Oddball Christmas Decorations: Off-Message, Perhaps?

While I'm working out my review of Good Night and Good Luck, here's a link to an article on Christmas Vader.

Because, you know that nothin' says "Christmas" like a super-villain turned into a decoration.

Which explains Hallmark's tree decorations based on Khan Singh from Star Trek this season, and the Death Star last year.

Good Night and Good Luck

Short review: it was worth two hours and nine dollars(Canadian, of course).

Long form...is a little more difficult to explain, as I said earlier.

I tend to think that George Clooney and his team have timed the production and release of this movie exactly right for various reasons already self-explaining if you watch, read and listen to the news on a regular basis. It was a good look back at a bad time in our next door neighbours' national history, focusing on the confrontations between newsman Edward R. Murrow and US Senator Joseph McCarthy. Doubtless, Murrow's work for CBS's See It Now was not the only factor in McCarthy's fall from political grace, but it certainly played a part, and with cause.

As for the show itself...the performances, the technical presentation are simple and effective. The choice of using the original footage of McCarthy himself in action and reaction to the events in which he had a hand works. I cannot say how closely it hews to the full historical record.

On that record itself...

That there was a real threat facing the United States -- and, as we saw with the Gouzenko Affair here in Ottawa, Canada as well -- could not be denied. But, in the course of meeting that threat as best we could, jointly with the United States and independently via our own means, we were sabotaged to some extent by McCarthy's like who sought the fear we had as a weapon for their own ends. That they believed those ends to be noble, I will not argue. Not here, not now, at least.

Still, they posed a danger, however inadvertant it may well have been, as great as our external enemies ever did: the danger of the suppression of informed dissent and debate.

Like many across the world, I fear that specific threat is renewed in many quarters by many people. The War on Terror is as based on real danger as the Cold War was then. The scale and the particulars differ somewhat, and I am not ready to speak to that fact.

We therefore needed this movie at this time, and I thank the people responsible for it. It speaks well of America as a nation that we can still see and hear works such as this, among a great many others.

Walking to Live

I'm going to thank my doctor soonish.

Here's why.