The government will now regulate what actors wear in films. They must wear transparent latex.

You might have thought that the First Amendment allows people the freedom of expression to get naked and copulate on camera. If so, you would be in agreement with the Supreme Court. And the ACLU. The community standards of prudes and Baptists can’t stand in the way of this all-important right.

Of course, if one of the actors were to criticize a politician in between grunts and moans, that speech could be regulated according to McCain-Feingold, and Congress is currently busy preparing new regulations of political speech to avoid anyone interfering with their re-election. The grunts and moans and close-ups of genitalia will remain fully protectable by the highest principles of enlightened democracy. Political speech will be banned.

If you want to make your porn film widely available to the public, there are some limitations. Naturally, Congress won’t allow you to include certain political utterances at certain times; that would be disrespectful, or unfair, or likely to skew an election.

And you shouldn’t distribute porn to children. Of course, attempts to regulate distribution in ways that might shield children from such films have been struck down by the Supreme Court. Why? Well, because adults have an all-important right to watch each other copulate on film. (It’s in the First Amendment, you know.)

Supreme Court to parents: “Get yourself an internet filter.” Ashcroft v. ACLU, 542 U.S. 656 (2004). Congress to citizens: “Shut up.”

But the First Amendment right to copulate for the camera has finally found a limit. It’s not based on community standards. No, it’s worker safety:

State regulators are expected to vote Thursday on a petition asking them to require porn industry performers to use condoms and to take other safety measures. The six-member California Division of Occupational Safety and Health standards board appears likely to create an advisory committee to report back on whether the law should be changed and how it could be accomplished.

The board, appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, has up to six months to act on a Dec. 17, 2009 petition filed by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation that seeks to change state law to require safe-sex protections for adult-film workers, including mandatory condom use and more stringent safety training and testing for sexually transmitted diseases.

That’s right. Your children be damned, but these porn stars are being exploited.

Forget about the First Amendment and the artistic expression inherent in going without condoms. Forget about the government supposedly having nothing to say about sex between consenting adults. We’re talking safety here.

It also sends a bad message to the public to see people enjoying unprotected sex. And since children are much more adept at working internet filters than their parents, they might just learn some valuable lessons, too.

Hollywood’s rush to the defense of Roman Polanski has left us awash in idiocy.  What can one say about Whoopi Goldberg’s assertion that it wasn’t “rape-rape” other than what Joan Smith said?  And how about that call to make the film industry immune from arrest at its film festivals? Debra Winger is outraged that the Zurich festival has been “unfairly exploited.”

Even the French — even the readers at Huffington Post — are shaking their heads over the knee-jerk defense of a child molester. Roger Simon notes:

And yet those people are defending a man who drugged and sodomized a thirteen-year old!

In the name of what? His art? One creepy character on the Huffington Post even went so far as to say Polanski had suffered enough because he didn’t get to work in Hollywood. How dumb can you get – multi-million dollar productions such as Polanski directed for years are financed internationally and distributed world wide. The only “suffering” Polanski had to endure in all this is he had to live in Paris instead of Beverly Hills. Quelle tragédie.

Image: Cry Baby www.addstudio.com.ar -  Creative Commons

On the subject of film awards, we now have a whole new classification: “Best Recycled Film for a Visiting Head of State.” In today’s Wall Street Journal, Rob Long demonstrates that the answer to successful diplomacy lies no farther than the DVD discount bin at Wal-Mart.

You never really grasp just how many countries there are in this world, President Obama will soon discover, until you try to buy DVDs for all of them. The good news here is that even though most countries are reflexively anti-American, most Hollywood movies are, too. So it’s easy to come up with a thoughtful title for your Hugo Chavezes and your Fidel Castros — just grab an American film that touches on the business or financial world. It doesn’t matter which one: “Wall Street,” “Erin Brockovich,” “Silkwood.” It’s a safe bet that any movie you pick will portray American businessmen thoughtlessly pillaging everything in sight.

For Ahmadinejad, he suggests the 1947 Gregory Peck film “Gentleman’s Agreement” about anti-Semitism. For the curious pair Putin and Medvedev, “Brokeback Mountain.”

It’s easy to play diplomat in this audaciously changed world of foreign relations. (Never mind giving handsomely mounted red buttons to our erstwhile cold war nemesis.) I might suggest “Good Neighbor Sam” for Canada, “The Mouse that Roared” for Venezuela, and “Lonely Are the Brave” for the Czech Republic.

For any country wanting to reciprocate with a housewarming gift for the administration that started this diplomatic fiasco, what title could better sum it up than “A Thousand Clowns”?

A young Dutch writer discovered about 64 years ago provided a brutally honest account of her oppression and came to symbolize what Roger Rosenblatt described as “the moral individual mind beset by the machinery of destruction, insisting on the right to live and question and hope for the future of human beings.” In today’s Holland, Anne Frank might be prosecuted for such temerity.

The appalling decision to try [Geert] Wilders, the Freedom Party’s head and the Dutch Parliament’s only internationally famous member, for “incitement to hatred and discrimination” against Islam is indeed an assault on free speech.

Bruce Bawer chronicles the fall of a country that contributed much to Western art and culture. Pim Fortuyn, on the verge of becoming prime minister before his assassination, spoke out against the country’s accommodation of sharia law. He was labeled a racist and loathed by the liberal establishment. Theo van Gogh, another filmmaker to criticize Islam, was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam. Queen Beatrix skipped his funeral in order to visit a Moroccan community center. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, scriptwriter and member of parliament, tossed off the shackles of Islam and promoted women’s rights. She was deemed a “disruption.” She now lives in hiding in Amsterdam. Sound familiar?

In Dutch Muslim schools and mosques, incendiary rhetoric about the Netherlands, America, Jews, gays, democracy, and sexual equality is routine; a generation of Dutch Muslims are being brought up with toxic attitudes toward the society in which they live. And no one is ever prosecuted for any of this. Instead, a court in the Netherlands—a nation once famous for being an oasis of free speech—has now decided to prosecute a member of the national legislature for speaking his mind. By doing so, it proves exactly what Wilders has argued all along: that fear and “sensitivity” to a religion of submission are destroying Dutch freedom.

Dutch liberalism is moving beyond the useful idiot category and proving to be a whole class of Quislings.

The movie about Afghanistan that Hollywood won’t make has been sketched out in the imagination of Andrew Klavan. After criticizing Hollywood for making only films critical of the U.S. (see previous post), Klavan decided to imbed with a unit in Afghanistan and get the true picture firsthand.

His account appears in City Journal: “Five Days at the End of the World.”

In the company of Major Rory, Lieutenant Baronner, and Sergeant Mitchell, the place comes alive. Klavan tells of physical discomfort, corruption, ambushes, and geography so bleak, foreboding, and isolated that “It’s poignantly easy to imagine Jesus walking the fallen world below while the United States Air Force patrols it from above.”

And worse. “Afghanistan’s in the thirteenth century, but this place was Paleozoic,” Rory told me later. “If a T. rex walked out from behind a hill and growled at us, it wouldn’t’ve fazed me at all.”

Rory resembles Alan Alda in the role of Hawkeye. But the characters for this movie are heroic.

So where are the dupes, the abusers, the kill-crazy crackpots who populate the armed forces in Hollywood’s ideology-driven depictions of the War on Terror? There are some somewhere, I’m sure. A small city’s worth of Americans are deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some are bound to go bad. But to tell only their stories amounts to a despicable slander-by-omission. These guys are the real guys. That Vietnam-era army of rueful, ill-educated draftees caught up in a conflict that they can’t comprehend is gone. This is a force of professional warriors, every single one of whom enlisted or reenlisted after 9/11, fully aware of what he was signing up for. Each has his complaints about the military, the war, and American foreign policy—who wouldn’t? But I met none who doubted that they were the spearhead of a force for good, a nation striving to do what was right in the world.

Once again, Rory spoke my showbiz thought: You could watch the most sentimental patriotic war film from the forties or fifties, he said, and get a more accurate picture of who these soldiers are than you get from more “realistic” Hollywood movies today.

Perhaps, if you leave out the dance numbers with Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. Lt. Baronner earned low marks for his West Side Story rendition. But portrayals of ordinary people performing honorably would fit – ordinary people in a situation of life or death wondering who they could trust.

That would be the theme, see: the frustrations of building goodwill in wartime. Because goodwill is the key to this multifront counterinsurgency. It’s the only way to win the locals away from the brutal scum who’ve enslaved them in the past and over to some semblance of liberty and the rule of law. That’s why Information Operations—what they used to call propaganda—is so important. That’s why the bad guys work so hard to spread lies about us.

And that’s why Hollywood should maybe try not to help them.

God Laughs. Snow fell as the House of Commons debated Global Warming yesterday – the first October fall in the metropolis since 1922. The Mother of Parliaments was discussing the Mother of All Bills for the last time, in a marathon six hour session.

Journalistic Apostates. (via Ace) “Barack Obama’s campaign made a few last-minute changes on the campaign plane and oddly enough, all of those left without chairs were from papers that endorsed John McCain.”

Joe the Plumber vs. Aunt Zeituni. Joe gets the State of Ohio digging into his life while the press wrings its hands over Auntie Z’s privacy. Mark Steyn comments on the double standard:

So when John Conyers gets huffy about “leaks”, is it even possible to “leak” that someone’s a “fugitive”? When regular boring US citizens are fugitives, they get pasted up on Post Office walls and written up in the papers. And, in the event that someone discovers that the guy on the lam is holed up at 27b Elm Street, there’s not usually a wave of outrage on the appalling breach of the fugitive’s privacy rights.

If I were Joe the Plumber, I’d ask Aunt Zeituni if I could move in. It’s his best chance of a quiet life.

Duller than Fiction. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin said fantastic space science fiction shows and movies are partly responsible for the lack of interest in real-life space exploration among young people. SF Signal has commentary here.

Wisdom. “Try to look unimportant; they may be low on ammo.” – Infantry Journal (via BurtonBlog)

No Barbed Wire; It Might Hurt the Thieves. From Britain’s Daily Mail:

A gardener has been ordered by council chiefs to remove three foot high barbed wire ringing his allotment – in case thieves scratch themselves climbing over it.

Mark Steyn asks, “Shouldn’t that principle apply to prisons, too?”

Wretching Professors. Karin Tanabe at the Puffington Host defends the intellectual integrity of the women’s movement with catty and snide remarks about Palin’s hair and nails. Ann Althouse notes the irony:

Tanabe writes:

The point is, Sarah Palin and her hockey mom’s, grandpa’s and second cousins, don’t want her to be authoritative.

It’s funny when the Givhan of HuffPo falls prey to the grocer’s apostrophe, is it not? Modeling haughtiness, she takes a pratfall.

Her bad highlights and her layers of puffy bangs scream “don’t mind me, I’ve been filing my nails in a log cabin for the last decade and didn’t know the bouffant was now reserved for burlesque dancers and women who think Vogue is a devilish jig invented by Madonna (cue giggle).” I’m pretty sure my college feminist literature professor is vomiting every time she sees bouffant Barbie. Don’t worry Professor Hart, I am too.

Is that that what Women’s Studies teaches these days — inane snobbery? And when did throwing up become the preferred form of elite expression?

Hollywood Has Always Favored Fantasy. Andrew Klavan writes:

The director of “Nixon” and “JFK,” Stone has shown himself to be a master of rewriting reality until it resembles his left-wing ideology, but he’s by no means alone. For the past 30 years or so, Hollywood storytelling has been guided by a liberal mythos in which, for example, blacklisting communist screenwriters during the ’50s was somehow morally worse than fellow-traveling with the Stalinist murderers of tens of millions (“Trumbo”); Che Guevara was a dashing, romantic liberator instead of a charismatic killer (“The Motorcycle Diaries”); and the worldwide violence currently being waged by Islamo-fascists is either a figment of our bigoted imaginations or the product of our evil deeds (“V for Vendetta”).

Andrew Klavan says the latest Batman movie takes a conservative viewpoint. Batman confronts the terrorists in the only terms they understand, and Batman is vilified for it. Sound familiar?

I have not seen “The Dark Knight” because the nearest theater is 50 miles away and I have to have a pretty good reason to make the trek. I do that for the Met Opera productions, but I can postpone seeing most Hollywood releases until Netflix makes them available. Of course, many Hollywood releases can be postponed indefinitely if not forever.

Klavan reiterates a point that we have taken up before (e.g., here and here): why does Hollywood insist on promoting a losing point of view – a view that promotes losing the war and that results in losing money?

[T]ime after time, left-wing films about the war on terror – films like “In The Valley of Elah,” “Rendition” and “Redacted” – which preach moral equivalence and advocate surrender, that disrespect the military and their mission, that seem unable to distinguish the difference between America and Islamo-fascism, have bombed more spectacularly than Operation Shock and Awe.

In contrast, “The Dark Knight” is making a fortune. Klavan also notes that Hollywood offers the conservative viewpoint only when it is disguised or sugar-coated in some way.

Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth? Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense – values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right – only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like “300,” “Lord of the Rings,” “Narnia,” “Spiderman 3” and now “The Dark Knight”?

I think Chesterton came up with part of the answer quite a while back in Orthodoxy.

My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. I generally learnt it from a nurse; that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of democracy and tradition. The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic. Compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong. Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth. I knew the magic beanstalk before I had tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I was certain of the moon.

When Hollywood makes a realistic film about the war on terror, the values vanish, and moral equivalence takes its place. As Chesterton would say, the rational approach is abnormally wrong.

Klavan concludes with what we all know but often choose to ignore: Doing what is right is difficult. And he highlights the distinction between those who recognize the moral complexity in doing right and those who merely profess an easy morality while doing nothing.

When heroes arise who take those difficult duties on themselves, it is tempting for the rest of us to turn our backs on them, to vilify them in order to protect our own appearance of righteousness. We prosecute and execrate the violent soldier or the cruel interrogator in order to parade ourselves as paragons of the peaceful values they preserve. As Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon says of the hated and hunted Batman, “He has to run away – because we have to chase him.

Well we had a pretty good day – my brother and I – got the outside frame of the floor done and put 4 out of 20 joists in place. The rest of the joists should be easy, might do a couple a day in the evening. When we put on the plywood subfloor (six sheets of plywood) the floor will be done, then we start on the walls, then roof. I’m not sure I want to go with the barn style per the plans I bought, as it seems limiting in terms of windows and skylight, but I don’t have to decide just yet. I think the hardest part was the foundation and floor. It should get a bit easier from now on, although the roof will be a challenge. Now, unfortunately, it’s back to work at the paying job, gearing up for trial.

My brother and I are like Gary Cooper in that movie about the architect – Ayn Rand’s fantasy The Fountainhead. We bow to no man, and follow the dream . . . of the perfect shed . . . as art … death before conformity! To Hell with the Building Code! The act of creation must be preserved, on film or in lumber!

So The Fountainhead was modeled after Frank Lloyd Wright? Yeah, as in Frank Lloyd Wrong! Nice ideas on paper, but horribly non-ergonomic buildings, chairs that hurt to sit in, doors where you have to step down and duck through simultaneously. Please, spare me FLW/R! Art belongs on a wall. A wall with a doorway fit for midgets is not art – sorry! Nor is a chair that is a hemorrhoid waiting to happen! Nor is a fork that won’t pick up a piece of rib-eye or a piece of lettuce. Patricia Neal can have the beamish S.O.B.!

Now, give me a nice piece of landscape architecture, and that’s a different story. A fountain, a waterfall, a barbecue pit. . . .

Here in the South, we’re concerned with space and ventilation, leg-room, gut-room, head-room, mind-room, mud-rooms, and cockroaches. We’re pragmatists who believe that form follows function, not ego, mushrooms, popularity, acid, adoration, publicity, sun-stroke, weirdness, funkiness, dementia, hero worship, or other flirt-ilizer, gim-crackery, crack, or general nonsense. We prefer horse-sense, barn style, barnyard, right angles, Anglican righteousness, righteous indignation, indignant outrage, and basic outrageous-ness, not to mention Elliot Ness, Lake Ness, lake effect, effective opposition, oppositional defiance, defiant self-righteousness, and generally being right (which brings us back to right-angles – which, frankly, Frank wrongly thinks are evil).

The ground in south Louisiana is nearly liquid, so it has the virtue of being flat in a way that Kansans can only dream about. Consequently, we naturally build our sheds at right angles to the ground and sky. The street lights on Bourbon Street are our plumb line, and when their angle to the ground appears too acute, or oblique, we know it’s time to go home and sleep it off. Somebody call Frank a cab.

To the Spoilers Goes the Victory. The sack race and three-legged race have been banned from a school sports day because the children might fall over and hurt themselves. Simon Woolley, head of education at Beamish in Co Durham, said: “We looked at a three-legged race and a sack race but what we want to do is minimise the risk to the children. We thought we would be better to do hopping and running instead because there was less chance of them falling over.”

Trash Culture. “Not long before she died, Pauline Kael remarked to a friend, ‘When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture.’” Robert Fulford elaborates:

Kael assumed she was safe to defend the choices of mass audiences because the old standards of taste would always be there. They were, after all, built into the culture. But those standards were swiftly eroding. [Paul] Schrader argued that she and her admirers won the battle but lost the war. Acceptable taste became mass-audience taste, box-office receipts the ultimate measure of a film’s worth, sometimes the only measure. Traditional, well-written movies without violence or special effects were pushed to the margins. “It was fun watching the applecart being upset,” Schrader said, “but now where do we go for apples?”

U.K. Moves Toward State-Sponsored Islam. “The BBC has announced that now the Government is to fund a ‘board of Islamic theologians,’ with Oxford and Cambridge Universities hosting debates on ‘key issues such as women and loyalty to the UK.’ Communities Secretary Hazel Blears said it was government’s job ‘to support Muslim leaders on controversial issues.’” Via Cranmer.

New Music Is Torture. Joe Queenan says the unsayable.

Having spent most of the last century writing music few people were expected to understand, much less enjoy, the high priests of music were now portrayed as innocent victims of the public’s lack of imagination. . . . [C]oncert-goers have learned to stay awake and applaud politely at compositions by Christopher Rouse and Tan Dun. But they do this only because these works tend to be short and not terribly atonal; because they know this is the last time in their lives they’ll have to listen to them; and because the orchestra has signed a contract in blood guaranteeing that if everyone holds their nose and eats their vegetables, they’ll be rewarded with a great dollop of Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn.

Beer Is a Health Food. George Will says it, so it must be true. And he backs it up with scientific and historical evidence. “Suffice it to say that the good news is really good: Beer is a health food. And you do not need to buy it from those wan, unhealthy-looking people who, peering disapprovingly at you through rimless Trotsky-style spectacles, seem to run all the health food stores.”