Talkies
Brudnoy, David
"Talkies" thoughtlessly absorbed large doses of the mental meat tenderizer of American academia----clich6 leftism. What seems to have been forgotten by Dr. Conant and the worse things that have...
...Mistitled or not, the essays are very good indeed...
...personally and through others...
...Were it only that, we would mark it off as a fabulously successful entry in the hearts-and-flowers, bottom of the barrel sweepstakes...
...righteousness lodged in it...
...It distorts the market's pricing mechanisms and thus makes efficient allocation of resources impossible (one by-product: pollution...
...10 for $12...
...Max is heading East, first to Denver to see his sister, then to Pittsburgh to set up a car wash with a small reserve of money...
...Besides providing much helpful information on current student opinion, the role of the federal government in determining educational policy, and the impact of New Left violence, Witonski also states an interesting case concerning underlying causes...
...While aggravated by Dewey and his more rabid successors, he says, the root problem of American education goes all the way back to the beginnings of the Republic and the ingrained Yankee notion that mass "practical" education is the desirable goal of our educational system...
...11, Box 360, Blooming~on, Indiana 47401...
...I reach back now to recollect my mood when I saw it, to try to see what I put into Scarecrow, to determine (and I fail at the effort just now) why I am now dangling between giving a slap or a buss to this extraordinarily moving, yet unconscionably artificial film...
...Offers -~,~i~g new view of profit...
...all's well, and some sing-a-ding-a-ling flick seems like the happiness masterwork of the decade...
...North is at his best on the subject of inflation...
...Just about every tear-jerking gambit but piteous oldsters in retirement homes is paraded out to evoke sympathy...
...Make 'era Laugh...
...Max, who's guilty of initiating the fight with a bunch of toughs, blames the innocent Lion for it and refuses to speak to him for their month on a prison farm...
...It acts unevenly, enriching those individuals or businesses nearest to, and favored by, the state at the expense of those furthest and least favored...
...It cannot be both awful and splendid, though parts are one or the other...
...Raise standards...
...Peter Witonski has done some serious thinking on the deeper causes of the breakdown and reached some interesting conclusions...
...The piled up woes are so arranged as to show us the weight of hopelessness impinging on guys born losers...
...You cannot achieve good ends with thieving...
...You cannot turn stones into bread...
...He acts carefree, goes off to play with some kids at a park fountain, and freaks out...
...Lion calls his ex-wife (or ex-girlfriend), who berates him for deserting her, then lies to him, telling him that their child was stillborn...
...Left to their own devices today, the same class of adolescents have somehow managed to spawn twin epidemics of illiteracy and venereal disease in the most overschooled, overmedicated society in the world...
...A fierce fight one evening in a roadhouse lands the men in jail...
...3:17-19...
...But it is more...
...Those days are gone, however, and now the machines are beginning to break down...
...you emerge proclaiming it a "majestic cinema treatment of a universal theme...
...Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...OK, they don't make it, but they work at making it...
...Neither men alone nor their governments can turn stones into bread...
...At the end, Lion has either died or remained catatonic...
...I do not mean to imply that North's prose resembles that gray-green sludge that Distinguished Professors of Economics pass off as writing...
...But this degree of scholarship, while limiting his readership, is the more rewarding to those who have the background and intelligence to stay with him in his skilled discussions...
...The temper we carry into the theatre, as much as the film itself, conditions the opinions we take from the experience to--in my case--the typewriter...
...All right, I say to myself: now hold on, separate your aesthete's eye from your critical glare, get it in perspective, let that witless cartoon-strip of a live-action movie have it...
...But the new paper is in fact stealing existing wealth, for those who do the inflating and those nearest NEWEST CHALLENGE TO CURRENT CONSENSUS Lively new guide for corrective thought-leaders Assigns rewarding new course to be pursued...
...Not at all...
...the despair eating Lion, who believes himself not only a deserter, which he is, but also the precipitating cause of his child's death, is so touching...
...North has studied the great works of von Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, Rushdoony, Roepke, and Hazlitt...
...I Discloses little known extent of union power and its abuses...
...At the picture's start, he crosses paths in some isolated area with one Lionel (whom Max rechristens "Lion"), acted by A1 Pacino, like Hackman an actor of diverse talents, some most likely still untapped...
...we cry with their sadness...
...They put their wounded selves into the struggle and fail the test: one fades out, the other goes courageously on, on, we guess, to more failure, however dogged his zeal...
...This was the logical precursor of the current devaluation in academic standards and climate in which, "while grades are rising at colleges and universities across the land, scholastic aptitude scores are falling...
...I would too, were Scarecroufs only memory for me an awareness of its tricks played on me...
...and see to it that noncollege material is channeled into practical trade and technical training centers...
...eliminate second-rate universities, faculties, and students...
...Scarecrow straddles that line between sentiment and sentimentality...
...It is also visions of contemporary America ringing true, the grit and grime of a culture increasingly lacking style, grace, warmth, but possessed everywhere t,f that particular ease, that forwardness, that optimism we call "Amer24 The Alternative November 1973 ican...
...Whether scarcity is expressed in biblical or scientific terms, the Christian economist knows that it imposes a limit on human action that men cannot overcome...
...Scarecrow tells of two losers...
...On a light level, for instance: in the spring I went off to Brother Sun, Sister Moon: perfectly charming to look at, lovely kids, Nature natural, greener than green, and on in that vein...
...Make 'em Cry You go to the movies in a funk, some film matches your temperament that day...
...To a Christian, that question is inverted...
...Charts only path to better living...
...North's essays on economics, only a few of which are explicitly Christian, and none at a level one would call "introductory...
...Yet both the Keynesians and the Chicago school of economists share the notion that inflation stimulates the production of new wealth...
...Max then beats the bully and we're off again...
...The conflicting approaches, bi-level emotions, reasoned film reviewer's backlog of experience fighting with the eternal little boy movie-lover's wonderment that the thing up there can move and can move me--all this conjoins not to produce, as one would hope, a well-made critique the next day, but to leave me with two sets of notes, as though two different heads saw the same film, the same night, the same two hours of, say, Scarecrow...
...One almost bemoans the passing of that extinct class, the slightly neurotic, rather despotic but wholely dedicated spinster teacher and/or austere teaching nun who at least succeeded in pounding the basic elements of mathematics and reading into their balky charges, along with a modicum of civility, clarity of thought and expression, and hygeine...
...Chapter on political sophistication worth the whole book...
...It is also cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond (who did the splendid work in Deliverance and McCabe and Mrs...
...they are crude...
...Max leaves, alone, for Pittsburgh...
...Lion tells Max only that the kid is fine, is a boy, and that he thinks he won't mess up the lives of those he's deserted by visiting them...
...As North explains it, economics works because it is based on the right "givens," on premises borrowed from Christianity...
...Box 9622, San Diego, Calif...
...Which I did...
...It is mythic: the lonesome buddies myth, the On the Open Read myth, the myth of the Yankee struggle for success out of adversity...
...They're an unlikely pair, the beffo-socko and the tender innocent...
...In a couple of the essays, he quotes Isaiah on the moral and financial ravages of inflation: "How is the faithful city become an harlot...
...You cannot create wealth by printing paper bills and designating them money...
...Freshly .^,lP.A~u debunks something-for-nothing promised through government, unions, business or magic...
...we come to favor them as they come to favor each other...
...How can you fuse Christian belief with a value-free science...
...North brings the best of both sides to these essays, although the book is heavily weighted towards, and most useful for, the economics...
...92109 The Alternative November 1973 25...
...These maintenance men used to be supplied by selective, traditionally structured universities that emphasized a rich appreciation and understanding of western civilization...
...It usurps and centralizes power in the state...
...For instance, the all-important economic fact of scarcity is an exact counterpart of God's curse upon the earth (Gen...
...Lion's personal aphorism--"people can't stay mad at you if you make them laugh"--and his pet theory (whence derives the film's name) that scarecrows don't scare crows but instead amuse them, thereby securing the crow's beneficence on the farmer who sets up the scarecrow, mark him as the beloved simpleton, the sweet boy-man whose final collapse into anguish tears us, the audience, apart...
...but now murderers...
...It is wrong...
...set up a dual secondary school system that separates wheat from chaff, along European lines...
...Sheds new light on cause and only possible cure of inflation and unemployment...
...North writes well, with occasional wit...
...P.O...
...What does Witonski suggest by way of improvement...
...Miller...
...Simon, I should guess, would be savage...
...Christianity, of course, does deal with moral values...
...The Alternative November 1973 23 Lion up in his plan to conquer the world with car washes...
...Scene four takes them to Detroit...
...Economics, as a science, is "value~ free...
...Shows what you can do to correct the situation...
...As if programmed on a machine, the set-up's perfect: we don't like these chaps at first...
...The Christian would add: inflation is theft...
...Until we follow such a course, too many unqualified college instructors will be teaching (or, rather, attempting to teach) too many unqualified college students with abysmal results to themselves and the institutions they supposedly serve...
...The two guys are obviously such nice, pathetic fellows...
...It is not supposed to make moral judgments about what is right, fair, or just...
...Puts blame where it surprisingly belongs...
...How can there be a valid economics except in a God-ordered world...
...Or the sun's tickling every fiber, the one you love loves you truly, truly dear, and shows it...
...Conant and the worse things that have come after him is the fact that civilized institutions--~ they artistic, economic, academic, or governmental--require a certain number of civilized maintenance men...
...Since Witenski is also a literate fellow with an ample measure of wit, it also reads well, despite a few traces of hastiness in preparation...
...It redistributes capital from efficient (by preinflation standards) producers to less efficient producers...
...Max, played by the estimable Gene Hackman, is just out of jail for fighting, a pattern he's developed of busting up people and places 'til he gets busted again and again himself...
...Good luck, Peter, but don't hold your breath...
...R iew An Introduction to Christian Economics by Gary North Craig $9.95 What we have here is a collection of Mr...
...It ought to be obvious...
...Re-enthrones the economics, morals and politics of something-for-sornething...
...we feel for their feelings...
...Max at first tries to avoid hooking in with Lion, but at last their inability to hitch a ride brings them together, Max sweeping The Alternative Educational News Service is a bi.weekly publication which offers feature stories, book reviews, research and background material for student publicotian~ .For o free subscription send the name and address of your campus publicotian to: The Alternative Educational News Service, R.R...
...Close...
...It has killed more men, pervaded and corrupted the choicest interests of our country more, and done more injustice than even the arms and artifices of our enemies...
...Before the trek to Detroit, where Lion wants to see his child, born after he had abandoned his girl to run off to sea for five years, they follow train tracks to Denver, there to contact sister Coley (Dorothy Tristan) and her partner, a sex-starved woman (Ann Wedgeworth) who gives Max what he needs...
...Lion refuses, horrifled, and is beaten by his friend-turnedtormenter...
...This film calls, perhaps, for the thoroughly ruthless critic (John Simon, maybe) to eviscerate its cheapjack emotionalism, to expose its manipulativeness, and to give no quarter even to the merits of the film, which are several, if overwhelmed by the faults...
...His latest book is a useful guide to anyone seriously concerned about the state of American education at all levels and how it might be salvaged...
...Institutional theft leads to social disaster...
...the girls are such toughies with hearts of gold...
...but the inane screenplay, the acting, the asinine cavorting about and silly resonances of current events to give, ugh, "relevance" to Saint Francis...
...He starts with the pure definition, "any increase in the money supply," and summons up flawless arguments against it...
...It encourages unscrupulous debtors to discharge their debts with depreciated paper worth a fraction of the sum owed...
...That debasement of the currency is accompanied by moral decline has been observed in every inflation, not least by Peletiah Webster at the time of the racking "Continental" inflation that prolonged and nearly ruined the American Revolution: "We have suffered more from this cause [paper money inflation] than from any other cause or calamity...
...He also has the knack of picking just the right quote to tack down a point...
...So how can there be such a thing as "Christian economics...
...it lapses into mawkishness, then rises fitfully to genuine humor laced with spunk...
...Despite the obvious advantages of settling in Denver--both men are happy, both women are happy, why not Denver?-it's not to be...
...Lion, naive beyond words, allows himself to be aided by a prison sharpie (Richard Lynch), whose aim is eventually revealed: sex...
...it was full of judgment...
...But it isn't always that simple...
...Postpaid Send check or money order direct to the publisher LOEFFLER &: CO., INC...
...Inflation is an invisible, unpredictable tax on capital...
...Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water: Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves" (Isaiah 1:21-23...
...From these wellsprings he has drunk deeply of erudition and, like most young writers, he tends to use rather more of it than is called for...
...It encourages manufacturers to hide price increases in the form of poor and shoddy merchandise...
...Sometimes, not infrequently, one finds two sets of conflicting reactions, thought patterns, approaches, operating during a film viewing...
...Indeed, a gush of new paper money does appear to stimulate productivity at first...
Vol. 7 • November 1973 • No. 2
