Author Archives: disinterested spectator

On the Significance and Function of Holidays

So here we are on Martin Luther King’s Day.  We are all familiar with the struggle of Martin Luther King, Jr. for civil rights, and we are all familiar with the derivative struggle to make a federal holiday in honor of him.  The appropriate day for honoring King is his birthday, January 15, which is today, a Monday.

But that is a coincidence.  By law, the holiday occurs on the third Monday in January. Right away, that makes us suspicious. I mean, what is more important, honoring King by having a federal holiday occur on his birthday, whichever day that may be, or making sure federal employees get a three-day weekend so they can have a good time?

Let’s back up a little, about six thousand years ago, when God created the heavens and the earth in six days.  On the seventh day, he rested.  And if having a day off was good enough for God, he figured it would be good enough for the rest of us too. Well, no one had to be told twice to knock off work once a week, but God wanted the day to be in honor of his creation, not a day for people to enjoy themselves by playing games or loafing around.  So, one of his Ten Commandments is to remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy.  That part about keeping it holy meant that the Sabbath had to be turned into the most boring day of the week, and so much so, that some people would actually sneak off and do a little work anyway, for which, if caught, they would be put to death.

This has been the tension in holidays ever since.  On the one hand, we are supposed to honor something or other, which presumably means having a somber expression, speaking in reverential tones, and passing the day in a mirthless manner. On the other hand, getting the day off is something we hate to waste, and so we soon forget the original purpose and use the day to have fun. For example, Good Friday and Easter, the days Christians are supposed to honor the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, their Lord and Savior, has become Spring Break, the week college students head to the beach for sun and surf, sex and suds.

And that is no doubt why in 1994, President Clinton signed a law designating Martin Luther King Day a National Day of Service.  I think the idea was that we would all use the day off to do some volunteer work.  Of course, that suggestion was directed primarily to government workers, because the rest of us typically go to work just as we do on any other Monday.  The fact that those in the private sector have to work while those in the public sector get the day off created an invidious distinction, engendering hostility and resentment.  The purpose of the National Day of Service, then, was so that those of us who had to go to work would not feel cheated, knowing that those government workers that did get the day off would be spending it doing volunteer work.

Of course, the one holiday that is unequivocally about having a good time is New Year’s Day.  We honor nothing on that day, but merely recover from partying the night before.  Exactly why people should get the day off merely to celebrate the passage of time is a mystery.  But at least we are not asked to feign honor and reverence.  And we are not asked to volunteer.  But most important of all, the rest of us get this day off too, and not just civil servants.

At the other extreme, there are Thanksgiving and Christmas. We know that these days are meant to be taken seriously, because they have yet to be moved to the nearest Monday.  Of course, some people manage to take off the Friday after Thanksgiving, turning that into a four-day weekend, and some people manage to combine Christmas and New Year’s Day into a whole week off, but all in all, the fact that these days are not invariably celebrated on a Monday tells us that they are meant for more than just having fun.  Besides, these are days many of us have to spend with relatives, so how much fun could we be having anyway?

The Fourth of July doesn’t count.  It cannot be put in the same category with Thanksgiving and Christmas, even though it is not celebrated on the nearest Monday. Rather, this holiday is tied to the actual day it is supposed to celebrate owing to the fact that its name designates that day.  It has this in common with New Year’s Day. Sometimes it is referred to as Independence Day, and if that ever takes hold, we will finally be able to move it to the nearest Monday, the ultimate destiny of every holiday.

It is interesting that Memorial Day has been moved to the nearest Monday, but Veterans Day has managed to remain fixed to November 11, even though both days have something to do with honoring people who served in the military. But more private sector employees get off for Memorial Day than for Veterans Day, probably because the former affords people a three-day weekend, whereas the latter does not.  In other words, Veterans Day has more honor and reverence, because it remains tied to a particular date, but Memorial Day is more important to us, on account of the long weekend we get.

Columbus Day is another one of those holidays in which only government employees get the day off.  This is in honor of the Europeans who killed off the Indians and took their land. There is a movement to change the name to Indigenous Peoples’ Day, in honor of the Native Americans who were killed by Europeans and had their land taken away from them.  There are two things about this day that will not change however it is designated:  it will be celebrated on a Monday, and only government employees will get the day off.

Finally, we come to the one holiday in which everything comes together without the usual tension between honor and reverence on the one hand, and having a good time on the other.  That is Labor Day.  This is all about honoring the worker. He gets to take the day off and honor himself.  This is the one lasting contribution of the labor movement.

Republicans still haven’t figured out how they let this one get past them.

On Whether a Dishwasher Is a Luxury or a Necessity

Last month, the dishwasher in my apartment conked out.  The maintenance man said that owing to the holidays, it would take about a week to order a new one and install it. And so, during the last week of December, I had to wash the dishes by hand, something I had not done in fifty years, back when I still lived with my parents while going to college.  What a chore!  I had completely forgotten what that was like.  First, I would fill one sink with hot water and liquid dishwashing detergent. Then, after soaking the dishes for a bit, I would scrub them, if necessary, rinse them, and then dry.  It all made me appreciate what a luxury a dishwasher is.  Right now, the dishwasher is churning away as I write this, and what a pleasant sound that is.

My next door neighbor saw the maintenance man removing the dishwasher from my apartment, and she called me to find out what was going on.  When I told her, she said she never used her dishwasher.  She lives alone, and she said she just washes the plate and utensils as soon as she is finished eating. A few days later, I brought the subject up while playing bridge, and the one man and two women at the table all pretty much said the same thing:  they never use their dishwasher, but simply wash everything by hand as soon as they finish eating. The man did allow that he used the dryer in the dishwasher rather than dry the dishes by hand, but that is all.  I don’t like to ask people personal questions, so I do not know this for sure, but I think they each live alone.

That, I suspect, is a critical feature.  I have never been married nor even lived with anyone, but I believe an arrangement in which each person would be responsible for washing his or her own dishes would be not work.  And then there would be the problem of the utensils used in common, such as the pots and pans.

Taking turns might be one solution, but there is the problem of asymmetrical personalities.  I knew a couple guys who were roommates while in college. They agreed each would do the dishes on alternate nights.  But one was neat, while the other was a slob.  On the first night, Mr. Neat did all the dishes, but on the second night, Mr. Slob just never quite got around to doing them, and so they were still in the sink the next morning. Mr. Neat decided he would teach Mr. Slob a lesson, so he let the dishes go unwashed the next night as well. Problem was, Mr. Slob didn’t care, if he even noticed at all.  The only one who was taught a lesson was Mr. Neat, and not long after that he moved out.

I found that story amusing enough when I heard it, but it is with a sense of dread that I broach the subject of married couples.  From what I gather, it usually one person who does the dishes, whether it is the wife (because it’s woman’s work) or the husband (because she cooked the meal, after all), but I suspect there is a lingering resentment about the arrangement however arrived at and by whatever justification.

I once knew a woman who said that when she was single and in hopes of getting married someday, if she went to a man’s apartment and the sink was full of dirty dishes, that pretty much ended the relationship right then, because, she said, she had no intention of cleaning up that mess on a regular basis. Of course, a man who would bring a woman to his apartment with a sink full of dirty dishes would also likely be messy in other ways, it being just an obvious indicator of a general situation.  After she had been married for a few years, presumably to a man with tidier habits, she started having an affair.  Her lover typically had dirty dishes in his sink, but she would walk right by that pile and go straight back to the bedroom.  “I knew I wouldn’t have to clean up after him,” she said, “so it didn’t bother me one bit.  As long as there weren’t any cracker crumbs in the bed, I didn’t care.”  (I knew a guy who did have cracker crumbs in the bed the night he brought a woman to his place, and he just got out the broom, stood on the bed, and swept it out.)

In any event, I suspect that much of the marital tension over doing the dishes is greatly alleviated by the presence of a dishwasher.  Though they were not married, I suspect Mr. Neat would have just put the dishes in the dishwasher and turned it on, if they had had a dishwasher.  But when the dishes have to be done by hand, that is when the trouble begins.  A friend of mine said that one night after dinner, his wife started doing the dishes by hand, for they had no dishwasher, while he sat on the couch and started playing his guitar.  After a few minutes, his wife, who worked same as he did, and who had been the one to cook the dinner they just ate, said, “If you loved me, you would offer to do the dishes.” He stopped playing the guitar, thought for a moment, and said, “Then I guess I don’t love you.” That was not the only reason she eventually left him, but I am pretty sure it made a major contribution to their estrangement.

After she left, the dishes piled up in the sink.  For a few months, he would take the top dish off the pile along with some silverware he could dig out, wash them, use them to eat his meal, and then put them back on top of the pile again. Finally, the absurdity of the situation became too much.  So, he set aside one dish, one glass, one fork, spoon, and knife, and threw the rest away.  His wife said that when she heard about that, she felt as though he had thrown her away. All hope of a reconciliation was dashed.

But suppose they had had a dishwasher.  Their marriage might have been saved. She would never have felt the need to challenge her husband’s love for her, because the dishwasher would already have been doing its job before any ill feeling could accumulate.  And had she left him anyway, for whatever reason, he would never have needed to throw the dishes away, and they might have patched things up.

I doubt if I would have reached the point of throwing most of my dishes and silverware away if I did not have a dishwasher, but after a week of doing them by hand, I suspect the temptation to let them pile up in the sink would ultimately have prevailed.  And that brings me back to these people I know that live alone and do not even bother to use the dishwasher, who were as surprised to find out that I did use one as I was to find out that they did not.

And so it seems that if you live alone, a dishwasher is a luxury that you may or may not care about, depending on the kind of person you are.  But if you are married, I believe it is a necessity.  So, just in case you were looking for a little marital advice from a bachelor, there it is.

Truth, Reality, and Ideology

Although we expect all politicians to dissemble, equivocate, and lie, the disconnect between the Trump presidency and the truth has taken all this to a level most of us have never before experienced.  By “the Trump presidency,” I include not only President Trump and his administration, but also the support Trump receives from Fox News and certain members of Congress, not to mention Trump’s base. What most of us would call undeniable facts, they deny with equanimity or with passion, depending on the temperament of the one who denies them.

What exactly, we wonder, is their connection with the reality? Do they truly believe what they say?  Or are they, with full consciousness, telling bald-faced lies? Are playing word games, intent on deceiving us while staying right with God?  Or are they confused, unable to bring the facts into some kind of connection with their thoughts?

It was with these unanswered questions in the back of my mind that I sat down to read Robert Warshow’s The Immediate Experience, because Warshow was an influential film critic, while I am a movie lover.  In other words, I was just planning on gaining a few insights regarding movies I had watched, and thus it was with a bit of serendipity that I came across his 1953 essay, “The ‘Idealism’ of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,” written shortly after the Rosenbergs were convicted of spying and sentenced to death. While in prison, they wrote letters to each other, which were published.  Warshow’s essay is a discussion of those letters. What struck me was the resonance between his analysis of the Rosenbergs’ idealism and the present situation concerning the Trump presidency, made all the more striking by the fact that they are at opposite ends of the political spectrum.

Warshow says that “the commitment for which they died—and by which, we must assume, they somehow fulfilled themselves—was precisely that the truth was not to be spoken.”  Because the Rosenbergs knew their letters to each other would first be read by prison officials, and because they were hoping to avoid execution, Warshow admits that they cannot be expected to have been completely honest about their spying for the Soviets.  But their dissociation with the truth goes beyond mere prudence:

Under the circumstances, they could not have been truthful.  But there is something uncanny nevertheless in the way this husband and wife felt compelled to write to each other, never evading the issue but, on the contrary, coming back to it continually in order to repeat continually what was not true.

Warshow quotes excerpts in which the Rosenbergs speak of their innocence, of how they had been framed, putting the word “Communist” always in quotes, and denying that they had committed the crime they had been convicted of.  Of this, Warshow says:

No doubt there is a certain covert truth-telling in all this, with “we are innocent” standing for “my resolve is unshaken; I will not confess.” But one is forced to wonder whether the literal truth had not in some way ceased to exist for these people.  It is now about seventeen years since Communists told the truth about themselves … and enough time has passed for the symbolic language of Communism to have taken on an independent existence.

The suggestion here seems to be that while a single thought cannot survive if it contradicts reality, when numerous thoughts are brought together under an ideology, they begin interacting with one another rather than with experience, which they are able to ignore.  And the internal logic of the ideology alters the meanings of words in such a manner that denying facts can act as a substitute for denying the ideas held by others.  For example, as Warshow notes:

… when he [Julius] says “it is obvious that I could never commit the crime I stand convicted of,” we cannot assume that he is simply lying.  More probably, what he means is something like this:  If it were a crime, I could not have done it.  Since in the language of the unenlightened what I did is called a crime, and I am forced to speak in that language, the only truthful thing to say is that I did not do it.

Not only did their ideology detach itself from external experience of the world, but also, according to Warshow, from experience of themselves as persons:

It is as if these two had no internal sense of their own being but could see themselves only from the outside, in whatever postures their “case” seemed to demand—as if, one might say, they were only the most devoted of their thousands of “sympathizers.”

And later Warshow concludes that “they filled their lives with the second-hand, never so much as suspecting that anything else was possible.”  And as such, they could relate to anything that served their purpose, and just as easily disown it later, “the initial responses and their contradictories [being] equally real, and equally unreal.”

There is something to this more profound than insincerity…. The Communist is always celebrating the same thing:  the great empty Idea which has taken on the outlines of his personality….

What they [the Rosenbergs] stood for was not Communism as a certain form of social organization, not progress as a belief in the possibility of human improvement, but only their own identity as Communists or “progressives,” and they were perfectly “sincere” in making use of whatever catchwords seemed at any moment to assert that identity—just as one who seeks to establish his identity as a person of culture might try to do so either by praising abstract painting or by damning it.  The Rosenbergs thought and felt whatever their political commitment required them to think and feel. But if they had not had the political commitment could they have thought and felt at all?

The thrust of all this seems to be that the most important aspect of their ideology was their personal identification with it.  We normally think of an ideology as directed toward some end, toward a better world in some sense. But once an ideology has triumphed over experience, the better world can be asserted and believed in regardless of the facts.  Jesus once asked how it would profit a man if he gained the whole world but lost his soul.  In this case, we may ask how it will profit a man if he loses both the world and his soul for the sake of an ideology.

I believe it would be both tedious and unnecessary for me to list examples from the Trump administration, Congress, and Fox News as corresponding instances of Warshow’s analysis of the Rosenbergs, so I will leave all that to the reader’s imagination.  And as to whether his analysis captures the nature of the Trump presidency and its relationship with the truth, I will leave that to the reader’s judgment.  But I have saved for last my favorite tidbit from Warshow’s essay, which I will present without additional comment:

On July 4, 1951, Julius clipped a copy of the Declaration of Independence from the New York Times and taped it to the wall of his cell.  “It is interesting,” he writes to Ethel, “to read these words concerning free speech, freedom of the press and religion in this setting.  These rights our country’s patriots died for can’t be taken from the people even by Congress or the courts.”  Does it matter that the Declaration of Independence says nothing about free speech, freedom of the press, or freedom of religion, and that Julius therefore could not have found it “interesting” to read “these words” in that particular document?  It does not matter. Julius knew that the Declaration of Independence “stands for” America. Since, therefore, he already “knew” the Declaration, there was no need for him to actually read it in order to find it “interesting,” and it could not have occurred to him that he was being untruthful in implying that he had just been reading it when he had not.  He could “see himself” reading it, so to speak, and this dramatic image became reality: he did not know that he had not read it.

Death and Taxes

According to Benjamin Franklin, nothing in this world is certain except death and taxes.  When he said that in the eighteenth century, these two things were doubtless thought to be independent of each other, except to the extent that the former puts an end to the latter.  This is as it should be, for one of the consolations of life is the finality of death, which finally puts an end to our torments.  And of the torments that plague Republicans, paying taxes is the worst. (When paying taxes is no longer a Republican’s worst torment, he becomes a Democrat.)

There was a time when chief among life’s consolations was the hope of an afterlife, a Heaven devoid of all sin and suffering. But soon that was spoiled when some meanie came up with the idea of Hell, full of torment everlasting, the fate awaiting the vast majority of mankind.  This led to the paradox that many true believers ended up fearing death more than the atheists, for whom death meant nothing more than oblivion.

Much in the way that the idea of Hell spoiled the consolation of Heaven, so too did it occur to Republicans that the idea of having to pay taxes after one has died would offend our sense of the rightness of things, for such would extend our torments beyond the grave.  Thus it was that they came to refer to the estate tax as the death tax, hoping to persuade people to let the rich pass on their wealth in its entirety.

Robert Novak once said, “God put the Republican Party on Earth to cut taxes,” from which it follows, I suppose, that Satan put Democrats on Earth to raise them again. Psychologically speaking, there may be something to that, for whereas Republicans always cut taxes with a sense of righteousness, Democrats experience feelings of guilt just thinking about raising taxes when they are in power, and so much so, that often as not they fail to raise taxes at all.

This asymmetry can be seen in the surveys that ask people, “Do you believe that something needs to be done about the entitlements?”  I am not so concerned with how many people answer that question one way or the other as I am with the implicit bias in the question, for the “something” that “needs to be done” in such questions is always understood as cutting the entitlements, never raising taxes to support them.

I have been opposed to every tax cut since 1980, which is when I first started paying attention to politics.  For that matter, I have been continually in favor of raising taxes ever since, and not just on the rich.  When the Greenspan Commission recommended raising the retirement age for Social Security as well as increasing the payroll tax, I thought to myself, “I wish they would leave the retirement age alone and simply raise the payroll tax even more.”  And this was at a time when I knew I would be paying that tax for years to come.

Another asymmetry concerns the deficit.  To express concern about the deficit is usually understood to mean that one wants to cut spending, seldom that one wants to raise taxes, as is the case for me.  The way I see it, we should first figure out what we are going to spend our money on.  Then we compare that with the revenue the government expects to receive through taxes.  If there is a shortfall, we raise taxes until the budget is balanced.  Actually, I would raise taxes just a little more, create a surplus, pay off the national debt, accumulate a savings, and lend it out to foreign nations at interest.  Essentially, this is what I did with my life—avoiding debt, saving money, lending at interest—and things worked out well for me.

But ever since I took that course in economics in college, I have been told that what is good for the individual is not necessarily good for society as a whole.  I naturally thought that since an individual would be better off if he saved his money, then society would be better off if everyone saved his money.  But I was informed that I was guilty of the fallacy of composition, the inference from what is true of the parts to what is true of the whole.  On the contrary, it turned out that there was this thing called the paradox of thrift, which has it that if everyone saves his money, this leads to a fall in aggregate demand, leading to less growth, perhaps even to a recession and higher rates of unemployment.

That made me feel bad.  You might think that I could just go on saving my money, knowing that society is full of spendthrifts who will not save, so I need not fear that what I am doing will harm the economy.  But as luck would have it, I had read Immanuel Kant, and I was familiar with his categorical imperative, which states, “Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature.”  In other words, according to Kant, it would be wrong for me to save money. Fortunately for me, I am not that good.  So I saved my money anyway.

Or consider the recent tax cut.  The Republicans I play bridge with were allowing that this cut in taxes should stimulate the economy.  I said I wouldn’t be at all surprised, much in the way that a man who lives on borrowed money can enjoy a higher standard of living than if he lived within his means.  They were undeterred by my sarcasm, for they had also taken that course in economics, and they reminded me of the fallacy of composition, pointing out that what would be profligate spending for a household, leading to misery and ruin, can be regarded as sound finance when applied to the federal government, leading to prosperity.

According to Steven Mnuchin, this tax cut will not only pay for itself, but it will help pay down the debt as well.  Ivanka Trump went further, saying that it would completely pay off the national debt.  Well, it looks as though nothing needs to be done about the entitlements after all, right?  Wrong!  With the flip of a Necker cube, Republicans will now become serious about all this deficit spending, saying that we must cut the entitlements.  Of course, since President Trump has assured us that the average household will see a four thousand dollar increase in income, on which the payroll tax will have to be paid, one would think that this additional revenue would put Social Security and Medicare pretty good shape.  But there I go again with the fallacy of composition, thinking that what will be good for each household will in turn be good for society as a whole.

And so it is that the entitlements will have to be cut.  This will have a twofold effect. First, by cutting the entitlements, this will reduce the deficit, just in case the tax cut does not pay for itself.  Second, by cutting the entitlements, there will be more death. And death is cheaper than life.  That is, by cutting Social Security, there will be more poverty for the elderly, leading to a lower life expectancy, which in turn will reduce the amount of money that has to be paid out to recipients.  And by cutting Medicare and Medicaid, people will not be able to afford good health care, which in turn will lead to an earlier death, further reducing government expenditures.  And so it is that cutting taxes will lead to more death, and more death will lead to greater tax cuts in the future.

Now, you may be thinking that since death is bad for the individual, then all this death will be bad for society as a whole. But that just means you still don’t understand the fallacy of composition.

Strategic Air Command (1955)

When watching Strategic Air Command, you almost expect to hear Reed Hadley saying, “These are the men of the Strategic Air Command, who stand ready to defend our nation against nuclear attack…,” and so forth, accompanied by triumphal music, determined to inspire us with patriotic admiration.

I am tempted to say that this is a dated movie, one that might have had some resonance in the 1950s, when the threat of nuclear attack seemed very real, except for one thing:  I was around in those days, and contrary to what you may have heard, children were not terrified by the threat of the hydrogen bomb.  We use to love getting out of class to go see those films demonstrating the destructiveness of this weapon.  It was better than doing long division.  The teachers would tell us that if we saw a flash of light, we should immediately “duck and cover,” but we joked about the futility in that.  One wise guy posted a note on the wall, saying, “In case of nuclear attack:  (1) Bend over.  (2) Put your head between your legs. (3) Kiss your ass goodbye.”  So, what I am trying to say in all this is that even in 1955, this movie would have been boring.  It’s just that it is even more so today.

As a check on how people of the day may have reacted to this movie, I consulted Bosley Crowther’s review for the New York Times.  He devotes the first six paragraphs to talking about the visuals.  In the seventh paragraph, he finally gets around to talking about the plot and the acting.  But then, given the plot and the acting, he might just as well have devoted a couple more paragraphs to the splendors of Vista Vision.

James Stewart plays Dutch Holland, a professional baseball player.  He was a pilot during World War II, and now, being in the reserves, he is called back to active duty to fly the long range bombers that carry a nuclear payload in case World War III should break out.  His wife Sally, June Allyson, really shouldn’t worry her pretty little head about the important work men have to do, but being a woman, she is all sentiment and feeling, and she just doesn’t understand her husband, who has to make all the big decisions in their marriage without consulting her, because a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

Unfortunately, World War III does not break out.  That means the movie must manufacture moments of dramatic tension:  a seemingly hostile situation just turns out to be a drill; an engine catches on fire, causing a crash; a bomber almost runs out of fuel, and Dutch has to land in the fog.  It makes you sympathetic to the device in Top Gun (1986), in which a dogfight occurs between American fighter planes and those of an unnamed enemy, even though the country is not at war.  Let’s face it.  Military movies set during peacetime can be pretty dull.

During the crash that occurred because the engine caught on fire, Dutch injured his shoulder.  This eventually leads to his being discharged, giving us the typical Hollywood ending:  Dutch got the satisfaction of doing the right thing by deciding to make a career out of being in the Air Force in spite of Sally’s objections, and Sally gets her way when he is forced to return to civilian life.  Of course, with an injured shoulder, it is unlikely that he will ever play third base again, which is in keeping with the sense of sacrifice that the men of SAC must make to keep this nation safe, as Reed Hadley might have said, just before the credits start to roll.

Newspeak at the CDC

There is no doubt that the word “Orwellian” has been overused, but the recent list of forbidden words being imposed on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention cannot be called anything else.

But let’s look at the bright side.  The Trump administration’s decision to forbid the use of the word “entitlement” is one that will probably be well received on a bipartisan basis. Republicans hate entitlements, of course.  They have been opposed to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid since their inception, and they have been trying to cut them in one way or another ever since.  But half the Democrats don’t like the word “entitlement” either.  Republicans have been disparaging the entitlements for so long that the word has acquired the connotation of welfare, which may be true of Medicaid, but not of Social Security or Medicare, the result being that a lot of Democrats have succumbed to this tactic.  In vain have the other half of the Democrats tried to argue that calling these latter two programs entitlements simply means that we are entitled to them.  So, by forbidding the word “entitlement,” the Trump administration will make half the Democrats and all the Republicans happy.  Of course, this means that the substitute word for Social Security and Medicare will now be “welfare.” But at least we Democrats won’t have to argue about whether these programs should be called entitlements anymore.

This leads naturally to the reason the word “vulnerable” can no longer be used. Now that the entitlements will be called welfare, they can more easily be cut, especially since those people presently depending on these programs can no longer be said to be vulnerable.  Republicans have always viewed welfare recipients as the undeserving poor.  As Republican Representative Mo Brooks has pointed out, “People who lead good lives don’t have preexisting conditions,” so they can always count on having affordable insurance, and as Orin Hatch pointed out, a lot of children who are presently on CHIP could pay their own way if they wanted to, but they “won’t lift a finger” to help themselves.  These undeserving poor will never amount to anything, even if the government gives them more money, because as Senator Grassley noted, they will just spend every penny on “booze or women or movies.”  Therefore, aside from a handful that are truly needy, all these freeloaders are just mooching on the rest of us, so calling them “vulnerable” is inappropriate. Now, I don’t know about you, but thinking about people who are vulnerable can spoil my good mood, so this is a word we are well rid of.

By eliminating the word fetus, we will now be free of the never-ending debate about abortion.  In place of the word “fetus,” we will now use the term “unborn baby.”  And as there can be no debate as to whether it is permissible to kill a baby, the issue will be settled once and for.  Well, there remains the pesky problem of deciding where an embryo ends and an unborn baby begins, but let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

As the word “transgender” is now forbidden, we will have to fall back on the word “transvestite.”  As the word “transvestite” still carries the connotation of perversion, which it acquired in the good old days, keeping transvestites out of the ladies’ restroom will engender far less debate.  Of course, Republicans are real men who won’t want them in the men’s restroom either, so transvestites had best wear diapers instead of panties.

Now that the word “diversity” is forbidden, it is incumbent on us to make reality conform to the absence of the word.  That is to say, if the word “diversity” shall henceforth not exist, then neither should diversity exist either.  Where there is no diversity, there is no prejudice.  There being no prejudice, there will be no discrimination.  This will eliminate lawsuits based on such, along with programs like affirmative action, designed to solve a problem that is now nonexistent.  More importantly, since everyone will henceforth be white, Christian, male, and heterosexual, everyone will henceforth be a Republican.  And if we are all Republicans, there will be much less discord.

Finally, the terms “science-based” and “evidence-based” will lift a great burden off our backs.  We will no longer have to worry about global warming, and those who still believe in the literal truth of the book of Genesis will no longer have to feel bad about the theory of evolution.  But there is more to it than that.  Republicans believe in freedom, and reason is the great obstacle that stands in its path. Nothing is more frustrating than being told you cannot do something because there is scientific evidence that it is harmful.  We feel constrained. Everyone should be free to do as he pleases, and to that end, we must sever the link between cause and effect.  That way we can cut taxes without increasing the deficit.

Eliminating these words from our vocabulary will greatly ease our minds, which is conducive to good mental health.  That is why the Trump administration was right to start with the CDC.

Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

Last week the subject of Beverly Young Nelson’s yearbook came up between hands at the bridge table.  Much was being made of the so-called “forgery” by my Republican acquaintances, to which I replied, “Witness for the Prosecution.” None of them knew what I was referring to. Actually, this was the second time I had made that reference, though at a different table against different opponents on a previous occasion.  It was in regard to the woman who told reporters at the Washington Post that she had been impregnated by Moore when she was fifteen, which led to her having an abortion.  It turned out to be a sting operation, apparently by orchestrated by Project Veritas.  My allusion to Witness for the Prosecution likewise met with blank stares. Well, the movie was made in 1957, which was sixty years ago, and not everyone is as much of a movie fanatic as I am, so that failure on the part of my friends to know what I was talking about is hardly surprising.  But the allusion is so apt that I feel compelled to do in this essay what I was unable to do at the bridge table.

In the movie, Tyrone Power has been romancing a lonely widow, who is in her fifties. Shortly after changing her will and leaving her fortune to him, she is murdered. Power claims he knew nothing about her will.  He says he is innocent, that he had been wooing the woman only in hopes that she would advance him a loan so he could develop and promote his invention, an eggbeater that not only beats, but also separates the white from the yolk. Charles Laughton, a barrister, believes him and agrees to defend him in court against a charge of murder.  There is a lot of circumstantial evidence against Power, however, and it is more likely than not that he will be convicted, even though his wife, Marlene Dietrich, would be willing to say he was home on the night of the murder. Laughton figures an alibi provided by a wife would not be worth much, so he decides not to call her as a witness for the defense.

Much to Laughton’s surprise, however, she appears as a witness for the prosecution. She testifies that her husband was not home at the time of the murder, that he came home with blood on his sleeve, and that he confessed to killing the widow. It looks as though Power is doomed.  The court recesses, and somewhat later, Laughton gets word that there is a woman willing to sell some letters that will be helpful to the defense, letters from Dietrich to her lover.  In one of them, Dietrich tells her lover that she will soon be free of her husband, because she intends to make up a story incriminating him, instead of telling the truth, which is that he was at home on the night of the murder.

The next day, with the letters as evidence, Laughton successfully impeaches her testimony.  The result is that Power is acquitted by the jury.  It is then, after the trial is over, that Dietrich tells Laughton that she was the woman he met in the bar to buy the letters from (she had once been an actress and was good at disguises and accents). She said she knew her husband was indeed guilty, and that only by arranging to have her truthful testimony “proven” to be perjury was there any chance for an acquittal.

In other words, if she had testified that her husband was at home on the night of the murder, the jury would have discounted her testimony, and Power would have been convicted on the evidence.  But when she was able to make it look as though her incriminating testimony was perjured, the jury then discounted all the legitimate evidence and found him innocent.

This was clearly the idea behind the woman from Project Veritas.  She would bring forward an attention-grabbing accusation against Moore, and then allow herself to be exposed as a fraud.  Logically, there would be a distinction between her fabricated testimony and the evidence of the legitimate accusers. But more fundamental than reason is the association of ideas, a form of thinking even the lower animals possess. Once the Project Veritas woman had been exposed as a fraud, so the plan went, the accusations of all the other accusers would have acquired the taint of fraud too.

That attempt failed, but then there is the case of Beverly Young Nelson.  After accusing Roy Moore of sexually assaulting her when she was sixteen years old, she produced her high school yearbook with an inscription in it by Moore.  She added a note underneath, stating the date and place of the entry, along with the letters “D.A.” after Moore’s name, a perfectly reasonable thing for someone to do.  Not only that, it is so obviously written in a different handwriting that no one could reasonably suppose it to have been penned by Moore.

Unfortunately, in bringing forth that piece of evidence, she made two mistakes. First, she did not state up front that she had added the note, but rather waited three weeks before admitting that that part of the note was hers. Even though the hyperbolic charge of forgery by Fox News was later retracted, the delay in announcing that that part of the note was hers has nevertheless undermined her case. Second, she allowed Gloria Allred to be her attorney. This mistake may well have been more damaging than the first. Nelson should have hired a local attorney that no one has ever heard of. For a Republican politician in Alabama, being accused of wrongdoing by Gloria Allred is like the rabbit being thrown in the briar patch.

The end result is that these two mistakes on Nelson’s part not only undermine her testimony, but they also, by that primitive association of ideas, undermine the testimony of all the other women.  Had Nelson not come forward, all the emphasis would be on Leigh Corfman’s story.  But now all the stories have become sullied.

In Witness for the Prosecution, Dietrich says early on in the movie that her husband would probably be acquitted, if the jury was composed solely of women, the idea being that Power was so good looking that jurors, especially those who were women, would be looking for any excuse to acquit him.  In a similar vein, many Republicans in Alabama were looking for an excuse to vote for Roy Moore with a clear conscience, and Nelson, acting as an inadvertent Witness for the Prosecution, may have provided them with one.

None of this will help me at the bridge table, if ever I again allude to Witness for the Prosecution, but at least I have been able to say my piece here.

Oh, I guess I shouldn’t leave you dangling about the movie. After being acquitted of murder, Power thanks Dietrich for getting him off, and then tells her he is leaving her for a younger woman.  She stabs him with a letter opener. Laughton says he will defend her against a charge of murder, saying she only executed him.

Whether electoral justice will be served on Roy Moore remains to be seen.

The Philosophy of Doing Nothing

There is much to be said for doing nothing.  Pascal remarked that “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”  And when you absolutely have to do something, the next best thing is to put it off.  Procrastination, which involves doing nothing as long as possible, is often thought of as a vice. Benjamin Franklin said, “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today,” but I say, if you put something off until tomorrow, you might not have to do it at all.  A lot of problems just take care of themselves.

As I have done nothing as much as possible all my life, I could give many examples of how procrastination paid off, but I shall simply relate my favorite.  I was at the Longhorn Saloon one night, when I saw Kathy, whom I recognized from the dance studio where we both took lessons, and so I asked her to dance.  While we were two-stepping around the floor, she asked me if I had made any plans for the rodeo.  (In Houston, “the rodeo” refers to a three-week period from late February through March, in which there are rodeo events and musical entertainment.)  Now, there were two possibilities:  either she was just making small talk, or she was flirting, hoping I would ask her out. I had never given any thought to dating Kathy, but I was not averse to the idea either.  In other words, if she was flirting, I wanted to take advantage of it and ask her out.  I do not care for rodeos, for I think they are boring, but such are the things we do for love.  Still, there was the possibility that her question was just idle conversation, and that she had no interest in me romantically speaking.

Ah, if only I had done nothing.  We would have had our dance while briefly discussing the rodeo, and then gone our separate ways.  Instead, I decided the situation called for bold, decisive action, and so I said, “Well, I haven’t made any plans, but now that you mention it, would you like to go to the rodeo with me?”  She said she would.  As this was only early February, we had plenty of time to decide which show we would go see (there are different bands on different nights), so we agreed to discuss the matter again that Friday, when we would have our weekly lesson at the studio.

That night, I woke up in a cold sweat.  I realized I had made a big mistake.  I always believe in asking a woman out in such a way that it is easy for her to say “No,” if she wants to. Therefore, I typically will ask a woman out on, say, Wednesday for a date on Saturday.  This is far enough in advance not to be considered “at the last minute,” but close enough so that she can beg off by saying she already has plans.  Instead, I had asked Kathy out weeks in advance for a date on an indeterminate night in a three-week period.  In other words, I had inadvertently asked her out in such a way that she could not possibly say “No” without hurting my feelings.  Worse yet, I had violated another rule of dating:  on a first date, keep it short and keep it simple. Going to a rodeo, on the other hand, is a complicated date, which typically starts in the late afternoon and lasts well into the night.  It also did not help that there was no real enthusiasm in Kathy’s voice when she accepted the date.

Therefore, I needed to get out of it somehow.  But how?  For the same reason that she could not say “No,” I could not break the date.  How do you say, “Something has come up,” when talking about a three-week period several weeks away?  Finally, around two in the morning, I decided I would tell her that some friends were coming to visit me in March, and so I had better not make any other plans, such as going to the rodeo with her.  The problem having been solved, I turned over and immediately went to sleep.

But when I awoke the next morning, I was no longer so sure.  If I was going to break the date, I knew I should call her right away.  The sooner I got it over with the better. “Never put off until tomorrow ….”  But put it off I did.  And I kept putting it off until by the time Friday rolled around, I knew I could not do it.  The excuse was too lame, too unbelievable.  A bunch of friends visiting me for three weeks indeed!  I realized that there was only one proper thing for me to do, and that was to see it through, right to the very end.  We would go to the rodeo and make the best of it, and then I would resolve never to get myself into such a situation again.

When I arrived at the studio, there she was.  I knew we needed to discuss which night we were going to go to the rodeo, but I could not bring myself to broach the subject.  When the lessons were over, we both stayed for practice.  I asked her to dance, and once again we were two-stepping around the floor, neither of us saying anything.  When it was over, we walked toward the perimeter.  It was as good a time as any to discuss the rodeo, but still I said nothing.

Suddenly, she turned around and said, “Oh John.  About the rodeo.  I have some friends coming to visit me in March, and so I won’t be able to go.”

With some effort, I managed to express just a touch of disappointment, saying, “That’s all right, Kathy.  Maybe we’ll do something else some other time.”

And thus it was that doing nothing solved the problem that my failure to do nothing had gotten me into.

Given my view that there is much wisdom in doing nothing, you might think I would be a Republican, for doing nothing is a recurring theme in conservative thought. Edmund Burke is sometimes said to be the father of modern conservatism, and his book, Reflections on the Revolution in France, is regarded as the best expression of his views.  And what views they are! He admits that there might be special circumstances under which democracy is appropriate, but mostly it is a scourge.  He lays down three so-called rights that the British people do not have and do not want. First, they do not want the right to choose their own governors. Inherited succession determines who the next monarch will be, and there is nothing the British people can legally do about it, and that is the way it should be.  The second right the British people do not wish to have is that of cashiering their governors for misconduct.  If a king misbehaves outrageously, there is nothing that can legally be done about it. Even if he is a bad king, he still gets to reign for life, and that is the way it should be. Finally, the British people do not want the right to frame their own government. The type of government they have is the one they are stuck with, like it or not, and that is the way it should be.

At the time this was written, the Americans had violated all three of these principles, framing their own government by writing the Constitution, which provided for the election of a president, along with the procedure to be followed for his impeachment, should he commit high crimes and misdemeanors.  And the Constitution even laid out the procedure for writing a new Constitution should the people decide they want one.  But Burke is silent about America in this book, preferring to concentrate on the French Revolution, probably because it made an easy target, whereas the Americans were violating these Burkean principles with no ill effects.

Of course, when Burke speaks of what the British people want, this was at a time when only ten percent of the male population had the vote, but he is confident that those few speak for the rest of the men and all of the women. Consequently, we see that the recent efforts on the part of Republicans to disenfranchise some of the electorate with Voter ID laws has a venerable tradition in Burke’s horror at the idea of letting the mob have a say in their government.

In all fairness, Burke argues that conservatism is relative rather than absolute. In other words, the point is that whatever government a nation has, that is the one to stick with as much as possible, because change is dangerous. Avoiding change is a form of doing nothing, and when that is not possible, the next best thing is to keep change to a minimum.

Also written in the eighteenth century is Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, in which it is argued that a government with good intentions cannot produce effects as beneficent as that of a free market, in which people act in their self-interest, as if guided by an invisible hand.  In other words, when it comes to economics, we are better off when the government does nothing (except for protecting private property and keeping the rabble in their place).

Conservatives also tend to be religious, and Burke was adamant about the need for religion to restrain man, an attitude still in existence today. However, when it comes to doing nothing rather than something, Christianity does not speak with one voice. There are those who believe so fully in God’s providence that there is little for man to do, except for avoiding sin, which is a form of doing nothing right there.  This is especially the case when it is thought that the end is near.  Climate change and environmental degradation will not matter much if the Second Coming is imminent. On the other hand, there are many Republicans, like George W. Bush, who believe in a faith-based foreign policy.  A lot of them seem to think that the prophecies in The Bible require something about the Jews returning to Palestine and a few other things happening over in the Middle East that apparently God cannot get done on his own, and thus we need a foreign policy that will help him out. There is a libertarian wing of the party that is opposed to American adventurism, and would prefer a more isolationist approach, a form of doing nothing internationally, but they are unfortunately in the minority.  Still, there is that fatalistic element in Christianity that counsels doing nothing, and it dovetails nicely with the political philosophy of Edmund Burke and the economic theory of Adam Smith.

The president who thoroughly embodied the philosophy of doing nothing was Calvin Coolidge, about whom Will Rogers said, “He didn’t do anything, but that’s what we wanted done.”  And more than a few have noticed an affinity between Coolidge’s style of governing and the Tea Party.  Conservatives are sometimes criticized for not having an alternative to certain programs favored by liberals, most recently regarding the Affordable Care Act.  But what needs to be understood is that the true conservative alternative is to do nothing, to let the unregulated free market produce the best of all possible worlds.  And when Congress is criticized for doing so little, for passing very few bills into law, it needs to be understood that for a true conservative, minimal activity is not a vice, but a virtue.  Therefore, when we criticize the Republicans for doing nothing, we should not be surprised if our words lack persuasive force, because doing nothing is their ideal, a form of governing in which they take much pride.

And yet, though my natural sympathies lie with doing nothing, I remain a liberal, inasmuch as I realize that doing something sometimes pays off.  For instance, there was that time that another woman asked me if I knew a good place to go ballroom dancing.  As before, I assumed she was hinting, and, as in the previous case, I asked her out.  One thing led to another, and the next thing you know, we did something rather than nothing, so it definitely has its advantages.

Gojira (1954) and Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956)

Here in American, we first became aware of Godzilla in the 1956 movie Godzilla, King of the Monsters!  But the original version of this movie was Gojira, released in Japan in 1954 and directed by Ishirô Honda.  Footage from this movie was used in combination with scenes directed by Terry Morse, which included Raymond Burr as Steve Martin, a reporter.  With Martin’s narration and some dubbing added in, the subtitles used in Gojira were unnecessary.

Although the addition of scenes with Raymond Burr might seem a little cheesy, the Morse version is actually an improvement over Honda’s original, and not simply because it eliminates the nuisance of having to read subtitles.  Notwithstanding the additional scenes with Burr, Godzilla, King of the Monsters! runs only 80 minutes, whereas Gojira runs for 96 minutes, from which it follows that a lot of footage was eliminated from the latter in producing the former.  This is not something to regret.  The result is that whereas Gojira drags on at a slow pace, Godzilla, King of the Monsters! moves at a nice clip.  Finally, Gojira tells its story from beginning to end, whereas Godzilla, King of the Monsters! begins in medias res, with Steve Martin trying to crawl his way out of the rubble of a destroyed city, who then tells us how things came to be through a flashback.  It is this narrative structure that allows for much of the boring material from the original to be summed up by Martin in a few words.

I didn’t expect to review these movies.  My favorite film critic is Danny Peary, who included Godzilla, King of the Monsters! in his Cult Movies 2, and so I figured he had probably said it all.  However, after seeing both movies back to back, it is clear that on a couple of points he is mistaken.  Peary discusses the many ways in which Gojira is a kind of metaphor and commentary on the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan in 1945.  However, he suggests that in making Godzilla, King of the Monsters! some of this was eliminated:

The American version makes two deletions that arouse suspicions regarding the covering up of references to damage done by the A-Bomb; a young woman (Emiko?) says that she doesn’t want to be a victim of Gojira, “not after what I went through in Nagasaki”; a doctor detects that a little girl has radiation poisoning, and though she is sitting up now, he indicates she is doomed.

The first scene involving a woman, who is not Emiko, by the way, does not say anything about Nagasaki.  She is talking to a couple of men about the possibility of Godzilla coming to their city.  Reference is made to the radioactive tuna and fallout stemming from the fact that Godzilla himself is very radioactive, and they talk about finding a shelter if Godzilla actually comes to the city, the reference presumably being to air-raid shelters.  Now, air-raid shelters were commonly used during World War II to protect people from conventional weapons, so there is no clear reference to the atomic bomb in what they say.  Of course, I am only going by the subtitles.  But their words in Japanese do not include anything that sounds like “Nagasaki.”  On the other hand, if we really want to get all conspiratorial, perhaps the woman’s remark about Nagasaki was cut out or there was dubbing in the Japanese language to make reference to shelters instead.  But enough of this.  In all likelihood, Peary was wrong about what this woman said.

As for the second scene, the one involving the doctor who indicates that the little girl is doomed by radiation poisoning, this was not eliminated in Morse’s American version.  But it occurs much earlier in the movie, owing to the flashback narrative structure, whereas in the original, it takes place much later.  This may be what led Peary to think it had been cut out.

I remember seeing a bunch of Japanese monster movies at the Triple Threat Drive-In a long time ago.  Binge-watching them like this makes you suspect that if you live in Japan, you can expect Godzilla or some other monster to be heading for Tokyo every other Tuesday.  My friends and I began to notice that Godzilla started protecting Japan from other monsters.  Peary also noticed this, saying that Godzilla had become a Japanese folk hero during the 1960s.  But maybe Godzilla was just being territorial.

Needless to say, some of these Japanese monster movies are better than others.  As we used to say in those days when we went to see them at the drive-in, “You pays your money, and you Tokyo chances.”

Straw Dogs (1971, 2011)

Most remakes raise the question, “Why did they bother?”  But for lack of anything better to do, I watched the 2011 remake of Straw Dogs.  It wasn’t bad.  In fact, I started wondering if maybe it wasn’t actually an improvement over the original.  Now, on the one hand, the original was directed by Sam Peckinpah, who made The Wild Bunch (1969) and The Getaway (1972); on the other hand, the original was directed by Sam Peckinpah, who made The Killer Elite (1975) and The Osterman Weekend (1983).  It had been a long time since I had seen the original Straw Dogs, and while I knew it was better than some of those awful films Peckinpah directed later in his career when he was given more freedom to do what he wanted, I couldn’t remember if it belonged up there with his best.

I tried to refresh my memory by reading some reviews, and it was then I found out that there was an uncut version available, which included five minutes of additional footage.  That meant that I might have seen only the cut version.  Back in the late 1960s and 1970s, there was no such thing as a director’s cut.  Movies would often be cut over the director’s objections before they made it to the theater.  There were no DVDs to save the day.  In fact, there was no cable TV and no video cassettes.  The first time I saw The Wild Bunch and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), they had each been reduced by about thirty minutes in length so that the theaters could fit two showings of these movies into one evening.  It was a long time before I got to see them in their entirety.

In some cases, the situation was further exacerbated when the movie was edited for television in order to cut out the dirty words or to reduce the amount of sex and violence.  Sometimes, once the cuts had been made by a major network, that edited version was all that was available from then on.  A case in point is Darker Than Amber (1970).  Even the DVD is nothing but the edited-for-television version from back in those dark days.

And so it was that I decided to watch the original Straw Dogs again, partly to see whether it was better than the remake, and partly to see scenes that might have been cut out originally.  It was better than the remake, much better.  When the violence begins near the end of the movie, we see the photography for which Peckinpah is famous, in comparison to which the remake is just fair.

What had been cut out of the original was some of the material from the scene where Amy Sumner (Susan George) is raped by her old boyfriend, who then holds her down so his friend can rape her too.  It also exceeds the corresponding rape scene in the remake in its visceral force.  But there is another difference.  In the remake, Amy does not want to be raped.  In the original, when her old boyfriend starts raping her, she vacillates between struggling against him and giving in to her lust for him.  This stands in contrast to her relationship with her husband David (Dustin Hoffman), who is a somewhat indifferent lover, who tends to be easily distracted when they are kissing or having sex.

The idea of a woman actually enjoying being raped is disturbing.  And there are several other disturbing elements of this movie.  Earlier on, Amy deliberately stood in front of the open bathroom window with nothing on from the waist up, letting the men working on the roof of the garage look at her, and then she turns to take a shower with the window still open.  You can almost hear the men, two of whom eventually rape her, saying to themselves, “Why, she’s just begging us to watch,” and “She wants it bad.  We ought to give it to her the way she wants it.”

In general, the David and Amy of the original are unlikable.  I would not want to spend an evening socializing with either one of them.  And together as a married couple?  Ugh!  How those two ever got together is a mystery.  Well, no, I guess it’s not.  But you really have to give those hormones credit.  We keep thinking, “Get a divorce before you wind up with a baby.”  The David and Amy of the remake are much easier on the nerves.

Another disturbing part of the movie involves Henry Niles (David Warner), who is differently abled, and one of the things he is able to do differently is fondle young girls.  Some people think he should be institutionalized, but his brother says that he can take care of him.  Of course, the brother’s idea of taking care his child-molesting brother is by brutally slapping him when a girl named Janice starts talking to him in the middle of the street.  In both movies, Janice is played by an actress that is about twenty-years old, but she is supposed to be a young teenager.

Janice, by the way, is sexually aggressive, and she keeps pursuing Henry, eventually getting him alone with her.  But when he hears people looking for them, because they fear the worst, he accidentally chokes her to death trying to keep her quiet.  We have been allowed up to that point to feel sorry for Henry, thinking he needed more understanding.  Suddenly, we realize he should have been locked up a long time ago.

David and Amy are driving home, having left a social event at the church early, mainly because Amy kept having flashbacks of being raped, when they hit Henry, who has run out into the street in the fog, fleeing the scene after having killed Janice.  They take Henry home, intending to call for medical help.  Failing that, they call the local pub, hoping to find the doctor there.  In so doing, Janice’s father, brother, and friends of theirs, who are at the pub, wondering where Janice is, find out that Henry is at the Sumner’s house.  They decide to drive out there to make Henry talk.  This leads to the siege and the subsequent scenes of violence in which David manages to kill all of them, with the help of Amy, who was reluctant at first.

Amy never tells David that she was raped.  In other words, Peckinpah deliberately kept the violation of David’s wife from being a motive for killing the men trying to break into the house to get Henry.  The concept of territoriality was very popular back then, having been made so by Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative, published in 1966.  We get the sense that David’s principal motivation is to defend his territory against those who would dare to invade it.

Aside from Amy’s seeming to partly enjoy being raped by her boyfriend, most of these disturbing elements are in the remake.  There is one thing about the remake that I did like:  it explains the significance of the title.  In the remake, which is set in Blackwater, Alabama, instead of some rural town in England, as in the original, the men who cause the Sumners so much trouble used to be football players in high school, and Blackwater is the kind of place where high school football is a big deal.  David refers to these men as straw dogs.  When Amy asks what he means, he explains:

… in ancient Chinese rituals, dogs made of straw were used as offerings to the gods. During the ritual, they were treated with the utmost reverence. When they were no longer needed, they were tossed aside, trampled on. They became nothing. When their football careers are over with, that’s all these boys become.

That makes perfectly good sense.  But even knowing this, it is hard to apply this metaphor to the men in the original, where sports do not figure into the story at all.  Of course, it would be rugby, not football, but there is no reference to that or anything like it.

Finally, there is one other difference that makes the original more disturbing than the remake.  In the remake, when the Sumners arrive at Amy’s old home, David notices that there is a bear trap in the house.  In the final scene of violence in the movie, David brings the bear trap down on the head of Amy’s old boyfriend, which clamps down on his neck.  We get to see him struggle to open it back up for about a minute, but to no avail.  All in all, it’s a satisfying form of revenge.  However, in the original, it is a mantrap, which was once used to catch poachers.  Amy bought it because she collects antiques.  Let’s face it.  Even if you deplore the idea of using a trap like that to catch bears, it is even more horrifying to think that devices such as that were once used to trap men.  It just sets a much darker tone for the original than the bear trap did for the remake.