RUTHFULLY YOURS

America is large and diverse. So it is risky to draw conclusions based on local samples. Nevertheless, a recent conversation with the chair of one of Old Lyme’s two political parties was of interest. Each of the two main political parties have roughly 30% of registered voters. Both, however, have been losing members, while the ranks of independents (Unaffiliated, as they are known in Connecticut) have been growing. The latter comprises 40% of the electorate. Nationwide, a 2013 Gallup Poll showed Republicans with 25%, Democrats with 31% and independents with 44%. Twenty-five years ago, those numbers were, respectively, 31%, 36% and 33%. While this is not a tsunami, it is a trend.

There are myriad reasons for this shift, including a decline in the homogenous nature of our culture to less parental influence and, importantly, a decline in community social groups that once helped bind us. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam in his book, Bowling Alone, wrote of the decline in civic and community service organizations fifteen years ago. Last year the federal government sponsored a study by the Corporation for National & Community Service that identified falling rates of volunteerism. Another study by USA Today showed similar trends among college graduates. The void created by the loss of volunteers has been filled by government employees. More government workers mean increased government spending. Gerrymandering has meant less competition between parties and more among inter-party factions. The result: more people feel isolated from a expanding sense of extremism in both parties.

When it comes to movies, conservatives can be just like liberals if a film pushes their buttons. This week I saw a former CIA official on TV praise Bridge of Spies as a “great movie” but then go on to cite the continued, unresolved, post–Cold War antipathy between the U.S. and Russia — a contradiction of Bridge of Spies’ insulting, ameliorative message. Many people who consider themselves politically vigilant still look at movies as separate from propaganda — as if only the news media could be partisan. They ignore the fact that the business of contemporary Hollywood is often the business of creating ideological weapons. Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies isn’t simply an entertainment, and neither are four films released this week: Our Brand Is Crisis, Rock the Kasbah, Heart of a Dog, and The Pearl Button.

Sandra Bullock is lucky that Our Brand Is Crisis will flop. She’ll be spared the embarrassment of many people seeing her fumbling venture into George Clooney political snark (Clooney co-produced). In this film, based on Rachel Boynton’s 2005 documentary, Bullock trades in her niceness to portray Jane Bodine, an American political strategist who rebounds from recent career failure to manage the campaign of a presidential candidate in Bolivia. This fact-into-farce gimmick uses a Third World allegory to instruct Americans’ political naïveté. Instead of tackling the U.S. political industry head-on, the film chides the noxious influence of American dogma (and marketing) on global politics. “The truth is what I tell the electorate the truth is,” Jane dictates. This isn’t really political, just another form of media squabbling. Self-destructively ruthless, Jane informs her staff about her “soul-stealing” profession: “Yeah, it’s advertising. Give people something they don’t need, and then you profit from it.”

Sequestration has elicited garment-rending from Head Start administrators and builders of bridges to nowhere, because it has proven about the only fiscal discipline of which Washington, D.C., is capable. President Obama, eager to end his presidency in an Oprah-style spending spree, is determined to bust through the sequestration spending caps locked into place in 2011, and he is even willing to hold the United States military hostage to do it. Hence his veto, last week, of the National Defense Authorization Act.

The great flaw of sequestration has been that it cuts defense too deeply. On that point, there is bipartisan agreement. The president’s defense request, submitted earlier this year, calls for $612 billion in defense spending – $38 billion over the budget caps established by the 2011 Budget Control Act. The NDAA fulfills that request by allocating $38 billion from the Overseas Contingency Operations fund, an “emergency” fund not subject to budget caps. Using OCO to fund standard personnel expenses, such as pay raises, is not ideal; renegotiating the BCA spending caps to facilitate adequate defense funding is the only long-term solution. But a stopgap measure is far better than leaving the military underfunded, which the heads of the armed services all agree would put American soldiers at risk, and would be the consequence of not using OCO funds. The president is vetoing the NDAA less because of anything in it – although he makes fig-leaf arguments about its contents – than because he wants Congress to increase domestic spending too. He is less interested in keeping the military sufficiently funded than in using the military as leverage to end the budget caps on spending for “job training” and other of his pet programs.

So radical is this proposal that — while Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are arming themselves to the gills and seizing territory — it would reduce America’s nuclear “assets” from over 500 missiles, bombers and submarines to less than a handful of nuclear-armed submarines.

“To my knowledge, our unilateral disarmament initiatives have done little to promote similar initiatives in our potential adversaries, and at the same time, they have reduced our arms control negotiating leverage.” — Admiral Richard Mies (Ret.), former Commander of the United States Strategic Command

America’s nuclear deterrent is roughly 35-40 years old. By the time there has been a complete modernization (by 2020) of the Russian nuclear missile force, the U.S. will not have yet built a single new strategic nuclear weapon for its arsenal.

To help with modernization, Congress and administration needs to get rid of the defense budget caps. Removing them should be America’s #1 arms control and nuclear deterrent priority in the nation.

The biggest problem with our believing in “Truth” is a fatal error in casting. Though Robert Redford is not much older than Dan Rather in 2004, the formerly handsome Redford has aged badly and bears no resemblance to the network anchor whom we scrutinized at close range in our homes for so many years. To make matters worse, Dennis Quaid who plays a military consultant to CBS, does look a lot like Rather and would have been perfect casting for the lead role. As we look at Redford with his sandy blondish hairpiece and fair, sun-damaged skin, we wonder why he’s usurping Dennis Quaid’s proper place as the dark-haired, square-headed Rather who remained telegenic as a man in his 70’s.

Cate Blanchett plays Mary Mapes, an overly frenetic, Xanax-popping, boozy journalist with creds who’s on to a very big story about George Bush’s appointment to and AWOL from the National Guard. The pressures of getting this on the air to take advantage of a scheduling opening in 5 days creates the tension, inducing the Mapes/Rather team to go with the story despite imperfect and incomplete journalistic vetting. As scripted, the villains of the movie are the corporate heads of CBS who don’t want to jeopardize their relationship with the president and the heavy-handed Republican lawyers appointed by CBS to investigate this matter before the company decides how to handle it.

Many columns have been written on the wages of immigration -unchecked and without profiling. This column, reprinted from the October issue of Outpost, the monthly publication of Americans for a Safe Israel is timely and urgent….please read it…and be worried….very worried….rsk
Are the years when the United States was a supremely comfortable place for American Jews coming to an end? Thanks to President Obama’s polices, the answer may be yes, although most American Jews are not only blind to the dangers, but actively promoting those very policies.

Challenged by what U.S. Secretary of State Kerry calls Germany’s “example to the world” in opening its borders to 800,000 (overwhelmingly Muslim) migrants this year, the Obama administration now proposes to boost the number of refugees it accepts to 100,000 annually, including 10,000 Syrians.

In practice, this means a huge increase in Muslim immigrants, much larger than even that number suggests. Breitbart reported that in 2013 there were 280,276 immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. Of these, just under 40,000 were refugees. The rest were divided almost equally into those given permanent resident status and those coming as temporary (in theory) migrants, including students and foreign workers. With Obama more than doubling the number of those admitted as refugees, there is little doubt there will be a substantial rise in the other categories. Don’t forget, family unification is a major source of legal immigrants.

There is no doubt that the American Jewish community is the one most threatened by this immigration. Unlike in Germany, a million more Muslim immigrants will not upend the religious demographics of the United States with its population of almost 319 million. But the radical growth in the Muslim population will have a dramatic effect on the small U.S. Jewish population. There are estimated to be five and a half million Jews in the United States. Even before the current Obama escalation, the Pew Research Center forecast the Muslim population would more than double by 2030 to 6.2 million, over-matching the number of Jews.

There is enough “Red” in Ridley Scott’s The Martian to repaint the Red Planet.

Ridley Scott is a superb director. Most of his films are visually mesmerizing even if one doesn’t like their themes, epistemology, or metaphysics, or share their senses of life. You watch them because of his artistry. He is a kind of cinematic Rembrandt: You may not care for the subject, but the subject is so well executed you can’t help but look at it. As with David Lean’s later work (e.g., Lawrence of Arabia), most of Scott’s directed films are consistently, visually stunning, from the oppressively dark (and rainy) Blade Runner to the edge-of-your-seat claustrophobia of Alien to the brutal combat arenas of Gladiator. I have not seen all of his directed films; some I have avoided seeing because the subjects do not interest or appeal to me (e.g., American Gangster).

It’s too bad he’s a lefty, or is in thrall of Hollywood’s lefty money moguls and studios.

Scott’s film oeuvre is inconsistent in subject and theme, as much as is, say, Otto Preminger’s. Preminger had a bad habit of making suspenseful films and then not resolving the stories, leaving the stories and viewers hanging. Anatomy of a Murder and Advise and Consent are notable examples. I’ve always maintained that some of the best Hollywood directors are, ideologically, the most influential in spreading or sustaining bad ideas. Preminger was one of them. For me, the most memorable film of Preminger’s (in a positive sense) is Laura (1944). Preminger’s output was so eclectic that it is difficult to say whether or not he was a lefty.

For those whose anxiety quotient hasn’t been filled by fears of snail dart extinction and global warming, there is now another impending disaster that hits us in our kitchens where we are most vulnerable. According to conservationist Jonathan Slaght, “the pine nut industry may be contributing to the crash of an ecosystem.” (Pesto? Hold the Pine Nuts,NYT 10/19) Apparently, most of our imported pignoli come from the Korean pine tree found in a rain forest in Russia’s far east where several species such as chipmunks, black bears and red deer depend on these tiny nuts for sustenance during winter. Memo to self: aren’t bears traditionally animals who learned to outsmart winter’s low food supply by clever hibernation?

Our greedy American demand for less expensive pignoli than the Italian Armani version has led to over-harvesting the forests and selling the nuts to the Chinese who sell them to us in typical “made in China” cheaper price points. This international trade is being blamed for the phenomenon of hungry bears leaving the forest to attack residents of Luchegorsk, a town you never knew existed and cannot pronounce that will now live in infamy as the innocent victim of white privilege and culinary cupidity. Mr. Slaght neglects to point a finger at the Italians whose telegenic chefs first taught us how to dress up spaghetti with the leftover rampant basil planted by over-zealous summer gardeners. I sincerely hope that Calvin Trillin gets wind of this crisis as he is the one who suggested changing America’s traditional Thanksgiving turkey dinner to spaghetti carbonara. Admittedly, there are no pignoli in that recipe but the nudge to love Italian food became a shove for all readers of Trillin’s classic tome, “Alice, Let’s Eat.”

America, we can grow more of our own pine nuts and/or substitute color-coordinated pistachios in our domestic version of pesto. Or, we can stop worrying about the food preferences of Putin’s bears and say in the immortal words of Catherine the Great, “Let them eat borscht.”