The decade of the 1950s gave birth to some genuinely weird westerns. I honestly don’t know why that might have been. Was it because the 1950s was a rather weird time? Or because so many westerns had been made they were running out of ideas? In this post I’m going to highlight and make a few points about two of them.

The first is Rancho Notorious (1952), directed by Fritz Lang and starring Marlene Dietrich, Arthur Kennedy, and Mel Ferrer. What makes it weird?

It opens, as quite a number 50s westerns did, with a rather florid song being sung over the credits. “This is the tale of Chuck-a-Luck”. What’s “Chuck-a-Luck”? We don’t know. (I know it’s a gambling game.) The working title of the movie was The Legend of Chuck-a-Luck, “Chuck-a-Luck” being an outlaw hideout run by Marlene Dietrich. But Howard Hughes, head of RKO, objected to the title so it was changed to Rancho Notorious. How is “Rancho Notorious” worked into the script? It isn’t.

The characters in Rancho Notorious were rather weird as well. Marlene Dietrich had just turned 50. She still looked great but, well, she had just turned 50 and 70 years ago 50 was a lot older than it is now. And she was still playing, essentially, the same character she’d been playing since 1930. She should have graduated to more mature roles and reportedly Fritz Lang wanted that but Marlene refused. By the end of the shooting of the film they were barely speaking.

Others of the characters just feel vaguely “off”. Rancho Notorious could very nearly be moved to the Austrian Alps, exchanging Mexicans and Native Americans for Romanians and Roma people without otherwise changing it a great deal.

Rancho Notorious is a revenge story and, at the end, just about everybody except Arthur Kennedy is dead. He’s gotten his revenge.

Present day viewers (assuming there are present day viewers—it’s watchable but just barely) will find Rancho Notorious oddly familiar. Blazing Saddles is largely a parody of Rancho Notorious—the theme song, Lily Von Shtupp, some of the other characters.

Did you think that “gender bender” westerns with female gunfighters and male helpless victims were an invention of the 1990s? Hardly. Johnny Guitar (1954) got there 40 years earlier. Joan Crawford (yes, Joan Crawford who became a star playing flappers in the 20s and revived her career with Mildred Pierce 20 years later) plays a gun-slinging female saloonkeeper, Sterling Hayden a sort of male bimbo. He’s not as helpless as he seems!

I can’t bring myself to rewatch Johnny Guitar which is a shame because it features the fabulous radio actress Mercedes McCambridge who, it is said, received standing ovations for her more dramatic scenes from the crew.

I presume there is some Nicholas Ray fan out there who will disagree with me about Johnny Guitar. Without a difference of opinion there would be no horseraces.

Any other weird westerns from the 1950s? Or later? I wouldn’t count parodies like Blazing Saddles and the great Lust in the Dust. Billy the Kid vs. Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, both made in 1966, come to mind.

In a similar vein at Rand James Dobbins muses about continued NATO expansion and, in my opinion, does a masterful job of mugwumpery, unwilling to oppose NATO expansion but convinced that the time for NATO expansion has long passed:

NATO’s expansion toward the Russian border has long antagonized Moscow. For many years Russia could do little about it. That has changed. In recent years, Putin has repeatedly demonstrated that Russia is capable and willing to use armed force to prevent further NATO encroachment on its borders. This is one reason why NATO’s open-door policy is an anachronism.

The other reason is the primacy accorded to the Chinese challenge by three successive American administrations. Commitments in Europe and the Middle East were supposed to be stabilized if not reduced in favor of rebalancing toward Asia. Undertaking to defend another of Russia’s neighbors over Russia’s vehement objections would indeed be a major new burden. Even increasing defense resources to Europe merely to hold open that possibility seems wildly inconsistent with settled and bipartisan American policy.

The dangers generated by NATO’s open-door policy are directed, in the first instance, at those who take the United States and its allies at their word. In 2008, at a NATO summit in Bucharest, the alliance’s leaders, prompted by President Bush, promised Georgia and Ukraine that they would one day become NATO members. It’s now 13 years later. Russia has invaded both countries and seized their territory either for itself or for Russian proxy regimes, leaving Ukraine and Georgia further from NATO membership than ever. Becoming a NATO member in waiting on the border of Russia leaves the aspirant in a most vulnerable position, provoking Moscow without committing NATO.

Yet even if one accepts that NATO’s open-door policy is anachronistic and dangerous, abandoning it under current circumstances could be more dangerous still. Closing the NATO door could save Ukraine from a Russian invasion and even enable it to recover some of its lost territory. Nevertheless, to adopt such a posture under Russian pressure would be interpreted, not least by the Ukrainians themselves, as an abandonment. Coming so soon after the U.S. and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan, this would render such a devastating blow to American credibility and NATO cohesion that continuing to defend an outdated policy and an empty promise of future membership may appear preferable.

He rather clearly thinks that Ukraine and, presumably, Georgia should engage in a posture of studied neutrality, as Finland and Austria did during the Cold War.

The question remains why are we determined to expand NATO to include Georgia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet republics? Clearly, it is not to strengthen the alliance. If anything it does the opposite. It stretches the credibility of the alliance. Does anyone actually believe that Germany or Italy will send troops to defend Ukraine in case of attack? And it actually places the new recruits in danger as Mr. Dobbins observed.

My WAG is that it’s part of continuing expansion of the European Union or, said another way, Germany wants more markets for its goods.

I think you might find this analysis of Germany’s views of the Ukraine situation by Marcel Dirsus at War on the Rocks informative. After observing that rhetorically Germany has been supportive of the Ukrainians while pragmatically they’ve been supportive of the Russians. Mr. Dirsus observes:

Germans’ world is one in which their country has “moved beyond power politics, the national interest and militarism.” It’s a parallel reality in which trade beats force and every conflict between states can be solved through more dialogue or more multilateralism. Germany’s allies can be exasperated by this view or take comfort in the fact it may slowly be beginning to change. But at the very least they would do well to understand it.

Germany, of course, is not a monolith, but there are some deeply held views in large parts of German society that have a huge influence on foreign policy.

The most significant of these is the way in which many Germans view the role of military power in international politics. Seen from Lower Saxony or Bavaria, military force is not just evil, it’s also useless. It has caused the greatest tragedies of the 20th century and a whole lot of needless suffering during the Cold War. Since then, it has only created more chaos and death in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya. In her excellent essay on the topic, Ulrike Franke outlines how millennial Germans, who are now moving into positions of power, came to think the way they do. If you were born in (western) Germany in the middle of the 1980s or thereafter, you grew up “in a world of exceptional stability and peace.” That doesn’t mean that nothing happened, but Germany was so safe and protected that Germans “never had to think about the military,” and their education further emphasized the futility of force. As Franke notes, that has had an important impact on the way in which young Germans see the world and on what they consider to be normal.

Read the whole thing. I think he’s being very charitable. I would say rather than a) Germany has been so swaddled for so long in an American security blanket the Germans see it as just part of the natural order of things and b) the Germans are highly reluctant to do anything that would bear costs for Germany. As long as we’re willing to underwrite German foreign policy goals, why should they think any other way?

From 1915 to 2013, an astonishing 98 year run, the Quigley Publishing Company, publisher of Exhibitors Herald, a film industry trade journal, published a poll. The poll was of motion picture theater owners and was called the “Top Ten Money Making Stars Poll”. It asked theater owners to list the top ten stars who made them the most money. It was generally regarded as the most reliable gauge of a star’s “bankability”.

I’ve found the results interesting and have been studying them. For example, as should surprise no one, the most bankable star of all time was John Wayne, closely followed by Clint Eastwood. John Wayne was ranked in the top ten for 25 years; Eastwood for 21. The star ranked #1 the most years, a bit surprising to me, was Tom Cruise. As will probably surprise most (but not me) the star who ranked #1 for the most consecutive years was Bing Crosby.

Hollywood’s “Golden Age” is usually reckoned as starting in 1930 (some would say it started with Birth of a Nation in 1915 but I would say that was more the beginning of the classic Hollywood movie). When you review the Top Ten lists of the Golden Age there is little doubt why Clark Gable was called “the King of Hollywood”. He ranked in the top ten every year from 1932 to 1943.

One of the things most interesting to me is how relatively few of the #1 rated stars of the Golden Age worked for Warner Brothers or MGM. Here are the #1 rated stars from 1930 to 1945:

In case you’re curious Humphrey Bogart was never rated the #1 box office star and only broke into the top ten in 1943. Nowadays Betty Grable to the extent that she’s known at all is known for her famous pin-up but during the 1940s she was the highest paid woman in America and probably Hollywood’s most reliably bankable star. Bette Davis was only in the top ten 1939-1941 and Katharine Hepburn didn’t make the top ten until 1969.

Why do people, to the extent that they have any idea of who the big stars were, tend of think of Warner Brothers or MGM players? MGM did have a lot of stars—”more stars than there are in the heavens” was an advertising slogan they used at one point. But that characterization fits Fox or Paramount at least as well.

My theory is that the reason that people are more familiar with Warner Brothers stars now than they were during Hollywood’s Golden Age has to do with television syndication. In other words Ted Turner probably had more to do with the fame of Warners and MGM stars than Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer did.

I materially agree with Andrew Sullivan’s take on the Whoopi Goldberg kerfuffle:

In my view, racism is first and foremost a human impulse: it can infect anyone, of any race, at any time. Tribal identity goes very, very deep, and resisting it requires work. It’s also true that, over time, systems emerge which institutionalize racism — slavery, segregation, the legal restriction to certain professions, the denial of religious freedom, bans on intermarriage, Jim Crow, affirmative action etc. Those systems do indeed need dismantling (and have indeed been dismantled in America) if we are to move forward together.

But in a multicultural, multiracial society as complex as ours, the cross currents, the nuances and the complexities — especially in a population becoming more diverse and inter-married than ever — simply cannot be reduced to “always-oppressor/white” and “always-oppressed/black.” There is good and bad, racist and antiracist, in every human soul and in every demographic group. When you ignore that fundamental truth, you end up where we are: missing so much of complicated human reality that you actually excuse the Nazis — yes, the Nazis — for their racism.

I do have a few quibbles, however. I think he’s conflating bigotry and racism. They aren’t the same. All racism is bigotry but not all bigotry is racism. In addition to bigotry with respect to race, there’s bigotry with respect to religion, economic status, ethnicity, and sexual orientation as Andrew must certainly have experienced, just to name a few. I myself have experienced bigotry on account of my race and on account of my religion. Believe it or not I experience bigotry with respect to my religion on practically a daily basis.

And I don’t think that many recognize it but the notion that blacks in the U. S. uniquely experience bigotry on account of their race goes back a long time—at least fifty years which is when the tenets of critical race theory and those that inform DEI were first explained to my by a black friend. I suspect they’re an outgrowth of black nationalism or at least interwoven with it.

In her Washington Post column Megan McArdle remarks on the decline in the value of Meta’s stock, the largest one day decline in the value of a stock in history:

In 2012, Mark Zuckerberg decided to take the company all in on a mobile-first strategy. This was disruptive, at first, but in time, he would be seen as a visionary prophet leading his company to the promised land.

The problem is, that land wasn’t owned by him. Zuckerberg had shifted his company away from the open platform of the browser and onto a closed system where Apple set the terms. For a long time, that was a very good deal for Facebook — but when Apple decided to alter the deal, Facebook didn’t really have much recourse.

There’s a lesson in that, even if you aren’t planning to launch a media site, or a social media platform. Our ferocious arguments about who should be kicked off Spotify, or Twitter, are fundamentally about the same problem: So much of our public life takes place on a handful of technology platforms, where what we see and whom we reach is determined by policies set by some faceless programmer in Silicon Valley. We are all of us tenants of the digital manor — even, it turns out, some of the lords.

I have never understood Facebook’s sky-high valuation for the simple reason that I didn’t believe that its prospective revenue could ever match the expectations. I do think that Facebook (and Google) should be broken up because a) they wield too much political power; and b) they have been using their de facto monopolies to expand their monopolies into other other areas.

I don’t have a great deal to add to Ms. McArdle’s observations but I do have some questions:

1. Will Meta’s stock recover? Or will it decline to its 2012 levels? That would be a decline of 90% from peak.
2. Will Meta bring other tech stocks down with it?
3. Is this the beginning of the end of the bull market?

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” H. L. Mencken (1918)

“The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive.” Thomas Jefferson (1787)

“Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” Thomas Paine (1776)

“There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” Sam Clemens (1896)

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” Ronald Reagan (1986)

“The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust our own government statements.” J. William Fulbright

“Distrust & caution are the parents of security.” Benjamin Franklin (1733)

“The fact that you continue to undermine public confidence in a vaccine, if the vaccine emerges during the Trump administration, I think is unconscionable.” Mike Pence (2020)

Now let’s turn to the editors’ of the Washington Post’s remarks on the mortality rate due to COVID-19 in the U. S. compared with other “rich countries”:

The covid-19 death toll in the United States has soared again, and the U.S. per capita death rate now exceeds that of other wealthy nations. Why? Wasn’t the United States supposed to be best prepared for such a calamity? What accounts for the different pandemic fates of nations and peoples — and what can they do to prepare better for next time? The answers lie in biology, but also in human behavior.

This is the kernel of wisdom in a new study published in the Lancet that examined how 177 nations fared from Jan. 1, 2020, to Sept. 30, 2021, and the impact of various factors on sickness and death. The study examined infections per capita and each country’s infection-fatality ratio, the proportion of deaths among all infected individuals. It was led by Thomas J. Bollyky, director of the global health program at the Council on Foreign Relations, along with Erin N. Hulland and Joseph Dieleman of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, with others. It measured the impact on the pandemic of such factors as age, economic output, population density, air pollution, body mass index, smoking, cancer prevalence and trust in government and interpersonal trust, among other things.

For many factors, the correlations weren’t clear, but some stood out. Most importantly, there is a link between lower infection rates and three factors: trust in government, greater interpersonal trust and less government corruption. The researchers said “higher levels of trust (government and interpersonal) had large, statistically significant associations with fewer infections for the entire study period.”

This is not a new idea but explains so much of what has occurred in the United States and elsewhere over the past two years. Especially in free societies, a high degree of trust in government and among people has led to better pandemic outcomes because people were more willing to comply with public health guidance — to wear masks and social distance, for example. But in the United States, the rise of distrust, misinformation and suspicion has seriously eroded that compliance, and has taken a toll. The study points out that higher trust also leads to a greater number of people getting vaccinated, and thus fewer deaths. Trust is important, the researchers found, not only by people in their governments, but between individuals. When people trust each other, such as in wearing masks when prescribed, it reduces the pandemic burden for all. The researchers also found that smoking and obesity, both health risk factors that can be reduced, contribute to worse outcomes.

The emphasis is mine. As the quotes with which I opened this post document, the United States was born with a distrust of government and Americans have never had a great degree of trust in our government. During World War II and its immediate aftermath there was a surge of trust in government but that was quickly eroded and by 1970 was all but completely gone.

The mortality rate from COVID-19 is higher in the U. S. than in any other OECD country. Besides a lack of trust in government and a higher mortality rate from COVID-19, we differ from other major OECD countries in a number of ways. Income inequality is higher here than in other major OECD countries other than the UK and Mexico, countries with which we have much in common. We are also racially/ethnically more diverse than nearly any other OECD country other than Belgium which has a mortality rate due to COVID-19 not incredibly different from ours. Like it or not racial/ethnic, linguistic, economic, and cultural homogeneity increase trust.

Additionally, when we have political parties and major media intent on making us distrust one another, what else would you expect?

I found this piece in The Guardian by Dani Anguiano about the goings-on in Shasta Country, California distressing:

Retired police chief and self-described Reagan Republican with decades of public service, Leonard Moty checked all the boxes to represent his community in one of California’s most conservative counties.

But on Tuesday, voters ousted Moty, handing control of the Shasta county board of supervisors to a group aligned with local militia members. The election followed nearly two years of threats and increasing hostility toward the longtime supervisor and his moderate colleagues in response to pandemic health restrictions.

While it’s not yet clear who will replace Moty, the two candidates in the lead attended a celebration on Tuesday with members of an area militia group, the Sacramento Bee reported.

The recall is a win for the ultra-conservative movement in Shasta county, which has fought against moderate Republican officials and sought to gain a foothold in local government in this rural part of northern California.

It also highlights a phenomenon that extends far beyond the region, as experts warn the pandemic and eroding trust in US institutions has fueled extremism in local politics and hostility against officials that could reshape governments from school boards to county supervisors to Congress.

“I think it’s going to be a change in our politics. I think we’re going to shift more to the alt-right side of things,” Moty said on Wednesday. “I really thought my community would step up to the plate and they didn’t and that’s very discouraging.”

I think they identified some of the factors in the change but not all. The obvious hypocrisy and arrogance of state officials and constant negative advertising for political gain are undoubtedly contributing factors as well.

The editors of the Washington Post are convinced that we can “win” against Islamist terrorist groups if we just deploy enough troops in enough places:

The raid on Mr. Qurayshi exemplified Mr. Biden’s preferred approach to global terrorist groups: containing them via “over the horizon” strikes and local allied forces rather than through long-term U.S. ground commitments such as the one he terminated in Afghanistan in August. It does not, by itself, vindicate that approach. To the contrary, the defeat of the Islamic State’s dangerous prison assault demonstrated the wisdom of keeping roughly 900 U.S. troops in Syria to support the Kurds, as Mr. Biden has quietly decided to do. The president has his hands full with deterring Russia in Ukraine and the longer-term effort to counter China. Yet, as Mr. Biden’s decision to strike the terrorist leader showed, those goals cannot be pursued at the expense of vigilance against jihadist terrorism.

I think they need to define “win”. I’m confident that by stationing a thousand troops here and a thousand troops there we can whack the moles down when they pop their heads up if that’s what they mean. The victory will only be temporary.

As I’ve pointed out before violent fundamentalist violence is endemic in any confession that is sola scriptura and has no magisterium but whose holy scripture can be interpreted as authorizing violence against infidels (however defined). Let me decompress that a bit. Sola scriptura means that scripture is the sole source of truth for the confession. Magisterium means ultimate teaching authority. Islam fits that description. The Qur’an is the source of truth for believers and there is no ultimate teaching authority whose interpretation of the Qur’an is more valid than that of the individual believer. Sure, there are scholars but they’re not authoritative.

Fundamentalist violence in Islam didn’t suddenly materialize in 2001. It’s cropped up from time to time among Muslims since the founding of the religion. There is no “win”.