And by that I don’t mean the passage of health care legislation (I refuse to call any change “reform” since it is an abuse of the word, whatever the “reform” is, left or right). For that I mean to wax about dovetails, since this blog is purportedly about writing, reading, thoughts in between. And he smiles. And he thinks that Bob Dole also liked the third person, and he stops smiling, because he’s used this before.
“Okay, now, then there” as James Dean said in Rebel Without A Cause, as I recall. And since film is a part of this larger-than-Twitter entry, I admit, I’ll go right to ‘”The mass loves strong men,” Benito Mussolini once said. “The mass is female.”‘ as begins a recent New York Times review of the Italian film Vincere. We can be sure, if we hold to some prejudice regarding machismo, that Mussolini wasn’t joking. Or, in mirror image, we can mark it down as ripe for Italian comic opera. Lest I mix an accounting metaphor with an agricultural one… but that’s another tangent. (I will note that John Lanchester in I.O.U. mixes metaphors too much, easy to do even for a novelist writing nonfiction).
Where was I…the mass…the masses…in the interest of time I won’t go into my recent Las Vegas experiences — not because they needed to “stay in Vegas” — but because rather than gamble professionally, I have to work for a living, and must conclude with: “the epoch of the masses is the epoch of the colossal” wrote Ortega y Gasset in 1930, and to my mind there is no better encapsulation of both Las Vegas and blockbuster film in American society. (Disclosure: I have not seen Avatar or The Titanic).
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