Any day now, I’ll get back to regular posting. The past couple of months have been too filled with events, including the sad (scroll down) and the joyous (the arrival of a new great-niece, Elsa Mae Oien, two and a half weeks ago), to leave much time or energy for this blog. It is not, however, abandoned forever, to demonstrate which, here are some miscellaneous thoughts as the year comes to a close.
■ The great disappointment of the season was the cinematic mangling of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. My faith in Hollywood’s ability to spoil a good book is almost boundless, but I’d had a smidgeon of hope that this picaresque tale would flow easily onto the screen. Ha, ha, ha.
In a triumph of dogma over esthetics, the movie makers decided that Caspian’s voyage had to have a better motive than curiosity about what lies beyond the horizon. Hence, his nominal purpose – to discover the fates of seven noblemen who years ago fled his evil uncle King Miraz – is converted into a videogame-like quest for seven ancient swords to lay on Aslan’s Table to break the spell of an “island of evil” that generates a green mist that evaporates the mothers of cute little girls.
To make space for this uninteresting ueberplot, the incidents that make the book worth reading are stripped of their flesh. We lose Caspian’s bold bluff to recover the Lone Islands and his classic retort to their slave-trading governor. (“Have you no idea of progress, of development?” “I have seen them both in an egg. We call it Going bad in Narnia.”) Eustace’s dragonification takes place off-screen. The Dufflepuds are whisked in and out in a few minutes. Lucy’s temptation by the Magician’s Book is barely intelligible. The Island Where Dreams Come True is now just a font of unexplained wickedness. Ramandu never appears. The final journey to the Utter East is dull rather than lyrical.
If one seeks dramatizations of the Narnia chronicles, a better choice – and less expensive than a movie ticket – is Focus on the Family’s radio adaptation.
■ According to liberal commentators (and some conservatives, too), the lame duck session of the 111th Congress was a surpassing triumph for Barack Obama. This “triumph” consisted of the deployment of huge, soon-to-depart Democratic majorities to repeal the legal restrictions on military service by homosexuals (thus leaving this and future Administrations free to adopt whatever policies they want and can slip past hegemonic judges) and to ratify a not very significant arms control treaty with Russia. Both measures could have been passed before the election, but the Democrats were afraid to bring them up, lest they aggravate November’s rout. Lame duck enactment was, at heart, a Dem F— Y— to the voters.
Yet even the waning majority wasn’t enough for an F— Y— on matters of greater moment. The White House and its Congressional allies gave up on tax increases for “the rich”, an extravagant spending plan for 2011, the cap-and-tax energy panacea and the abolition of secret ballots in union organizing elections, formerly high priorities. All in all, the President “triumphed” by surrendering most of the ground on taxes (and in as sullenly ungracious a manner as possible; even airhead Obamacon Peggy Noonan noticed), whimpering helplessly as his budget plan tanked, abandoning key elements of his agenda, and consoling himself with the two items least offensive to conservatives. The repeal of DADT will make military operations more challenging, but the Armed Forces can handle challenges, and one must concede that homosexuals have powerful reasons to take the lead in fighting Islamic supremacists. New START does little harm; the argument against it is that it does no good and feeds the pretensions of Tsar Vladimir.
A few more triumphs like this, and the President will have ample leisure in 2013 for the writing of his third autobiography.
■ The high risk pools that were supposed to mitigate the plight of Americans who can’t buy medical insurance (pending Obamacare’s forced draft of youngsters to subsidize their less healthy elders) have been a spectacular flop. Enrollment is less than 1/40th(!) of the forecast level, yet the $5 billion set aside for subsidies is likely to be insufficient. From this experience, I draw two morals:
First, the problem of uninsured people with pre-existing conditions, while sometimes tragic for individuals, is too small in scope to justify an upheaval in our country’s health care system. Based on the Medicare actuary’s projections, barely one in 800 Americans needed high risk pool coverage. Hardly one in 40,000 took advantage of it. These are magnitudes of misfortune that charity and, if necessary, public welfare can handle.
Second, the experts know little about the consequences of the giant, jerry-built scheme that constitutes Obamacare. In other areas, progressives are risk-averse advocates of the Precautionary Principle. Regarding health care, they choose to leap from Sears Tower with an untested parachute sewn by blind seamstresses.
. . . . More to come.