Well, not really. It was recorded too early. Next week’s show, which will concern this year’s indie triumph slumdog millionaire – set in India – doubtless will have plenty to say about Mumbai. (We hope it will be over by then, but who knows?) But in today’s POLIWOOD Chetywnd and I show our complete disdain for the new James Bond – the pretentiously titled Quantum of Solace (yes, I know there was an identical Ian Fleming title).
The villain here (and in the movie) is “moral equivalence.” As it has been in so many recent Hollywood thrillers, the bad guys are businessmen, CIA agents (rogue or otherwise), the man in the moon, fake environmentalists (Quantum) anything and anyone but the real villain staring them in the Mumbai face- Islamofascism. Heaven forbid they might address the truth.
Of course Fleming and the original Bonds did. They were all about our competition with the former Soviet Union and, as Lionel points out on the show, it was a given that we were the good guys. That gave Connery/Bond the license to wreak all kinds of havoc on his SMERSH (KGB) adversaries. And he did it with a smile, something conspicuously absent from the new Bond.
On today’s show, we carry forth the “moral equivalence” discussion out of the Bond arena into a more serious film of recent years, Steven Spielberg’s execrable Munich. How pathetic that film looks in the shadow of Mumbai. We didn’t mention it on the show but one thing I noted at the time was that movie buries the actual terrorism that instigated the Israeli “revenge” in an arty montage near the end of the film. To have shown the Black Septembrists massacring the Israel athletes at the front of the movie, where it would normally have been, would have disrupted the filmmakers vision of “moral equivalence.” Whether that decision was made by Spielberg or his scenarist Tony Kushner is not known. But one thing is known – Kushner was and, I assume, is a militant anti-Zionist. Why did Spielberg, the supposed lover of Israel, hire him? Strange as it may seem, it’s possible the director didn’t even know the playwright’s views. After all, Spielberg’s a busy man. Very busy. Many projects on his plate. Crazy, huh? … Well, that’s POLIWOOD!
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16 Comments
1. Instapundit » Blog Archive » IT’S A NEW EPISODE OF POLIWOOD, with Roger Simon and Lionel Chetwynd. It’s about James Bond, Mumbai,…:[...] with Roger Simon and Lionel Chetwynd. It’s about James Bond, Mumbai, and more — well, sort of. Free to everybody, no registration [...]
Nov 29, 2008 - 10:06 am 2. Dawnfire82:… The Munich that I saw (DVD) showed the terrorists attacking and killing the Israelis almost right away, though if I recall correctly the scenes were split up over time.
“As it has been in so many recent Hollywood thrillers, the bad guys are businessmen, CIA agents (rogue or otherwise), the man in the moon, fake environmentalists (Quantum) anything and anyone but the real villain staring them in the Mumbai face- Islamofascism.”
The bad guys were Quantum, who were loosely identified as a worldwide organization of rogue intelligence officers. That Greene’s organization (the fake environmentalists) was targeted at all was simply because it had the misfortune of being identified as an appendage of Quantum first.
Nov 29, 2008 - 10:50 am 3. Roger L Simon:Point taken re: Munich, Dawnfire, although it was deliberately fractured toward the same purpose above. Regarding the silliness of Quantum, that’s a distinction without a difference. Yes, they were rogue intelligence agencies, yes they were fake enviros… yawn. What a bunch of meaningless hokum.
Nov 29, 2008 - 10:56 am 4. Amos Franck:From day one the James Bond franchise has been “meaningless hokum” – entertaining meaningless hokum. Was ‘Quantum of Solace’ entertaining?
Nov 29, 2008 - 11:34 am 5. Roger L Simon:“From day one the James Bond franchise has been “meaningless hokum” – entertaining meaningless hokum.”
Indeed, but here’s my point. It was “meaningless hokum” on our side. Fun with a point. ‘Quantum of Solace’ is nihilist hokum and amazingly boring. Not only that, the craft was terrible. You can’t tell what’s happening in the chases and who was following whom. The plot was simultaneously impenetrable and banal. Not only that, not a second of romance between Bond and the Bond girl. For shame. “Was ‘Quantum of Solace’ entertaining?” Yes, if you’re a masochist.
Nov 29, 2008 - 11:54 am 6. Alan Kellogg:Roger, have you ever noticed how Christian Leftist ideology is? The whole matter of moral equivalence can be traced back to Jesus’ admonition to, “Judge not lest you be judged.” Since people don’t like to be singled out for criticism or condemnation, they’ll avoid criticizing or condemning others.
There’s a problem there, you can’t avoid judging. You can’t avoid making an assessment of other people’s behavior, good or bad. Everybody does the occasional bad thing. Some people do bad things because they think they are doing good things, or because they don’t care what others think of their actions. And all while they do these bad things the Left excuses their behavior because we’re not supposed to judge.
Original sin comes into play as well. The idea that the behavior of imaginary people is the responsibility of generations living long after them. Going by YEC thinking, at least some 150 generations.
Combine the directive to not judge others with the belief that we are all guilty of some petty crap, and you get moral relativism. Augmenting the universal guilt there is our perceived status as something unnatural. We don’t belong here and shouldn’t be here. We sinned against God, we’re a crime against Nature, and passing judgment against others is wrong. You can’t win for being a despicable creep.
So you get people saying we are no better than the terrorists, if not worse. Even going so far as to assert that since we possess resources and a position of power superior to those held by terrorists and like groups, the the terrorists are somehow morally superior to us. In the end, for all their protestations of superiority to conservative Christians, the Left is no better, in some ways worse, and in many ways just like their enemy. In short, a Leftist is a Christian Fundamentalist who refuses to forgive.
Look at classical feminism, Marxism, socialism itself. All predicated on the Christian idea that we are a stain in the eyes of God and don’t deserve to live. Far from being liberal Leftists are reactionary conservatives with all the flaws expressed by like groups. Lest we forget, Westover Baptist Church has local Democratic Party friends.
When we decide to treat what somebody else said long ago as as flawed as anything said today, that is when we’ll start to address terrorism, crime, and other hateful acts appropriately. Until then we’ll act as if we didn’t deserve to take the full measures required, and so condemn ourselves and our descendants to lives of wearisome misery.
Nov 29, 2008 - 4:07 pm 7. The New Bond - God Save the Queen! : The Pink Flamingo:[...] Simon on the you know what that the new “James Bond” has become. Once upon a time James Bond was a man’s [...]
Nov 29, 2008 - 7:32 pm 8. Roc B.:With respect to QoS, check out the “proposed theme song” for the film…it makes fun of the new movie in a similar vain as the points of your review…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMoJRLStD9c
Nov 30, 2008 - 2:15 am 9. Jack Aubrey:Roger has never read Ian Fleming or seen a Bond film in the ’60s.
Nov 30, 2008 - 4:25 am 10. ricpic:Clearly Spielberg has tremendous moviemaking expertise and the energy to actualize his dream projects. That said there is something jarringly and permanently jejune about his “vision,” for lack of a better word. The man never grew up.
Nov 30, 2008 - 8:27 am 11. marymcl:The thing I found most offensive about “Munich” was the scene at the very end, where the two men meet on the Brooklyn waterfront with the towers of the World Trade Center across the river behind them. I’m not Jewish, but I lived in Borough Park for a time years ago, and it struck me how baldly accusatory that set up was – as if to say to the orthodox community “You did this. You brought this on the rest of us”. Contemptible.
When “Schindler’s List” came out, I was singing its praises to a a Jewish friend, who was unimpressed. “These Hollywood Jews,” he said. “It takes them 50 years to make a movie about the Holocaust and when they do, the hero’s a Nazi.”
Nov 30, 2008 - 9:05 am 12. Alan Kellogg:marymcl, #11
He’d rather those people had died? Such a withered and twisted soul.
Nov 30, 2008 - 3:14 pm 13. bogie wheel:Original sin comes into play as well. The idea that the behavior of imaginary people is the responsibility of generations living long after them. Going by YEC thinking, at least some 150 generations.
This isn’t really what the doctrine of original sin means, even ignoring the “imaginary people” snark.
The Founders believed enough in the practical implications of original sin that they created a system of checks and balances to disperse the power in government among various groups, and to give each branch of the federal govt specific means to restrain the other branches. If the Founders had subscribed to a view of man as innately good, the Constitution would be a radically different document.
I will agree insofar as the “four legs good, two legs bad” mentality and moral relativism are hallmarks of the contemporary Western Left, but I don’t think these things are primarily outworkings, even distorted ones, of Christianity. The Left is hugely populated by secularists whose beliefs about man, morality, the universe, and God (or the non-existence thereof), descend variously from Darwin and French and German philosophers. C.S. Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man” does a good job, I think, tracing the consequences of those ideas, which were not rooted in Christianity but stood in direct opposition to it.
The Christian Left is the only segment of the Left that really gives any kind of a sincere rip about what Jesus said. And to the extent that any of them do parrot the “Judge not” verse, it is in ignorance (or convenient airbrushing) of all the other many, many verses in which Jesus talks about judgment and damnation. A non-judgmental Jesus is the actual “imaginary person” in this scenario.
The Left has also appropriated a lot of ideas from Eastern philosophy and spiritual traditions, as well as pre-Christian animist beliefs.
Orthodox Christianity is not only not the ideological fount of the modern Western Left, it is and has always been the natural enemy thereof. Name the issue — morality, sexuality, sanctity of life, the place of man in the larger world — and you will find the two groups inevitably on opposite sides of the divide.
Nov 30, 2008 - 7:21 pm 14. marymcl:@12 No. He didn’t “rather those people had died”. Idiot.
Nov 30, 2008 - 9:53 pm 15. marymcl:#13 bogie wheel
Well said. Nor would it be a stretch to say that a significant amount of Leftist thinking derives from a reaction against Christianity.
I love the contrast between the well-known staple of orthodox Marxism that calls religion the opiate of the people, and Czeslow Milosz’s response – that the real opiate is the idea that there is no life after death, no higher power to answer to, no day of reckoning for the evil that men do.
Dec 1, 2008 - 8:17 am 16. Scott:I hate Daniel Craig…he looks like a constipated Vladimir Putin
Dec 1, 2008 - 10:49 am