Thursday, August 7, 2025

The U.S. News Media is Basically Michael Scott

Considering the mainstream media, and especially the mainstream news media, it seems to me that it is basically Michael Scott from the U.S. version of The Office.

Like Scott it is a paid shill for a failing business. Like Scott it is very ill-informed about the world at large, and spends much less than one percent of its time engaged in critical thinking, while mostly believing what it wants to believe, regardless of the facts, and telling it to others as if it were the truth. Like Scott its principal talents seem to be distraction and misdirection, while it never really seems to do any real "work," or let anyone else get any real work done either. Like Scott it is a narcissist that is always trying to make itself seem more impressive than it really is in ways that just show how awkward it is, but thinks it has succeeded in achieving the elevated standing it regards as its right to go by its wildly exaggerated idea of its own standing in the eyes of others, reflected in its demands that everyone pay attention to it at all times and not anyone else. Like Scott it is also prone to feel underappreciated when its wildly unrealistic expectation of others' attention and respect are (unsurprisingly) disappointed, and very prone to self-pity, though after wallowing to its satisfaction invariably reverting to its inflated notion of its importance, no introspection required. Like Scott it presumes to be concerned and conscientious and a pillar of humane and tolerant values when it is usually the extreme opposite, not least in regard to matters like race--posturing as enlightened, while being exceedingly bigoted and exceedingly offensive in doing so, all as it indulges fascist nitwits to an extreme degree. Like Scott it is prone to react in wildly disproportionate fashion when it goes on the attack against someone it has deemed an enemy, while being as incompetent as it is irresponsible in that attack (ever ready to do the equivalent of Scott's planting "weed" on Toby). And like Scott, no sane person with sufficient lucidity to understand what it does wants to have anything more to do with it than they can possibly avoid, with that unavoidable minimum likely to be far more than they find bearable, and quite enough to force on them a situation in which they cannot help saying what they really think. (Stanley, you speak for all of us.)

Really the only time when the media isn't like Scott is in those moments when Scott surprises us with a display of significant, useful knowledge, insight or skill, or genuine human consideration for others. No, that we definitely do not see, the media's consistent loyalty to its masters (or at least, its functionaries' consistent loyalty to the protection of their phoney-baloney jobs) far too great for that to ever happen.

Remembering "Homer's Enemy"

I recall watching the Golden Age Simpsons episode "Homer's Enemy" and being struck by its treatment of the figure referenced in the title, one Frank Grimes. Abandoned at the age of four by his family, depriving Frank of a normal childhood in ways he was never allowed to forget (as the relevant wiki article has it, he had to work as a delivery boy "presenting gifts to children from wealthy and loving families"), at the age of eighteen he suffered the additional calamity of having a silo fall on him, putting him in a full body cast. The recovery and rehabilitation from the accident were long and hard, but through it he managed to earn a degree in physics, making his life the kind of story of "overcoming adversity" that moralizing idiots love to fling in the faces of the discontented--such that, sure enough, it made the local news as a human interest piece. Happening to see it, it impressed Mr. Burns enough that he was moved to offer Frank a Vice-Presidency at the plant--only for (in another cruel twist of fate all too characteristic of poor Frank's life) Burns to forget all about him in his fascination with the protagonist of the next story, a heroic dog, to whom he gave the Vice-Presidency instead (!), as he had Smithers fob Frank off with a job "somewhere out of the way" in Sector 7-G, where, of course, he encountered that other Sector 7-G worker, Homer Simpson.

The intelligent, conscientious and hard-working Frank thus ended up constantly face to face with a man who was the opposite in every respect, a profoundly underqualified, incompetent, irresponsible and lazy man who nonetheless had "everything" (apparently living the "American Dream" in the suburbs--and a Grammy-winning astronaut to boot!). That was more than Grimes can bear, drove him over the edge of madness--and before the credits rolled, to his death.

One of the series' darker episodes, it seemed an indictment of something, but of what exactly? Some seem to see it as an indictment of the universe's absurdity. But that fails to explain the sheer meanness the episode itself seemed to display toward Grimes. Through the entire story Homer's endless financial, legal, health and family problems, which do see him constantly suffer from the stupidity and irresponsibility that so offend Frank, are conveniently forgotten, so that nothing disabuses Grimes of his illusions about just how good Homer apparently has it, while no one ever shows Grimes the slightest sympathy or empathy for his situation, the writing stacking the deck in favor of Frank's being not just made to feel even worse than before about his unhappy lot, but that having a problem with it he is the crazy one until eventually he does become crazy.

Still, I didn't give all this much thought until I read a piece about the writer who had the story credit on this one, John Swartzwelder. TV writing can be very collaborative, and the convoluted way in which the industry hands out credit means that a writer who has writing credit on an episode of a show may not have actually had much, or even any, input into that particular episode of that show. (I recall the quip in Toby Young's The Sound of No Hands Clapping by one Hollywood figure that he'd won Emmys for TV episodes he hadn't even seen, let alone written.) Still, Swartzwelder was notorious for fussing to get more of his material into an episode than his colleagues, while he has also been much remarked for his right-wing, libertarian, politics, which suddenly seemed significant. It is, after all, the right which insists on those who have been unfortunate gracefully stomaching not just misfortune generally but unfairness specifically, with this insistence, indeed, what defines their ideology (conservatism is in the end a defense of the status quo and those privileged under it against those who are not), with this reflected in how a very large part of what is conventionally presented as wisdom, morality, religion and personal "maturity" is stomaching unfairness without inconveniencing the comfortable, the powerful, those in Authority--not getting mad, not getting even, not protesting or trying to get redress in any way, just enduring it with a "good attitude." Indeed, the indoctrination in this accommodation to unfairness, from the first sneer of a grown-up that "Life isn't fair" in a child's face, is so intensive that at the first sign of objection to any unfairness people of conventional mind fall all over themselves trying to shut down the "whiner," and indeed, many gleefully embrace the role of "apologist and admirer of injustice, misery and brutality." It is also the right that gets outraged when people don't display the expected "convenient social virtue" to accept unfairness with grace, and denounces them as immoral, envious, self-pitying, even insane, and certainly dangerous--potential Pol Pots the lot of them (Homer's deciding that his flaws have nothing to do with the situation, that it's just Frank being "a crazy nut," obtuse and oafish as it sounds, perhaps not to be dismissed too quickly here as the Message).

Especially given the stress on the contrast between competent and conscientious but ill-rewarded Frank and a Homer who is the opposite on every count it seemed to me that the ideas of that particularly important figure in the libertarian tradition, Friedrich von Hayek, were specifically relevant. Where so many apologia for "things as they are" make much of meritocracy as a legitimator of inequality (and promise the disappointed that if they are frustrated now, if they are worthy, they will eventually get their share of the good things in life), von Hayek, in The Constitution of Liberty, rejected meritocratic justifications in no uncertain terms. As he emphasized, a system of private exchange distributes rewards not according to "merit" (What would the standard of merit be? How would we assess merit?) but to the extent to which one's services have provided benefits" to other participants in that system. One may imagine that all other things being equal the intelligent and hard-working will create more "benefits" by way of their services than those who are not, and be rewarded commensurately, but merit and service remain two different things nonetheless, all as other things are not all equal, with Hayek indeed stressing the importance of "accident" in life, and the maximization of the room for accident to happen as indispensable to civilization's progress, and even sustenance (to say nothing of freedom as he understands it). The result is that there would be outcomes unexplainable in terms of merit, that are when judged by that standard, and perhaps any other, unfair, but simply have to be borne--with all that implies about what that Statement of Aims of the Mont Pelerin Society signatory and inspiration to Margaret Thatcher thought about the proper attitude toward those who did not simply accept unfairness the way they demanded. (I might add that it does not seem irrelevant that in giving Grimes a stereotypically nerdish appearance the show could seem to evoke certain well-known stereotypes about those the right has long perceived as disproportionately numbered among threatening malcontents.)

For his part Swartzwelder disavowed any sophisticated rationales behind the story of "Homer's Enemy" (the issue instead that Grimes "didn't approve of our Homer" he said in an interview a few years ago). Still, taking it altogether it can look an awful lot like a man to whom life has been generous punching down at the Frank Grimeses of the world and their sympathizers from the position of a cushy writing gig. And accepting that reading of the episode it also looks like a reminder of how pop culture tends to be a lot less "liberal" than many across the political spectrum constantly insist it to be, even a show as "liberal" as The Simpsons delivering its share of right-wing Message. Those racking their brains for another example of such a moment may find one in what seems to me the particularly anti-populist-with-a-whiff-of-Cold-Warrior story of Swartzwelder's later "A Tale of Two Springfields" (not so subtly having the revolt of the have-nots against their "betters" produce physical division behind an analog to the Berlin Wall, with the have-nots in a failing economy and society behind it), though venturing nowhere nearly so far through the episode guide one could find another Message and Agenda-heavy episode--in the immediately prior episode Swartzwelder got writing credit on, which aired just two weeks before "Homer's Enemy," "The Old Man and the Lisa."

Remembering "The Old Man and the Lisa"

Reading about John Swartzwelder's time on The Simpsons had me looking anew at not just the famously divisive "Homer's Enemy," but also another, less notorious, episode of his, "The Old Man and the Lisa," frankly for the same reason, its being a piece of right-wing satire. After all, consider what we have in the episode--a billionaire losing his money, but totally regaining his fortune by episode's end on the basis of plain and simple "entrepreneurship" on an implicitly "level playing field," with the result that where we all know Monty Burns to have been born to wealth and privilege, here he is "reborn" as a "self-made man." As Kurt Vonnegut might have had it, the episode makes making a dollar look very easy--so that those who haven't done so well at that game are left with nothing to do but "blame and blame and blame themselves" for the fact, perhaps the more in as far from being able to attribute it all to under-handedness on the part of an evil man, Montgomery Burns this time around is presented as a kindly, honest individual who means to make the world a better place, and deal fairly with the little girl to whom he owes the idea he used to make it all happen.

It seems fair to describe this course of events as a paean to the Social Darwinistic notions of the inherent superiority of the rich at the money-making that they hold to be the ultimate test of a man's mettle, the cult of the "entrepreneur," the validity of "bootstraps" ideology, the idea that everyone of any merit who is not a billionaire is only "temporarily embarrassed" that way, and to capitalism more generally, while it is also a blow against the tendency to villainize plutocrats so much a bugbear of the right to boot (the more obviously so as Swartzwelder's writing credits on the show include the episode in which Homer's more fully self-made half-brother Herb managed an even earlier return to riches after "losing it all," and other episodes which showed a softer attitude toward Burns as "Rosebud," or more respect for his abilities, like "Homer the Smithers").

However, on top of that there is also the specific entrepreneurial project Burns used to regain his wealth--a colossal "recycling" plant using giant nets woven together from disused six-pack holders to, via the most destructive fishing technique imaginable, collect vast amounts of biomass that the plant then turns into canned "slurry." Accelerating the destruction of the oceans rather than saving them--all, again, with the best of intentions, as Burns shows when he presents the operation to Lisa and, in his present state of fair-mindedness presents her a check for her share of the proceeds--Lisa can do nothing but reject the project and the money in horror, all as, in contrast with many an episode of the series, the usually much more gently treated Lisa is not given the slightest cause to dry her tears by episode's end.

Of course, the episode doesn't seem to have been taken that way when it aired. Different people explain this in different ways, but it seems to me that the reason for that is that when this episode came out in the '90s, environmentalism (like "political correctness") seemed so secure as societal conventional wisdom that it appeared harmless to mock at it, the more in as there was that "'90s irony" that had people of limited intelligence dealing with anything dissonant by taking it as meaning the opposite of what the speaker actually said, or even nothing at all, the more easily for the tendency of many who ought to know better to "convert narrative gaucherie" into such, as Ian Watt had it. So did it go with that contemporaneous piece of narrative gaucherie par excellence, South Park. However, while South Park has since undergone a measure of (long overdue) revaluation that has had many accepting that many of the nihilistic or reactionary stances the show took were not meant at all ironically, no such reevaluation has happened with The Simpsons, or even just the episodes of the now famously right-wing (and anti-environmentalist) Swartzwelder, so that they assume there is a "liberal" sensibility is at work even when what they have in front of them is very obviously a right-winger giving them the middle finger.

The Virtues of the Good Old Landline Phone

The old landline phone was simple, durable, reliable. Buy one, just about any one, install it, and you might find yourself still able to use it perfectly well decades later, without having to do anything but keep paying your phone bill. You could even use one when the electricity was out--something people learned to appreciate in disaster prone-areas (which just about every area seems to be these days). These are considerable virtues from the standpoint of the sane non-idiot--and when personal computers exploded in the 1990s, seeing how little of these virtues those devices displayed, they may have hoped that computers would become more like phones this way. Instead computers remained just as problematic as before, and indeed got worse in various ways--in significant part because the ballyhooed "entrepreneurs" of Silicon Valley realized that making them into Orwell's telescreens would be a profitable proposition, and the government they pretend to despise even as it invented and subsidized everything that made them rich (as they take all the credit to the thunderous applause of their claqueurs in the media and the rest of the commentariat) of course had no problem with their using them this way (wink, wink). In the process, rather than making computers more like phones they turned phones into computers, with all their enduring and even worsening defects actually magnified (at least the user of a wired PC--never mind a landline phone user--doesn't have to worry about battery charge and signal strength and the security of their "Wi-fi" and fumble with tiny and hyper-delicate SIM cards and touchscreens with all their annoyances and maintenance demands), all as, even twenty years after the unveiling of the smart phone, a mobile phone still can't give you the reliability and quality of an old-fashioned landline call, not that people will be able to make the comparison for much longer. Telecom companies which love taking your money but hate paying for infrastructure and everything else relevant to service are working hard to make the landline a thing of the past, not by making it superfluous but by making it legally possible for them to simply not offer the facility.

I, for one, appreciate the technological progress of the last two decades. I feel no nostalgia whatsoever for dial-up Internet, preferring gigabit broadband and all that it enables--like streaming video. I certainly think being able to query a chatbot with a complex question far superior to typing strings of unconnected keywords into a search engine. And I certainly think it a good thing on the whole that portable communications devices exist. But it is dishonest or stupid to pretend that every change has been for the good, that the bad was all the necessary "price of progress," and that the changes were all a matter of "consumer choice." Here as everywhere else the consumer is not king. Business offers the consumer what it wants to offer them, take it, or take it, all as "simple," "durable, "reliable," "long-lasting," "low-maintenance," "straightforward," "cheap" and "user-friendly" are not only not at the top of their lists, but things the Waste Makers fight against with every fiber of their being as a mortal enemy to their divine right to take the consumer for as much as possible as they give them as little as possible in return, all as they smarmily tell them "You've never had it so good."

"The Stupid Person's Smart Person": A Few Thoughts

It is not uncommon these days to hear this or that "public intellectual" dismissed as a "stupid person's smart person"--someone who, perhaps not really a "smart person," conforms to certain conventional expectations of how a "smart person" appears and sounds and may therefore be taken more seriously than they ought by the credulous.

But what goes into that really?

Let us start with the oft overlooked reality that high intelligence tends not to be a very "showy" trait, apt to manifest itself only in relatively small and subtle ways, at least in casual social contacts and other comparable, everyday, situations--a certain alertness or nuance or quickness with words or numbers, for example. Such things are unlikely to register with and make much impression on a "stupid person"--their "smart person" having to display evidences of intelligence in a much more conspicuous, even bombastic, way. I can think of at least two types of such evidence:

1. The Appearance of Authority.
The society we live in is vehement about treating intelligence as the defining trait of, foundation of the authority of, indeed even monopoly of, society's elite. (As Immanuel Wallerstein put it in his handy essay, the presumption is that the bourgeoisie is in charge because "they are the smartest.") This is underlined by how any suggestion that those who are not of the elite have any intelligence is dismissed--most famously in the vulgarian sneer "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?" (utterance of which phrase is as good a piece of evidence of the speaker being a "stupid person" as I know of). The result is that the "stupid person" will expect the "smart person" to display the trappings of elite status and the Authority that goes with it in spite of the fact that these may testify to privileged social background rather than actual intelligence--such as evidences of wealth, position, and an education at far-flung and exotic-sounding institutions of learning (which education is not likely to be had without one's having come from money, regardless of their intelligence, such that it is a surer testament to the former than the latter). Consistent with this is the arrogant and even rude demeanor that those who have had privilege and position so often display regardless of intelligence (perhaps, as evidence of its lack)--the respectful, indeed, apt to speak of them that foolish phrase "He did not suffer fools gladly."

The actual "smart person" will see right through the trappings, the demeanor, and judge whether the person in question really has anything to say worth hearing (and are thus not a "stupid person's smart person," just a "smart person" lucky enough to have what it to takes to impress the stupid that they are such). However, as (in lieu of Naming Names, however easy it may be to come up with many a name deserving of mention here) the list of the more prominent public intellectuals of our times indicates, there don't seem to be many of these around, least of all in the mainstream media, given its profoundly uncritical, indeed often exceedingly deferential, treatment of figures who acquire such status--in spite of the fact that they so rarely do have anything to offer.

2. A Tendency to Unnecessary Obscurity. People react very differently to what they do not understand depending on the circumstances. Much of the time, confronted with the unintelligible, they will assume that it is also unintelligent. However, when the unintelligible is backed up by Authority the more credulous--those of whom we speak as "stupid persons"--will very readily believe that it is all simply above their heads, whereas a "smart person" may reserve judgment, and indeed be skeptical, for the truth is that the greatest feats of intelligence are apt to involve making what may seem overwhelming comprehensible. (To take an easy example, thus do scientists derive laws of nature from the phenomena of the universe.) Indeed, unintelligibility is apt to bespeak confusion, whether the speaker's being confused, or their deliberately trying to confuse their audience to intimidate them--with their effort to do the latter apt to take such forms as a flinging about of empty buzzwords, a propensity for mathematical statements that mean nothing at all, a penchant for arcane diction and obscure quotations for their own sake, perhaps even a proneness to just speak very fast, so as to conceal the banality of their ideas, and even their not having any ideas at all, behind seemingly ostentatious intellectuality.

Faced with such the actual smart person will, if given a proper chance, be able to tell the difference between someone whose explanation is difficult because the material is genuinely difficult (and they, again, not a "stupid person's smart person" but a "smart person" period), and someone who is pulling a con--but again, there don't seem to be many of these around, least of all in the mainstream media.

Taken together what we get from this is that the prototypical "stupid person's smart person" is a personage displaying the trappings of Authority who wraps up vacuity in a show-offy pseudo-erudition, or possibly both. In doing so such a stupid person's smart person also makes themselves "the smart person's stupid person," one who is the more deserving of being labeled a stupid person because they worked so hard to earn the opprobrium, and because when they have become public figures their claptrap is so often so pernicious in its effect--not that the criticisms of such persons by the truly intelligent and learned amount to much anyway, just about never slowing down a racket of this kind once they have got it properly going.

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

The Media Ignores a Hunger Crisis. (Food Prices and the News Media Today.)

Recent years have seen what has been universally acknowledged by all but the most idiotically committed deniers of hard quantitative fact as spiking food prices, with an effect on the public worse than what is usually reported given the reality that the cheapest items are susceptible to higher-than-average price shocks (the margins were already slight to begin with), with all that means for those who can afford prices least; and what a great many consumers report as a degradation in the quality of many familiar food products (for example, supermarket bakery bread increasingly stale, prone to rapidly molding, etc.), such that the value for the money has fallen relative even to the higher price; neither of which situations gets much coverage. (The price shock at the bottom end of the market tends to be a side remark in the news story if it rates a mention at all, while the signs of lower quality going with the higher prices are the kind of thing you see consumers discussing so much in fora like Reddit or TikTok that "everyone knows" that it's "not just me"--but so far the media hasn't deigned to acknowledge it in any significant way, and at least as yet no attempt at a comprehensive government or academic or other research study has substantiated it.)

Also not getting much coverage is what this really means for the consumer. The media treats us to plenty of grumbling about the price of staples like eggs--but just grumbling, as if it were all a case of essentially comfortable people irked at having to shell out a little more cash for superfluities of life ("You don't really need that!" they are ever quick to tell us), and (certainly if you believe the "Don't Worry, Be Happy" line the editors of the Times shovel out to you) this mostly a matter of their being clueless or graceless because incomes have gone up with prices, leaving them no worse off than before. However, far from incomes always marching in lockstep with prices the reality tends to be more complex, such that it is only logical to expect that many, maybe most, will see prices running ahead of income--the more in as the latest price shocks comes on top of a half century of the American worker's purchasing power consistently falling relative to the essentials of everyday life (halved or worse in relation to the price of a home, the price of transportation, the price of health insurance, etc.), such that one would expect these latest rises to mean more hardship out there. And indeed that expectation has actually been affirmed by the statistics of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which show the proportion of U.S. households suffering "food insecurity" (and the more severe "very low food security") in 2021-2023 shooting back up toward the level we saw in the wake of the financial apocalypse of 2007-2008, all as there is reason to think things got no better in 2024. (Indeed, given the trend in income among the less affluent, cutbacks to the social safety net, and associated factors, they probably got even worse.)

Even granting that the news media has, in line with its Big Business character, elite staffing, pandering to the affluent reader and viewer, centrist-neoliberal prejudices and general obsequiousness to the powerful and the status quo they favor, never taken much interest in the lot of those who would be represented in the figures just discussed, its disconnect with economic reality seems ever more extreme, and ever more blatantly Agenda-driven. For even as the public faced the sort of hardship that hit it in the immediate wake of that Great Recession that never truly ended their functionaries sneered in our faces "It's Not the Economy, Stupid"--when it is really the case that the measure of stupidity is one's readiness to believe their propaganda.

Europe Rearms. Or Tries To. Sort Of?

Trying to follow a news story from day to day you are apt to find the news media--especially the mainstream news media--deluging them with little bits, typically presented without connections or context, all as what passes for help in making sense of them is the platforming of some Establishment functionary not looking to help you think things through for yourself, but rather eager to tell you what to think, which, because they are an Establishment functionary, is likely to be what they want you to think, irregardless of its relationship to reality (with which Establishment functionaries tend not to be on speaking terms, even though they often know enough to realize that it's not what they are saying). You can only make sense of things when you step back from the onslaught of pseudo-information and put the bits together for yourself--or let someone unlikely ever to get much of a mainstream platform talk you through it properly (as many genuine experts of the kind you won't ever see on the panel shows are perfectly happy to do).

So it has gone with the deluge of news about Europe's rearmament, yet another "news story" that is all sound and fury--and exactly the kind of tale that such sound and fury tends to signify. The leaders of European governments, and European Union institutions, make grand pronouncements, and throw around colossal numbers--hundreds of billions, maybe trillions, of euros, as if they are engaged in a bidding war with monopoly money. Yet, at least to go by what we see in public, the talk is completely unconnected with any specific plans or goals--what these vast sums of money are supposed to actually buy, what Europe's forces will look like after the money has been spent not spelled out. Indeed, they don't even seem to know that such targets might have any use here. And all that is to the extent that one can speak of "Europe's" forces at all. After all, serious talk of the integration and synchronization of European defense forces at the level of their militaries, or even talk of collaboration in the production of the weapons they need (or even what weapons they might be), has been pretty much nonexistent--in spite of how little military power the European governments dispose of individually, how we have seen even immense sums of money soaked up in accomplishing very little (remember Sergeant Olaf "I see nothing!" Scholz's hundred billion euro one-off of a few years ago?), and the hard reality that the rather fragmented and withered defense-industrial bases of the continent's various powers ("We can get you ten tanks by next year! Well, not new tanks, just refurbished tanks. Maybe. Do they actually have to be third-generation?" they say as tanks are getting smashed up by the thousands) can deliver that much less each "going their way" rather than pulling together. Meanwhile said officials are proving rather artlessly dodgy on the matter of where they expect to get the added personnel for the bigger, more powerful, militaries of their fantasies. (Whatever you do, don't say conscription!)

Instead of such specifics what we get is the kind of grandstanding that makes politics "Show Business for Ugly People"--the performers in which Show Business never fail to remind the onlooker that in their low-rent corner of the show business world the most coveted role of all is that of war leader, the British leader wanting to be Churchill, the Frenchman wanting to be de Gaulle, the German and Italian wanting to be . . . well, better I leave that to your imaginations. Still, this rather shabby and vulgar display is not without its more practical political purposes. After all, posing as war leaders gives them an excuse to call for "unity," which is a professional politician's way of telling the people at the bottom to stop thinking of the problems of everyday life, and how their elected politicians broke their promises to them, and the way their society's elite are leading them all off a cliff, and instead do as the folks in the commercials in the Starship Troopers movies do when looking at the camera and saying "I'm doing my part!" in that way addicts to Greatest Generation piffle about World War Two just can't get enough of--the more in as the supposed necessity of hundreds of billions more for defense is a long-favorite excuse to take hundreds of billions from everything else, which is after all what they were intent on doing anyway. (Orwell readers, remind me--whether the war is with Eurasia or Eastasia, just who was the "real" enemy again?)

All the same, unserious as they are, and domestically-oriented as their agendas may be ("Those who have little shall have less") one should not trivialize the consequences of the talk for an international scene ever more conflict-ridden, ever more tension-filled, ever more dangerous as what a short time earlier seemed virtually unthinkable (like a major land war raging year after year on the European continent) becomes another hard fact of life over and over and over again. And disgraceful as the international media has been in its coverage of the talk about the money, it has been even more so in its failing to drive home the dangers of that still more serious situation they have so little tried to explain to Europe's publics, very few members of whom are eager to cosplay as Johnny Rico with killer drones flying about under the "leadership" of Sir "Free Gear Keir" Starmer, Monsieur "President of the Rich" Macron, or Herr "Manager der Reichen" Merz, let alone experience the potentially much worse that may lie ahead in an age in which elites absolutely refuse to remember that there is such a thing in the world as nuclear weaponry, and how seriously we have to take the fact of its existence.

Is the Relevance of "Democratic Peace Theory" Declining in Our Time?

It recently seemed to me that we hear less of "democratic peace" theory than we used to do, and indeed I decided to test this impression by checking the frequency of the term's usage logged by Google's Ngram. As it happened, Ngram logged a 37 percent drop in usage of the term between 2013 and 2022--in contrast with the 1139 percent rise it logged in the term's usage between 1986 and 2013.

This surge between the late 1980s and early 2010s, and plunge in the subsequent decade, seems to me very telling, a rough measure of the credence that Fukuyamaesque "liberal triumphalism" enjoyed between the signs that the Cold War was drawing to a close in the era of Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Great Recession that, in spite of much stupid rhetoric about the world having quickly got over it, the event being past, dealt the global economy a blow from which it is still reeling. The result has been the halt and erosion of the global economic integration so evident in the 1986-2007 period, more conflictual relations between the major powers, and of course, more illiberal domestic politics. Indeed, many Establishment commentators openly worry about the polarization of their countries' publics, the collapse of established political parties and the ascent of extremist figures to the national stage, and the propensity of chief executives to invoke emergency measures to get their way. And so now we hear less of democracy's spread, let alone any supposed pacification of the world by it--as instead those who talked much but understood nothing strike tough guy poses as they traffic in old-fashioned realpolitik.

The Decline of L.A. Film Production--and Hollywood's Mystique With It

Looking at the place of film in contemporary culture few would deny that it is less central than it was a few decades ago in what some call "the age of movies," all as Hollywood would seem to have lost something of its romance, something of its glamour. Certainly part of this has been the advent of television and its implications, from the decline of the "theatrical experience," to the collapse of the old studio system "dream factories" with their larger-than-life bosses and "last tycoon" underlings and their More Stars Than in the Heavens and the whole world-within-a-world they seemed to constitute. (Just ask yourself this: can you picture any filmmaker of today doing with the Hollywood of a quarter of a century earlier--the Hollywood of 2000 A.D.--what the great Billy Wilder did with the then-quarter-of-a-century-older Hollywood of Sunset Boulevard? I doubt even the most stubborn contrarian out there would actually try to argue on behalf of a "Yes" answer--while considering this it seems no coincidence that even the makers of new movies about Hollywood are drawn to that earlier period, as Damien Chazelle clearly was in his tale of silent-era Hollywood of a couple of years ago, Babylon.)

That romance and glamour didn't all vanish at once, and indeed hasn't vanished completely even now. (Thus do some still argue over whether the movie star still exists, properly speaking--as many find some amusement in playing "armchair movie executive.") Still, the trend has long been clear, and it can seem to me that other developments have added to it--not least, the decline of Hollywood as a place, and one might add, the romance of that place's location. The idea that this magical world-within-a-world overspread some forty square miles or so of golden Southern California when "California" and "Los Angeles" had been names to conjure with in a way less the case today--that here was where it all happened, with the bosses having their offices here, and the movies shot on the studio lots, and the stars and everyone else involved living and working and playing here--seems to have added to its fascination, with even darker or more satirical portraits of the place (like Nathanael West's Day of the Locust or B.P. Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?) paying tribute to that fascination in their way. In recent decades, with production venturing to places like Vancouver or Atlanta to exploit ill-conceived corporate welfare schemes that in rather on the nose fashion underline just how much politics is "Showbusiness for ugly people," that sense of American filmmaking as in some way an enchanted world of its own is going--and if that is a small thing next to the livelihoods upended as many workers in the field find themselves forced to relocate if they are to go on working in their jobs at all, and a deindustrialized Southland suffers yet another blow to its economy, it still remains the case that this dispersal is also taking another part of the industry's long-fading glamour, most likely for good.

Of Hollywood's Golden Age, and the Fortunes of Great Powers

Looking back it can seem plausible that Hollywood's centrality within the film world in the twentieth century reflected America's centrality within the world economy in the same century--the country's having been the scene of a techno-industrial-commercial revolution that had it accounting for a third (and for some decades, even more) of the world economy, its productive methods a model for even those most skeptical of America's social model, its wealth a source of unprecedented power in the world for its businesses and its government, and its people, if far from fully sharing in the gains, still to a significant extent having a standard and way of living that fascinated the rest of the world. (Consumer culture as we know it, the auto-subtopian existence that Americans equate with a decent living standard--this was where they all began.)

It is commonly the case that when a country enjoys a "golden age" in the material ways it also enjoys a golden age culturally--great art, alas, that much less likely to appear in a time of stagnation, decline, poverty--and the American century was no exception. The fascination of many in the Old World was tinged with anxiety and even repulsion as they contemplated what seemed to them the "land of the future," with many thinking it a comparatively cultureless place--but then they tended to think in terms of old forms and old standards, with little receptivity to the new (like upper class, Eton-and-Balliol College-educated Briton Aldous Huxley sneering at modernity, progress, egalitarianism in the all too often uncritically taken Brave New World). The comparative vastness of the American film market afforded filmmakers prospects for resourcing their filmmaking greater than were to be had anywhere else in the world, with all that meant the technical potentials of American film, and the fascination of the rest of the world with American cultural products inextricable from America's more material strengths, had their part in bringing Hollywood films a world market, and drawing to Hollywood talent from far afield (with alongside the "push" effect of the interwar and Second World War years the "pull" of Hollywood enriching Hollywood with a generation of Central European talent in particular).

Amid all that, in an era in which America was in spite of the snobs making its mark within the high culture of the Western world, but "high culture" was increasingly taking on a decadent cast in its flight from contemporary reality and its challenges--a flight in which it continues a century on--such that one may argue for Hollywood having been to America's golden age what those nations' output in literature and the more traditional visual arts had been for Renaissance Italy, the Spanish, the Dutch and others in their periods as leading powers, all as the decline of Hollywood can seem in respects to track the decline of American power. Riding high in the years after World War II the decline of the studio system can seem to parallel the decline of the Bretton Woods-based world economic order, with an air of decadence setting in this cultural milieu as well about the time the country went off the gold standard, and the end of the "New Hollywood" and the onset of the crass high concept/blockbuster era going hand in hand with the ascent of neoliberalism, deindustrialization, the hollowing out of an economy living on speculation fueled by central bankers giving away free money to "investors." Indeed, reading Daniel Bessner's great article in Harper's last year, Hollywood can seem a microcosm of the larger economy in the age of short-termism and "shareholder value" and merger and acquisition games run amok, of traffic in old brands rather than the building up of new ones as the taking that is speculating edges out making, of global arbitrage in labor and other costs, declining prospects for the many as compensation explodes for a handful of "winners," and the general crapuleux idiocy and vulgarity that is the norm at the top in such times.

After decades of all that few would think either Hollywood or the American economy in a particularly healthy state--as those disheartened by the situation and desirous of regeneration find few grounds for hope in a scene where the self-satisfied elite thinks that it need only "stay the course," and the only alternatives that seem to ever get a mainstream are no alternatives at all. They offer just the same old thing in a rather thin new guise, a sequel no one ever asked for to a movie that wasn't worth seeing the first time.

Where Do Authors Stand Within the World of Celebrity?

Recently considering the standing of the novel today, and the matter of celebrity, it occurred to me that while I have written about celebrity of various kinds (that of actors, of musicians, of athletes), and even celebrity as such, I have not discussed authors much from that standpoint. I suppose that I did not even think to do so reflects the reality that authors, while not excluded from the world of celebrity when they attain a certain level of success, or at least visibility, also do not rank all that highly within the world of celebrity--in our times at least.

Consider those things that make a celebrity a celebrity rather than merely famous, or even merely famous because

1. They are not just famous, but famous among the general public in a "household name" way.

2. They tend to be highly visible--not just their name but their face well-known, in part because the public sees them at whatever work it is that makes them famous (on the screen or the stage or in the stadium where they give them an entertaining show).

3. Their performance tends to at least appear highly individual, and to be made possible by an extraordinary personal talent.

4. They are perceived as not just accomplished, but glamorous.

Consider how writers stack up here against, for example, singers.

In a culture where the written word matters less and less and fewer people pay attention to books, accomplishment in letters is less likely to make anyone a "household name."

Even if they do become famous we are more likely to know their names than their faces, in part because what they do doesn't lend itself to showy display before a public. The actor acts, the singer sings, the athlete plays in front of us. The writer doesn't write in front of us. In fact, when we see them they are taking time away from their writing, likely because their publishing contract made them do it--all as watching them write, aside from not being really interesting, wouldn't be a "performance" in the same way, the "performance" instead what we get when what they work on is published and we read it.

In part because few people pay attention to books, and because the accomplishment of a writer lacks that kind of performative-visual aspect, many simply don't recognize talent in writing the way they do acting or singing or athletic accomplishment. Personally moved by an actor or singer's performance, or perhaps even more easily impressed by an athletic feat. (Seeing a player hitting one out of the park, making a full-court shot, and of course, scoring four touchdowns in a single game, even people who know virtually nothing about the sport are likely to know they have seen something extraordinary.) By contrast in the minds of many "anyone" can string words together, while the appraisal of the result is simply "subjective" (as every failing composition student is quick to say).

And of course, there is the plain and simple fact that writing is seen as "nerdish" in a way other artistic endeavor is not--with all that means in a nerd-bashing and generally anti-intellectual culture, and its prospects for glamorousness. It is the case, too, that publishing is less a young person's scene than the performing arts or sports, that the ability to spellbind with the written word is less likely to be linked to physical appearance or charisma than is the case with those who spellbind an audience from a stage.

Of course, like many others writers are for all that encouraged to constantly exploit and deepen whatever celebrity they may have, as seen in the aforementioned rituals of book publicity, like those book signings that the makers of atrocious films and television shows about authors love to shoehorn into the revolting crap they foist on the viewing public. And should an author, for example, see their book made into a movie doubtless they get some of the reflected glory of the Cinema. Still, if the movie reaches a bigger audience it is those who starred in the movie that I suspect people are more likely to associate with it than the author of the source material--the words "The Hunger Games" probably conjuring up in far more minds the image of Jennifer Lawrence than that of Suzanne Collins. The result is that even if after having made the journey to Park Avenue they take a second trip from there to Tinseltown, they are not likely to become truly of Tinseltown barring their becoming something other than a writer of fiction.

In all that there can seem a pattern. The low stature of authors within the celebrity world means that much less interest in what they do, while the lack of interest in what they do further depresses their stature--reflecting and reinforcing the shift of contemporary culture's center of gravity away from the written word in our time.

What Makes a Famous Person a "Celebrity?"

When we speak of celebrity we generally seem to take for granted that "everyone knows" what the term means--perhaps less unreasonably than when using a great many other terms with a sociological significance, but still not unproblematically. After all, the simplest and most common definition of "celebrity" is "a famous person," but I think most will agree that fame by itself does not a celebrity make, many people quite famous without being celebrities properly speaking. The result is that it seems worth spelling out the concept.

For a start, there seems some expectation that a celebrity not only be famous, but famous with the general public for having "done something great"; that people in general know who they are; that we can speak of them as a "household name." By way of contrast with this consider the case of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. They are certain to be very well-known within their field. They are likely to get considerable media attention on the day that the Nobel Academy holds the awards ceremony. However, unless they somehow parlay their stature as a scientist into a broader "public intellectual" status, at least, very few people are likely to know who they are--in comparison with those categories of person we are more likely to associate with "celebrity," such as actors, singers and athletes.

The obscurity of even scientists at the top of their field by comparison with actors and singers and athletes seems importantly reflective of the logic of celebrity, which status (especially in our day) has a lot to do with a certain kind of individual visibility. If you are a celebrity people know your face, in part because they have seen the celebrity's face while they were doing what it was that made them famous. People saw them perform in a dramatic or musical production, or play in a game. By contrast a scientist's work, however hard, brilliant, important, publicized it may be, does not make for a "show" the same way. The work goes on largely in their heads, with its physical aspects conducted in laboratories away from public view, the evidences of what went on there presented to the world in their published papers unclear or even incomprehensible to the layperson, etc., etc., such that it simply cannot make the same impact on their imaginations. And while the public by and large retains an obsolete view of science as an intensively individualistic endeavor (because it serves certain political or dramatic purposes than for any other reason), it is harder to ignore the increasingly collaborative reality of the sciences. This is not just because there is typically a lot of less celebrated work paving the way for the "breakthroughs" that gets so much attention, but because anyone who can simply count notices how many names were on the byline of that paper reporting that important discovery, and the contrast it makes with the ferociously individual accomplishment with which celebrity is associated, which is typically expected to come from a particular place, namely talent that no "ordinary" person possesses and can never make up for the lack of no matter how hard they work--not diligence, but prowess. And of course, there is what is supposed to follow from exceptional prowess, namely wealth, luxury, adulation by the many, their being sought after and desired, others fantasizing about being them (or being with them, the aspect of sex not to be underrated, perhaps the more in as society is getting more puritanical about this)--in short, glamour. Few consider even the most accomplished scientist in such terms--as indeed scientists laugh (perhaps not without some bitterness) at the ridiculous glamorization of their field by Hollywood.

Taken altogether this picture--combining general renown, individual visibility achieved through personal prowess lending itself to visual display, and winning the visible rewards that prowess is supposed to win--seems to me to cover the territory--what in Veblenian terms is its essential simple-minded barbarism--pretty well, though I think it worthwhile to acknowledge that I am describing an ideal here at an extreme end of the spectrum, and that some may fall in between the questionable "celebrity" of a famed scientist at one end, the more conventional celebrity of a famed singer or athlete at the other.

At the same time the matter can be somewhat confused by those who ordinarily would not really make the cut but try to make it seem as if they do--people who are famous, but intent on being celebrities, and helped in their quest by their courtiers and claqueurs within a fairly willing media. As with plutocrats who seem unlikely candidates for the performance of any great artistic or athletic or any other sort of feat before the eyes of the public (which doesn't necessarily stop them from trying to be, say, Brazilian jiu-jitsu champions), but whom they shove their faces in our faces all the time as their partisans keep telling us what "geniuses" and "supermen" they are. ("Smarter than you, smarter than you!" they insist, the more stridently insofar as they know they are irritating us.) At the same time, living in the age of reality TV we are deluged with people who are highly visible without being in any evident way accomplished--one reason, I think, why I have personally been resistant to recognizing reality "stars" as celebrities--though in the culture in which we live it is common to think of "being rich and famous" as somehow a worthy achievement in itself, entirely befitting that Veblenian conception of barbarism on which all this ultimately rests.

The (Illusory) Accessibility of the Literary Path to Celebrity

In considering the motivations for becoming a writer Upton Sinclair in Money Writes!, if possessing the highest regard for literature and those who go about the task heroically, did not mince words about the crasser side of the matter--indeed taking a rather sneering view of many of those who do try to become writers. As he acknowledges, living in a society where most can expect at best an objectively crummy working class life, constantly tantalized by the thought of how much better others than they were living, and told not to expect anything better or fairer by way of a change in society and instead look to their own efforts to raise themselves up within the hierarchy--to, as drawing on Pestalozzi he puts it, grow from fish into pikes--they credulously look to do just that. With celebrity the only alternative to crime as a way of dramatically changing their fortunes they try to become such, with many of them hitting on "becoming a writer."

Considering this it seems fair to attend not just to the attractions that writing has for many (a writer's independence, etc.) but also the seeming accessibility of the path. In contrast with, for example, being a musician, where one needs to at least know how to play an instrument, a would-be writer, strictly speaking, would seem to need only the literacy that has become universal to make a start. The material requirements (something to write with, a place where they can get some quiet and some privacy) may be hard for some to get, but are at least low in comparison with a musician's need for instruments and a place to practice, or the more specialized material and work space needed by many a visual artist. They may want and benefit from the help of others, but compared with a musician looking to organize a band, an actor organizing a troupe, a budding filmmaker trying to get together the cast and equipment for even the most bare-bones production, it can seem a thing they can do without if they must. And certainly in contrast with those in the performing arts they are under less pressure to bear the expenses of travel, let alone relocate entirely to a possibly unfamiliar and distant place on what may be very slender resources and few prospects of a living wage (it is no accident that so many of those who managed to become actors, even when their biographies do not indicate any significant help from connections, hail from the southern California and Tri-State areas), only their manuscript needing to travel--all as, indeed, they never have to stand in person before an audience.

Of course, what followed was rarely as tidy as those who thought his way expected. Then as now the writer's path was far and away most likely to prove a walk down a boulevard of broken dreams. But the start at least seems more plausible, and may seem to have become more so since Sinclair's day, with most of the likely candidates having some access to a computer, and the research resources of the Internet, and the option of submitting their work electronically, at no marginal cost. (I recall editors insisting on those wretched Self-Addressed Stamped Envelopes long after e-mail became a practical alternative and explaining this in public statements by saying that the added hassle and expense of mailing them was a way of eliminating "the bozo factor"--making those submitting to them waste their time to no useful end in that way idiot entitled authority figures love to do with those over whom they have power, and for whom they have only contempt. But they have become fewer with the years.) It has also been the case that those who get their fill of the form rejection letters, as mechanical and inhuman and demoralizing in our time as they were when young Martin Eden faced them, now have the option of self-publishing a book in print and electronic editions for no marginal cost at all, provided they are willing to do all the requisite work of turning their manuscript into a book themselves. Still, given what "the wages of writing" tell us about the returns to effort here the odds of a career have only worsened, not improved--so much so perhaps that, especially as alternative paths to celebrity unheard of in Sinclair's day beckon, it seems to me very plausible that people are losing interest in being writers someday, looking past the books telling them they can teach them to be a writer to the ones telling them they can teach them to be an online "influencer" instead.

Novel Reading a "Cultic" Activity By 2034: How Fares the Prediction?

Back in a 2009 interview with The Daily Beast Philip Roth predicted that in a quarter of a century, and likely less, novel reading would be "cultic," invoking the number of people still engaged in "reading Latin poetry in the original" as a point of comparison for how little it would be done (the circle of novel readers not quite as small as that, but not much greater).

In 2025 we are about two-thirds of the way to twenty-five years from his standpoint. Personally I think that his prediction for the state of things in 2034 is more dire than the reality is likely to be--but not so very much more dire. Consider how

* In the late '00s and early '10s young adult books were all the rage, and the trajectory that ended up following. At least part of the story was a lack of excitement about books for adults, and "adults" looking for easier reads, as well as young adult interest, with all that suggests for the vibrancy of letters and for the prevailing level of literacy--while the way the bubble popped circa 2015 without anything to compare since can seem suggestive of people of all ages doing even less reading than that.

* Whole genres of popular fiction have withered and all but vanished (consider where action-adventure fiction stands today relative to where it was circa 1990), as in other cases we have seen stagnation (certainly to go by how, for example, the "club" of bestselling authors of other kinds of thriller has seen just the same old names from year to year, decade to decade, old names surviving on likely dwindling numbers of old loyalists, instead of new successes).

* Even as Big Publishing mounted its counter-revolution against the e-book with sensational success, the mass-market paperback still disappeared from the shops for lack of buyers--and how the media treated both events as virtually non-stories.

* The slight impact of even recent bestsellers on the wider culture, as seen in the fact that for many years the film adaptations of even colossal bestsellers simply do not become first-rank blockbusters the way they did a short time earlier; and how, even with pop culture a principal terrain of the kulturkampf and all its obscene noxiousness, books constitute an ever-smaller part of the controversy, especially when we get away from the mainly symbolic fights over very limited aspects of the contents of school libraries. (By contrast the kind of arguments that people had over a book like Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, and certainly the way in which a serious social scientist like William Whyte discussed the book as sociologically relevant in his study of "the organization man,", aren't even a possibility now.)

Consider, too, the implications of a declining interest in literature and the humanities on college campuses that has gone so far as talk of the "end of the English major"--which I suspect is not just a response to the sneers at those subjects by the morons who pass for thought-leaders, or the (very understandable) worries about the earning prospects of those who major in them in a time of ever more outrageous tuition, worsening prospects for college graduates and a tendency on the part of employers to reward more vocationally-oriented course work and the demonstration of quantitative skills at the expense of other kinds of credentials and training, but simple disinterest among the young. The causes of the situation are numerous, but one that I do think worth stressing what Mr. Roth's biographer Blake Bailey acknowledges after a long career as a biographer of such figures, that the day when endeavoring to write "the great American novel" seemed a heroic endeavor is behind us, simply because "Nobody's paying attention"--a remark that, in contrast with the boosterism we usually get about book sales, the publishing business, reading, when we get coverage of them at all seems to me a breath of fresh air for its frankness. Indeed, even those who really find themselves taken with the written word are, if fancying a career that would lead to something better than a crummy working class existence, probably more likely to set up a camera and try to become "influencers" than pour their heart and soul into a manuscript, especially as the disappointment self-publishing has been proves ever harder to deny, and the never very likely path to acceptance on Park Avenue only continues to grow more implausible.

Thursday, May 29, 2025

Bond 26 Finally in Development? Some Thoughts

For years now the press has buzzed about an upcoming "Bond 26"--almost entirely on the basis of no actual information, instead simply recycling stale franchise gossip, offering speculations about the usual subjects ("Will Henry Cavill be the next James Bond?" they ask for the mind-numbing billionth time), and little "If I Were the Studio Boss"-type "think" pieces. A thin substitute for actual news, this clickbaity crap got very, very wearisome indeed. However those who follow the matter finally did get some real news this past February in the report that Amazon MGM had finally acquired complete creative control over the franchise, cutting the Broccoli family-Michael Wilson combination out of the picture entirely, after which there were at least semi-solid reports of development of a new Bond film being "fast-tracked" for production and "development" underway under the supervision of Amy Pascal and David Heyman with an eye to getting said film into theaters before the end of 2027.

Previously considering the lack of movement on the part of the franchise-runners in the over three year period since the release of the last Bond film (the Daniel Craig era capper No Time to Die) my guess had been that the executives were showing some caution and sitting tight given the huge question marks hanging over the film market since the pandemic, and what, after things started settling in 2023, we have seen of the post-pandemic market. This has been a significantly shrunken market for theatrical releases much less receptive to "tentpole"-type blockbusters than was the case a decade ago, where movies still can make big money but audiences have to be really excited for them if they are to come out at all, with the Bond films' standing here shaky in light of No Time to Die's softer gross and particular underperformance with the young, encouraging them to bide their time with this one, letting the field lie fallow, and given how insistent they were on coming back, at least trying to do so with something that a sizable audience would "really want."

Of course, as I have myself remarked, the studio bosses have been extremely resistant to these lessons, and now I suspect that those in charge of 007 were no exceptions to that pattern--that the delay has not been a reflection of the Suits showing some well-warranted circumspection about another go with another (let us be frank here) absolutely unnecessary iteration of a thoroughly exhausted franchise that could easily be left in the past, but rather the usual fight for control and egos and general stupidity that are the real "skill set" of the managerial class sitting atop the commanding heights of the economy here as well as everywhere else. This is, if anything, affirmed by the choice of producers for the project. In giving ex-Sony Boss Amy Pascal (who did as boss of that studio preside in some degree over prior Bond films) a closer involvement in this new film Amazon is bringing on board a toxic vulgarian unredeemed by any great competence. (As Sony CEO she actually seemed to have less grasp of the direction her own business was moving in than a casual reader of the Penske publications, while if the Suits' courtiers prefer to talk her up as having had a part in the success of Spider-Man--perhaps--we can also credit her with believing Will "The Slap" Smith's After Earth was the next Star Wars.) Coproducing the film with her is a dude who spent the last decade giving the world the profoundly ill-conceived cash grab that was the ultimately failed Fantastic Beasts series (in which, rather ominously for Bond, he banked on the affections of an aging audience that the producers took too much for granted as they signally failed to win over the younger crowd on the way to disappointing and dwindling ticket sales).

No, there was no sign of a learning process here, and the only thing about this whole situation that surprises me, really, is that I gave the folks running this show the benefit of the doubt, in this case leading me to have likely overestimated them. Moreover, none of this seems to me to bode well for the franchise at present, the more in as those who would make a successful Bond film in this market (or for that matter, any action film from a long-running franchise in this market) have such a big and difficult task on their hands. Of course, they may yet surprise us. But that's just it--their making a movie that really succeeds, artistically or commercially, would be a surprise, especially to the extent that the figures named here are able to claim any credit for said success.

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