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Seeing the USA

"Can you still see the USA in your Chevrolet? Through a windscreen darkly. ...

"See the USA from your Chevrolet: An hereditary legislature, a media fawning its way into bankruptcy, its iconic coastal states driving out innovators and entrepreneurs, the arrival of the new Messiah heralded only by the leaden dirge of 'We Three Kings Of Ol´ Detroit Are/Seeking checks we traverse afar,' and Route 66 looking ever more like a one-way dead-end street to Bailoutistan. ...

"'I feel like I lost my country,' said the Hudson Institute´s Herbert London the other day, wondering whatever happened to the land of opportunity and dynamism. But I´m more of an optimist. Maybe Princess Caroline [Kennedy] will be appointed CEO of [General Motors] and all will be well. Or maybe Bed, Bath and Beyond will put wheels on the Swash 700 Elongated Biscuit Toilet Seat Bidet."

-Mark Steyn, writing in "Can You Still See the USA in Your Chevrolet?" on National Review Online on Saturday

Taking notes

"The story begins 20 years ago. Roz Wyman, who had chaired the Democratic Convention in San Francisco in '84, was lunching... with ...Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.... Wyman button-holed William Morris' Norman Brokaw as he walked by and she told him Pelosi was someone to watch. ... He gave her one piece of advice: 'Take notes, take notes.' She did.

"Pelosi, now the grandmother of seven and married to Paul P. for 45 years, has written 'Know Your Power: A Message to America's Daughters.' ...

"When first approached to run for Congress, she admitted she asked her then-teenage daughter for advice. 'It's up to you,' Nancy told her oldest. The response was immediate. 'Mother! Get a life!' She certainly has. Pelosi writes, 'I consider my involvement in politics as an extension of my role as a mom.'

"In addition to talking about her opportunities, she emphasized the importance of recognizing and utilizing power. She pulls no punches in relating her disagreements with the President on the eve of - and following - his declaration of war. ...

"As for the future, she spoke enthusiastically about the new administration and its plans in all fields - of which she has always been a supporter. And - she'll take notes."

-Army Archerd, writing in "Speaker Nancy Pelosi Speaks in L.A." on Variety.com on Dec. 15

Tackling the 'Self'

"Jim Carrey will loom large in our shattered posterity ... because his filmography amounts to a uniquely sustained engagement with the problem of the self. Who knows how the self became such a problem, or when we began to feel the falseness in our nature? ...

"Other clowns have risen since Carrey first stormed the multiplexes with 'Ace Ventura: Pet Detective' - Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Seth Rogen - but for more than a decade now, he has been the go-to guy for high-concept metaphysics, for Hollywood´s sci-fi of the self. ...

"Movie after movie finds Carrey either confronting God ('Smite me, O mighty Smiter!' he roars in 'Bruce Almighty') or enacting, violently and outrageously, some version of the dilemma identified by the Spanish existentialist Jose Ortega y Gasset - that man, as he exists in the world, is 'equivalent to an actor bidden to represent the personage which is his real I.' One wonders what the French make of him. Here in America, we´ve been content to regard him as a blockbustering goofball, but in France ... where philosophy is king and Jerry Lewis is awarded the Legion d´Honneur, might not they be readying garlands for Jim Carrey?"

-James Parker, writing in "The Existential Clown," in the December issue of the Atlantic