I’m going away for the rest of this week but if that leaves you starving hysterical naked dragging yourselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix of Klavan on the Culture, don’t despair.*   As per every other always, my new Klavan on the Culture video will be out on Thursday at PJTV.com.  Those of you who are committed atheists should only watch it projected on a piece of cardboard through a pinhole.  If you stare at it directly, it will lead you to believe in God in just sixty days…  or your money back.  That’s Thursday at PJTV.com.

*Don’t look at me – I’m just an asterisk – find the quotation yourself.

A couple of weeks ago, I recommended the 1964 Bryan Forbes film Seance on a Wet Afternoon.  Recalling it as a “stone masterpiece,” but admitting I hadn’t seen it in a long time, I promised to watch it again to see if I remembered it rightly.  Being a serious man of my word, only without the serious part, I did as promised over the weekend.

I’ll modify my praise this far:  it’s a small, brilliant crime film, one of the best of its era.  It is kept from being an absolute masterpiece by a single mistake, a change in the plot of the novel by Mark McShane on which it is based.  I can’t give the change away without spoiling it, so I won’t, but if you can find the novel, read it.  It’s also a pleasure.

As for the film, it’s as riveting and suspenseful as I remembered.  Beautifully directed.  And the acting is phenomenal.  For those who only know Richard Attenborough from his later Jurassic Park hambone days, he was, in his prime and in his admittedly limited range, one of the great actors of his generation.  Brighton Rock, 10 Rillington Place, Guns at Batasi–he was absolutely wonderful.  And in this, playing a little Englander trapped between his own desperation and the desires of his disturbed wife (also brilliantly played by Kim Stanley) he’s at his best.

Definitely a top-notch suspenser, disturbing, beautiful and brilliant.

All right, so, clearly, I forgot to explain the all-important Don’t-Be-Funnier-Than-Klavan Rule.  I’ll overlook the transgression this time, but don’t let it happen again.  No, seriously, many of the reader entries in the CNN New Slogan Contest were hilarious.  It almost makes me wish I were a liberal so I could give everyone a prize to promote his self-esteem.  Unfortunately, I’m a conservative and believe that competition fosters excellence…  so it’s time to announce who will win…  The Blitzy.

Yes, our top three contributors will receive this lovely statuette depicting The Serpent of Ideology Devouring the Children of Truth…  an exact replica of Wolf Blitzer’s moral compass.

For the entry that made me spray my coffee all over the place in a spit-take reminiscent of early Jim Carrey films, the Blitzy goes to:  #39 Erik Larsen:  “CNN, the number one name in . . . . oh look – balloon boy!!!”  To be fair, this could apply to just about every television news operation.  Still, I’m here to be amused.

For pure cleverness, a statuette to:  #70 Sioux Lady:  “Hear no news.  Speak no news.  Cee No News – CNN.”  I tried to get something like that to work but couldn’t do it.  Sioux’s effortless solution left me bitter and envious.  I’m filling a bucket with pig’s blood and waiting for the prom!

And for combining wit with precision and accuracy, the Blitzy to:  #29 Rick Zalon, “CNN: We beat the Sham-Wow guy with the coveted 18-54 demo in the 3 am timeslot!”  Yes, I’ll just bet they did.

To everyone else, well done.  I really did get a lot of laughs, which is why I’m here.  Have a good weekend and Happy Halloween.

CNN now rates last among cable news networks.  Gee, I wonder why that is.  The good folks over at PowerLine think it might “be attributed to the network’s liberalism in general and its attacks on, and sniggering denigrations of, normal Americans.”  Well, maybe.  But maybe all they really need is a change of slogan.  And so, always ready to throw enough rope to our flailing Mainstream Media, I’ve come up with some suggestions:

CNN:  We Report, You Turn On FoxNews To Find Out What Really Happened

CNN:  Where Glenn Beck Used To Work

CNN:  The Most Trusted Name In Sniggering Denigrations of Normal Americans

CNN:  Because No News Is Good News

CNN:  The President Likes Us; He Really, Really Likes Us

CNN:  Where You Get All The Rush Limbaugh Quotes You Won’t Get From Rush

CNN:  Saturday Night Live Fears Us!

CNN:  No, Really.  We Used To Have Glenn Beck.

CNN:  When The President’s A Hologram, Shouldn’t The People Who Cover Him Be Holograms Too?

And my personal choice:

Yes, We CNN!

Please feel free to add your own – the best entry will win a free tingle up his or her leg.  But other than that, keep it clean.

I was embedded with our troops in Afghanistan only briefly in 2008 and went out on only a single three-day mission with them in order to write this article for City Journal. I in no way felt I became an expert on the country or the war. But I did, of course, do extensive research before writing the piece and felt by the time I was done like a well-informed citizen who, like any citizen, was entitled to my opinion.

My opinion was this: when then-candidate Barack Obama told his adoring throngs that Iraq was a war of choice that had taken our attention and resources away from the necessary war in Afghanistan, he had gotten things almost exactly backwards. The war in Iraq had overthrown a dangerous tyrant poised to acquire weapons of mass destruction the moment UN Sanctions were lifted, as they soon would have been. It had established a bulwark of nascent democracy between the Mad Hatters in Iran and Syria. And it had inspired stirrings of freedom-yearning in Iran and Lebanon. President George W. Bush had been right to go in, right to stick with it, right to win.

The Afghanistan conflict, on the other hand, could have no similar conclusion. While it had been necessary to destroy the Taliban’s terrorist training grounds, there was never a possibility of establishing a free nation in that wilderness of tribes and ancient tribal enmities—not, anyway, at a price in blood and treasure the American people were willing to pay. To me, Afghanistan was, at best, a staging ground from which to harry and destroy Islamic extremists in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and, most especially, to keep the bad guys from getting their hands on Pakistan and its nukes.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Obama was wrong. But one of us has to come up with a policy fast–and guess what: it isn’t me.

A guide for the perplexed, including David Letterman and Roman Polanski. My latest Klavan on the Culture video.  With a bare stage painstakingly constructed board by board by Brilliant Visuals Guy (BVG) Justin Folk, who also makes a cameo appearance wearing the coconuts.   Kidding, kidding…

The Wall Street Journal’s estimable James Taranto wrote a profile this past weekend of my likewise estimable friend Andrew Breitbart, the now-famous internet…  uh, something-or-other…  who knows what that guy does exactly?  Anyway, Breitbart did an excellent job of explaining how his recent humiliation of ACORN through the pimp-and-hooker tapes of make-believe pimp and hooker James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles was also–maybe even primarily–a calculated humiliation of the “Democrat-media complex.”  Breitbart’s brilliant strategy of slowly releasing the damning tapes at specific times was designed to circumvent what he knew would be the media’s counter-strategy of attacking the messenger to protect ACORN and the Obama administration.  Breitbart outguessed our corrupt and statist news brokers at every step of the way.  It was a beautiful thing to behold and great to hear him tell the tale of how he pulled it off.

What was annoying–and rather puzzling–about the WSJ piece was Taranto’s unnecessary and seemingly knee-jerk rationalization for the media’s malfeasance.  No one knows better than Taranto what fools these journalists be.  His excellent and frequently hilarious online column Best of the Web (to which I’ve occasionally provided unpaid contributions) is practically a catalogue of their misdeeds.  Yet for some reason, he skewed the Breitbart profile with remarks like this:  “Even if one accepts Mr. Breitbart’s critique of the mainstream media, nobody should root for their downfall or destruction. Their role—that of impartial watchdog and broker of information—is a vital one, whether or not they perform it well.”

But, of course, that’s exactly Breitbart’s point:  the mainstream media don’t perform their role of impartial watchdog well–they don’t perform it at all!  And the importance of that task only serves to make their corruption all the worse–as when the police become corrupt and collaborate with criminals.  Our media is now thorougly dishonest, thoroughly seduced by the left’s statist agenda.  The institution needs to be reformed.  And that won’t happen without people like Breitbart–and Taranto, for that matter–taking them to school–reform school specifically, where they most certainly belong.

A friend of mine recommended I watch Drag Me To Hell and some day, somehow, I’ll get him for it.  Dreadful tripe.  Spiderman director Sam Raimi returned to his genre roots to direct the horror story.  It centers on bank loan officer Christine Brown, played by Alison Lohman, who is trying to get promoted despite the sexism at her bank.  Taxed by her boss to “make the tough decisions,” she turns down a loan to an old gypsy woman who’s already defaulted twice and is too proud to go live with her daughter.  So naturally the irresponsible not to mention disgusting old hag puts a curse on the girl.  The “scares” include the old woman repeatedly vomiting into the younger woman’s open mouth, eyes exploding and so on. Even if it’s meant as self-parody to some degree, that’s no excuse.

Nonetheless, the film was a success so there’ll probably be a sequel.  Here’s my idea for the plot.  Congressman Barney Frank forces banks to make loans to every gypsy who can’t afford to repay them and then Wall Street bundles these bad-risk loans into investment instruments.  They can call it:  Drag Us ALL To Hell.

Well, that was fun, video-game-wise.  A bit overrated by the critics.  Most of them called it a great game.  It’s not.  It’s very good and plenty exciting at a time when most games are repetitive and dull.  Beautiful to look at, great voice acting (including Mark Hamill and Adrienne Barbeau), smooth fighting with some cool stealth moves and a couple of top-notch boss levels–the Scarecrow and the Croc.   Ends kind of abruptly and the final boss level is a disappointment, which I find with a lot of games.  Other than that, a pleasure all the way.

And yes, Batman is George W. Bush…  except he spends less money.

The fatuousness of the Nobel committee’s Peace Prize award to President Obama cannot, of course, be held against Obama himself. He didn’t campaign for it or claim to be worthy of it, whatever “worthy” might mean in regards to an honor so degraded by ideology. And when he won it, he did what any politician would’ve done – what I would’ve done in his position – tried to put it to use to further his agenda. Fair enough.

But that a group of presumably serious individuals convinced themselves that they might give such an award to a man who has accomplished nothing but the winning of elections does indeed say something about Obama’s role in their lives and the lives of people like them. It shows that they regard him as an empty vessel that they have filled with their political hopes and dreams–that they know he’s such a vessel and that they’re comfortable with that. This means, if you follow the logic, that the committee has essentially presented the Peace Prize to themselves, to their own feelings and aspirations. Thus, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize is, in effect, the ultimate expression of leftism: it’s  people giving themselves an enormous pat on the back for their own excellent intentions without regard to results.

I can’t help but draw a direct link from this to a hilarious comment made recently by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein in his defense of child sodomist and film director Roman Polanski. “Hollywood has the best moral compass,” Weinstein unforgettably proclaimed, “because it has compassion.” Here too, as with the Nobel folks, a liberal confuses a feeling state with virtue.

As a result of such confusion, the disasters leftism has relentlessly unleashed on the weak and poor of the world don’t count for anything because the feelings behind them are beneficent and therefore good.  They kill millions in the name of saving the earth, destroy families and neighborhoods in the fight against racism and sexism, crush our educational system in the cause of diversity–but they care so much and mean so well, how can they be anything but in the right?  And how can anyone who opposes them be anything but mean or greedy or racist?

I am reminded of the marvelous book After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre in which the author proposes that we live in a world that continues to use the language of morality but has lost its comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of what, in fact, morality is.  It is in precisely such a world that people rush to the defense of child rapists and award high prizes to do-nothings:  a madcap cartoon world of men and women with buttocks where their heads should be, sick with silliness, all of them, maybe even unto death.