Wasted time, wasted money, wasted life

No, not talking about Ben Nelson. I'm talking about Da Tech Guy's brutal review of But I'm a Cheerleader, starring Natasha Lyonne:

It's 85 minutes you’ll never get back.

I've linked that review as a sidebar headline, but thought I'd dilate on the topic a little more here in the mainbar. Da Tech Guy slags the movie for its negative stereotypes of Christians, a pet theme of contemporary Hollywood -- and a theme that is both unpopular and unprofitable.

Several similar movies have been produced in the past dozen years, praised by critics and even lavished with Oscar nominations, and yet none of them has been a major moneymaker. One might suppose that the geniuses in Hollywood would get the message, but apparently they don't.

Evidently, sarcastic secular screenwriters know that if they produce a script portraying Christians as a bunch of uptight prudes or hypocritical bigots, there will be some producer or studio executive who'll buy it, as this kind of product represents the regnant Hollywood worldview.

The problem is that while producers and executives constitute the market for scripts, they aren't the ultimate consumers of films. That's an important distinction. The American public might buy all manner of insipid dreck -- predictable slasher flicks, implausible sci-fi fantasies, gross-out comedies, cartoonish action movies -- but they do not share the Hollywood prejudice against Christianity manifested by movies like But I'm a Cheerleader.

There aren't enough God-haters in America to make such movies profitable, and yet they continue to be produced, evidence of how the perverse insularity of the film community has contributed to Hollywood's decline.

Now, go enjoy Da Tech Guy's blog. He's a good guy, even if he is Catholic.

'You have one more Catholic friend now'

He lives in Massachusetts in the same neighborhood his Sicilian immigrant grandfather settled in when he came over from the Old Country.

We had talked 45 minutes when he said, "Hey, why did you call me? Why did you send that e-mail asking for my phone number?"

"Wait . . . I forgot," I answered. Then I remembered and told him and we laughed.

"I'm Protestant and proudly Protestant," I told him, "but I've got lots of Catholic friends. They're conservative, I'm conservative . . ."

So he told me I had a new Catholic friend, and I said, "Hey, I gotta be careful. All these Catholic friends -- I'll ruin my reputation."

You know what's funny? When I told him about another friend, he didn't even know she was a she, much less that she was Luo-American. And we talked about she said about the first chapter of Romans . . . Sad, but she's still praying.

But it was a good talk, cheerful and at one point I found myself talking about John Garang and the SPLA men who held the line at "Mile 40" . . . It was just weird. Out of nowhere. Another Man's War.

Be good, buddy.

Foreign Policy, Made Simple

Da Tech Guy has posted a "Statement of Common Principles" which you may want to check out. My own personal reaction, posted there as a comment:

Hmmm. It's all foreign policy. I don't see anything objectionable here, but I've never been much interested in foreign policy, which is an expert's game and I'm not all into that diplomacy stuff.
So far as I’m concerned, the world can be divided into four categories:

1. U.S.A.
2. Countries that we’re at war with.
3. Countries that we’re not at war with.
4. Countries that are watching from the sidelines and thinking, "Hmmm. Maybe we should jump in on this war against America."

The objective of policy should be for category 1 to whip the living dog$#it out of category 2, and thereby transfer them to category 3, so as to send a message to category 4: “Don’t even think about it, a$$holes."
Peace Through Superior Firepower. Anybody got a better idea?

This is why editors never offer to pay me to write about foreign policy. They always want nuance and insight and crap like that: "Whither Azerbijan?"

My attitude is more like, "Who cares? Canada, France, Azerbijan -- they're all just a bunch of foreigners. Unless you want to send me on an expense-paid trip to Azerbijan, let some geek at Brookings Institute write that stuff." Which sort of rules out foreign policy as an area of professional interest.

This is why four-eyed geeks like David Brooks get all the free trips to Azerbijan, so they can write nuance that bores people to sleep. Foreign policy magazines are the Darvon of journalism. They're boring on purpose. You wouldn't want some deputy undersecretary at the State Department to pick up his favorite foreign policy journal and read the kind of gonzo stuff I might write if the American Entetprise Institute sent me to Azerbijan:

The swimming pool at the Park Hyatt Baku is warm, the whiskey is cheap, the local prostitutes are friendly, and top officials from European NGOs were having themselves a swell old time of it. They had come to Azerbijan for a September conference convened by the United Nations, funded in part by U.S. foreign aid, to combat AIDS and international human trafficking. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had spoken that morning, but when I asked one British official, sitting poolside with a slender 17-year-old Azerbijani call-girl on his lap, what he thought of Mrs. Clinton's speech, he took a sip of his fourth gin-and-tonic and shouted: "Cow!" . . .

No, AEI would never underwrite a "foreign policy" trip that produced such brutal stuff. Anyway, you should check out Da Tech Guy's "Statement of Common Principles."

Frankly, I've never been much of a joiner . . .