Ebert's Most Hated

Every few years, I get a good laugh by re-reading this selection of zingers from Roger Ebert's most devastasting movie reviews.

My favourite is definitely this one: "This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels." (It's for a comedy with an obscene name so, if you're curious, you'll have to read the article. Or at least skim it.)

But don't get me wrong, I also appreciate this one: "Watching Mad Dog Time is like waiting for the bus in a city where you’re not sure they have a bus line". (This unfortunate film also won this unenviable accolade from him: "the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time".)

And then there's his verdict on the Spice Girls, the stars of Spice World: "What can you say about five women whose principal distinguishing characteristic is that they have different names?"

Mind you, I don't agree with all his evaluations. The Dukes of Hazzard is one of my favourite films, although I seem to be alone in my enthusiasm for it. (Even the cast disparaged it.) Halloween III isn't one of my favourite horror films, but it's definitely in the second division (to a great extent on the strength of that incredibly creepy jingle that plays in a sinister advertisement, "Three more days to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween..")

I watched all the Resident Evil films that had been made up to 2018 over the Christmas of that year, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. They're goofy, but fun. I saw Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo in the cinema and found it endearingly stupid. I laughed several times.

I thought The Village (and its twist) deserved much better than to be featured on this list, and The Usual Suspect is good by any standards.

Still, his put-downs are a hoot.

To find out what happened when Ebert ran into someone who'd been on the receiving end of one of these reviews-- probably the worst of them, in fact-- read here. It's both funny and heartwarming.

Real and Imagined Social Decline

There are, in my view, two mistaken attitudes to social decline:

1) There is nothing new under the sun. People have been lamenting social and cultural decline since the dawn of man, but nothing ever really changes.

2) Everything is declining all the time. Almost every example of change can be held up as a sign of broader social and cultural decline.

My suggestion is this: there are real examples of social and cultural decline, but dragging everything into this narrative makes it impossible to talk about it seriously. If we fall into a pattern of reflexive curmudgeonliness, nobody need take anything we say about actual social and cultural decline seriously.

A few of my recent blog posts have been along this theme. For instance, in this blog post on language change, and in this blog post on criticisms of social media (including the common claim that attention spans are shortening). I'm playing the sceptic in those posts.

However, I definitely believe there are real examples of social and cultural decline. For instance (and this will surprise nobody who's ever read this blog), the decline of poetry.

When I talk about the decline of poetry, I'm often presented with the argument that music lyrics are the poetry of today. So the successors of Yeats and Tennyson are actually Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Eminem.

I don't think this argument works. I'm not denying that the lyrics of popular music can often attain the level of poetry. I think they can. But only in flashes, here and there.

On the whole, there's no comparison. There's nothing like the same level of depth, nuance, and seriousness involved. Nor is there the same level of coherence. A poem by any great classical poet flows from beginning to end. Even the best popular music lyrics tend to be simply a series of phrases strung together. 

(I've noticed that many of the more well-read rock musicians were influenced by Dylan Thomas, a classical poet who did write in this montage style. Bob Dylan took his stage name from him. William Blake also tends to popular with rockers, partly for the same reason.) 

Besides, there were always popular songs and people always quoted them, but they once lived alongside classical poetry.

But I don't want to go any further down that bunny trail.

Here's something I've noticed about laments of social decline. Liberals and progressives seem to indulge in them at least as much as conservatives. Very often it points to a contradiction in their own thought which they seem reluctant to face. 

For instance, they'll (quite rightly) lament the sexualization of advertising or pop culture, but they won't relate this to the 1960's sexual revolution, or to the decline of Christian ethics. (Again, their panacea seems to be socialism; don't blame the sexual revolution, blame capitalism!)

But really, everybody seems to indulge in laments of social decline, all the time. Very often they have to do with everyday irritants like manners, customer service, etc.

Sometimes there are familiar laments that are entirely justified. For instance, inflation. The old codger nostalgically remembering everything he could do with a fiver, and still have change, has been a comic figure for decades. But he's been right all along. Inflation has continually skyrocketed for generations now.

Then there are other laments where I'm not so sure. For instance, the decline of small business in the face of big business. Chesterton was writing about this in the early twentieth century and it's seemed to be a constant refrain for decades. It's a perpetual theme in movies and TV. But small businesses haven't disappeared. Small shops haven't disappeared. It doesn't even seem to me like they've especially declined since my childhood.

And then there's the fact that people rarely seem to dwell on social and cultural improvements.

Here's an example. Many years ago, knowing my interest in movie posters, somebody bought me two books about them (and full of examples of them). One was about movie posters from the 1940s, the other was about movie posters from the 1980s. It took only a cursory flick through both of them to see that the movie posters from the eighties were clearly superior to the movie posters from the forties. The 1940s posters were all very boring, unimaginative compositions involving a few star faces and the title of the film. There was nothing like the famous image of ET passing over the moon on a bicycle. Or the little girl sitting beside a glowing screen, her arms outstretched, on the poster for Poltergeist.

Even when it comes to my biggest anxiety about social and cultural change-- the dread of cultural homogenization-- I'm not entirely sure it's really happening, considered as a whole. Is it simply the case that there have been recurrent waves of homogenization followed by fragmentation? Why do we have so many languages descended from Latin? How did La Téne culture become so widespread in an era long before modern communicatons? And what about counter-currents such as the recent revival of the Cornish language?

Now all has been heard, here is the conclusion of the matter: I think we should be slower and more tentative to make claims of social and cultural decline, without falling into the "nothing new under the sun" fallacy.

Places

Here's a very interesting post from Professor Bruce Charlton, "Meaningful Places Are Objectively Real to Me-- But Why?".

As I said in a comment, I wish he had elaborated more on why they're meaningful.

It's got me thinking about place. Well, I was thinking about it already, but it got me thinking about it more.

This post is just going to be about my own experiences and thoughts of place so it may not be of interest to anybody at all.

Here are some of my thoughts and experiences on place, in a numbered list:

1) I have a catastrophically bad sense of direction and geography. When I tell people this they generally think I'm exaggerating. It's worse than you would imagine. I don't even know Dublin well and I've lived here all my life. I don't even know Dublin city centre well. I can get from one place to another, of course, once I've done it a few times, but I can't mentally map the route (or describe it, without actually memorizing the description). It's like the password that you can tap in without thinking, but you can't remember when you have to think about it.

As for geography, I can now place all the counties on a map of Ireland (most of the time), and I'm pretty good at identifying the states of America and countries of Europe. But that's from taking internet quizzes repeatedly, over a period of years. And I still need to refresh that knowledge regularly or I'll forget.

2) I had absolutely no interest in geography or places as a kid, and even into my twenties. I developed an ego-protecting contempt for geography. I considered travel bores to be the worst of all bores (and I'm still inclined to think this). I didn't leave Ireland until I was twenty-seven. And this attitude still remains with me, pre-reflectively. For instance, I have a terrible habit of filtering geographical information out of whatever I'm reading, or whatever somebody is saying to me.

3) In spite of all this, over the years (decades) the idea of place has become fascinating to me. Especially this thought: that this place (wherever I am) is a unique place, different from any other. Even if it's totally unremarkable. Somehow, the thought of the uniqeness of a totally unremarkable place (like an industrial park or a dormitory suburb) is very exciting to me. The word "here" is exciting to me.

4) The indeterminacy of the term "place" excites me, too. What is a place? China is a place. Luton is a place. The Home Counties are a place. The Giant's Causeway is a place. The Rolling Donut on Dublin's O'Connell Street is a place.

I don't know why this excites me so much. I like everything that defies definition, that makes the world seem shimmering and eternally elusive.

I especially likes the way different ways of mapping the world cut across each other, for instance, old forms of demarcation like baronies and townlands which still have a sort of lingering existence.

5) Places are never really distinctive enough for my craving. I honestly wish every street and village had its own flag. When I went to Hull, I was seriously upset that there were more Yeats books than Larkin books in the local Waterstones.

6) Contrariwise, my innate loyalty to the ordinary (God knows where I got it from) has given me a sort of disdain for the picturesque. Disdain is too strong a word-- I'm happy the picturesque exists. I'm very happy it's there-- but it's not for me. It seems like cheating, too easy, even a kind of escapism. I need to find meaning and sustenance in the ordinary.

Of course, it's hard to really draw a clear distinction between the ordinary and the picturesque. Is Punxsatawney, the sleepy little town in Groundhog Day, picturesque? Or is it ordinary? I suppose it's both, but it's the sort of picturesque that doesn't seem like giving up on the ordinary. It's small town picturesque. There are lots of small towns.

7) As for particular places, that's such a big subject it would require a new post. I tried to write about Dublin a while back and I found it quite a strain, albeit an enjoyable one.

G.K. Chesterton on the English People in Politics

"You have seen English people perhaps for a moment in omnibuses, in streets on Saturday nights, in third-class carriages, or even in Bank Holiday waggonettes. You have not yet seen the English people in politics. It has not yet entered politics. Liberals do not represent it; Tories do not represent it; Labour Members, on the whole, represent it rather less than Tories or Liberals. When it enters politics it will bring with it a trail of all the things that politicians detest; prejudices (as against hospitals), superstitions (as about funerals), a thirst for respectability passing that of the middle classes, a faith in the family which will knock to pieces half the Socialism of Europe. If ever that people enters politics it will sweep away most of our revolutionists as mere pedants."

As quoted in Maisie Ward's biography. Originally from the introduction to a book called From Workhouse to Westminster: The Life Story of Will Crooks MP, by George Haw. Chesterton wrote a lot of introductions...

Midnight

On New Year's Day of 2025, I got a new watch in Lidl. It was part of my New Year's resolutions. I wanted to spend less time looking at screens, and thought having a watch would remove one excuse to keep checking my phone. It cost ten euro, and I never expected it to keep ticking along as long as it has.

As you can see from the blurry photo above, my watch had a bit of a mishap recently. The number twelve has fallen from its place at the top of the dial. One of the digits is trapped at the centre of the dial, another is stuck to the glass. I have no idea how this happened, but it was only a couple of days ago. It hasn't affected the watch's mechanism so far.

Strangely enough, I had already been thinking about the word "midnight" before this happened. Spooky, right?

"Midnight" has a strange glamour to it. Considered objectively, it's no big deal. It's simply the moment when one calendar day is succeeded by another. 

But the word can always be counted on to deliver something of a frisson, which means it often appears in the titles of songs, films and other works.

Midnight suggests all sorts of things; spookiness, danger, solemnity, pensiveness, anticipation...

I keep a spreadsheet of all the movies I watch, and all the movies I can remember ever having watched. (Pretty nerdy, I know.) It currently lists 1346 films, but the word "midnight" only returned two hits; one for Midnight Sting (1992), the other for Midnight Sky (2020), neither of them films that have lingered in my memory. (Indeed, I can't remember anything at all about the latter.)

There are lots of well-known films with the word "midnight" in the title, even though I haven't seen any of them: Midnight Cowboy, Midnight Express, Midnight in Paris, Chimes at Midnight.

(I love the phrase "chimes at midnight". It comes, as you probably know, from Shakespeare: "We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow". Meaning: we've lived it up.)

There used to be a fast-food restaurant in Dublin called Midnight Express, though I think it changed its name recently. (I've often wondered if naming a business after an artistic work has any copyright implications.)

There must be tonnes of folklore about midnight, although the only snippet that comes to mind is Cinderella having to leave the ball by midnight-- and in all honesty, I'm not even too clear about that. I don't want to look any of it up, because right now I'm interested in the popular associations that hang around the word "midnight", and I don't think most people would know any more of the folkore than I do.

I can think of at least one book I've read with "midnight" in the title. Four Past Midnight was actually the first Stephen King book I ever read. As you can probably guess, it's a collection of four stories. One of them, "The Sun Dog", actually spooked me. (It features a camera which takes inexplicable images of a scary dog coming closer and closer.) I started reading Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie but gave it up after a few pages. (The children of the title are Indians born at the moment of Indian independence.)

I've always loved the title Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, though I have no idea what the book is about.

The word "midnight" must feature extensively in poetry, I'm sure. But the only instance I can think of right now is the first line of "The Raven" by Poe: "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.."

Similarly, I'm sure there are hundreds of songs with the word "midnight" in the title. In fact, there are lots of articles listing them, like this one. My favourite is Midnight Confessions by the Grass Roots, which I came across on the excellent Jackie Brown soundtrack.

There's a sense of magic about midnight, I think it's fair to say. (Or at least, potential magic.) In this regard, I always recall a memory from my last year in primary school. My class were competing in a drama competition and we were staying in Ennis overnight. I can remember us sitting in the lobby of a hotel (although we weren't actually staying in the hotel). I made a reference to tomorrow, and another kid said: "It is tomorrow". So it was obviously past midnight. I was very impressed by this remark and I still think about it all these years later. I guess midnight is a "liminal space", a concept that has been much discussed in recent times.

I think we all have a sense of anxiety about disenchantment these days. And by "these days", I mean ever since the beginning of modernity. We are frightened of time and space becoming simply a grid, a contiuum. And we reach out for times and places that seem to have a soul of their own, an enchantment. It's nice to think that one of them comes every twenty-four hours.

(I timed the publication of this post for exactly midnight, but it shows as four p.m. I can't explain that! The obvious explanation is that Blogger, the platform I use, operates from a different timezone, but how would it be such a difference?)

Politics and the Irish Language

(The title of this blog post is a nod to Orwell's famous essay "Politics and the English Language", which I just happened to flick past while browsing a collection of his essays. I couldn't resist the coincidence.)

There are posters up all over Dublin for an upcoming protest in favour of the Irish language. They have given the protest the title "Cearta", which means "rights".

Here we see the thumbprint of the left once again. It's always about rights, it's always about government intervention, and it's always about more public money.

Personally I am entirely sympathetic to the preservation (and revival) of the Irish language, and I'm also sympathetic to increased public funding and to the compulsory use of Irish in various contexts, such as education.

But without increasing a public appetite for the revival of the Irish language, no level of government support will ever be enough. And it's hard to see what arguments could be used  to encourage people to speak Irish, considering anti-nationalism has become so engrained in modern Irish discourse.

And here we come to an interesting aspect of this campaign. Its website gives a list of ten problems, and here is number nine in its own words: "Over 50,000 students in secondary school are exempt from learning Irish and there is no plan at all to address this (the Department of Education has even made a point of saying that the upcoming 2 year Action Plan for the Irish language in English medium schools won’t deal with exemptions)".

The website avoids saying why so many exemptions have been given, but Dr. Matt Treacy spells it out in an article on the indispensable Gript.ie.

Personally I feel somewhat vindicated. I have been saying for many years that multiculturalism and the revival of the Irish language were going to come into conflict at some point. How can we have a "rainbow Republic" and still give special priority to one language over others-- a language, moreoever, that is now much more of a minority language than many others spoken here on a daily basis?

As far as I can tell, most immigrants to Ireland are very positive about the Irish language (and Irish culture in general) Many want to learn Irish. But, as always when it comes to this topic, it's the sheer weight of numbers that counts. All those new arrivals have their own roots and heritage, which they will naturally want to keep alive. It's asking a lot to co-opt them into a language revival that was already struggling (to put it mildly) before they arrived.

What's extraordinary is how the Irish liberal left refused to see this problem. Nearly all Irish language enthusiasts are from the liberal left persuasion and nearly all of them are pro-multiculturalism. And this has been the case for a long time. Either they couldn't accept that these two aspirations might conflict, or they reassured themselves with that old standby: Increased government funding (and eventually, the abolition of captalism) will resolve all contradictions. 

Incidentally, this is nearly always the line I'm given when I present liberal-lefties with some cultural or social tension to which their own policies are contributing: it's a purely artificial tension created by capitalism, sometimes even a deliberate effort by the Powers That Be to create division. All aspirations will be compatible once we get rid of poverty, or private property, or whatever it is they want to abolish-- which is never entirely clear.

European and American Conservatism

It's commonplace (and, I think, correct) to draw a distinction between European and American conservatism.

European conservatism is based on age-old traditions, slowly evolving institutions, and unwritten customs. It's like a web that has grown over centuries.

American conservatism is based on the Constitution. It's an irony of history that American conservatives are essentially revolutionaries in that they are loyal to the principles of the American Revolution.

You could say that European conservatism prefers the organic and piecemeal, while American conservatism appeals to the abstract and a priori.

I've always considered myself much more of a European conservative. But recently I've found myself changing my mind.

European institutions seem incapable of resisting the encroachment of the liberal left. It's very hard to think of any European institution that has not been captured by political correctness to some degree (and usually to a great degree). The liberal left doesn't have any time for gentleman's agreements.

The State is the major example. I've never been an anti-government type of person, but the ever-increasing reach of the State, and especially its ability to impose an ideology, seems relentless on this side of the Altlantic. It continues even in the face of economic privatizations and what's often called "neoliberalism". (The ruling elite is quite happy to work through HR departments and employment law.)

So I have switched. I've become much more of an American conservative and a believer in the principles of the American Revolution and the Constitution, which I've long suspected to have been divinely inspired (although that's just my own tentative theory and not essential to my argument here.)

Freedom of speech is under intense, concerted attack on both sides of the Atlantic. But the First Amendment makes all the difference in the world on one side of it.

America has an infratructure of Christian colleges, conservative think tanks, and religious organisations which seem impervious to the entryism of the liberal left. Europe has nothing like the American religious right and their network of organisations. And no, I don't think that's a good thing, I think that's a bad thing.

In Europe, libraries, schools and universities are mostly organs of the ruling ideology. In America they have to deal with pesky things like elected school boards and library boards. And so on.

America is the only country in the world that was set up with the explicit intention of limiting the power of government, and maximising individual freedom. I don't particularly value freedom for its own sake. But I do value it as a way to protect families, communities, churches, and institutions from a ruling ideology. Ironically, American freedom does more to protect the Burkean "little platoons" than European conservatism can.

I'm the biggest sentimentalist in the world when it comes to institutions, especially venerable institutions. But I think it's reached the point where European conservatives (and all who are opposed to political correctness) need to become pretty ruthless towards all human institutions. Hopefully the voters of the UK will be ruthless towards the Tories (and, of course, Labour) at the next election. Ultimately principles matter far more than institutions.

Don't fantasize about reviving monarchies and aristocracies. They'd almost certainly be woke, anyway. (As long ago as 1910, G.K. Chesterton saw this: "The simple key to the power of our upper classes is this: that they have always kept carefully on the side of what is called Progress.")

I'm sure I'm still enough of a European conservative to exasperate some of the more radical anti-government Republicans. But I feel I've made a significant switch.