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I watched the 2008 film adaptation of the book The Thirty-Nine Steps last week. I’ve never read the book, or seen the classic Hitchcock film, but this version was quite enjoyable, being well-paced and fairly well-acted. From what I have read, however, it bore little resemblance to the novel.

But one thing that irritated me was the film’s use of a rather tired trope. The film’s hero and heroine meet while the hero is being chased by German spies. As they are trying to flee their pursuers by car, they are trading petty insults back and forth, even as the spies are closing in on them.

Ultimately, of course, they end up falling in love.

This sort of thing seems to be very common in film nowadays. Personally, I’m tired of it, and it wasn’t all that good to begin with. I’m all for injecting wit into even serious films; but the fact is that most people will not be coming up with clever insults while being pursued by armed enemy forces.

Moreover; I don’t know who decided every movie couple has to start off being annoyed by and arguing with each other. From what I have heard, I was under the impression it was more regular for a couple to like one another at first, and only over the course of years of knowing one another do they start fighting. But that’s quite cynical, I admit.

One of the reasons I hold the Star Wars prequels superior to the original trilogy is that they managed to almost entirely avoid this kind of thing. Whereas Han Solo and Princess Leia fight with each other almost constantly throughout A New Hope and the first half of The Empire Strikes Back, in the prequels Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala are actually shown to be in love first, before they run into… difficulties in their relationship.

I am not arguing for the Star Wars prequel love story as some kind of model for cinema romance. It is rather shabbily written, no doubt. But as a concept, it stands out from contemporary film romances. (Admittedly, this is partly because it is willing to embrace even older tropes that have lately fallen so far out of fashion they seem more original.)

The essence of drama, the saying tells us, is conflict. Therefore, in order to create drama, the lazy writer simply creates conflict wherever he can, even if it doesn’t make sense for the characters and story.

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Walter Hudson writes, in a Conservative rebuttal to claims that President Obama’s speech on Libya proves his belief in American exceptionalism:

“De Tocqueville observed that the young American nation had a unique ability to prosper. This was the result of an exclusive political and economic environment, namely liberty, which enabled a culture of success… this was no special claim to international leadership or a moral duty to intervene in the affairs of others. The Left, including President Obama, are making that up.

The exceptional quality which de Tocqueville noted enabled America to become prosperous and therefore powerful. Conversely, the Left’s bastardization of American exceptionalism, the so-called “responsibility to protect,” is a product of power which dictates its use. These two views of American exceptionalism are mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed.”

I’ve thought about it for a while, and I’m fairly certain that last sentence is objectively false. Correct me if I’m wrong, but de Tocqueville says “Here is why they will have power.” Obama says “Here is what we must do with the power.” I see no reason at all that they can’t both be correct. I’m not saying they necessarily are, you understand, but that they might be. But I’m no logician.

At any rate, the core of Hudson’s argument is quite revealing. “[I]f we are bound to others by some special calling”, he writes “we are not free to pursue our own interests.” And note that, in the passages Hudson quotes, de Tocqueville says nothing whatever about what America ought to do. He is merely giving a description of Americans, not offering any moral prescriptions.

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I am always amused by conspiracy theories. Here’s a good one currently going around, as reported by The Daily Mail, that the strange on-air bouts of incoherence by various people on television are the result of secret experiments by the U.S. military.

It’s a fairly good conspiracy, but I dare any conspiracy-minded readers to peruse H.P. Lovecraft’s novel The Shadow Out of Time and not come away with an infinitely more terrifying, and slightly more plausible theory. Here is an excerpt:

“The collapse occurred about 10.20 A.M., while I was conducting a class in Political Economy VI – history and present tendencies of economics – for juniors and a few sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room other than the classroom.

 My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that something was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious, in my chair, in a stupor from which no one could arouse me. “

I don’t want to give away too much. “Most merciful thing in the world” etc.

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The Left/Right political dichotomy is inarguably the most useful tool which we have for explaining the present-day political situation which confronts us. This taxonomy, which originated with the French National Assembly, and was based on those were for the monarch and those who were against the monarch, need not be seen as a not unwise reason for continuing its use in contemporary politics. Indeed, just the opposite.


The major advantage of this system is that it allows for political identification to be viewed as a kind of spectrum–though of course it does–but rather that it allows to be wholly binary. If the concept of a theoretical center admits too much room for potential dissidents, it may be viewed rather that each individual unit is composed of a certain percentage of “Right” ideas and of “Left” ideas and that the ratio of these two things establishes him firmly as either “Left” or “Right”. In the unlikely event he is exactly 50% of each, then he must choose randomly.


This absolutist system simplifies matters a great deal, but at some level there may always be those who will seek to rebel against its simplicity. These persons will insist that the system is too simple, and must needs include more complexities before it is accurate. This raises the specter of the spectral mode of political thinking, but herein the system’s innate flexibility is shown in its full color.


Because “Left” and “Right” may also appear on a continuum as well as a kind of binary it is possible to allow for a great deal of variation between them. To those who are inclined to do so, this enables the placing of persons definitively in relation to one another politically.


In this way, we simply conclude that anyone who holds any combination of political views, of which some are “Left” and some are “Right” is therefore to be placed in the center of the line. Therefore someone who believed in the social policies of the “Left” and the economic policies of the “Right” would be in the center. Likewise, someone who believed in the social policies of the “Right” and the economic policy of the “Left” would also be in the center.


This “center” system is of course only to be used as a handler of rare exceptions, for most people may be easily and totally described as being one of the two extremes. But rarely will someone dare to not be on either extreme, and here we find our centrists.


There is finally to be considered the question of whether there could be someone who did not like the entire spectrum, and who sought to build some altogether new philosophy that fit nowhere on the spectrum. It is doubtful such a person could exist, for it would mean that the system for determining whether the French wanted a King was not wholly suited for covering the entirety of political thought.

So, as you could probably tell, this post was a “tongue-in-cheek” piece I’ve been working on. It was supposed to be a “Modest Proposal“-esque sort of humor piece, though it comes off (in my opinion) as just glorified sarcasm, which isn’t terribly funny. I was trying to figure out a way to finish it up well, and I couldn’t. But I thought I’d post it anyway–and April Fools’ day seemed appropriate.

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I can’t figure out how the guy did it, but whether it’s an optical illusion or a digital image manipulation trick, it’s well done. (It’s based, by the way, on this piece by the artist M.C. Escher.)