If you haven’t been reading Manzine this week, here’s what you’ve missed:

• James Bond Ruined the Martini Sean Connery’s Bond was the essence of cool. But he drank lousy martinis.

• Steakhouse Steak at Home You don’t need to spend $40 at a premium steakhouse to enjoy delicious steaks. Here’s how to do it in your own kitchen.

• Man Laws That Should be Repealed Remember those commercials in which athletes and actors sat around a table discussing questions about manhood such as whether it’s permissible to put lime in one’s beer?

• Margaritas: Skip the Blender Booze in the blender may render a frozen concoction. But it won’t be a real margarita.

• What is an American Car, Anyway? Chrysler has been sold to Fiat and GM has gone bankrupt. But the American auto industry is alive and well.

• 10 Manliest John Wayne Quotes You could do worse than John Wayne as your role model for manliness.

• Real Men: Harald Hardrada He fought in Sicily and Bulgaria, and visited Jerusalem. He married a Russian princess, and ruled as a Norwegian King. He died a thousand miles away from Byzantium and Kiev, fighting on the shores of England.

We’ve also started a sideblog, which shares a name with the title of this post, for shorter posts:

• Hot Waitress Economic Index

• Obama, Clinton, and I Play Golf

Let us know what you’d like to read about and we’ll try to write about it.

Mark Safranski has a mini-review up of Doug Stanton’s Horse Soldiers.

Not having read the book, I don’t have anything substantive to add.  I had previously mentally noted that Horse Soldiers was also the name of a classic John Wayne movie but figured it was a coincidence — until I saw the bottom blurb that he had previous written a book called In Harm’s Way which, of course, is also the name of a classic John Wayne movie.

Any guesses as to the next book?  Marry up a John Wayne movie title with a one-sentence subtitle in Stanton’s genre to play along.  The Green Berets is hereby ruled ineligible on account of being too obvious.

Alex Massie and Radley Balko remind me that John Wayne died 30 years ago today.

I recall it well, having just recently returned to the States from Germany and waiting to start 8th grade in El Paso.  I’ve seen most of his movies since and become a bigger fan.

Someone (Robert Prather, perhaps) shared via Google Reader a superb tribute by Roger Ebert published earlier this week in the Chicago Tribune.  I recommend it highly.

Alex lists his five favorite Duke movies, and they’re all good.  “Rio Bravo” and “Horse Soldiers” are two of my favorites as well.  I like Wayne in his later years, where his humor was more integral to his roles.  My all-time favorites are “Big Jake,” “The Commancheros,” “El Dorado,” “Chisum,” and “Rooster Cogburn.” The last, a reprise of his Oscar-winning role in “True Grit,” was a more enjoyable movie.

Of his non-Westerns, “The Quiet Man” is easily my favorite.  The WWII flicks “In Harm’s Way” and “They Were Expendable” were also quite superb.

The trailer from “Big Jake” is below.

What are your favorites?

Big Hollywood’s Leo Grin has an excellent analysis of the classic Howard Hawks film Rio Bravo,  which was made 50 years ago. A generous excerpt:

Characters are the most important elements of any Hawks movie. By 1958 he had concluded that “audiences were getting tired of plots….But if you keep them from knowing what the plot is you have a chance of holding their interest…It’s when a character believes in something that a situation happens, not because you write it to happen.” Hawks had an unparalleled flair for consciously using detail to expertly reveal character. All throughout the production of Rio Bravo, he would sit silently as the actors rehearsed their scenes, ever on the lookout for ways to organically grow their motivations cinematically, thereby creating deep wells of subtext without clubbing the audience over the head with a screaming, obvious M-E-S-S-A-G-E.

[...]

Most crucially, it was director Hawks who crafted John Wayne’s character into a master not only of action but of reaction, in the process establishing an overriding feeling of camaraderie that makes the film endlessly rewatchable. “John Wayne represents more force, more power than anyone else on screen,” Hawks claimed, and yet by dint of directorial will the star of Rio Bravo becomes everyone else’s straight man. During the course of the plot the Duke gets socked by Dean Martin (twice!), is verbally out-dueled by the precocious Ricky Nelson, suffers the outrageous behavior of Walter Brennan, is relentlessly teased by the ever-flirtatious Angie Dickinson, and is continuously rescued by all of the above. “You give everybody else the fireworks,” Wayne grumbled to Hawks at one point, “but I have to carry the damn thing.”

And yet Hawks knew that, with a universe of talents at his disposal, Wayne’s secret weapon was always his generosity and humility as an actor, his penchant for binding himself and his ego to the needs of a picture. He was unparalleled in his ability to lend his potent movie-star glow to others in a scene, holding up the entire business like a grizzled, enduring Atlas. For Rio Bravo, the breakthrough came during one of Dean Martin’s many set-pieces, while Wayne was standing aside and watching glumly as Martin got to once again chew up the scenery with his performance. “What do I do while he’s playing all of these good scenes?” he finally asked Hawks in frustration.

“Well,” Hawks replied, “you look at him as a friend.”

Suddenly everything Hawks had been striving for, the entire emotional spectrum he was meticulously constructing, became clear. And throughout the finished Rio Bravo, you can go to any point and see the spectacular results of Wayne embracing Hawks’ perceptive direction. Watch, for instance, the scene after Walter Brennan’s character Stumpy has almost killed Dean Martin by carelessly shooting at him through the jailhouse door. Wayne stands by as Brennan, one of the all-time great scene-stealing character actors, goes through an entire blabbering monologue of words and emotions that covers denial, mortification, and finally a resigned acceptance of responsibility. It’s all great stuff, hugely entertaining — but look closely at Wayne. Not a word spoken, not a single word. And yet his pitch-perfect reactions to each of Brennan’s lines gives the scene its touching pathos and power.

Wayne spends virtually the entire film loaning his star power to others in this fashion, not acting so much as reacting, and using those reactions to give his co-stars a much brighter spotlight in which to shine. Indisputably, we have Howard Hawks to thank for that.

Much, much more at the link.

Randy Barnett says the flick “was never one of my favorite westerns” but will give it another go after Grin’s review. It’s long been one of my favorite Wayne flicks precisely because of the great character interaction described above, featuring the superb repartee that was a hallmark of most of the Duke’s best movies.  Similarly, the best of the genre, and certainly “Rio Bravo” was an archetype, very much had a M-E-S-S-A-G-E but it was conveyed through the protagonist’s deeds rather than a lot of speechifying.

John Wayne vehicles were seldom realistic and often corny by today’s more cynical standards.  But they were incredibly entertaining and uplifting.  I recently saw the new “Star Trek” movie and found it much the same.  After years of that franchise leaving its “space opera” roots for more preachy plots, it was great to see the focus returned to daring heroism and the interaction between friends whose bonds have been forged through shared trials.

UPDATE: See my July 2003 post, “High Noon for U.S. Army,” for a more detailed discussion of Rio Bravo as Hawks’ and Wayne’s angry counterpoint to the Gary Cooper classic High Noon. Grin’s essay also discusses that angle.

Bill Dyer reviews Banquos’s Ghosts, the first novel by Rich Lowry and Keith Korman, and finds it weak on writing and strong on moral clarity.  Having read so many spy novels with the opposite mix, he’s anxiously awaiting the sequel in hopes they get a better editor.

It’s been some time since I’ve found the time and energy for reading fiction, so most of my recent encounters with the spy genre have been on film.  I must say that I’ve gotten quite tired of the CIA as bad guy and the villain-as-sympathetic-character tropes.  Both were novel plot twists a quarter century ago and made for more three-dimensional characters.  Now, though, they’ve become formulaic and, given we’re in the midst of two wars, a bit demoralizing.  I’m not sure we need to go back to the entertaining but propagandistic films of John Wayne’s heyday but a couple steps back in that direction would be welcome.

Not, I hasten to add, at the cost of good writing.

As I was sorting through my Sunday Washington Post so that I could throw everything but the Parade and Washington Post Magazine my wife reads into the recycle bin, my attention was grabbed by this photo montage on the front of the Style section:

For a second, I thought they had juxtaposed Barack Obama with Malcolm X (the newsprint version is grainier than the digital one).   But the Obama as Will Smith and John McCain and John Wayne comparison is more apt.

The illustration accompanies a Stephen Hunter feature entitled, “Leading Men -Barack Obama and John McCain Want the Biggest Role in Politics, Yet Each Candidate Has Very Different Star Qualities to Offer.”  The opening:

Wonderful moment in John Ford’s “The Searchers,” from way back in 1956: John Wayne, as the surly, violent Ethan Edwards, signals to his young compadre that it’s time to move on in their pursuit of Scar, the Comanche chief who’s murdered their family and kidnapped the youngest daughter, Debbie.

“Let’s go, blankethead,” he scowls to the young Martin Pawley.

I love the Duke’s pronunciation of the word “blankethead”; it radiates contempt for the young and the untested. Ethan is using the blast of scorn to tell the young man not only to get going to his horse but to get going in growing up, to acquire sand, grit, salt and all the other granular metaphors for old-guy toughness and savvy. Blankethead: It’s a three-syllable telegram on the theme of the fecklessness of youth, and nobody but Wayne could turn it into poetry.

But in the same instant, I remember Will Smith in the original “Men in Black.” The hotshot young cop has been recruited to an alien-hunting team secretly HQ’d in a New York bridge, and now he’s working for Tommy Lee Jones and Rip Torn. Torn and Jones are babbling about something and not paying attention to Smith. There’s a moment of frustration on the young face, and he interrupts with his own blast of scorn: “Hey, old guys !”

It’s a voice full of impatience, annoyance, even contempt, suggesting they haven’t the energy, the quickness or the attention span to take care of business. It’s on him, now, the new guy, the kid: He’s got to keep them from wandering off, losing track, drifting as the old are wont to do.

A bit strained, perhaps, but interesting.

YahooNews has applied the nonsensical headline “Young voters: Obama’s race as an asset, non-issue” to an AP story about how various age cohorts view the issue of race in general and Barack Obama in particular. Either something is an issue or it isn’t. If it’s an asset, it’s an issue.

For young voters, Rosa Parks’ refusal to sit at the back of a bus in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 is schoolbook history. Even the racially charged 1992 riots in Los Angeles are a distant memory.

The United States is far from a blueprint for racial harmony, but for today’s young adults — all born after segregation was outlawed in the mid-1960s — race is not the issue it once was. They have grown up with Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan among their highest-profile and wealthiest role models. And in their everyday lives, they are much more likely than their elders to have friends of another race, studies show. Is it any wonder, then, that young adults have been the most willing age group to support a black man for president?

Primary exit polls conducted for The Associated Press illustrate the generational shift that has helped Barack Obama secure the Democratic presidential nomination. About 56 percent of Democrats younger than age 30 supported Obama. That number dropped steadily with each age bracket to a low of 30 percent for voters 65 and older.

Many young voters say a diverse background is an asset for a candidate. “Rather than just being tolerant of race, we embrace and accept our differences,” says Alisha Thomas Morgan, a 29-year-old black state lawmaker in Georgia. “We all recognize that racism still exists. But I think younger people are much more willing to get over it.”

They also are more accustomed to seeing people of color in positions of power. The country has, for instance, had a black secretary of state for the past seven-plus years. “I shouldn’t say we’re taking it for granted. But it’s not especially strange to us,” says Tobin Van Ostern, a junior at George Washington University who is spending his summer in Chicago as a leader for Students for Barack Obama.

Van Ostern, who is white, says he understands that Obama’s victory is historic. “But it’s one that seems appropriate for the direction the country is going,” he says. “In numerous ways, it presents a new image of the United States to the world — and not just because of the color of his skin.”

[...]

The way Patricia Turner sees it, Obama’s race is just one factor that makes him more accessible to younger voters. Turner is a professor of African-American studies at the University of California, Davis, a diverse campus where she says no one racial or ethnic group is the majority. She recalls a conversation at a recent university dinner where her table included a few Asian-American students and a white woman in her 30s who was married to a man of mixed race. Asked what struck them about Obama, they listed everything from his age and rearing by a single mother to the fact that he is biracial. “There’s something about the sophisticated and complex ethnic identity that resonates with younger voters as well,” says Turner, who is black. “Younger people are able to say ‘we’ — and that ‘we’ includes Barack Obama.”

The story is mostly anecdote with only one fact (the polling by cohort) to buttress the point. So, let me respond in kind.

I was born just a few months after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed and went to school with it never occurring to me that black kids should go to a different one. And I’ve rooted for black athletes, enjoyed black actors and comedians, had at least one outstanding black high school teacher, and had, as a young Army officer, both a black battery commander and a black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

While aware of the color of these people’s skin — it was both visually obvious and culturally remarked upon with some constancy — I was able to judge them based on their performance and by the same standards that I would have applied to whites in those positions.

At no time, however, did I say to myself, “How awesome is it that they’re black! This must be a real treat for me!*”

It strikes me as implausible that a significant number of people who are 10-20 years younger than me, who, as noted in the story, have grown up with blacks in key leadership positions as a norm, would be fascinated by Obama’s biracial existence and exotic upbringing and conclude that these things would make him a great president.

Photo: Seattle Policore

_____________________
*See John Wayne and Roscoe Lee Browne in “The Cowboys” (1972) if this reference is unfamiliar to you.

I feel like I’m beating a dead horse on the issue, but the continued high pitched battle between conservative Republicans who have rallied around conservative-come-lately Mitt Romney in hopes of defeating Teddy Kennedy’s Good Friend John McCain remains the most interesting story this election cycle.

Conservatives Love Romney

The most recent Rasmussen poll shows that “Romney leads by sixteen percentage points among conservatives while McCain has a two-to-one advantage among moderate Primary Voters.” Of course, Rasmussen shows Romney and McCain tied nationally, whereas Gallup and Fox show McCain leading by 20 and 28 points, respectively. Even Michelle Malkin acknowledges that the poll is “the anomaly.”

Still, that Romney is outpolling McCain among self-identified conservatives is a consistent trend. We’ve seen it time and again in the exit polls.

John Hinderaker asserts that, “as the primary season draws to a close, most conservatives are coalescing around Mitt Romney.” Bill Quick believes we are now engaged in “the War for the GOP” with the “GOP establishment attempting to remake the party in its preferred liberal-conservative image – an image in which the ‘conservative’ part is mostly window dressing for the suckers.

Republicans Voting for McCain, Not Romney

Yet, for reasons Eric Kleefeld lays out nicely, McCain is likely to emerge Tuesday night as the prohibitive favorite to win the Republican nomination. AllahPundit, who strongly prefers Romney but maintains a realistic outlook, concurs.

So, we have two countervailing trends:

• Conservatives prefer Romney over McCain, hands down

• McCain is winning Republican primaries against Romney

This, incidentally, despite Romney having outspent McCain by ridiculous margins in television advertising.

What is one to conclude from this?

Perhaps “conservatives” are now a minority, even among Republican primary voters? If so, given that there are virtually no conservatives remaining in the Democratic Party these days and that voters who aren’t aligned with either party are almost by definition non-ideological, that would mean that conservatives are a small minority, indeed, among the American electorate.

Alternatively, perhaps the definition of “conservative” has become so narrow and esoteric that it’s become virtually meaningless?

When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 and again in 1984, he did it by putting together a coalition of small government conservatives, social conservatives, and anti-communists. He famously engendered the support of blue collar folks who were dubbed “Reagan Democrats.” Most of that group simply became Reagan Republicans.

Has the country gotten that much less conservative since then?

In some ways, yes. We’re much more tolerant on lifestyle issues, notably the role of women and acceptance of homosexuality, than we were a generation ago. Abortion has now been legal for 35 years, not a mere seven. We’re also much further removed from the days of the military draft, which means fewer of our menfolk have served.

But, fundamentally, we’re the same country we were in 1980. We’re still the most religious country in the developed world and probably the most patriotic. We’re more citified and more homogenized than we were but we still cling to the John Wayne rugged individualist mythos to a large degree.

The conservative majority has become a Conservative minority.

The Conservative Movement has morphed from a handful of intellectual true believers trying to shape the debate into something approaching a civil religion with loyalty tests and a clericy that has the power to excommunicate.

John McCain was part of the 1980 wave that rolled into Congress on Ronald Reagan’s coattails. Indeed, McCain was among those Reagan was honored to stand with at 1974’s CPAC convention. But someone with an 82 percent lifetime ACU rating is considered a traitor to the cause. Much better, apparently, to flip 180 degrees on election eve and spout the right Party Line talking points.

As I wrote last year from CPAC, when throngs of so-called conservatives lined up for Ann Coulter’s autograph moments after she referred to John Edwards as a “faggot,” “Somehow, I can’t imagine Ronald Reagan being pleased.” Yet, the modern Conservative Moment seems to be dominated by the shrill nonsense of Coulter and Jonah Goldberg[*] and Michael Savage and Neil Boortz. In short, the Conservative Movement is no longer particularly “conservative” at all.

_______

[*] UPDATE: See Goldberg, Coulter, and Savage for a follow-up to this point.

On the eve of Veterans’ Day, a new study sheds light on the nature of heroism.

An infantryman charges a pillbox in the face of enemy fire. A firefighter rushes up the stairwell of a burning skyscraper as office workers flee. A teacher shields her student from a schoolyard gunman with her body. Heroes all. But what personal qualities made them heroic?

In the movies, heroes are charismatic rebels played by the likes of Will Smith or Bruce Willis. But researchers who surveyed decorated World War II veterans found not all heroes are cut from the same swashbuckling cloth. Quiet types with a sense of loyalty and selflessness often have the right stuff, too.

“We often think of the gung-ho, John Wayne ‘Sands of Iwo Jima’ kind of hero driven to combat,” said researcher Brian Wansink of Cornell University. “But there’s a whole lot of these heroes that are much more along the lines of that Captain Miller character Tom Hanks played in ‘Saving Private Ryan’ — the reluctant high school English teacher.”

In a paper to be published in the management-oriented journal The Leadership Quarterly, researchers asked 526 World War II veterans who experienced “heavy and frequent combat” to evaluate themselves on qualities such as leadership, loyalty, spontaneity and selflessness. There were 83 men in the group who received a medal for meritorious service or valor — either a Bronze Star, Silver Star, Distinguished Service Cross or Medal of Honor.

Unsurprisingly, veterans who had been awarded medals tended to rate themselves higher for qualities like leadership, adventurousness and adaptability. Results became more intriguing when researchers divided medal earners into two groups: those who enlisted (”eager heroes”) and those who were drafted (”reluctant heroes”). The reluctant heroes scored higher than any other group in selflessness and working well with others.

The study suggests that quiet heroes rely on a deep sense of duty and esprit de corps as opposed to derring-do. That sentiment was echoed by several of the medal-earning veterans interviewed separately for this story. To a man, they downplayed any notion of heroism. “You show me a man who says he was brave over there and I’ll show you a liar,” said draftee and Bronze Star recipient William O. Carpenter, 84, of Champaign Ill. “Every one of us was afraid. Even the Germans were afraid.”

Former paratrooper Charles Murz was shot at more times than he can recall after dropping behind enemy lines in Europe and earning two Bronze Stars. Now 83 and living in East China, Mich., he scoffs at the idea he showed any particular courage. “Brave? Well, I don’t know about that,” Murz said. “I did what I had to do at the time that I did it.”

Of course, that’s the very definition of heroism. As George Patton famously put it, “All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.” He also said, “If we take the generally accepted definition of bravery as a quality which knows no fear, I have never seen a brave man. All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened.”

Wansink said that understanding the range of heroic qualities can be useful to people who recruit and train soldiers, firefighters and police. A quietly respectful student might be able to distinguish herself as much as the extroverted high school quarterback.

Wansink also said the study underscores the effectiveness of team building in hazardous jobs, be it partnering police officers, having firefighters live together or organizing troops into units. “A hand grenade falls on the floor and leads you to do something other than if you didn’t know who these guys were and didn’t have a commitment to them,” he said.

That sort of loyalty effect has been noted before, famously by the late author Stephen E. Ambrose, who even named one of his books about World War II combat troops “Band of Brothers.” Writing in “Citizen Soldiers” of the men who liberated Europe, he noted: “What held them together was not country and flag, but unit cohesion.” “I did it because it was expected of me,” said 88-year-old Marcel Leschot, of Indianapolis, Ill, a Bronze Star recipient. “You never thought of your own preservation.”

Indeed, the idea that men fight for their comrades-in-arms more so than for lofty ideals of patriotism, belief in the cause, and the like has been long established. Indeed, it has been the essence of professional military training for decades.

People collect all sorts of things, stamps, coins, velvet Elvis paintings, & old manuscripts. And some collect murderabilia, a term I had not heard before.

Round and chrome, it looks a lot like an average hubcap from a vintage VW Bug.
But this one is special. And it’s for sale.
It’s off the 1968 Beetle that Ted Bundy drove as he roamed the West in the mid-1970s murdering young women. From Washington state to Colorado to Utah, Bundy is considered among the most diabolical serial killers in U.S. history.

Although he was executed in Florida’s electric chair more than 18 years ago, anything connected to Bundy is a hot commodity in “murderabilia” — items offered by a handful of Web sites.
The starting bid for the hubcap from Bundy’s Beetle is $3,500. Or how about $1,700 for a signed note that Bundy smuggled to another prisoner on Florida’s death row? Along with Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, Bundy’s stuff is the most sought after, said Andy Kahan, director of the Houston mayor’s crime victims office. Kahan has led the effort to limit such sales.

I agree this is macabre. I agree with Ebay’s decision not to sell such items. But this is a “slippery slope” issue, where do you stop? John Wilkes Booth? Hitler? Genghis Khan? King Leopold II of Belgium? Martha Stewart?

But don’t worry, Congress to the rescue. This is a national priority under the Commerce Clause!

Five states – Texas, California, New Jersey, Michigan and Utah – have passed laws aimed at limiting such sales. U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, has introduced legislation that would prohibit state and federal prisoners from mailing such items.
“The more notorious, the more violent the crime, the more morbid curiosity some people have,” Cornyn said. “For all the upsides and benefits of the Internet, this is sort of the dark side of technology.”
Reichert [WA] said he would take a “hard look” at introducing similar legislation in the House.
One of Kahan’s best-known supporters is Berkowitz, whose killings of six people terrorized New York City in the 1970s. In a letter to Kahan, Berkowitz said he had no control over his articles and writings that turn up on the Web, adding he was “bothered and troubled” by the auction sites.

Bundy and Ridgway do share one thing in common – they have their own line of greeting cards available at www.morbid curiosityshop.com. A Valentine card featuring a drawing of Bundy carries the greeting, “Love You to Death.” A Ridgway greeting card reads “Who Knows What Evil Dwells in the Hearts of Men.”
“Rod Serling couldn’t make this stuff up,” Kahan said.

Um, that is Sterling. Even I know that.

Bohannon operates the Web site www.murderauction.com and is also a collector [ED: collector?]. He had hair from Manson, artwork from Texas serial killer Elmer Wayne Henley and hundreds of letters from convicted murders.
In addition to the Bundy hub cap, his Web site offers a Manson fingerprint chart, a Zodiac killer wanted poster and a tracing of serial killer Alfred Gaynor’s right hand.
As of Sunday evening, there were few bids logged on current Murder.auction items.
Bohannon said most of what he offers can be authenticated, including the Bundy hubcap. The hubcap was removed from the vehicle in 2002 after the VW was purchased at a Salt Lake City police auction by a deputy sheriff.
Bohannon said he and other collectors are being treated unfairly. He said efforts to limit such sales would violate their constitutional rights to free expression.
“The media has a lot to do with who is sought after,” Bohannon said. “It’s all about sensationalism. I think people have been collecting stuff like this since the days of the Old West. People probably have old guns tucked away.”
Terry Hinds’ sister, Cynthia, disappeared in August 1982. Her body was found five days later, another victim of the Green River Killer.
Hinds said he wasn’t aware that anyone was selling stuff linked to serial killers. Those who traffic in it, he said, shouldn’t be profiting.
“Of course it upsets me,” he said. “If anyone is making money off this, it should go to the families.”

Why? Most of the families of those killed by the Green River Killer had already written off that relation. Why should they get money? They didn’t support them while living, so why should they get a death bonus? Yes, I find this seedy, but I’m not about to make the decision about what is allowed (Martha Stewart shawl auctioned off to support prison ministries), vice what is not.

I know I’m ignoring the Son of Sam laws issues. I see this as another USA hubris law, assuming that if it is outlawed in the USA, the rest of the world is cowed into submission.

Phil Carter’s commenters are having great fun with his critique of Lifetime’s “Army Wives” for “easy caricatures and the easy plot formulas” which “fails to convey the depth and complexity underlying a number of important military issues.” They rightly note that very few movies and television shows about anything are accurate and complex because their interest is in entertaining viewers rather than informing them.

Phil counters that “sometimes fiction is the best vehicle for telling the larger truths about a subject,” listing “Three Kings” and “Catch-22″ as examples. That’s also true, although those cases are rare, indeed, compared to the totally worthless portals of military life in fiction (cf “Sgt. Bilko,” “McHale’s Navy,” “I Dream of Genie,” etc.).

My guess is Phil has the same annoying affliction that I have: The inability to suspend disbelief when watching movies about things that we know something about. I can’t count the number of times every week when I make some point about why some plot twist doesn’t make sense to have my unsympathetic wife exclaim, “It’s a movie!” or “It’s a TV show!”

I’m perfectly willing to watch fantasy entertainment like science fiction adventure shows, superhero adventures, or James Bond flicks and accept the far-fetched premises. (Sun’s yellow rays make you fly? A radioactive spider, huh? Fine.) Even there, though, I get annoyed when those premises aren’t adhered to or the characters make inexplicable decisions simply to move the plot along. (Why is the captain taking the entire command staff down to explore that dangerous planet? Just shoot him already! Why can’t the female lead ever just stay in the damn car like she’s told?)

Likewise, I can watch war movies and accept that John Wayne is pretty near invincible or that fighter jocks are dangling their air masks because, otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to see their facial expressions. I never understand, though, why they can’t get the haircuts and uniforms right.

In the comments section of a recent post about Andrew Sullivan’s movie reviews, I noted that

“2001 [A Space Odyssey]″ is one of several movies–“Shane,” “Gone With the Wind,” and “High Noon” come immediately to mind–that are widely considered classics and yet I either disliked or found rather underwhelming even though I typically like films in those genres.

Having recently enjoyed “Casino Royale” in the theater, my wife and I watched the original James Bond flick, “Dr. No,” on DVD last night and were bored to tears. She’d never seen it and it had been perhaps twenty-five years since I had. Sean Connery was superb, of course, but the plot was so devoid of action that I could barely stay awake. And I was one of perhaps seven people who found the Timothy Dalton era films enjoyable.

Similarly, I’m a huge fan of the post-Singing Sandy John Wayne movies and yet don’t see what the fuss was about “Stagecoach,” widely considered one of the classic movies of all time. It’s not that it’s a bad movie; it just lacked the drama and character development of the ones he would make even four or five years later.

It’s not purely a function of era, either, as there are plenty of movies from the 1940s and especially 1950s that I find very enjoyable. Still, there is an amateurism and dullness to many so-called “classic” movies the critics assure us have stood the test of time.

Travis Daub points to the CIA’s new recruiting commercial for the Clandestine Service:

Daub is confused by the tagline, “Are you ready for a world…of ambiguity and adventure?” saying “I’m not sure I know what that means.” One gathers it means that the CIA is looking for people who have to navigate a world where they make decisions on the fly, without guidelines or knowing whether they made the right call. That is, indeed, the world of the Intelligence Officer.

Overall, though, much like the recent U.S. Army recruiting commercials, I find them weak. The characters look wimpy and the voiceover announcer is bland. While the life of a spy isn’t much at all like a James Bond movie, that image is a major reason highly intelligent young people are willing to put their lives on the line for meager pay. Ditto the real Army and a John Wayne movie. You recruit them with the macho, train them on the duty, and keep them with job security and retirement benefits.

Living as I do very near Fort Belvoir, I read with interest this morning’s A1 piece in WaPo about the Army’s plans to build a giant amusement park and hotel complex in land owned by the base.

Army officials say they are considering allowing a private developer to build a 125-acre entertainment, hotel and conference center complex next to a national Army museum at Fort Belvoir that could draw more than 1 million people a year to traffic-choked southern Fairfax County. The possibility of adding what county officials call a military theme park arises as about 22,000 employees prepare to be transferred to Fort Belvoir in the next five years because of the federal base realignment and closure recommendations, designed to save $49 billion nationwide.

Having little to say about it aside from grumbling about not needing the added traffic–something only readers who live nearby would possibly care about–I decided it wasn’t worth blogging about. Oddly, however, a minor blogswarm is developing on the left side of the blogosphere.

Steve Benen, among the handful of left-bloggers I consider regular must-reads, writes that, in addition to the traffic issue,

[T]here’s also the question of taste. Particularly in a time of war, combat is a serious matter, not an amusement-park simulation. Those who are brave enough to wear the uniform and put their lives on the line aren’t characters in some kind children’s entertainment show.

I’m no expert, but theme-parks are about amusement, leisure, and fantasy. Is it me, or does military service not fit in with this description at all?

First Draft’s scout_prime skips the serious analysis and posits, “In a neo con world of continuous war I guess this will be necessary to capture the minds of our youth as early as possible. But need I even say this is just sick…”

Wonk engages in what one presumes is levity:

Following closely on the heels of the forthcoming upgrade of the Vietnam Memorial (“frag” your parents with authentic wacky paintball rifle!), the Army is pleased to announce that to pay for its somber, Medal of Honor-shaped national museum at Fort Belvoir, it will have to contract some hucksters to build a theme park.

Writing at HuffPo, Robert Weissman takes it several steps further:

This business of making military combat seem fun and a game — no small thing with dying and wounded soldiers coming back from Iraq, but assisted by the Bush administration’s efforts to block media coverage of the caskets — is no small thing.

Of course, the amusement park is unlikely to mention that one in six soldiers seeing combat in Iraq are coming home with serious mental health problems.

It’s not likely to play up the likelihood of getting injured or killed.

Nor is it likely to depict how military service — especially, but not only, in pursuit of unjust objectives — can be dehumanizing, and lead otherwise good people to commit atrocities. (About which, be sure not to miss Sunday’s Los Angeles Times extraordinary story on declassified Pentagon papers showing that U.S. atrocities went far beyond My Lai.)

And I guess it’s fair to assume the theme park wouldn’t plan to have booths from those who might convey an honest assessment of military service, like Citizen Soldier.

The amusement park, if it does get built, will instead help romanticize war. In our class-riven society, that’s a doubly dangerous thing.

Such romanticization fits right into the schemes of deception used by military recruiters as they target minority, working class and rural kids for military service.

Even aside from the fact that military recruits have more education and come from wealthier social backgrounds than their civilian peers and that black and Hispanic soldiers are disproportionately not serving in the Infantry, this argument is rather illogical.

For one thing, we already have plenty of toys, games, and other amusements that glorify warfare. Haven’t these people heard of G.I. Joe? Or video games? Or John Wayne movies? How about air shows? Or, hell, the Hummer (Note to Wonkette readers: I refer here to the sport-utility vehicle.)?

Moreover, the proposed park would be aimed at visitors to the National Army Museum, to which this would be an adjunct. Presumably, the kind of folks who would be inclined to drive out to Fort Belvoir and visit an Army museum would be, well, interested in the Army. Such a museum would, if like any other similar one I’ve visited, have numerous static displays of tanks, weapons, Jeeps, and the like for visitors. It strikes me as perfectly natural that they would make the visit both more educational and more enjoyable by allowing people (presumably, adults or at least licensed drivers, for safety and liability reasons) to drive some of the vehicles.

Are those complaining about this alleged “glorification” of war concerned about the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds traveling to sporting events and air shows wowing impressionable youngsters with the sexier side of the military? Including, often, allowing kids to crawl around disabled versions of their planes and sit in the cockpit?

For that matter, how about those military bands going around giving free concerts at schools, conventions, and other places where they might give impressionable youngsters the idea that all soldiers ever do is play catchy tunes on the trumpet? Scandalous, I tell you!

Former Wonkette Ana Marie Cox takes us Inside the Cult of Kos with a TIME magazine feature on the Yearly Kos convention. It turns out that Markos Moulitsas Zuniga is one sexy, charismatic, drill sergeant of a manly man. And a charismatic S.O.B. to boot.

Some excerpts:

• Compact and wiry, Moulitsas, 34, exudes quivering intensity. He speaks in staccato paragraphs, punctuated by intense stares and a raised eyebrow. His eyes bulge slightly outward, as if reacting to the pressure of all the ideas inside his head.
• He’s the left’s own Kurt Cobain and Che Guevera rolled into one, dripping sex appeal for progressives for whom debate has become synonymous with losing, who need a muscular liberal answer to the cowboy swagger adopted by the Bush Administration and its fans.
• Called in to mediate disputes among community members, Moulitsas has all the patience of a drill sergeant. “I get it all the time: ‘Such-and-such was mean to me,’” he says in a mock whine. “I feel like I’m in high school. Suck it up, this is politics.” More to the point, “This is war.”
• Adam Nagourney, a political reporter for the New York Times . . . praises Moulitsas’s political insight but notes that the Daily Kos phenomenon is a product of charisma: “He’s got it and he knows it.”

He’s a veritable John Wayne of blogging.