So apparently I'm late to the party and everyone knows he's really smart and thoughtful?

I was blown away when I saw The Fever and this has an interesting anecdote about the origin of that play

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n03/christian-lorentzen/i-hate-this-place

she and her husband, the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, visited Central America 'to see what our country was supporting there'. They sought out journalists and human rights activists and made return trips. On their second visit to El Salvador, they encountered Methodist missionaries delivering medical supplies: 'They said to us: Why did you come back? You know this situation - you don't have anything more to learn here. And we said: It's just easier, it's more comfortable to be here than to try to live with this in New York or even discuss it at a dinner party there. And they said: That's why we're here, too.'

I love Wallace Shawn. I highly recommend the films he made with Andre Gregory, especially My Dinner With Andre. He was also Grand Nagus Zek on Star Trek: DS9 which I've been rewatching.

The image he opens and closes with, of the GIs in their jeeps in Europe and NY really resonates with me, I know it's a cliche of old WWII movies, which is where I got it from, but one of the deep images I've always had of the character of Americans was from those movies, specifically scenes of GIs in Europe throwing chocolate bars to kids from the back of their jeeps. A certain generosity of spirit and it's been hard to see even the illusion of that fade.

2: My Dinner With Andre was a formative film for me, and remains one of my favorites. What do you think of Vanya on 42nd St? I was disappointed when I saw it, because it wasn't breathtakingly good, like My Dinner With Andre, but I've been thinking that I should re-watch it, to see it on it's own terms rather than in the shadow of a legend.

One point of the anecdote in (1), is that he's been thinking for a long time about how to write in response to moral horror -- and he is good at it.

I've never seen "My Dinner with Andre", but I remember The Simpsons episode where there was a video game version of it.

4 I liked it but I agree it doesn't hold a candle to My Dinner With Andre which is a goddamn masterpiece

7 is me

I have spent the last four years thinking about how singular WWII was, in both political and moral terms, and how treating it as a facile paradigm for almost anything -- how wars typically go, how genocide typically goes, America's role in the world, defeating fascism -- causes tremendous distortions. But for most of my life, it has been the paradigm. (Often unconsciously.) I wish I had more time rn to unpack it, since this is super vague, but you all can argue it out. I remember liking "Vanya on 42nd Street" a whole lot.

The Ferengi stuff in DS9 is clearly problematic (those wacky greedy Space Jews! all portrayed by Jewish actors), but Shawn sure put his all into it. One Nagus episode every season.

Shawn is superb as Tall, the crane truck on Stinky & Dirty.

The opening of The Fever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc77-hsx5yE

I always thought he should be doing ads for birth control.

"Inconceivable" would be a good name for a birth control pill.

The big lesson authoritarians learned from WWII is not to make their takeovers big and flashy or to risk their successes by invading everyone. It even worked for Franco.

Lurid, indeed. I wanted once to write a leader arguing that no one in public life should mention or allude to the years between 1939 and 1945 for a period of five years, but more stupid counsels prevailed.

There are important lessons aplenty from those years, though! Just not the ones people have been taking. (I know this is all beyond obvious, and yet.)

Chamberlain's policy of appeasement after the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor was disgraceful. Never again!

People really shouldn't go with the WWII analogies.

Not when you can explain nearly everything with analogies to events from 1775 to 1778 -- and anything else with events from the Peloponnesian War.

Build the Long Wall.

Yeah, it was a good article.

Truth loving Persians do not dwell upon
The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon

Different war.

And your point is?

I have spent the last four years thinking about how singular WWII was, in both political and moral terms, and how treating it as a facile paradigm for almost anything -- how wars typically go, how genocide typically goes, America's role in the world, defeating fascism -- causes tremendous distortions. But for most of my life, it has been the paradigm. (Often unconsciously.)

This is insightful.

So apparently I'm late to the party and everyone knows he's really smart and thoughtful?

I mean no, most people, you mention his name and they just lisp "inconceivable!" but he's great in so many ways. He's sometimes cast as a visual punchline but he's a terrific actor (see: Vanya on 42nd Street) and playwright (The Designated Mourner) and essayist and just all around sort of the famous person I'd most like to be pals with. My 40th birthday present to myself was seeing Wallace Shawn and his partner Deborah Eisenberg and Larry Pine in the Designated Mourner at the Public.

His second most famous thing is My Dinner with Andre. His father was the editor of the New Yorker for many years. He is super interesting in a dozen ways and I die inside just a little when he gets reduced to one joke from a movie.

What do you think of Vanya on 42nd St?

A rare near-perfect film adaptation of a play. One of the only things Julianne Moore has ever done that required her to do anything surprising. A really good translation performed by an honest to god ensemble. One of my favorite movies.

People really shouldn't go with the WWII analogies.
Not when you can explain nearly everything with analogies to events from 1775 to 1778

"The US is undergoing a bitter political struggle in which the leader of one faction is a massive racist who is receiving support from a hostile foreign dictator."

It reminds me a little bit of discovering that Kareem Abdul Jabbar is a lot more than just a one-off actor from Airplane!

I know, he also made appearances in Mannix and Diff'rent Strokes.

And has published three novels about Mycroft Holmes. Huge nerd.

Here's one I certainly did not know about: In September 2018, Abdul-Jabbar was announced as one of the writers for the July 2019 revival of Veronica Mars.

I think he played basketball when younger.

I didn't know about the Veronica Mars thing, or the Mycroft Holmes thing. I have enjoyed some of his essays, though. That is a pretty amazing life of a Renaissance man, though. Essayist, genre novelist, TV writer, greatest basketball player of all time.

Way to trivialize him, dude.

35 to 33.

Also, grew up in my neighborhood. With Kareem and Dr. Ruth, Inwood does pretty well for itself.

This bit (from The Fever) on commodity fetishism was floating around Twitter independently and is proof that Shawn can just flat-out write.

That's really good. (I'm not entirely sure that I know what the fetishism of commodities means still, though. Are talking about the provenance of every commodity we treat casually, and how specifically the blood/sweat/tears in the provenance is a mismatch with the dollar amount? Or are we just saying that the dollar value is the worth we place on that provenance? Or that when we put a dollar amount on a coat based on how it might sell, we erase the provenance?)

I don't think it's just the dollar amount - as he describes it, it's severing all of the object's qualities, including price, from the complex and society that creates it, and treating them as inherent to the object.

"Late that night, naked in bed, I leafed through it. The beginning was impenetrable,"
The guy's a comedic genius.

The line about the Sermon on the Mount stuck out to me. I'm not religious and never have been but over the past five years I've been thinking that the impact of mainstream Protestant denominations & liberal Catholicism has been a lot more beneficial to US civic life than I've believed before. Preachers throughout the South and the frontier regions definitely helped people articulate a moral framework that tempered the more gonzo, destructive elements of the settler lifestyle (drunkenness, violence everywhere, lawlessness, nihilism, etc.) that were ever present. Meanwhile back in the present day, Trump's strongest support from any group comes from self-described White Evangelicals who nevertheless rarely or don't attend church. Those people are easy pickings for the dark side.

(Also takes me back to a Douthat article from years ago, although I hate to give him credit for anything, the jist of which was, "Liberals, if you hate the religious right you're REALLY gonna hate the post-religious right, and you better believe that as the nation secularizes there's still gonna be a right...")

42 is good, and also reminds me of Leonard Cohen's reference to the Sermon on the Mount in "Democracy "

"Democracy is coming to the USA
It's coming through a crack in the wall
On a visionary flood of alcohol
From the staggering account
Of the Sermon on the Mount
Which I don't pretend to understand at all"

42.1: I started to agree with this, and then I remembered what staunch supportesr of slavery 9and later Jim Crow, segregation, etc) the white churches were.

I imagine a scholar responding that yes, this is true, but look at this study that shows that slaveowners that didn't go to church were the most cruel of all.

42.2: That interesting, because I've thought about how of all the people that were wrong about Trump in 2016, Douthat was one of the worst -- after just about everyone realized that Trump was going to be the Republican nominee he was still insisting that this couldn't happen. It was especially embarrassing because this is his bailiwick - he'd been writing about how the traditional Republican message of low taxes and small government failed to resonate with their voters for years. But his incomprehension at Trump's rise showed that he didn't get what these voters really wanted at all -- or else he just couldn't face the plain horrible truth.

And the plain horrible truth is even more on display this time. There's no plan to bring back manufacturing, no businessman who can get trade deals, no health plan better than Obamacare -- nothing that the 'forgotten man' could legitimately hope for. Nothing but resentment and vengeance. And it'll capture, what, 90% of the voters he got last time?

It's way past time to stop pretending that what we call conservatism in this country actually has a legitimate point to make.

Political violence escalating.

46 is fucking outrageous and really alarming.

Yes. 46 is frightening.

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Has NNM to Sean Connery been posted yet?

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Yes. Everything is at half mast already.

46 sucks and so does this case to throw out 100K votes in Harris County.