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Roger Stone is an infamously execrable force in American politics. Perhaps his only saving grace is that he's not a hypocrite about it.

Stone is a proud "dirty trickster." The GOP kept him on a leash lest his amorality be too closely associated with the Republican brand. Part of his code is that the best defense against legitimate criticism is to shoot the messenger: "Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack."

As a proud cynic, if not an outright sybaritic nihilist, Stone would probably find the very notion of legitimate criticism foolish. "Nothing is on the level," he says. What's right is whatever you can get away with. "It's better to be infamous than never famous at all." (These bits of wisdom are laid out in "Stone's Rules," which reads like Mao's Little Red Book of Trumpism.)

I suspect that one reason Stone has a cult following on the right and among many in the media a fan club that long predates his status as a Trump loyalist is his willingness to own his political amorality in unapologetic sound bite form, thus immunizing himself from conventional charges of hypocrisy. When you turn deceit and dishonor into guiding principles, the only way you can be a hypocrite is if you fail to go low enough.

But Stone's hypocrisy exemption isn't transferable. His defenders, and defenders of President Trump's Friday-night commutation of Stone's prison sentence for seven felony counts of perjury, obstruction of Congress and witness tampering, won't escape judgment for their two-faced behavior.

The three main commutation defenses, all offered with Stonian shamelessness, are: (1) The president has the power to do it; (2) it was warranted because Stone's conviction was part of the "Russia hoax"; and (3) other presidents used their pardon and commutation power corruptly, too.

The first defense is true as far as it goes, though its a straw man given that few dispute it.

Second, whatever you think of the Russia investigation, Stone is guilty of the crimes he was tried for. Indeed, if Stone believed Trump to be wholly innocent and that the Russia collusion claim was a hoax, why not fully cooperate with investigators to clear the air?

The third and most popular defense is the one that reeks of hypocrisy.

A common talking point is that Bill Clinton abused his pardon power, too. Clinton pardoned his own brother! He pardoned billionaire fugitive and Clinton fundraiser Marc Rich!

Roger Clinton's pardon was indeed unseemly. And liberals denounced it. Jimmy Carter was outraged by the Rich pardon. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer couldn't "think of a single justification for [it]." Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank called it a "real betrayal" of Clinton's supporters. "It was contemptuous."

Liberals called the inexcusable inexcusable. Now, the majority of GOP senators seem not just willing but thrilled to excuse the inexcusable admitting nothing, denying everything and launching counterattacks. Indeed, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham said he wants to grill special counsel Robert Mueller because Mueller penned an op-ed defending the Stone prosecution.

Congratulations, Roger Stone: You won. It's your party now.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast.

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Jonah Goldberg: The Republican Party now belongs to Roger Stone - The Ledger

If only mobs were allowed to destroy federal property without consequence. Then there wouldnt have to be any dispute over federal agents defending a federal courthouse in Portland, Ore.; it could simply be overrun and burned to the ground with no unwelcome resistance from the government.

As it is, Portlands mayor, Ted Wheeler, who presides over a city that has become a watchword over the years for left-wing thuggery unchecked by municipal authorities, has roused himself to a state of high dudgeon over federal officers trying to counter ongoing assaults on a federal building.

He calls the feds a direct threat to our democracy and argues that they are engaging in unconstitutional arrests and inflaming protests that he had hoped would end within a matter of days.

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden had this cool-headed take on the president and his acting secretary of Homeland Security: Now Trump and Chad Wolf are weaponizing the DHS as their own occupying army to provoke violence on the streets of my hometown, because they think it plays well with right-wing media.

If Portland was on the verge of calm prior to the arrival of the feds in force, it would have been the first time since the killing of George Floyd.

Protests have taken place every day since May 28. A few headlines form a timeline, from the local TV station Koin.com: For May 29: Massive Vigil in North Portland Leads to Declared Riot Downtown. For May 30: Curfew Imposed and Ignored. For June 30: Police Building Protest: Another Riot Was Declared by Police.

Although the federal courthouse has done nothing to provoke protesters and has been standing at the same spot since 1997, it has been a constant target. Protesters have smashed its glass doors, covered its exterior with graffiti and repeatedly attempted to light it on fire. This has been happening since at least early July.

True to form, protesters over the weekend took down fencing and lit a fire at the buildings entryway. As a statement by the Portland police put it, dozens of people with shields, helmets, gas masks, umbrellas, bats and hockey sticks approached the doors of the courthouse but surely it was just a misunderstanding that led the federal officers to believe they had to repulse them with tear gas.

This isnt hard: It is the people attacking federal property who bear moral responsibility for whats happening in Portland. In all the cities around the country where nihilistic mobs arent trying to burn down symbols of our justice system, theres no enhanced presence of federal officers.

The feds havent been wearing badges with their names and have been using unmarked cars for fear of retaliation against the officers involved and mob actions against vehicles.

Both are unquestionably legal tactics. According to DHS, the officers are wearing the insignia of their agencies and unique identifiers; they are arresting only people suspected of involvement of attacks against federal property; and they are identifying themselves to arrestees, although not to crowds.

Perhaps these officers should be more clearly identified, but there is no case whatsoever for calling them, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has, stormtroopers who are kidnapping protesters.

The arrest of a man named Mark Pettibone has gotten a lot of press attention. He says he did nothing wrong and was arrested by federal agents, who took him to the federal courthouse and read him his Miranda rights, before releasing him.

He wasnt detained indefinitely, or disappeared, or harmed in any way, but apparently arrested in error and then allowed to go on his way.

It would be one thing if municipal authorities in Portland could legitimately claim that they have things under control. They dont. The mobs have been clashing with the local cops for months.

This longstanding riot is a stark commentary on the misgovernance of Wheeler, who is far better at insulting federal law enforcement than he is at doing at his job.

Rich Lowry is author of The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United and Free. Twitter: @RichLowry

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Nancy Pelosi and Democrats have it exactly wrong on feds vs. protesters in Portland - New York Post

WASHINGTON, July 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --Family Research Council's Cathy Ruse received the Ruth Institute's "Activist of the Year" awardfor exposing radical, anti-science sex ed and transgender mandates in public school systems, especially in Fairfax County, Virginia. The Ruth Institute seeks to inspire survivors of the sexual revolution. Cathy Ruse continues to trailblaze on this topic; she most recently authored FRC's publication, "Sex Education in Public Schools: Sexualization of Children and LGBT Indoctrination."

Cathy Ruse, FRC's Senior Fellow and Director of Human Dignity released the following statement:

"Wealthy international pressure groups are using sex ed in public schools to manipulate children. And leftist school boards like Fairfax County are willing accomplices. By their own admission, these groups view public schools in Northern Virginia as 'laboratories' for their experimental policies, like teaching children they can be born in the wrong body. Public schools should never experiment on children. Children are not lab rats. This scenario is playing out all across the country.

"Yes, we must protect our own children. But opting out is not enough. Because right down the street, at your local public school, there is a spiritual battle raging over the next generation and so often our side isn't even on the battlefield. It's time to get into the arena! Justice demands it, but wisdom too. Because the vast majority of our governors, teachers, sheriffs, doctors, and lawyers will come from our nation's public schools. We cannot let the sexual nihilists shape them in their own image," concluded Ruse.

To download a copy of Cathy Ruse's publication, "Sex Education in Public Schools: Sexualization of Children and LGBT Indoctrination," visit: https://www.frc.org/sexeducation.

To request an interview with Cathy Ruse, contact [emailprotected].

SOURCE Family Research Council

https://www.frc.org

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FRC's Cathy Ruse Receives 'Activist of the Year' Award - PRNewswire

Call it a dagger of the mind or the stuff of wicked dreams, but as the COVID-19 death toll climbs and election day nears in my homeland, Ive begun to think of the Donald of Manhattan as the Thane of Cawdor, otherwise known as Macbeth.

It all started back in January. During his failed defence of democratic norms, House impeachment manager Adam Schiff made reference on the Senate floor to a CBS News report in which a Trump confidant said that key senators were warned, Vote against the president and your head will be on a pike. His remark drew gasps of not true from Republican senators whove heard far worse on a nearly daily basis from the Twitter account of their partys standard bearer.

The phrase head on a pike brought me back to the final scene of Roman Polanskis 1971 film Macbeth. After the hero, Macduff, unceremoniously hacks off the usurpers cursed head and proclaims the time is free, those whove been freed shove a pike into Macbeths noggin. For a few fleeting moments, we see the gruesome scene from the perspective of the fallen kings dying eyes: looking up, instead of down, at his subjects and witnessing their elation at his demise. In my thought experiment, Macbeth is not the senators but Trump. And Macduff is neither Schiff nor any other member of the House or Senate. He is Joe Biden, the former vice president and longtime Delaware senator whose only living son the US president has done his best to destroy.

Former Vice President Joe Biden. Photo: Reuters/Brendan McDermid/File

The analogy is not perfect. Trump has little of the courage, eloquence or self-knowledge of the mighty Macbeth. And its unlikely that Melania has anything like the malign influence Lady Macbeth had over her husband. Nevertheless, by targeting Bidens only surviving son, Hunter, with accusations of corruption for his former seat on the board of Ukrainian gas giant Burisma Holdings, and tying nearly$400 million in military assistance to Ukraine to a desired investigation into Burisma and the Bidens, Trump, like Macbeth, may have set in motion his own political demise, not by a cowering Senate but a disillusioned electorate.

Like Trump, Macbeth, decides to target his rivals families. Hes won the crown by murdering the king not uncommon in Shakespeare. But later, in one of the most heartless decisions in all of Shakespeares tragedies, he sends his henchmen to murder Macduffs entire family, Wife, children, servants, all. This, you may recall, is in addition to the murder of Macbeths friend and comrade in arms, Banquo (and attempted murder of his son), among whose descendants a king is prophesied.

Macbeth and Banquo encounter the Witches for the first time. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Thodore Chassriau, Muse dOrsay, Public Domain

One tends to think that Shakespeare hoists too much tragedy on the shoulders of his heroes. But real life is often far more tragic. In 1972, after being elected senator of his home state of Delaware for the first time, Biden lost his wife and daughter, Naomi Christina, in a car accident. Neilia was 30 years old, and Naomi, lovingly called Amy, had just turned one. Bidens two sons, Hunter and Beau, 2 and 3 at the time, were critically injured in the accident. Biden wouldnt leave their bedside and was sworn in as senator from their Wilmington hospital room.

The boys recovered and eventually went home with their father, who took the train home each night from Washington to Wilmington to be with them, and continued doing so for decades. Biden remarried in 1977, and his wife Jill and he welcomed their daughter, Ashley, into the world in 1981. As he explained in a 2015 commencement speech at Yale, it was in part the tragedies he overcame but more importantly the enduring bond with his family that allowed him to maintain a healthy perspective on what it means to serve the American people.

Also Read: Hollow Man in the Confederacy of Dunces: The Phenomenon of Donald J. Trump

Ambition is really important, he said. You need it. And I certainly have never lacked in having ambition. But ambition without perspective can be a killer. I know a lot of you already understand this. Some of you really had to struggle to get here. And some of you have had to struggle to stay here. And some of your families made enormous sacrifices for this great privilege. And many of you faced your own crises, some unimaginable. But the truth is all of you will go through something like this. Youll wrestle with these kinds of choices every day. But Im here to tell you, you can find the balance between ambition and happiness, what will make you really feel fulfilled. And along the way, it helps a great deal if you can resist the temptation to rationalize.

The speech was given while his son Beau, a former attorney general of Delaware and recipient of the Bronze Star for his service in Iraq, battled brain cancer at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. At the age of three, Beau survived the car accident that claimed the lives of his mother and sister and fractured his brother Hunters skull. Two weeks after his father delivered this speech, Beau succumbed to brain cancer on May 30, 2015. He was 46 years old.

Our common pain is now the coronavirus pandemic, not unlike the plague in Shakespeares time, having claimed more than 140,000 lives in the US alone (on July 20) and threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions more.

It is again Macbeth that most fully captures the anxiety and misery our nation is currently experiencing, where political tribalism and social insecurity seem to deepen with each passing day; with each new protest and each new death by a disease that has itself become grotesquely politicised. The carnage wrought by Macbeth and Lady Macbeths unmoored ambition takes place in an atmosphere of plague and paranoia, where physical ailments are amplified by psychological and emotional distress. As Ross says to Macduff when the latter returns to Scotland after Macbeths ruthless ascent to power:

Alas, poor country,Almost afraid to know itself. It cannotBe called our mother, but our grave, where nothing,But who knows nothing is once seen to smile;Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the airAre made, not marked; where violent sorrow seemsA modern ecstasy.

The bard would never be so prosaic, but its no surprise that the remedy for controlling a deadly pandemic and restoring faith in government is one and the same: Trust. Laurie Garrett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of The Coming Plague told us as much at the onset of the now global pandemic in a February 15 column for Foreign Policy: An epidemic cannot be fought and won unless the bonds of trust between governments and people can survive the grief, confusions, emotions and medical challenges of the battle.

US President Donald Trump. Photo: Reuters/Joshua Roberts/File

Clearly, that trust has broken down between much of the US and Donald Trump, who much like Macbeth, imprisoned yet empowered by his all too human vanity, ambition and moral nihilismmay not fully believe but behaves as if:

Lifes but a walking shadow, a poor playerThat struts and frets his hour upon the stageAnd then is heard no more: it is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.

Literary historian Stephen Greenblatt, in his 2018 book Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, never mentions Trump by name, but his passages on Macbethinfer parallels. The internal and external censors that keep most ordinary mortals, let alone rulers of nations, from sending irrational messages in the middle of the night or acting on every crazed impulse are absent, he writes. All tyrants are enemies of the future, he continues, not only in the figurative sense, by undermining the rule of law and the ties that bind; but in Macbeths case, in the literal sense, by destroying the offspring of those who might bring stability and prosperity to the kingdom.

The truest line of that Yale commencement speech Biden gave five years ago about why he commuted from Washington back to Wilmington every night to see his young boys was this: [T]he real reason I went home every night was that I needed my children more than they needed me. Its hard to imagine a better reason for Macduff to return to his plague-ridden Scotland and challenge Macbeth, or to avenge the tyrants assault upon his pretty ones.

Michael Judge, a former deputy features editor at The Wall Street Journal, is a US-based poet and freelance journalist.

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Sound and Fury: Seeing the Trump-Biden Contest Through the Eyes of Macbeth - The Wire

At least six Black children were killed during the Fourth of You Lie weekend. They werent doing anything wrong, just attending a community picnic, or going to visit a grandmother, or riding in a car.

One of the children, Secoriea Turner, 8, lived in Atlanta. The day after the killing, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, emotionally addressed the killers.

You shot and killed a baby, she said. This random Wild, Wild West, shoot em up because you can, has got to stop. It has to stop. She went on to say, Enough is enough. You cant blame this on a police officer. You cant say this is about criminal justice reform. This is about some people carrying weapons who shot up a car with an 8-year-old baby in the car. For what?

In Washington, 11-year-old Davon McNeal, ironically attending an anti-violence cookout organized by his mother, was shot in the head. An 18-year old has been arrested, and there are two other suspects.

In Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco and New York, our children are being murdered. We can get thousands to the streets for a Black Lives Matter protest. How many can we get out for Natalia Wallace, 7, killed in Chicago, or Jace Young, 6, of San Francisco who was killed attending a birthday party?

In 2019, 692 children under the age of 12 were killed or injured. In 2014, 603 were killed or wounded. The Gun Violence Archive, which has been counting gun deaths since 2013, states there were 733 child deaths or injuries in 2017, the peak year since the organization began collecting the data.

The murdered children are never the intended victims. Instead, somebody with more firepower than sense shoots into a crowd, not caring who they hit. And theyve been killing our children.

I could write dissertations about why angry and unemployed young men are running around with guns, settling scores and securing reputations with no regard for others. But Im sick of the sociological explanations and the excuses. Im with Mayor Bottoms. Enough is enough. How do we stop it? How do we dismantle the gun culture that dominates so many of our inner cities? Will it take new laws? Harsher penalties for illegal gun use?

Conservatives are right to say we may lose fewer Black lives to police violence than to street gun violence. Even as we resist police brutality, structural racism and other inequities, we must fight the enemy within, the callous young men who engage in gunplay on public streets when anybody could be walking by. How to get through to them?

Dr. Cornel West, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, once described these young men as nihilistic, believing that life has no intrinsic value, simply not caring about social norms and moral values. Anyone who would shoot a deadly weapon into a crowd has no regard for human life. And perhaps one could argue that these young men do not value human life because human life has not valued them.

But Im sick of making excuses for sociopaths, even as I understand the forces that created them. These shootings have to stop!

I love looking at Black children, looking at their small, partly unformed faces and wondering what kind of adult they will evolve into. Too many gun-toting criminals ensure that some of our children wont have the opportunity to grow up.

Class differences among African-Americans mean that some fall asleep to the sounds of gunfire while others know shooting from television.

When we say it takes a village to raise a child, what happens to the villagers that would rob a child of life? We need to call these villains out. We need to ask their associates to call them out.

When you say Black Lives Matter when you march and chant, think of 11-year Davon McNeal, 6-year-old Jace Young, 8-year-old Secoriea Turner or 7-year-old Natalia Wallace. Their Black lives matter, too. What must we do to protect our children?

The writer is an author, economist and educator.

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The enemy within, by Julianne Malveaux - Richmond Free Press

I know a lot of you are missing summer-blockbuster season, and I'm certainly not thrilled to be missing it, either, given that this year's lineup of delayed potential hits includes a new Christoper Nolan, a new Pixar, and a new Wes Anderson (even if Wes Anderson and blockbuster hardly belong in the same sentence). But here's a short list of previously scheduled titles that you and I thus far haven't seen due to closed cineplexes: Top Gun: Maverick. Wonder Woman 1984. Ghostbusters: Afterlife. The James Bond continuation No Time to Die. A Quiet Place Part II. Minions: The Rise of Gru. Candyman. And, lest we forget, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run. So, you know . Silver linings.

To be fair, some of those sequels might be good. Hell, some might be great. And some might be so great that our experiences dwarf even the fond feelings we have for their cinematic inspirations. So as we continue to cross fingers that something anything will soon be playing at a theater near us, let's take a look at five direct sequels from 1980 to 1993 that, for me, are all significant improvements on the blockbusters that preceded them. And even though I strongly considered including it, you're welcome, in advance, for my decision to not cite Ghostbusters II. There's only so much hate mail a reviewer can take.

Addams Family Values: Considering the movie had Raul Julia playing Gomez, Anjelica Huston portraying Morticia, Christoper Lloyd enacting Uncle Fester, the deadpan cutie Christina Ricci channeling Wednesday, and Carel Struycken the giant from Twin Peaks! glaring and groaning as Lurch, the casting for 1991's The Addams Family was the main reason everyone I knew wanted to see it. In the end, the casting was really the only reason to see it, and I consequently, politely avoided director Barry Sonnenfeld's 1993 sequel when it debuted around Thanksgiving. Plenty of others did, too. Yet in a kooky-spooky-ooky slapstick crammed with jokes, the biggest one turned out to be on those of us who prematurely dismissed the film and waited for home video to see it, because Sonnenfeld's follow-up is just about flawless for what it aims to be nothing more, or less, than 90 minutes of madly inspired, laugh-out-loud silliness. On paper, the subplots may sound only mildly promising: Gomez and Morticia have a new, apparently indestructible baby (Pubert!); Fester falls in love with a money-grubbing murderess; Wednesday and Pugley go to summer camp. In practice, though, the script by that fiendish wit Paul Rudnick is flooded with deliciously nasty jokes most of the best ones delivered by Joan Cusack as a venomous Black Widow and everyone involved seems encouraged to aim toward the highest peaks of comic lunacy imaginable. They all get there, and I've watched Sonnenfeld's outing many times over just for the zany pleasures of Peter MacNicol and Christine Baranski as hyper-chipper camp counselors and Wednesday escaping the Harmony Hut and offering the series' most hilarious/terrifying sight ever: Ricci's fixed-straight-line mouth slowly, painfully morphing into a hideous smile. She's scaring me! screams a fellow camper. Me, too, kid. I'd be traumatized if it weren't so freaking funny.

The Empire Strikes Back: Nowadays, the world-building nature of franchise culture dictates that sequels don't end so much as end, leaving us with cliffhangers and credit cookies designed to get us psyched (and shell out more dough) for future adventures a year or more down the line. So unless you saw Star Wars' first sequel in the summer of 1980, there's probably no way to adequately describe how unsettling it was to exit The Empire Strikes Back with so many unanswered questions: Would Han Solo remain forever frozen in carbonite? Was the turncoat Lando Calrissian actually to be trusted? Was Darth Vader really Luke Skywalker's fa- ? Um . Spoiler Alert? Leaving director Irvin Kershner's sci-fi mind-blower as an 11-year-old, I remember being dazed and overwhelmed, like I'd seen something too majestic, too adult, to fully grasp. I also remember wanting to get home and play with my Star Wars action figures (in their Vader-mask carrying case) pronto, because this startling upgrade on George Lucas' 1977 blockbuster did a miraculous job of expanding the Jedi universe in your mind: You not only wanted to re-enact the film in moveable plastic, but create your own conceivable follow-ups to the one you just saw. Today, of course, Empire is largely considered the finest of the nine films in the three Star Wars trilogies, and certainly a more polished work than its immediate forebear better written, better acted, better at conveying mood and atmosphere and crisis. Given the expanded visual palette and additions of Yoda, Lando, the gutted Tauntaun, Laugh it up, fuzzball, et cetera, it's also more fun than Star Wars, even if we pre-teens did cry Ee-e-e-ew-w-w! when Han and Leia kissed. Now that we're adults, we only say that when Leia kisses Luke. I'd explain why, but ya know . Spoilers.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch: Plenty of unimaginative sequels get mileage merely from re-staging their first films' setups in new locales, and at first glance, you could say that's what director Joe Dante is doing in the follow-up to his 1984 smash trading Gremlins' sleepy small town for the interiors of an imposing Manhattan skyscraper. But what Dante has actually done is far more subversive: He's traded the real world of the original for the cartoon universe of a Looney Tunes short. I mean this almost literally. Before the sequel's narrative gets underway, that familiar Looney Tunes logo with its accompanying peppy score pops on-screen, and audiences are right (if a little confused) to expect a Chuck Jones animated short to precede the movie. In quickly becomes clear, however, that these early slapstick antics involving Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are connected to the movie, and all throughout, the tone is so deliriously manic and over-the-top that you wouldn't be surprised for human co-stars Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates to share scenes with Porky Pig. The first Gremlins is a terrific time, but 1990's Gremlins 2: A New Batch is the superior one because it's so breathtakingly nuts: the brainy beastie voiced by Tony Randall; the New York, New York musical sequence; the unholy half-gremlin/half-spider creature; the unexpected film break followed by shadow puppetry and the threat of a Hulk Hogan smack-down. Absolutely nothing about Dante's follow-up is meant to be believed, and its exuberant I can't believe it! fearlessness and gonzo unpredictability make it one of the most joyously satisfying of all 20th-century-blockbuster sequels. And man how I wish we had a new one now, given that John Glover's villain in the film is an eccentric billionaire named Daniel Clamp. Who else is up for seeing Dante's gremlins thrive in the White House?

Superman II: As previously mentioned, my 1980 screening's largely young crowd audibly reacted, not entirely favorably, to Han's and Leia's Empire Strikes Back kiss. Yet just one summer later, in the sequel to 1978's Superman the Movie, our hero and Lois Lane were shown lying in bed together presumably naked, presumably after having sex and our packed auditorium primarily composed of kids didn't make a peep. I'm guessing we were all in shock. And Superman II was a shock, partly because director Richard Lester had the nerve to stage the formerly unthinkable. (What could that union have possibly been like?!? I might've asked, had 12-year-old me known what I was talking about.) Mostly, though, it was shocking to see so much that was treated with portentous seriousness in the original the trio of Phantom Zone captives, the cataclysmic action finale handled with a breezy insouciance that was sometimes inseparable from parody. In their brief 1978 appearances, the malevolent Ursa, Non, and General Zod seemed pretty darned scary. In Superman II, though, they're enjoyably evil, and consequently mesh perfectly with a presentation that goes for laughs whenever possible; everything from Lois' planned unmasking scoop at Niagara Falls to the flying baddie knocked into the neon Coca-Cola billboard is designed to get you giggling. Christopher Reeve, meanwhile, appears intent on making you think about, and actually feel for, his dual identities as Clark Kent and Superman, and that this sequel works as well emotionally as it does as a comic-book kick is testament to Reeve's and the indispensable Margot Kidder's touchingly profound understanding of character. The visuals may be slapdash; they were in the original, too. But like Gene Hackman's expression when revealing Lex Luthor's endgame Australia! the majority of Lester's movie is one massive grin.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day: I'll readily go on record citing James Cameron's 1986 Aliens (which I wrote about in April) as my all-time-favorite sequel. But if I had to name the blockbuster follow-up that most successfully expanded, complicated, and improved upon its source material, I'd probably go with this other Cameron sequel 1991's Oscar-winning sci-fi-action behemoth that's like the mighty-oak version of his original Terminator. That isn't meant to suggest that 1984's unstoppable-killer saga was an acorn. When I re-watched the film a decade ago, I was impressed at how well that scrappy, nihilistic little thriller held up a quarter-century after unleashing Arnold Schwarzenegger's pitiless, catchphrase-happy cyborg upon an unsuspecting world. T2, though, is T1 super-sized. (I was tempted to write on steroids, but in deference to Arnold's bodybuilder past .) Its chase scenes are louder, longer, and more intricately choreographed; its time-travel possibilities more complexly designed; its relentlessly grim worldview more open to spontaneity and humor. (There's a lot of E.T. in Edward Furlong's attempts to humanize Schwarzenegger's inhuman protector.) Best of all, while Michael Biehn's absence was unfortunate (if understandable), Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor transformed from perplexed victim to bona-fide, Sigourney Weaver-style ass-kicker, allowing the performer to create an iconic heroine whose anguished gravitas continually kept the movie from merely being exceptionally realized popcorn entertainment. The success of Cameron's epic led to more sequels than I can remember, including one from last autumn that's only memorable for being so disheartening. None of them, however, hold a candle to this wildly effective audience-grabber with its supple liquid-metal effects and frighteningly dead-eyed Robert Patrick, and precious few sci-fi films have ever landed the perfect blend of emotionalism and corn that accompanies Schwarzenegger's final thumb's-up descent into molten lava. Hasta la vista, baby. See you, for increasingly diminished returns, in a dozen years.

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Second-Round Knockouts: Five Sequels That Improve on Their Blockbuster Originals - River Cities Reader

"Untitled (Private)," William S. Burroughs, 1986.Courtesy photo

"Secret Service Agent," William S. Burroughs.Courtesy photo

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The Beat Generation literary lions William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg are together again in a new show at the Gonzo Gallery in downtown Aspen.

The pop-up gallery which this week expanded into a large commercial space at the corner of Hyman Avenue and Hunter Street from its more modest adjacent space will open a new exhibition Friday presenting side-by-side the visual art of these eternally rebellious American authors.

Their lives were works of art, said gallery director Daniel Joseph Watkins. They were writers, of course, and their work spread into the visual realm as well.

The show includes 27 works by the pair, among them black-and-white photos by each, shotgun art and collages by Burroughs from the 1980s and 1990s and drawings by Ginsberg from the same period.

The pair, both of them lightly fictionalized by Jack Kerouac in On the Road and elsewhere, emerged as polar ends of the Beat movement: Ginsberg the poet who birthed the watershed Howl and later the Flower Power peace movement; Burroughs the brilliant nihilist and prose innovator behind Naked Lunch and Junky known for his cut-up method.

Their later-in-life artwork reflects those differing viewpoints. Titled Flower Power x Fire Power, the show aims to display how Ginsbergs peace-loving and gentle outlook existed harmoniously with Burroughs scabrous and grim life philosophy from the Beats brief 50s heyday through their deaths in 1997.

They were pushing each other and their differing viewpoints forced them to rethink some of their perspective on things, Watkins said.

Curator Yuri Zupancic noted that Burroughs and Ginsberg were in dialog about visual art in correspondence from soon after they met in the 1940s, and both were serious visual artists. But they rarely exhibited their work.

They felt pressure in their time not to present themselves as visual artists, said Zupancic. It was taboo, in a way, to present yourself as more than one type of artist.

Curators like Zupancic, through galleries like the Gonzo and museum shows like Beat Generation at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 2016, have in recent years shed light on the Beats, Burroughs and Ginsberg as interdisciplinary artists.

Anyone interested in the mythical lives of the Beat Generation authors will find some delight in seeing the photographs in the show, which capture the pair as well as Beat figures like Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky together in Tangier where Burroughs, a Kansan, spent much of his life and of Burroughs with fellow expat author Paul Bowles.

The artworks on view ranging in price from $750 to $32,000 include Burroughs paintings on file folders from the early 1990s and his works of shotgun art from Watkins collection (a March 2013 show at an earlier iteration of the Gonzo Gallery focused solely on Burroughs shotgun art and included rare pieces from the Burroughs archive in Kansas).

Burroughs shotgun art, a body of work the author began making in the 1980s, created imagery made by shooting paint onto and holes through nontraditional art surfaces like targets, books and posters. Among the most striking in this show are a colorful metal no trespassing sign shot up and sun-faded, and Secret Service Agent, a sepia-toned poster of a man in a suit pointing a gun at the viewer, with a Burroughs-drawn red target on it and gunshots through the paper.

Aspenites may be familiar with the shotgun art form through the works of Hunter S. Thompson, with whom Burroughs collaborated on artworks and who made his own beginning in the 1990s. Thompsons longtime creative partner Ralph Steadman also worked with Burroughs on shotgun art pieces. One is included in the Gonzo Gallery show.

The show also includes a handful of absurdist ink-on-paper drawings by Ginsberg from the 1980s (the double entendre-inspired Dragon Coming a highlight), a bullet casing signed by Burroughs, ephemera and posters.

With social distancing practices and mask wearing mandatory inside the Gonzo in keeping with public health restrictions, the gallery is hosting receptions Friday and Saturday night. Outside on Sunday evening it will stage a panel discussion with the Ginsberg Trusts Peter Hale, former Burroughs estate curator Yuri Zupancic, musician and activist DJ Spooky and Watkins.

atravers@aspentimes.com

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Gonzo Gallery in Aspen showcases the visual art of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg - Aspen Times

The arson attack on Nantes Cathedral is a terrible yet apposite metaphor for our troubled times. We do not know who tried to destroy this beautiful place of worship, but we should understand the significance of the action.

Attacks on churches in France, common in recent years, have been carried out by anarchists, nihilists, Islamists and others. But regardless of the cause or lack of one behind this attack, its symbolism is unmistakable.

Churches and cathedrals stand for religious faith, of course. They represent Europes Christian heritage, too. They are part of our cultural and national identities.

Some have stood for hundreds of years, physical monuments to the long sweep of history, and a reminder, through wars, plagues, recessions and depressions, of the continuity of the institutions and traditions of our societies.

The Church is just one institution, and Christianity just one traditional belief, that for generations have encouraged us to compromise with one another, and make sacrifices for one another, in the name of community. They have taught us to pursue not only our own material benefit but the common good.

Other institutions have played similar roles of course, such ascharities, trades unions and philanthropic foundations. And other beliefs systems, from other religions to political creeds such asconservatism and social democracy, have also sought to foster a sense of solidarity to build a cohesive society.

And yet Western countries are today hardly cohesive societies. In Britain, the wealth of the richest 10 per cent of families is five times higher than the wealth of the bottom half of all families combined. With children's life chances defined more by their parents' prosperity than talent, social mobility is in crisis. With the working class demonised and despised by many, social solidarity is in crisis too.

Then there is the pernicious effect of cultural liberalism and militant identity politics. While elites debate the number of black students at Oxbridge with guilt and urgency, few acknowledge that white students are less likely to go to university than any other ethnic group, and white working-class boys fare worse than anybody else at school.

While the powerful engage in exclusively elite equality debates, such asthe number of women on boards, they give little thought to the availability and affordability of childcare for low-income parents.

Those who try to raise the plight of the white working-class are often written off as racists and cranks. And those who argue in favour of unifying identities made possible by patriotism, or our attachment to more local communities are lampooned as reactionary and ridiculous.

Like letters through a stick of rock, running through each of these problems is liberalism, the ideology that made our modern Western world.

The pursuit of the common good has little place in liberalism, for liberalism is principally concerned with the maximisation of individual freedom. Liberals have always tended to underestimate how the freedom of the rich and powerful can undermine the freedom of the poor and powerless. But it is only now that this reality is becoming so blatant, prevalent and, in the eyes of many, inevitable and even legitimate.

So we have a mirage of meritocracy, in which many of those who reach the top do so not through their own achievement but the headstart handed to them by their parents.

Believing they succeeded on their own merits, however, they feel they owe little to those who "failed" to make it. This is just one reason we see a selfish corporate class, paying themselves sky-high wages and marking one anothers homework, tax avoidance by rich families and big business, and faltering support for progressive taxation and universal public services.

Also to blame is the misplaced universalism of liberalism. Partly because much of liberal thought starts with a misconceived "model" of human nature and political organisation, liberals underestimate the cultural and institutional context and history of communities and countries.

They assume we are all rational freedom-seekers, the same the world over. This leads liberals to all sorts of flawed judgments about foreign policy (think Iraq), democracy (think European Union) and immigration.

Viewing countries as little more than a platform, upon which anybody from anywhere in the world can live and work with only minimal obligations towards others, liberals support mass immigration.

In fact, they are often maniacally in favour of it, because for many of them, borders are a restraint on freedom, and culturally diverse countries are more likely to put irrational attachments to majority culture and identity behind them.

But study after academic study shows that the more diverse a society becomes, the less trust and reciprocity there is, and less willingness to pay taxes to fund universal public services and welfare systems.

Liberalism attacks the institutions and traditions that bring us together, in part because they are seen as hindrances in the pursuit of freedom. But this destructiveness is also down to the problematic relationship liberalism has with the idea of inevitable progress.

Because some liberal thinkers justify pluralism and tolerance on the basis that they create trial and error that leads to an increasingly perfect society, liberalism can become illiberal and intolerant: conservatives who worry that change can bring loss and not just gain, institutions and traditions that ask us to put others first, and beliefs that seek to achieve the common good are mocked, undermined and attacked.

The irony is, the more we see the full extent of the crisis of Western society, it becomes clearer that liberalism has always depended on those very institutions and traditions and ways of life it attacks.

Perhaps liberalism can survive without Christian virtues and stable national identities, but we cannot yet know that for sure.

And so we return to the tragedy of Nantes Cathedral. We saw on Saturday a place of worship going up in flames, but without a greater willingness to pursue the common good, it will be more than a cathedral that succumbs to fire. The very basis of Western civilisation will be in serious danger.

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Liberalism made the Western world, but now it is destroying it - Telegraph.co.uk