developed in this millennium. There might have been, there might still be, just one way of deciding a question as to truth, instead of the variety of ways which we live by and with. We certainly are only too aware of contests between rival institutions, between rival procedures. The warfare between science and religion was one; the rivalry between doctors and lawyers over unreasonable law-breaking actions was another; covert and not so covert tugs of war between politicians and their scientific advisers are becoming routine; and in the United States, the lawyers and the journalists increasingly vie for the highest public function of supreme adversary of those who would deny or cover up the truth, whether it be about killer viruses, arms scams, or athletic lovers.

We give the name "scientism" to the conviction that scientific truth should have hegemony over other truths, and that scientific institutions therefore have a privilege in relation to other institutions. We live in the age of scientism: by which I do not mean that scientism has been accepted, simply that ours is the age in which it is a continual presence, a continual seduction. One may be extremely sympathetic to its seductions, one may be extremely impressed by the successes of the sciences and their interdependent technologies, but that should not prevent us from recognizing how extremely vulnerable we are to scientism, nor from recognizing that its victory would spell the end of the distinctive plurality of truth games which constitutes the present dispensation for truth in our world.

What are the best ways of investigating this present dispensation of our truth games, including the insistent longing for the definitive scientific answer? When practitioners, institutions, whole discourses lay claim to their truths, the obvious point of entry into the foundations of their claims is the manner in which they exclude threats to the well-foundedness of those claims. The liar emerged for me as the exemplary figure of the outcast from those competing discourses. Error and ignorance, as the obverse of truth, appear as less interesting and threatening than lies. Each discourse or institution has its procedures for dealing with error and ignorance, which range from the legal fiction that ignorance is no defense to the philosopher's fiction that error, in the form of a bold but falsified hypothesis, is the highest scientific virtue. The liar, however, can become a truly subversive and scandalous figure, whose nefarious influence may extend far more widely than her own individual actions. Every truth-establishing institution has its own version of the liar: in the realm of economic transactions, there are the counterfeiter and fraudster; in the realm of politics, there are the Nixons, Hitlers, and Stalins--we even remain content with a definition of the diplomat as someone sent abroad to lie for his country; in the sciences, there are the Kammerers and Burts. But I had additional reasons for thinking that lying was a profitable area of inquiry.

Our century has given rise to a most original form of scientism: the quest for a science of the intimate and private person, a science of our moral inclinations, imperatives, failings, and hypocrisies--in short, a science of the individual life and of its fateful tragedies and comic fatalities. That project is psychoanalysis. It is well for us to recall the hopes and confidence that attended the rise and expansion of psychoanalysis--not least because we live at a moment when those most imbued with scientism repudiate as vociferously as the laws of libel and slander will allow the claims to scientific status of the somewhat becalmed flagship of their movement. Part of the revolutionary, even flamboyant, promise of psychoanalysis was its pledge to reveal the underbelly of all other truths: of the physicist's truths, of the politician's, not to mention the more obviously targeted judge's and priest's truths. All that was necessary was for them to lie on the couch. Freud proposed that no area of discourse should be closed to the analyst's inquiry; and he also offered the rule of thumb that the sexual life of each individual should be considered as the model for his or her activity in all other areas of life, in the process proposing that sex be regarded as the ultimate truth about human beings.

However, allied with the breathtakingly imperialistic requirement to reveal all is the psychoanalyst's limitless tolerance for the subject's inability--his refusal--to speak the truth. Psychoanalysis is thus an intriguing example of a scientistic discourse that is focused on the intimate truths of everyday life, while redrawing the conventional lines between truth and lies. Might the psychoanalytic equanimity concerning lying offer a clue as to the manner in which other truth games, which are markedly less tolerant in this respect, regulate their practitioners and manage their relations with other, competing truth-seeking institutions? Could it be that the transgressions of truth and the truth game played by the psychoanalyst, that connoisseur of transgression, show us the means of discovering how we are governed by the various regimes of truth under which we now live? This book attempts to show that the answers that flow from this question are, at the very least, intriguing.

-----
I have lived with the ideas in this book for a long time, long past the nine years enjoined by Horace. It was Lacan who first kindled my interest in the topic of lying, with his observation that the psychoanalyst's patient is, even when lying, operating in the dimension of truth. If such is the case, I reflected, then psychoanalysis must operate with a very different notion of the rules connecting truth and lies from those implied by the blacks and whites of the moral condemnation or the blithely truth-serving epistemologies of the natural sciences. I also quickly came to recognize that the lies of childhood, my own included, were, as philosophers, psychologists, and pedagogues insisted, of great significance. There are those who acquire the habit of lying in a spectacular and dramatic manner, transforming their lives in the process. For them, lying can have a foundationally creative function; that first lie marks the opening of their own personal truths. But then there are those who have always lied, whose lies as a consequence appear somewhat inconsequential, just a habit, like playing with their hair. For these, lying was more a natural disposition, akin to enthusiasm for sex or sport, than a matter of life and death. My growing awareness of the interesting variety of lies and of liars, fully sustained by numerous conversations and encounters in which I was told of the most horrendous, entertaining, and extravagant bouts of lying, led me to realize that this was a topic about which many people felt enthusiastic and perplexed. This recognition kept me working on the topic, on and off, over a period of twenty years.

At some point in the work, about ten years ago, I became preoccupied with the questions of trust and confidence that are linked to the endemic fear of lying. If the world were full of liars, the argument so often ran, how could we trust what other people said? This argument, it seemed to me, always put the cart before the horse. As all people seem to agree when they are living in their unofficial worlds, there is a great deal of hard lying that goes on in the world, especially among those we most respect and admire. But, nonetheless, we live in a world in which there is trust; how much lying goes on in that world appears to be a matter for disinterested empirical inquiry rather than philosophical anxiety, and may bear only very indirectly on the basic attitude of trust. A venerable parallel began to impress me, that between the trust underlying the institution of truth-saying and the trust underlying the institution of economic exchange. Counterfeiters are the liars of the economic world, and their attack on the institution of money seems very much akin to the liar's parasitic attack on the institution of truth. Are not both institutions dependent, as all the commentators seem to agree, on trust? And are not both institutions therefore always in need of something deeper, more solid, more foundational, more rocklike, than trust upon which to base that trust?

I explore the parallel between money and speech in the second essay in this book, through an examination of the metaphors of circulation, exchange, indebtedness, and trust that slide incessantly from one domain to the other, from words to coins and back again. The essay opens by looking at the relationship between Lacan and Freud, but it soon extends to the broader questions of the anthropology, the economics, and the metaphysics that underpin psychoanalysis and the human sciences. And it closes with the conclusion that the concepts which we find it impossible to relinquish when we assess human relations and human connectedness, the concepts of gift and debt, are irremediably unstable, riven with internal contradictions whose effects we live with but can never master. In transactions, in intercourse, whether the gift is of speech or of a harder currency, we seek benchmarks which we will never find. That, too, is a hard truth of--and for--psychoanalysis.

First amendment

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Illustrating an intellectual confusion common on campuses, Vanderbilt University says: To ensure “diversity of thought and opinion” we require certain student groups, including five religious ones, to conform to the university’s policy that forbids the groups from protecting their characteristics that contribute to diversity.
Last year, after a Christian fraternity allegedly expelled a gay undergraduate because of his sexual practices, Vanderbilt redoubled its efforts to make the more than 300 student organizations comply with its “long-standing nondiscrimination policy.” That policy, says a university official, does not allow the Christian Legal Society “to preclude someone from a leadership position based on religious belief.” So an organization formed to express religious beliefs, including the belief that homosexual activity is biblically forbidden, is itself effectively forbidden. There is much pertinent history.
In 1995, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the private group that organized Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade to bar participation by a group of Irish American gays, lesbians and bisexuals eager to express pride in their sexual orientations. The court said the parade was an expressive event, so the First Amendment protected it from being compelled by state anti-discrimination law to transmit an ideological message its organizers did not wish to express.
In 2000, the court overturned the New Jersey Supreme Court’s ruling that the state law forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation required the Boy Scouts to accept a gay scoutmaster. The Scouts’ First Amendment right of “expressive association” trumped New Jersey’s law.
Unfortunately, in 2010 the court held, 5 to 4, that a public law school in California did not abridge First Amendment rights when it denied the privileges associated with official recognition to just one student group — the Christian Legal Society chapter, because it limited voting membership and leadership positions to Christians who disavow “sexual conduct outside of marriage between a man and a woman.” Dissenting, Justice Samuel Alito said the court was embracing the principle that the right of expressive association is unprotected if the association departs from officially sanctioned orthodoxy.


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In wiser moments, the court has held that “this freedom to gather in association . . . necessarily presupposes the freedom to identify the people who constitute the association and to limit the association to those people only.” In 1984, William Brennan, the court’s leading liberal of the last half-century, said:
“There can be no clearer example of an intrusion into the internal structure or affairs of an association than a regulation that forces the group to accept members it does not desire. Such a regulation may impair the ability of the original members to express only those views that brought them together. Freedom of association therefore plainly presupposes a freedom not to associate.”
As professor Michael McConnell of Stanford Law School says, “Not everything the government chooses to call discrimination is invidious; some of it is constitutionally protected First Amendment activity.” Whereas it is wrong for government to prefer one religion over another, when private persons and religious groups do so, this is the constitutionally protected free exercise of religion. So, McConnell says, “Preventing private groups from discriminating on the basis of shared beliefs is not only not a compelling governmental interest; it is not even a legitimate governmental interest.”
Here, however, is how progressivism limits freedom by abolishing the public-private distinction: First, a human right — to, say, engage in homosexual practices — is deemed so personal that government should have no jurisdiction over it. Next, this right breeds another right, to the support or approval of others. Finally, those who disapprove of it must be coerced.
Sound familiar? It should. First, abortion should be an individual’s choice. Then, abortion should be subsidized by government. Next, pro-life pharmacists who object to prescribing abortifacients should lose their licenses. Thus do rights shrink to privileges reserved for those with government-approved opinions.
The question, at Vanderbilt and elsewhere, should not be whether a particular viewpoint is right but whether an expressive association has a right to espouse it. Unfortunately, in the name of tolerance, what is tolerable is being defined ever more narrowly.
Although Vanderbilt is a private institution, its policy is congruent with “progressive” public policy, under which society shall be made to progress up from a multiplicity of viewpoints to a government-supervised harmony. Vanderbilt’s policy, formulated in the name of enlarging rights, is another skirmish in the progressives’ struggle to deny more and more social entities the right to deviate from government-promoted homogeneity of belief. Such compulsory conformity is, of course, enforced in the name of diversity.

Movie quotations

"I'll make him an offer he can't refuse." 




"I just want to say one word to you - just one word.... 'plastics.'"





"Michael...we're bigger than U.S. Steel."


"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms."
."
"

"...I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" 


"Go ahead, make my day."

Gort. Klaatu Barada Nikto. It's a Sicilian message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes. 
It's his ship now, his command. He's in charge, the boss, the head man, 
top dog, big cheese, head honcho, number.. 
I lost it at the movies. ( title of book by New Yorker critic Pauline Kael) 

Don't forget the cannoli. 

How's Paully? 
Oh Paully... won't see him no more. .
Someday, and that day may never come, 
I'll call upon you to do a service for me. 

"You owe me money!"Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country

Arthur I'm so rich, I wish I had a dime for every dime I had. 

Don Corleone, I am honored and grateful that you have invited me to
your daughter... 's wedding... on the day of your daughter's wedding. And I hope their first child
be a masculine child.

But, I'm funny how? Funny like a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I'm here to fuckin' amuse you?

Badges? We ain't got no badges.We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges. 
My father made him an offer he couldn't refuse.. .
Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him, 
that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract.

Now I know we're not in Kansas anymore. 



"Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!"

"Gentlemen. You can't fight in here. This is the War Room!"


- "Tell me, how did you find America?"
- "Turn left at Greenland." 



"You don't understand! I could've had class. I could've been a contender. I could've been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am. Let's face it......It was you, Charley."

"I'll be back."


"If you don't get the President of the United States on that phone, do you know what's gonna happen to you?...You're gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola Company."

"Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!"

"Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night."

"I stick my neck out for nobody."


"A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti."


"They call me Mister Tibbs."


"Show me the money!"

- "Did you hear what I said, Miss Kubelik? I absolutely adore you."
- "Shut up and deal!"

"You're tearing me apart!"

"Then close your eyes and tap your heels together three times. And think to yourself, 'There's no place like home'."

"Here's looking at you, kid."

"That is one nutty hospital."

"...Bond. James Bond."


"We find the defendants incredibly guilty."



- "You want answers?" 
- "I want the truth!"
- "You can't handle the truth!"



"Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown."

"You talkin' to me?"





"What do you mean, I'm funny?...You mean the way I talk? What?...Funny how? I mean, what's funny about it?...But I'm funny how? I mean, funny like I'm a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I'm here to f--kin' amuse you? What do you mean, funny? Funny how? How'm I funny??...How the f--k am I funny? What the f--k is so funny about me? Tell me? Tell me what's funny!..."

"Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops, that is, depending on the breaks."


"The horror...the horror."

"We belong dead."


"Get away from her, you bitch!"

"We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives." 

"Last night I saw a flying object that couldn't have possibly been from this planet...But I can't say a word! I'm muzzled by army brass!" 

"All you of Earth - are idiots!"

- "He was from my village. He was the village idiot!"
- "Yeah, what'd you do, place?"



"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave? Stop, Dave. I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it."
"
FIVE EASY PIECES
- "Now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for the chicken salad sandwich, and you haven't broken any rules."
- "You want me to hold the chicken, huh?"
- "I want you to hold it between your knees."


A FEW GOOD MEN. Col. Nathan R. Jessup's (Jack Nicholson) courtroom tirade: ("You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know - that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives; and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall -- you need me on that wall. We use words like "honor," "code," "loyalty." We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punch line. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said "thank you" and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand the post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to!")