etc.

"I am sorry."

Jason — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 11:58:29 -0700

Whether you enjoyed I Am Legend or not, check out the alternate ending; it sets the "main" "zombie" character (billed as Alpha Male) as the protagonist's foil and moral equal instead of a mere nemesis. Though the new ending shows more consistent character logic and sets up themes like "love vs. hubris" instead of just "loneliness is sad," this is relevant to this blog how? As follows:

- The Alpha Male is no longer killed for attacking an apparently innocent Dr. Neville. He now has a just motive, alluded to in earlier scenes but left hanging without this ending. As far as he reasonably sees things, Neville is a serial kidnapper whose victims must unite and take the law into their deformed hands. Which is fine, since zombie police are incompetent, conducting no-knocks on wrong houses and so forth. Or maybe that's normal police.

- For what crime is the Alpha Male character murdered in the original version? Breaking and entering Neville's home after Neville entered his and left with gun blazing? Setting mannequin traps modeled after Neville's own? Killing his tormentor's dog? Are any of these worse than kidnapping and injecting volatile substances?

- In the original, most members of this character's race are monsters, so therefore he is judged as a monster as well, and his slaughter is actually presented as a moment of Christlikeness on Neville's part, embellished by quite a few previous associations between Neville and Jesus. The alternate ending does away with this collectivist logic; this character has his own intentions that have nothing to do with the random violence attributed to others who resemble him. He is an individual. Maybe they're otherwise all killers and demons, and this person is just one of a kind, but that's the entire point: he is one of a kind. That's libertarianism.

- Even more than being one of a kind, he's also the best of his kind. When his comrades rush to attack Neville as the lab door is opened, the Alpha Male orders them to fall back. Thus he is an argument for the inevitability of progress; things are getting better, perhaps influenced by Neville's earnest efforts but just as importantly because things, when left alone by ignorant but concerned outsiders, usually do improve. He displays disdain and suspicion towards Neville as the female is being released, but he also shows clear sympathy during Neville's head-hanging expression of guilt. Trust in the ability of evolutionary "markets" to produce better humans is similar to trust in financial markets, right?

- This ending fills with irony Neville's pronouncement that "social devolution appears complete" among the infected. When the Alpha Male exposes himself to lethal sunlight just to snarl at Neville, he is not being a raving beast but is protesting the taking and gun-butting of his ladyfriend. Imagine how useless propaganda would be if we could all see the "enemy" as human instead of devolved monster.

- It becomes a film about desperately seeking to understand instead of destroy. It is the supposed inhuman who offers the decisive act of communication (the butterfly smear) and is attributed with supernatural wisdom by an enlightened Neville ("...I'm listening," he says, alluding to an earlier dialog about listening to God). Maybe Hillary Clinton and other neocons should listen, too, instead of mocking the idea of negotiating with "evil" foreign leaders.

- Instead of forever staying the course in "his Ground Zero," assuming his coercive practices can eventually save a world that is in no hurry to be saved, government agent Neville leaves this new breed of human to fend for itself and evolve and hopefully begin to civilize, as it does in the few short days the film's main thread covers.

- Neville's comeuppance and revelation speaks to the government tradition of forced medical care (government-sanctioned lobotomies, CIA experiments, shock therapy episodes, Tuskegee syphilis, druggings, ritalin prescriptions, rehab stints, etc.), not to mention the state's more explosive brands of larger scale intervention.

Neville, no longer a self-righteous suicide bomber AND well-intentioned government agent, is humbled to accept a fellow individual's choice to be sick, to bark like a lion, to breathe rapidly in shadowy naked dude huddles, and to not watch his female companion used for involuntary medical experiments. It's also important that the final scene is no longer a speech about a legendary military hero accompanied by institutional symbols (church steeple surrounded by camouflaged United States soldiers, gigantic border walls, and retina scanners); it's now a trio of individuals, otherwise strangers, reaching out across free airwaves and open roads.

Try to think of a line from Orwell that isn't a cliche by now

Jason — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 05:03:56 -0700

Maybe "Her hair conquered the pigeon dung?" I bet somebody somewhere sells that on a shirt.

Booklamp.org is a burgeoning book recommendation site, like the last.fm/pandora of books. I would say it works great, but it looks like they haven't hung anything on the walls yet so here's hoping.

Their number one recommendation for a 1984 fan: the USA Patriot Act, a 98% match.

Booklamp: book recommendations PLUS cute jokes!

We need no border

Jason — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 13:59:57 -0800

Oh, it's about to get extremely random.

- Raimondo is right about Ron Paul. Many of us were wrong to varying degrees. 'Tis better to light a candle that favors state's rights over individual rights than it is to curse the darkness. 2nd in Nevada, 2nd in Louisiana, Fred's gone, Huck's broke, Rudy's a joke. Two frontrunners, one underdog. Paul is the Republican John Edwards. Wait, what?

- Based on spec fic written by the CIA, should you avoid traveling to Europe in, oh, 2010? Yes, yes you should.

- "Freedom is good. We need no border," says a young Palestinian crossing broken borders into Egypt to buy the groceries denied his family by the Israeli state. Are we anti-Semitic if we think this is the very best kind of border control?

- List of nations recently liberated by the US.

- Who else hates us for our freedom? Pigs.

- We guarantee the War on Terror will end within our lifetimes.

- Does this remind anybody else of those commercials about dreams of Abe Lincoln suspending a chess-playing beaver's right to habeas corpus?

- 11 years ago, the US ordered Bolivia to burn hundreds of acres of coke farms, since they were hurting the environment. Burning hundreds of acres of farm does not hurt the environment, but did this succeed in ending ancient Bolivian coca farming customs? Of course it did.

The Non Paul revolution

Jason — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 12:47:52 -0800

First: diversions. Twins accidentally married each other. Whimsical! And needlessly tragic. Count how many times CNN assumes this looks like a job for ... legislators? While you have your fingers and toes up, tally the AJC's implications that poor merchants in poor communities would never get robbed if they just filled out some forms. On to our main event.

Um. Yeah. Ron Paul. Luckily, it's irrelevant whether he's a racist or not, because even though he almost surely is not one, he has been an enabler of way too many of them. The clincher is Paul's continued association with the likely guilty party; and, yes, we believe in innocent until proven guilty more than anybody, but when the accused has no interest in proving innocence, somebody has to decide. His campaign is beached, obviously, but the bigger question is what this means to the future of libertarianism.

Which sounds better: 1. Oh, you're a libertarian? Like that guy Ron Paul who thinks MLK raped children? 2. Oh, you're a libertarian? Like that guy Ron Paul who won the Alaska primary? So it is still in our interest for Paul to salvage face.

Some cohorts claim it would be better for libertarians to compromise with conservatives (conservatives??) instead of all this "believing in shit" nonsense. Well, as we know, Ron Paul WAS the compromise. They come along so rarely, and contrast so sharply with their fellow members of the elite leech class, that men like Goldwater and Paul can seem like momentary messiahs; as if to provide an appropriately nerdy metaphor for the first ever revolt both waged and crushed via the Web, I can't stop remembering the scene in Star Wars III where Obi-Wan looks at the scalding, mutilated, seething stump of something that used to be Anakin Skywalker and screams, "You were my brother! You were the chosen one!"

And he did seem to be. He was far from ideal, and not because of his inability to speak without using run-ons, which is kind of awesome. He wasn't a libertarian, but he was close enough for us to forget that; plus, he's got more balls than the nightly Pick Six. Now we know: instead of waiting for the next One, just be the one. This is not the end. For all the damage Paul's negligence has done, he's also opened minds to anti-war and anti-tax principles, which will blossom in at least a few into full embraces of liberty. So long as he battles a little longer, and maybe spits once more in an esoteric and comma-heavy fashion in one last frontrunner's face (Romney, for one, hasn't felt a Ronslaught! yet), the Paul candidacy can be counted a net gain for the greater movement.

I'd also like to nominate this as the official elegy of the rEVOLution. Any others?

Overheard last night on the subway: "My resolution? I'm 'So Great In '08!' Ain't changing a damn thing!"

Jason — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 09:27:03 -0800

- Moderate, middle of the road state-despiser Dave Barry wrings out the old year and is reasonably gentle on Mike Vick. Meanwhile, Radley Balko looks at what we can look forward to in 2008 .

- The earnest contrarians at Slate, always prepared to act in character, have "brewed up" a fresh pot of revelatory economic theory: competition is ... good?

- Can you dig or fathom this: Justin Raimondo and Michael Medved disagree on What Must Be Done about ~~Iran~~ Pakistan. Speaking of Mike's numeralized war mongering, here's his Baghdad Bob-esque 2002 Iraq piece.

- The Film Of The Year, according to this half: This is England, about an 11 year old boy, grieving and bored son of a dead Falklands soldier, taken in by a group of nice skinheads that soon turns into a group of mean skinheads. It's American History X for grown ups. The fourth-wall-cracking final scene is the clincher; it's the most directly anti-nationalism film to ever feature an oi cover of Louie Louie.

- Re: Ben's 12/31, the $70 million those feds are weeping about would be enough to pay the Administration on Aging to keep its doors open for an entire six months. Old people think $5 is a good birthday present, so they should be fine.

- For more federal budget revulsion, take a hard walk around this sharply designed herald of our disrepair.