Dinesh D’Souza on the Anti-Colonial Business

Explaining President Obama, rereading Dreams from My Father.

http://www.nationalreview.com
October 5, 2010 4:00 A.M.

Dinesh D’Douza’s new book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, has a reputation that precedes it — in large part due to some advance buzz from Newt Gingrich and a piece in Forbes. Now that the book is on shelves, in a conversation with NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, Dinesh D’Souza seeks to set the record straight about The Roots, and Obama.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What makes you so sure you know how Obama thinks?

DINESH D’SOUZA: It’s really simple: I figure out how Obama thinks by reading what Obama writes and says. My theory about Obama is really derived from Obama himself. It’s quite silly how people are saying things like, well, Obama didn’t really know his absentee father, so he couldn’t have been influenced by him. Go read his book, starting with the title Dreams from My Father. The whole book is about how Obama shaped his values, personality, and identity in the image of his father. So I took Obama at his word on this and then asked the question, “If Obama took his father’s anti-colonial ideology, how does that help to explain his policies?” Not only it does it explain Obama’s foreign and domestic policy, it also explains lots of little details about Obama’s actions that no other theory can explain.


LOPEZ: Be honest. You were worried everything had been said about Barack Obama, so you looked for something new and found yourself in Kenya.

D’SOUZA: Actually, I started with another theory about Obama, no less original. My working hypothesis was that Obama was really a civil-rights guy — shaped, that is, by the ideals of the civil-rights movement. This would explain Obama’s fierce allegiance to the federal government. After all, it was the federal government that desegregated the schools; the federal government helped to create a black middle class; to this day, blacks are much more sympathetic to the federal government than whites. So this was my theory: Obama is a civil-rights guy, but his innovation was to take the black civil-rights agenda and remove the word “black.” It was only when I began to study Obama’s own background that I realized that my theory was wrong. Obama has little or nothing to do with the civil-rights movement. His roots are in Kenya, and he is shaped far more by anti-colonialism than by anything that Martin Luther King said or did.


LOPEZ: Much of your argument could have been made during the presidential campaign — based on Barack Obama’s own writings. Why is it new and important now?

D’SOUZA: My argument is relevant now because if we know what motivates Obama, we have his compass. Not only can we explain what he is doing, but we can also predict what he is going to do in the future. For instance, there is a lot of speculation now about whether Obama will be a centrist after the midterm election, like Bill Clinton became after 1994. My theory says that he won’t because he cannot. Clinton was largely a non-ideological guy. If Obama came by his liberalism in the faculty lounge, then sure, he can see it hasn’t worked and he can modify it. But if Obama got his formative ideas when he was very young, and if they are the result of his traumatic relationship with his father, then they are built into his psyche. He’s not going to change because, to his anti-colonial mindset, meeting the Republicans halfway is a form of sellout. He would be untrue to his principles if he were to cut deals with a group that he considers to be the neocolonial party.

LOPEZ: You write that “Obama recognized that he had to deliver radical and even revolutionary themes in a bland, anodyne way so that they could cross the threshold of political acceptability.” Isn’t that just smart politics?

D’SOUZA: Yes. We can all admire the skill with which Obama does this. Somehow he has the ability to translate the dreams of his father — a Luo tribesman from the 1950s — into language that mainstream America can understand. So Obama doesn’t say, “I don’t care whether Iran gets a nuclear weapon; my goal is to reduce America’s nuclear arsenal because I consider America to be the world’s rogue nation.” Instead, Obama says, “I want a world free of nuclear weapons.” And the only practical action he takes in this connection is to reduce America’s nuclear arsenal, while North Korean continues its nuclear buildup and Iran continues to move closer to acquiring a nuclear bomb.


LOPEZ: If you have so much in common with Barack Obama, how did you wind up as a conservative intellectual, now president of an evangelical university?

D’SOUZA: Obama remains frozen in his father’s time machine. His anti-colonialism is the anti-colonialism of Africa in the 1950s: state confiscation of land, confiscatory taxation, and so on. My anti-colonialism is the anti-colonialism of India in the 21st century. Recently, the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, gave a speech at Oxford in which he gave two cheers for colonialism. He said India is growing fast and is on its way to becoming a superpower. How? Because the Indians speak English, they have technology, they have universities, they have property rights, they have democracy. And why do they have these things? They got them from the British. Now, Singh could never have said that a generation ago. But the world is changing. Poor countries today have a better solution to the legacy of colonialism. They are able to use their cheap labor costs to make what other people want to buy. This is what the economist Thorstein Veblen once called “the advantage of backwardness.” So the difference between Obama and me is that I have embraced the new world of globalization and free trade, and he continues to be haunted by his father’s ghost.


LOPEZ: Why does Barack Obama look so angry on the cover of your book?

D’SOUZA: Obama looks angry on the cover because he is angry. The cover image captures Obama’s suppressed rage and is true to the argument of the book.


LOPEZ: I know from listening to him that he’s condescending and annoyed at the fact that he has critics, but rage? What justifies use of that word? How has “rage” manifested itself in the Obama administration?

D’SOUZA: Some people consider Obama very serene because he talks about issues like equality and the poor in a very calm manner. He sounds like he is reading from his tax return. Some liberals are confused, and say that Obama must be a very cerebral guy. But there is an alternative explanation. He sounds bored about these issues because he doesn’t care about them. He isn’t motivated by poverty or inequality. He is motivated by hatred of the rich and the banks and the investment companies and the drug companies. Notice that when Obama speaks about these groups, his lip curls and his face darkens and he shows real passion. That’s when he wants to, in his words, “kick ass.” So there is a sublimated rage in Obama that is reminiscent of the rage of Barack Obama Sr., a man who often sat outside his hut and went into drunken rages against the West for denying him the fulfillment of his anti-colonial dreams.

LOPEZ: What are some clear examples of how this anti-colonialist mindset can be seen in the presidency of Barack Obama?

D’SOUZA: Ramesh Ponnuru and others say Obama is a conventional liberal. But conventional liberals don’t come out for the release of the Lockerbie bomber. Conventional liberals don’t return the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. Conventional liberals don’t block oil drilling in America while subsidizing oil drilling in Brazil. Conventional liberals don’t try to turn the space agency NASA into a Muslim-outreach program.

My anti-colonial theory beautifully explains all these facts. If Obama views America as the neocolonial occupier of Iraq and Afghanistan, then Muslims fighting against America are anti-colonial resisters and deserve a measure of sympathy; no wonder Obama has no problem with releasing the Lockerbie bomber. Obama hates Churchill because Churchill was the prime minister who cracked down on an anti-colonial uprising in Kenya, one in which Obama’s father and grandfather were both arrested. Obama’s oil-drilling double standard is fully understandable when you see that he wants the neocolonial oppressors to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. If Obama sees NASA as a symbol of American power — not only are we the world’s superpower, but now we are trying to colonize space — then we can see why he might want to convert NASA into a symbol of international achievement, not American greatness. So plug in the anti-colonial theory and you can explain the facts; remove it and Obama’s behavior becomes almost impossibly difficult to account for.


LOPEZ: Do you worry you’re encouraging “birthers” and those who believe Barack Obama is a Muslim by going all the way to Kenya to figure him out?

D’SOUZA: My argument has nothing to do with the “birther” claim that Obama was not born in America. In The Roots of Obama’s Rage, I specifically say that Obama was born in Hawaii. His birth was noted in two local newspapers in August 1961. That pretty much settles it for me. The White House press secretary Robert Gibbs is the one who raised this “birther” allegation in connection with my book. Others, like the New York Times, have uncritically circulated it. But it is a complete misrepresentation of my argument.


LOPEZ: You’re not disputing that Obama is a socialist, though? You’re simply saying it’s not the full picture?

D’SOUZA: Socialism is clearly part of the picture. Remember that many Third World countries, in opposing Western colonialism, allied themselves with the main alternative, which was Soviet socialism. Obama’s father, Barack Sr., was by his own account an African socialist. He wrote a paper in 1965 proposing tax rates of up to 100 percent. He said that there was nothing wrong with 100 percent taxation as long as the benefits accrue to the state and to society as a whole. Interestingly, Obama, who knows everything about his father, has never alluded to this paper in any of his writings or speeches. Even more remarkable, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems to throw valuable light on what Obama is doing in the White House, on what Obama means when he says the rich won’t pay their “fair share,” and so on. So socialism fits within the larger anti-colonial model. Both theories, viewed in conjunction with each other, are necessary to give a full account of what Obama is doing.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is an editor-at-large of National Review Online.

HBO's 'The Promise' chronicles creation of Bruce Springsteen's 'Darkness on the Edge of Town' album

By David Hinckley
The Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com
Monday, October 4th 2010, 4:00 AM


Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa arrive at the premiere of 'The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town' at the Toronto Film Festival.(Gunn/AP)


Nancy Geller says you don't need her level of Bruce Springsteen devotion to appreciate "The Promise," a documentary, on HBO Thursday at 9 p.m., about the making of Springsteen's 1978 "Darkness on the Edge of Town" album.

But okay, it wouldn't hurt.

Which has also turned out to be sound ratings business, because a film like "The Promise" just plain tells a good story.

"When we premiered it at the Toronto Film Festival," says Jon Landau, Springsteen's manager and working partner, "it was clear this isn't just fan-oriented."

"I had known Bruce since the early 1970s," says Rebo. "I wanted to be a cameraman, and here was this great performer who was also incredibly charismatic. It was a natural fit, so I shot him on and off for years.

The fact that the film exists at all is a happy bit of serendipity. Even better, says Zimny, is the feeling Rebo captured.

"He was the classic fly on the wall," says Zimny. "You get a very honest look at what's going on."

"Ninety percent of the time," says Landau, "we didn't even know or remember that he was there. We didn't do anything for filming purposes. If we were listening to playbacks in a dark room, that was the light he had."


"Often there was virtually no light," says Rebo. "I'd rig up a tube on the camera lens to focus in. When the film looks grainy, that's why. I wanted to live the moment, not influence it."

Perhaps the film's most exuberant scene has Bruce at the piano pounding out a crude version of "Sherry Darling" - which didn't make it onto "Darkness" - with Little Steven Van Zandt beside him, beating on the top of the piano with a pair of drumsticks. "That scene says so much," says Zimny. "It's an unedited view of exactly how it was in 1978."

That meant "Darkness" had to reestablish him. Both at the time and through subsequent interviews Zimny weaves into the film, Bruce explains he wanted a darker sound, feeling and message about coming to terms with the adult world.

He wrote some 70 songs and cut them down to 10, leaving out gems like "The Promise" as well as tunes like "Fire" and "Because the Night" that became big hits for the Pointer Sisters and Patti Smith.

Landau admits in the film that at times, the marathon process "wasn't fun," and Springsteen jokes that "since I had no life," he forced the band to share his obsession with perfection.

But in the end, a classic rock 'n' roll record emerged, and Zimny says he tried to make a film that told that story while showing the same discipline.

"We lost some great scenes," he says, "so we didn't slow down the story we wanted to tell."

Both in message and feel, says Nancy Geller, it works.

When you go to a live Bruce show, she explains, "You want to be within ‘sweat distance.' "On the ‘Born in the U.S.A.' tour, I made it to the front row a couple of times, and that was the best. A film like this makes you feel like you're inside sweat distance."


HBO film captures key moments for Springsteen

By DAVID BAUDER – Mon Oct 4, 9:18 am ET
Associated Press
http://news.yahoo.com/

NEW YORK – Bruce Springsteen doesn't imagine his three children, ranging in age from 16 to 20, would be that interested in a new HBO documentary on his 1978 album "Darkness on the Edge of Town."

Maybe they will later, since the movie is partly for them.

"Do you really want to watch your dad, watching thousands cheer your parents?" he said. "Nobody wants to see that. Watching people boo your folks, that would be something worth coming to see."

For his fans, the film "The Promise: The Making of `Darkness on the Edge of Town" is an intriguing peek, supplemented with home video from the time, into the creative process of a music legends at a key time in his career. Burdened by a management lawsuit and brooding over newfound fame at age 27, Springsteen and his E Street Band produced a taut treatise on growing into adulthood within a faltering economy. The film debuts Oct. 7 at 9 p.m. ET.

Getting there was anything but easy. Springsteen wrote and discarded far more songs than he used — fans will be able to hear many of them later this fall — as he whittled the band's sound from expansive to lean and made sure the disc hung together creatively.

One night a bleary-eyed Springsteen forced poor Max Weinberg to repeatedly hit his snare drum, searching for a sound he imagined in his head but could never quite get on tape.

"Madness has its rewards — if in the end you don't destroy yourself," Springsteen said. "I had an idea but a lot of it, looking back now, probably could have been dispensed with and everyone would have been left with a little more of their sanity. But that was how we made those records. I believed at that time that you had to work hard at something. I didn't trust anything that came too easily."

That may have tortured a few band members but the attitude made him think hard about what he wanted to say and made for well-constructed songs.

"I wanted them to last and they did last," he said. Along with the title cut, the album features "Badlands," "Prove It All Night" and "Racing in the Street."

Sheer luck made this video document possible.

A friend at the time, Barry Reebo, frequently followed Springsteen and his gang with a video camera, back to when the rocker played small clubs. No one thought twice when Reebo hung around the studio during the "Darkness" sessions. He didn't use big lights. Sometimes it seems the musicians forgot he was there.

After reforming the E Street Band a decade ago following a hiatus, Springsteen began thinking about video archives of their work, particularly for younger fans who knew nothing of their epic late 1970s performances.

Reebo hadn't sold his footage, and Springsteen was surprised at all he had. He struck a deal, and filmmaker Thom Zinny made "The Promise" by mixing the old tapes with current recollections from Springsteen and his band.

"We caught the band at a very pivotal moment — immediately post-success, and I'm in the throes of trying to figure out what I'm all about, trying to figure out what that success meant," he said.

Success was fine, but he mistrusted it. He felt safe among the places and people he grew up with in New Jersey.

"I felt there was a story there, the late '70s in the United States, what they call the Carter recession," Springsteen recalled. "I thought there was an interesting and unique story in my neck of the woods that wasn't being alluded to or told very much in American rock music. It was being told in England by the Clash, but not so much in American rock music."

He pursued it with an almost maniacal sense of purpose.

"We were in the studio for a long time not because we were interested in making records, but because we were interested in making purposeful records," he said. "We were interested in making essential records."


George Pimentel/Getty Images

In September Bruce Springsteen sat down for an hour-long chat with actor/friend Ed Norton as part of the Mavericks program at this year's Toronto International Film Festival.

Family was also on his mind. He didn't feel he really knew his parents and what they went through — the song "Factory" was about his dad's blue collar life — and "The Promise" exists in part so Springsteen's children will have a document of how their father handled the curiosity of his own teen years.

The "Darkness" album came three years after "Born to Run," a lifetime in that musical era. For much of that time, Springsteen was prevented from releasing music due to a lawsuit involving his former manager, Mike Appel. Appel was a big music fan with his own vision for Springsteen's career, and the lawsuit was strictly about control, Springsteen said.

Appel even appears in "The Promise" and issues what could be interpreted as an admission that he had been wrong. "I had strong ideas," Appel said. "In the end, you have to say, `Mike, who's the artist?'"

Springsteen laughs when he's asked if he's ever gotten an apology. "No," he said. "I've never asked him to and he doesn't have to. We're very good friends."

It's a season of "Darkness" for Springsteen. On Nov. 16, Columbia will release two products centered on the period. One is "The Promise," a two-CD set of material recorded then that never made the original 10-song album. It contains 21 songs, including "Fire," which became a hit for the Pointer Sisters, and "Because the Night," which Patti Smith took, added some of her own lyrics and turned into the biggest hit of her career.

The songs likely formed the bones of an album never made between "Born to Run" and "Darkness."

A more extensive package, formed to look like the notebooks Springsteen used for song lyrics at the time, contains those two CDs and a remastered version of "Darkness on the Edge of Town." It also contains three DVDs with the HBO documentary and four hours of concert footage.

The material includes an entire 26-song Houston concert from 1978, and a 2009 recording of Springsteen and his band performing the "Darkness" album in its entirety at an empty Paramount Theater in Asbury Park, N.J.

Springsteen described his recording process at the time as "making a huge splatter painting and standing back and editing and shaping the way I wanted it to come out."

The outtakes "really hold together as a body of work because they all came out of the same sessions, the same sounds and tones. ... It's an interesting bunch of music that I hope the fans enjoy."


On the Net:

http://www.hbo.com

http://www.brucespringsteen.net/



The Big Picture

Patrick Goldstein on the collision of entertainment, media and pop culture

'The Promise': Who knew Bruce Springsteen owned so many white T-shirts

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/the_big_picture/
October 1, 2010 11:45 am

If you're any kind of music fan at all, you'll want to see "The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town." This new film gives us a fascinating glimpse of Bruce Springsteen in 1977, when he was in the midst of making the pivotal, post-"Born to Run" album that established him as more than just a one-hit Time and Newsweek cover boy wonder. The documentary, made by Thom Zimny, will debut on HBO on Oct. 7. I got a chance to see it the other night at Sony Music, which is housed in CAA's old Beverly Hills headquarters.

Half the fun was seeing all the old Springsteen fans on hand, including the likes of New Line chief Toby Emmerich, who got his start working at Atlantic Records, and my old pal, longtime Sony soundtracks guru Glen Brunman, who took me backstage to meet Springsteen when I was just a hopelessly dopey college kid. I'm no longer a starry-eyed Springsteen fan, having been underwhelmed by much of his recent work. But he was at the top of his game when he was making "Darkness on the Edge of Town," which as the documentary makes clear, was the work of an artist determined to make his mark. Or as Springsteen says of his youthful self in a present-day interview in the film: "More than being rich or famous or happy, I wanted to be great."

The film is punctuated with present-day interviews with Springsteen, his longtime manager Jon Landau and the rest of the E Street Band. But what makes it worth seeing is the extensive footage of Springsteen and Co. at work in the studio, the Boss almost always clad in a white T-shirt, involved in the often-agonizing process of making the "Darkness" album. After the success of "Born to Run," Springsteen became embroiled in a dispute with his former manager, Mike Appel, which had prevented him from recording a new album for nearly two years -- an eternity in that era. So Springsteen and the band rehearsed and worked on new material every night until the lawsuit was settled and they could go back into the studio.

The film offers a rare look at an artist trying to establish an identity while also attempting to come to terms with his own ambition. Springsteen acknowledges viewing success as a dark cloud, since stardom was cutting him off from his deep, bar-band, working-class roots, which were exactly what provided the fuel for his sucess in the first place. So how did he survive?

Watching him in the studio recording "Darkness," Springsteen reminded me of a lot of young filmmakers that I've seen at work -- apparently it's a common artistic trait to feel the need to keep tight control of the decision-making process without ever actually committing to a decision. Springsteen had written untold dozens of songs, but he had such trouble picking a final lineup for the album that the bandmembers would regularly bet on which ones he'd keep and which ones would get bumped. Even the film's title is something of a sly joke, since "The Promise" was a song that Springsteen spent three months recording, and then yanked from the record, saying in retrospect that he was too close to it.

Still, Springsteen's writing process is pretty fascinating. He would take a verse or a riff from one song in his notebook and graft it onto another song, likening it to how a mechanic would pull parts out of one car to make another one run. "Because the Night" -- one of Springsteen's most commercial songs -- was a product of these sessions. But it was left off the record because, as Springsteen now tells it, he was "too cowardly" to really write a love song, so he gave it to Patti Smith, who completed the lyrics and had her only big hit with it.

The movie has its share of light touches, including a comical sequence in which we see Springsteen, ever the perfectionist, obssessing for days over how to properly record Max Weinberg's drum sound. But as with so many films that show us our icons in their youth, the best moments allow us to see an artist exploring and experimenting with his gifts, trying to figure out what kind of artist he wants to be.

At the time of "Darkness," Springsteen was so young and strikingly handsome (and full of inner turmoil) that it's easy to see why filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese thought he could have been a terrific actor. When he's in the studio, soulfully singing one of his heart-breaking ballads, Springsteen has just as much live-wire charisma as the young DeNiro or Pacino. But Springsteen only wanted to be a rock star, and the biggest joy anyone can get from this film is seeing just how hard he worked to fulfill that promise.

Photo: Bruce Springsteen, appearing on the cover of "Darkness on the Edge of Town." Credit: Frank Stefanko / Sony Music Entertainment

Film Reviews: 'The Social Network'

Millions of Friends, but Not Very Popular

By MANOHLA DARGIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
September 23, 2010

Merrick Morton/Columbia Pictures

Jesse Eisenberg in “The Social Network.”

What makes Mark Zuckerberg run? In “The Social Network,” David Fincher’s fleet, weirdly funny, exhilarating, alarming and fictionalized look at the man behind the social-media phenomenon Facebook — 500 million active users, oops, friends, and counting — Mark runs and he runs, sometimes in flip-flops and a hoodie, across Harvard Yard and straight at his first billion. Quick as a rabbit, sly as a fox, he is the geek who would be king or just Bill Gates. He’s also the smartest guy in the room, and don’t you forget it.

The first time you see Mark (Jesse Eisenberg, firing on all cylinders), he’s 19 and wearing a hoodie stamped with the word Gap, as in the clothing giant, but, you know, also not. Eyes darting, he is yammering at his girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara), whose backhand has grown weary. As they swat the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s words at each other, the two partners quickly shift from offline friends to foes, a foreshadowing of the emotional storms to come. Soon Mark is back in his dorm, pounding on his keyboard and inadvertently sowing the seeds of Facebook, first by blogging about Erica and then by taking his anger out on the rest of Harvard’s women, whose photos he downloads for cruel public sport: is she hot or not.

Although the names have remained the same, “The Social Network” is less of a biopic of the real Mr. Zuckerberg than a gloss on the boot-up, log-on, plug-in generation. You don’t learn much about him other than the headlines, beginning with Facebook’s less-than-humble start in 2003. Despite its insistently unsexy moving parts (software, algorithms), the movie is paced like a thriller, if one in which ideas, words and bank books blow up rather than cars. It’s a resonant contemporary story about the new power elite and an older, familiar narrative of ambition, except instead of discovering his authentic self, Mark builds a database, turning his life — and ours — into zeroes and ones, which is what makes it also a story about the human soul.

The price of that ambition, at least as dramatized here, is borne by those around Mark, who remains a strategic cipher throughout: a Facebook page without a profile photo. Charmless and awkward in groups larger than one, he rarely breaks into a smile and, if memory serves, never says thank you. He seems wary at some moments, coolly calculating at others: when his eyes haven’t gone dead, you can see him working all the angles. One of those angles, according to Mr. Sorkin’s script, which follows the outline of “The Accidental Billionaires,” Ben Mezrich’s book about Facebook, was one of the site’s co-founders, Eduardo Saverin (a very good Andrew Garfield), a fellow student of Mark’s as well as his first big check writer and personal chump.

Eduardo strides in early, his collar turned up against the Cambridge winter, and quickly moves in on our sympathies, which Mr. Eisenberg, guided by his supremely confident director, never does. Mr. Garfield can sometimes wilt on screen as if in surrender, but here his character merely sways, held up by an essential decency that makes Eduardo so appealing and such a contrast to the sometimes appalling Mark. (When Mr. Eisenberg makes Mark’s face go blank, the character seems scarily emptied out: it’s a subtly great, at times unsettling, performance.) Mark might be the brains in this unlikely friendship, but Eduardo is its conscience and slowly bleeding heart. Though he knows better, he hangs on even after he’s been cut loose.


Merrick Morton/Columbia Pictures

Defriended: From left, Andrew Garfield, Joseph Mazzello, Jesse Eisenberg and Patrick Mapel in “The Social Network.”

The plot thickens after Erica dumps Mark, and he meets a pair of near-comically-perfect supermen, the identical twins and future Olympic rowers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. (An amusing Armie Hammer plays both brothers with wit and the aid of different hairstyles, special effects and a body double.) The Winklevosses emerge as unlikely objects of Mark’s interest and, much like Erica, his eventual contempt. The twins and their friend Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), have a Web site idea and need Mark’s programming help. They’ll pay (and how!), but the gig, they grandly explain, will also rehabilitate Mark’s reputation on campus after the hot/not scandal, a patronizing moment that echoes Mark’s breakup with Erica. “You’d do that for me?” he asks the twins flatly, recycling a line Erica once used on him.

The conspicuous paradox that “The Social Network” plays with is that the world’s most popular social networking Web site was created by a man with excruciatingly, almost pathologically poor, people skills. The benign view of Facebook is that it creates “a community,” a sense of intimacy, which is of course one reason it also creeps out some of its critics. As the virtual-reality visionary Jaron Lanier puts it bluntly in his manifesto “You Are Not a Gadget,” Facebook also reduces life to a database. In “The Social Network,” a character lashes out at both Mark and “the angry” who haunt the Internet, but Mr. Lanier takes the view that it’s fear that drives the idolizers of what he calls the “new strain of gadget fetishism.”

Beyond the obvious (money, sex, fame) it’s hard to know what truly pushes Mark, whose personality emerges in furtive smiles, gushes of words and painful pauses. Eventually everyone does pay: the Winklevosses, Eduardo, even Mark. The filmmakers have their ideas about who did what to whom, but they don’t try to fill in all the blanks or, worse, soften Mark’s edges with a Psych 101 back story. You see what turns him on: software, revenge and, in several lightly comic and darkly foreboding scenes, Sean Parker, the flamboyant co-creator of Napster, who’s played by Justin Timberlake as a jittery seducer. Sean oozes into Mark’s life for a piece of the action and instantly dazzles the younger man with his bad-boy ways (coke and Champagne for everyone!), sexy dates and big, brash talk of riches.

Shooting in digital and working with the cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, Mr. Fincher turns down the lights and tamps down his visual style, deploying fewer special-effects sleights of hand than he did in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” with its wizened and baby Brad Pitt, while also maintaining the familiar Fincher atmosphere of dread. Harvard has rarely been represented to such dolorous effect as in “The Social Network,” where even the colors seem leached of joy. A restrained, somber palette and the shallow depth of field express the limits of Mark’s world, while the rapid, seamless cutting among different times and spaces — scenes of him creating Facebook are woven together with scenes of him in separate depositions — evokes the speed of his success, giving the narrative terrific momentum.

Mr. Fincher pointedly abandons his smudged browns for a gauzily lighted sequence of the twins rowing at a tony British club that, with the edges of the image blurred and movements slowed, looks like a dream. This is a world of rarefied privilege in which men still wear straw boaters, and royalty blathers within earshot. Mark isn’t invited, not because he’s poor (he isn’t), but because this is a closed, self-reproducing system built on exclusivity and other entitlements, including privacy. (The movie refers to Mark’s being Jewish, and the twins look as if they crewed for the Hitler Youth, but that’s just part of the mix.) Mark doesn’t breach this citadel, he sidesteps it entirely by becoming one of the new information elite for whom data is power and who, depending on your view of the Internet, rallies the online mob behind him.

“The Social Network” takes place in the recognizable here and now, though there are moments when it has the flavor of science fiction (it would make a nice double bill with “The Matrix”) even as it evokes 19th-century narratives of ambition. (“To be young, to have a thirst for society, to be hungry for a woman,” Balzac writes in “Le Père Goriot.”) The movie opens with a couple in a crowded college bar and ends with a man alone in a room repeatedly hitting refresh on his laptop. In between, Mr. Fincher and Mr. Sorkin offer up a creation story for the digital age and something of a morality tale, one driven by desire, marked by triumph, tainted by betrayal and inspired by the new gospel: the geek shall inherit the earth.

“The Social Network” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The usual college high jinks, drugs, drinking and semi-naked women.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

The film, to be shown on Friday on the opening night of the 48th New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, opens nationally next Friday.

Directed by David Fincher; written by Aaron Sorkin, based on the book “The Accidental Billionaires,” by Ben Mezrich; director of photography, Jeff Cronenweth; edited by Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter; music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross; production designer, Donald Graham Burt; costumes by Jacqueline West; produced by Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, Michael De Luca and Cean Chaffin; released by Columbia Pictures. At 6 and 9 p.m. at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center. Running time: 2 hours.

WITH: Jesse Eisenberg (Mark Zuckerberg), Andrew Garfield (Eduardo Saverin), Justin Timberlake (Sean Parker), Armie Hammer (Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss), Max Minghella (Divya Narendra), Josh Pence (Tyler Winklevoss), Rooney Mara (Erica Albright), Brenda Song (Christy), Rashida Jones (Marylin Delpy), John Getz (Sy), David Selby (Gage), Denise Grayson (Gretchen), Douglas Urbanski (Larry Summers), Aaron Sorkin (Ad Executive) and James Shanklin (Prince Albert).

Influencing People

David Fincher and “The Social Network.”

by David Denby
The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/
October 4, 2010

“The Social Network,” directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, rushes through a coruscating series of exhilarations and desolations, triumphs and betrayals, and ends with what feels like darkness closing in on an isolated soul. This brilliantly entertaining and emotionally wrenching movie is built around a melancholy paradox: in 2003, Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), a nineteen-year-old Harvard sophomore, invents Facebook and eventually creates a five-hundred-million-strong network of “friends,” but Zuckerberg is so egotistical, work-obsessed, and withdrawn that he can’t stay close to anyone; he blows off his only real pal, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), a fellow Jewish student at Harvard, who helps him launch the site. The movie is not a conventionally priggish tale of youthful innocence corrupted by riches; nor is it merely a sarcastic arrow shot into the heart of a poor little rich boy. Both themes are there, but the dramatic development of the material pushes beyond simplicities, and the portrait of Zuckerberg is many-sided and ambiguous; no two viewers will see him in quite the same way. The debate about the movie’s accuracy has already begun, but Fincher and Sorkin, selecting from known facts and then freely interpreting them, have created a work of art. Accuracy is now a secondary issue. In this extraordinary collaboration, the portrait of Zuckerberg, I would guess, was produced by a happy tension, even an opposition, between the two men—a tug-of-war between Fincher’s gleeful appreciation of an outsider who overturns the social order and Sorkin’s old-fashioned, humanist distaste for electronic friend-making and a world of virtual emotions. The result is a movie that is absolutely emblematic of its time and place. “The Social Network” is shrewdly perceptive about such things as class, manners, ethics, and the emptying out of self that accompanies a genius’s absorption in his work. It has the hard-charging excitement of a very recent revolution, the surge and sweep of big money moving fast and chewing people up in its wake.

We know from “The West Wing” that Sorkin can write the smartest and swiftest dialogue since Ben Hecht and Preston Sturges. His adrenaline-pumped men and women anticipate one another’s best shots; they fill out or overturn one another’s half-finished sentences, answering what’s implied rather than simply what’s said. Sorkin’s script for “The Social Network” is his best work yet—incisive and witty from moment to moment but expansive over all as a picture of college social life, hipster business enterprise, friendship, and rivalry. But Sorkin’s particular skills in “The Social Network” are familiar. The unexpected element is David Fincher’s work. The director of “Fight Club,” “Zodiac,” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a master of sullen menace, convulsive violence; he loves creating an aura of the magical and the uncanny. Yet he treats Sorkin’s real-world situations with extreme delicacy and precision. Fincher has always been obsessed with outsiders and rebels, but now, in mid-career, he has transferred that obsession into a subtler, more telling form, with both comic and tragic implications.

“The Social Network” draws on a 2009 book, “The Accidental Billionaires,” by Ben Mezrich. Mezrich also went to Harvard, and in both the book and the movie the Harvard lore is laid on a little thick. The eager suburban co-eds trucked in for parties, the rabbity competitiveness and status-seeking among the men, the terrific excitement of being “punched” for one of the all-male “final clubs” (off-campus social sites for the chosen élite)—to outsiders, all this frenzied self-importance seems slightly mad. Yet the filmmakers don’t satirize Harvard, and you can see why: they needed to re-create the pressures and the social stratifications that led to Zuckerberg’s revolt. Fincher has often worked within a frantic boys’ world—by way of having fun in “Fight Club,” guys literally punch one another, to a pulp—but here the violence is emotional, not physical. Watching Zuckerberg and his friends toss beer-bottle caps and ideas at one another in the dorm, we’re meant to think that they really are the brightest (and perhaps the most obnoxious) kids in the country. In the opening scene, Zuckerberg tells his lovely and intelligent girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara), that he could introduce her, a mere Boston University student, to important people if he gets into one of the clubs. He’s prickly, overprecise, condescending; he keeps wrong-footing her and then scolding her for not keeping up. Yet, even as he acts like a jerk, you feel for him, because at some level he wants Erica, and the harder he tries to impress her the faster he drives her away. Sorkin created an emotionally stunted, closed-off young man, and Fincher pulled something touching out of Jesse Eisenberg. Slender, with curly light-brown hair and dark-blue eyes, Eisenberg pauses, stares, then rushes ahead, talking in bristling clumps, like a computer spilling bytes. The self-assurance he gives Zuckerberg is audacious and funny. It’s also breathtakingly hostile. Yet, after many of Zuckerberg’s haughtiest riffs, a tiny impulse of regret quivers across his lips.

As Zuckerberg and his friends lay siege to computers in marathon sessions—the pace is giddy, Beck’s-enhanced—they turn women into objects, even prey. In the end, Facebook becomes gender neutral, but the movie is sparked by a bitterly comic irony: a worldwide social revolution, capable of rattling authoritarian governments, began with nothing more urgent than the desire of two middle-class Jewish boys to be considered cool at college and meet girls without having to endure the humiliation of campus mixers. By focussing on the moment of creation, Fincher and Sorkin are getting at something new. From the first scene to the last, “The Social Network” hints at a psychological shift produced by the Information Age, a new impersonality that affects almost everyone. After all, Facebook, like Zuckerberg, is a paradox: a Web site that celebrates the aura of intimacy while providing the relief of distance, substituting bodiless sharing and the thrills of self-created celebrityhood for close encounters of the first kind. Karl Marx suggested that, in the capitalist age, we began to treat one another as commodities. “The Social Network” suggests that we now treat one another as packets of information. Mark Zuckerberg, as interpreted by this film, comes off as a binary personality. As far as he’s concerned, either you’re for him or you’re against him. Either you have information that he can use or you don’t. Apart from that, he’s not interested.

At Harvard, Zuckerberg hacks into the university’s computer system, a stunt that gets him into trouble with the administration but also brings him to the attention of the seniors Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who are identical twins and American aristocrats. In a weird touch, balanced between derision and awe, both brothers are played by the dazzlingly handsome Armie Hammer. Devoted to physical cultivation, civility, and fair play, the twins row at dawn on the Charles River; they’re headed for the Olympics. Yet the Winklevosses—or Winklevi, as Zuckerberg calls them—want to get into the social-media business. Zuckerberg strings them along while he and Saverin develop the prototype of Facebook; that’s the root of his eventual legal troubles. The movie is framed by the two civil suits brought against Zuckerberg a few years later—one by the Winklevosses, who claim that he stole an idea that they had developed with their partner, Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), the other by Saverin, whom Zuckerberg may have aced out of the company. The movie is a tightly fitted mosaic of agitated fragments. As the lawyers and the disputants throw verbal darts at one another across a conference-room table, the filmmakers repeatedly cut, sometimes in mid-sentence, first back to Harvard and then to Palo Alto, where Zuckerberg lands in the summer of 2004, enticed by the siren song of Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the co-founder of Napster.

Justin Timberlake and Jesse Eisenberg

When Zuckerberg first gets to Silicon Valley, he’s as unworldly as a cloistered monk. Surrounded by pizza boxes and beer cans, and dressed in gray sweats, flip-flops, and a hoodie, he even looks like a monk. But Sean Parker, a hustler of genius, says to him, “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” And though the hoodie remains, everything else changes. Parker, who foresees the universal success of Facebook, comes off as intelligent but reckless and dissolute—a candy man who brings the goods (venture capital, mainly, but drugs, too). Justin Timberlake, with his charm and his physical dynamism, and with a wicked visionary gleam in his eye, torques the movie even higher. The colors in Jeff Cronenweth’s cinematography change from Harvard crimson to the electric pink of a San Francisco night club. Yet, no matter how quickly the film moves, Fincher, working with the editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, pauses within the fast tempo and lets the emotional power of the moment expand. Relying on nothing more than tiny shifts of emphasis and inflection, the director, to an amazing degree, makes us care about the split between the unyielding Zuckerberg and Saverin, who’s a decent guy but unimaginative and perhaps a little timid. As Saverin, Andrew Garfield has the emotional fluency—the fear, the indignation, and the hurt feelings—that Eisenberg has to suppress. In the legal dispute, a college prank that was once a joke between them is recalled and used as ammunition, and the moment rips what is left of their youth to shreds. “The Social Network” is a linear accelerator that breathes, and Fincher is the one who created the breathing room.

Fincher has been a bit of an outsider himself, working at the edge and celebrating inspired screw-ups, marginal eccentrics, and monsters. Born in Denver in 1962, he grew up in Oregon and Northern California, skipped college, and, at the age of seventeen, went to work as a camera operator for the San Francisco independent filmmaker John Korty, the director of “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” and other gentle movies. A few years later, Fincher moved to George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic, where he worked on the special effects for “Return of the Jedi” (1983) and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (1984). By his late twenties, Fincher had found his own cinematic style in razory, provocative, and beautiful music videos—for singers like George Michael and, most notably, Madonna—and in a series of commercials that added exciting and disturbing images to the collective unconscious: increasingly fast speed demons (a dog, a runner, a horse, a bullet train) racing across a sunbaked desert, for Nike; a fetus slowly and thoughtfully taking a drag on a cigarette, for the American Cancer Society.

Fincher was never an outsider in the way that, say, an independent filmmaker like Jim Jarmusch is. But he may be one of the few directors who can flourish as an idiosyncratic artist amid the quarterly-return mentality of the conglomerate-controlled studios. There’s no indication from his work that he has read much, or that he has lived much outside the movie world, yet he’s not, thank God, another director obsessed with the movie past, like the pop-scholastic Quentin Tarantino, whose virtuosity with camera, mood, and tone Fincher more than equals. Fincher has his own obsessions. The 1993 video for Madonna’s “Bad Girl” is Fincher’s work in miniature: The police enter and examine a corpse (Madonna’s)—a visual motif that he returned to in the grisly “Se7en” (1995), in which cops repeatedly walk in on deliquescing or bloody corpses. In “Bad Girl,” Madonna is murdered by a serial killer, and both “Se7en” and “Zodiac” (2007) are about serial killers. Outside Madonna’s apartment, Christopher Walken, as some sort of angel of death, looks at his watch, which is running backward. That image became the key visual idea in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (2008).

Fincher is now a demon on the set, controlling everything, demanding, in “The Social Network,” seventy or eighty takes of a single shot. But, like any director working in the mainstream, he has to fight to impose himself. He was only twenty-eight when he started on his first feature, “Alien 3” (1992), and he got pushed around on the set by the studio, Fox, which then recut the movie. Still, there’s a peculiar look to this noir sci-fi horror movie, with the camera often positioned beneath the actors and tilting up at black or mucky ceilings. It’s a look that could have been produced only by a man ornery enough to attempt to have his own way with a prized studio franchise. In “Se7en,” the first real Fincher film, there’s a prolonged philosophical dialogue between a pessimistic, isolated older cop (Morgan Freeman) and an idealistic, life-loving younger one (Brad Pitt). But then, at the end, a surprise: the killer, a religious-fundamentalist nut calling himself John Doe, shows up in the hyper-articulate person of Kevin Spacey, and he turns out to be cogent and comprehensive in his disgust for the world and most of the people in it. Fincher almost makes John Doe a sympathetic character. Sympathy for the devil has always been a productive mood for an artist, and particularly for Fincher; he could probably make a thrilling version of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” with Satan reigning heroically in Hell.

Spacey’s killer boasts of his ability as a murderer to overturn everyone’s complacency, to disrupt the bourgeois order, and a version of that disruption is enacted upon the body and the spirit of Michael Douglas’s wealthy and pleasureless banker, Nicholas Van Orton, in Fincher’s “The Game” (1997). Terrible things happen to Van Orton, and it turns out that they are all part of an elaborate prank, a kind of benevolent shock therapy administered by his kid brother (Sean Penn) in order to jolt him out of middle-aged rigor mortis. Yet what one remembers from the film isn’t the reassuring hugs at the end but the way the world falls apart for Van Orton—his pen leaks, staining his shirt; bullets whiz around his head; a taxi races down a hill and tosses him into San Francisco Bay. The banker is toyed with—terrorized, really. Fincher’s mischief was taking on a malevolent edge.

Rooney Mara and Jesse Eisenberg

Genuine terrorism shows up in “Fight Club” (1999), which begins with another rant against bourgeois order and conformity. Hoping to escape mediocrity and boredom, a depressed corporate worker (Edward Norton) joins a sub-fascist group of disaffected men, a band of bloody brothers, which grows larger and more organized, finally planting bombs. The movie has a wacko happy ending in which the bombs go off, bringing down office towers. (It’s pre-9/11.) Towers remain standing in “The Social Network,” but barriers fall; the barbarians not only enter by the gates but destroy them. Every Facebook user, Zuckerberg tells Saverin, becomes the president of the club, and the reign of the Winklevi and their kind is over. At last, Fincher has made a movie about a revolution that succeeded.

Despite the half-craziness of the themes, the early Fincher movies have a visual distinction that makes them galvanic, irresistible. Even Fincher’s patented junk and mess, first seen in “Alien 3” and then in the rubbishy, derelict rooms in “Se7en” and “Fight Club,” has a perversely attractive appeal, a glowing awfulness, as if it were lit from within. He doesn’t hide the disintegrating walls, the sordid beds; we are meant to see the ugly poetry in them. Whatever locations he uses, Fincher brings out their special character. At the beginning of “The Social Network,” Zuckerberg runs across the campus to his room at night, and Harvard, its many enclaves lit with intellectual industry, looks glamorous, like an imaginary city. The scenes of the Winklevosses in their boat, crisply cutting through the water, are ineffably beautiful; the twins are at ease in their bodies and in nature, while the Zuckerberg gang slouch over their computers in the kind of trashed rooms that Fincher’s anarchists and killers live in. The revolution brews amid garbage.

In the early movies, and in “Panic Room” (2002), a well-made but meaningless B movie, Fincher worked in overdetermined forms, with plot arcs as rigid as steel. Formally, the outlier in Fincher’s work is “Zodiac,” based on the investigation of an actual serial killer in Northern California. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Robert Graysmith, who pursues the murderer for years, is another of Fincher’s inspired outsiders, an obsessive who so thoroughly gives himself over to his task that he almost destroys his own life. Graysmith comes very close to cracking the case, but, in the end, proof falls maddeningly out of his grasp. “Zodiac” feels open-ended. It lasts more than two and a half hours, but it might have gone on for hours more; it accumulates a series of suspicions rather than working toward a simple resolution. The truth, Fincher seems to be saying, is best approached with data, impressions, and interpretations. The double-deposition scenes in “The Social Network” would also seem to be a way of attaining proof, but, again, truth slips away. Fincher and Sorkin have turned a philosophical position into a dramatic strategy. We see the events of 2003 and 2004 from different sides—Zuckerberg’s, Saverin’s, the Winklevosses’—and all the self-serving versions have a degree of validity.

The movie’s evenhandedness forces us to make our own judgments. For instance, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, despite their hilarious double perfection, are never caricatured as muscle-bound jocks. They understand the idea of a social-dating site. What they lack is Zuckerberg and Parker’s intuitive apprehension of it as a new form of virtual social life. Fincher and Sorkin treat the brothers as squarely honorable traditionalists. They go to see Larry Summers (Douglas Urbanski), then the president of Harvard, to complain about Zuckerberg, and one can feel, in this seemingly unimportant scene, history falling into place, a shift from one kind of capitalism to another. Fincher and Sorkin wickedly imply that Summers is Zuckerberg thirty years older and many pounds heavier. He has the same kind of brightest-guy-in-the-room arrogance, and little sympathy for entitled young men talking about ethics when they’ve been left behind by a faster innovator.

Zuckerberg’s tragedy, of course, is that he leaves behind his friends as well as his intellectual inferiors. It may not be fair to Zuckerberg, but Sorkin and Fincher have set him up as a symbolic man of the age, a supremely functional prince of dysfunction. Charles Foster Kane was convivial and outgoing; Zuckerberg engages only the world he is creating. But those viewers who think of him as nothing more than a vindictive little shit will be responding to only one part of him. He’s a revolutionary because he broods on his personal grievances and, as insensitive as he is, reaches the aggrieved element in everyone, the human desire for response. He’s meant to be a hero—certainly he’s Fincher’s hero, an artist working in code who sticks to his vision and is helpless to prevent himself from suffering the most wounding personal loss.


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/10/04/101004crat_atlarge_denby?currentPage=all#ixzz11QVpi7qy

Remembering Joe Sobran

By W. James Antle III
http://www.enterstageright.com/index.html
web posted October 4, 2010

Before there was Ann Coulter, there was Joseph Sobran. The former National Review senior editor and syndicated columnist might have been the sharpest polemicist ever to skewer a liberal, the wittiest foe of the conventional wisdom ever to wield a pen. Few others were as adept at turning a phrase -- or turning the keeper of some taboo red with rage.

Sobran died last week at the relatively young age of 64, physically frail but strong in his faith. He left behind a body of work as powerful as that of any conservative writer of the 20th century, worthy of comparison to Chesterton and Belloc. To call Sobran an influence would not just be an understatement; it would be an insult to Joe Sobran.

Pat Buchanan called Sobran "the finest columnist of our generation." High praise considering the source, but apt nevertheless. From politics to pop music and abortion to the welfare-warfare state, Sobran was a shrewd analyst who cranked out perceptive one-liners like some kind of literary machine.

Having lived through what liberals described as the "Decade of Greed," Sobran memorably observed, “Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money -- only for wanting to keep your own money." Long before there was any Tea Party holding rallies where people read the Constitution, Sobran dusted off the forgotten founding document and explained the basic premise of the American Republic: "The rights of the people come from God. The powers of government come from the people."

While other conservatives offered technical or economic arguments against the latest expansion of federal power, Sobran asked a simple question: Is the proposed measure constitutional? The answer, more often than not, was no. But the abandonment of the Constitution forced us into a set of obligations the average American never freely chose, at a cost that grows more staggering by the day. The Constitution isn't some perfect document, Sobran understood. But fidelity to it would have avoided the United States' impending national bankruptcy.

Yet as Sobran frequently lamented, "the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government." A president who tried to govern according to the Constitution would probably be impeached. We'll see how much better the Republicans not named Ron Paul running for Congress this year will fare. "Most Americans aren't the sort of citizens the Founding Fathers expected; they are contented serfs," Sobran wrote. "Far from being active critics of government, they assume that its might makes it right."

Though Sobran died something of a Catholic anarchist, he was no libertine. He understood, for example, the reality behind the euphemism of "choice" in the context of the unborn: “After tens of millions of 'procedures,' has America lost anything? Another Edison, perhaps? A Gershwin? A Babe Ruth? A Duke Ellington?" he asked, concluding, "As it is, we will never know what abortion has cost us all."

As the Cold War came to a close, Sobran came to reject the United States' postwar interventionist foreign policy. He opposed not only the second President Bush's disastrous, unpopular war in Iraq, but also the first President Bush's seemingly successful, popular one. To him, it was consistent anti-statism. Sobran quipped, "If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you’re a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate. If you don’t want government to intervene anywhere, you’re an extremist."

Soon people began to detect the whiff of anti-Semitism in his columns about Israel, ending his relationship with both National Review and William F. Buckley Jr., the man who discovered him as a writer. Sobran denied the charge, but over time -- after the break with the conservative movement and the attendant loss of income -- the denials became increasingly difficult to believe. He wrote noxiously of "the Jews who maintain their borders furtively and deal disingenuously with gentiles" and consorted with Holocaust deniers, who praised him as a brave truth-teller while he professed ignorance of the documentary evidence and Zyklon B. "I am not, heaven forbid, a 'Holocaust denier,'" Sobran remarked. "I lack the scholarly competence to be one."

"If I were to hate Jews en masse, without distinction, I would be guilty of many things," Sobran went on to say. "Obviously I’d be guilty of injustice and uncharity to Jews as human beings. I would also be guilty of willful stupidity. More personally, I’d be guilty of ingratitude to my benefactors -- which Dante, in his Inferno, ranks the worst of all sins -- since many of my benefactors, in large ways and small, have been Jewish." Yet he picked a funny place to demonstrate gratitude to such benefactors: a speech to the Institute of Historical Review, a "revisionist" outfit dedicated to denying or minimizing Hitler's crimes against Jews, in which he dwelled at length on what he saw as malign Jewish influence.

Publicly, a number of Sobran's allies closed ranks behind him and pretended he was merely a victim of having broken one taboo too many. Everyone else pretended that nothing was lost in his dismissal from polite society. Privately, many who knew him on both sides were dismayed by this turn of events. Even those who continued to admire him were troubled by some of his associations; others who shunned him wondered what happened to the gentle scribe they long considered incapable of hating Jews or any other human being.

Sobran wrote wittily even about his sudden radioactivity. Caught up in the controversy surrounding the Council of Conservative Citizens, a White Citizens Council-like group with which several Southern Republicans had been entangled in the 1990s, he made a confession. "It’s true I addressed them some years ago," Sobran admitted in one of his columns. "But I should state here, for the record, that I would never have accepted their invitation if I had known then of their associations with Republican leaders."

Before William Buckley died, he and Sobran reconciled. After Buckley was diagnosed with the emphysema that eventually killed him, Sobran wrote movingly of his old friend's acts of charity. "Compared with all this, the political differences that finally drove us apart seem trivial now," Sobran concluded. "I saw the same graciousness in his relations with everyone from presidents to menials. I learned a lot of things from Bill Buckley, but the best thing he taught me was how to be a Christian. May Jesus comfort him now."

And comfort Joe Sobran, too.

W. James Antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator.

Dim Idea

By Rob Long
http://www.nationalreview.com/
From the Oct. 18, 2010, issue of National Review.
October 4, 2010 4:00 A.M.

Arriving late one night into Tokyo, I checked into my hotel room to discover the world’s most complicated toilet.

There were hoses and nozzles where hoses and nozzles probably shouldn’t be, and along the side there was an alarming set of button and switches, which made the entire contraption look like a neat freak’s electric chair.

But, you know, when in Rome, right?

With features like pre-warmed seats, massage options, auto-lid opening with proximity sensor, blow dryer, germ-resistant seat, air conditioning, glow-in-the-dark surface, dual water jets with soap mixture, music, and O-Zone deodorant systems, the Japanese toilet is hands down the best toilet ever made.

It’s difficult to convey, in a magazine dedicated to the higher pursuits of political philosophy and national renewal, just how fantastic the Japanese toilet was. It’s impossible, especially, within the civilized parameters set by the editors and their assistants, to describe what a revelation it was — after a few eye-popping mishaps with the electric controls and one of the smaller nozzles — to discover that there were still things to perfect about an act we’ve all come to take for granted, still improvements to be made on the entire system, and that the Japanese had done it.

On the other hand, it uses an awful lot of water, at least the way I adjusted the settings. In addition to the water in the toilet itself, there’s the additional water for all of those clever nozzles — you can set the pressure for each of them, but I learned the hard way that it’s best not to be a hero.

By the end of my trip to Japan, I had already located an American dealer. It’s an expensive unit, but I like to think I’m worth it. Also, it took me the entire week to make it through the user’s manual, and once I’ve put in that kind of time on a gadget, I like to get my money’s worth.

So, my beloved Japanese toilet now finds itself ensconced in my bathroom — look, this is going to get personal, okay? — near my shower, which sports a sunflower-sized showerhead, which rains buckets and buckets of soothing water onto the bather, the entire room lit by hot-burning incandescent bulbs with 100 watts apiece of wake-up brightness.

My bathroom, in other words — which to me represents the pinnacle of easy livin’, the perfect intersection of raw technological innovation and empathetic human understanding — is an environmentalist’s nightmare. My dazzling and profuse showerhead, which turns a morning ritual into a moment of Zen, and my complex, computer-chipped, nozzled toilet, and the bright bulbs that give it all a clarity and visual snap — all of them are in the crosshairs of the eco-police. All of them are doomed.

The light bulbs are the first to go. The last major incandescent-light-bulb factory in America, in Winchester, Va., is closing. When you remember that light bulbs are also the symbol of great ideas, sudden inspiration, entrepreneurial Aha! moments, the fact that the country of Thomas Edison no longer produces light bulbs is a sad metaphor. Maybe we no longer produce light-bulb moments, either. A compact-fluorescent bulb flickering to life above the head of a cartoon character doesn’t feel the same.

By 2014, according to an absurd and indefensible act of Congress — and this one passed in 2007, so it’s not Obama’s fault for once — the kind of light bulbs that we all prefer — you know, the bright ones, the ones that actually illuminate rooms and objects — will be essentially banned and replaced by those awful Dairy Queen–looking things, the compact-fluorescent bulbs that bathe the world in a gauzy, dirty, yellow haze. It’s sick-room lighting, state-mental-hospital illumination — the kind of lights they used in East Germany to keep everyone sad and downcast.

The compact fluorescents are harder to manufacture — something about all of those twisty tubes — and if something is hard to make, it ends up getting made in China, which is where all of our light bulbs will come from by 2014.

And that’s how the Chinese will win, of course. We’ll all be squinting into the sick gray light while they sneak in and take everything.

The only time I ever really lost my temper in a business setting — and there’s no point in working in Hollywood if you don’t throw a huge tantrum every now and then; exploders and fit-pitchers are not only tolerated out here, they’re positively celebrated — was when the studio decided to install those awful light bulbs in some kind of ludicrous “green” initiative.

Working late became impossible — you couldn’t actually see the script you were supposed to be rewriting. The minute the sun went down, it was as if we were working in an emergency zone, with flickering generator lamps lighting our job site.

I sent a polite memo to the studio facilities crew asking for the incandescents to be reinstalled. They sent a polite memo in reply denying that request — “The studio is committed to creating a green workplace” — and suggested that I just needed to let my “eyes adjust.”

I’d like to say that I handled this in a firm and civilized way, but I didn’t. I went nuts. I marched over to the studio president’s office and demanded that he spend the next evening in my office in the cold yellow haze and try to read a script printed in a twelve-point font. I yelled and threatened and shouted and screamed, which people do in Hollywood all the time for more money or a bigger trailer or a helicopter taxi, but rarely for better light bulbs.

In the end, they gave me back my light. But I knew the days of the incandescent were numbered. Workplaces all over America are going to get darker and even more depressing.

And now they’re coming into my bathroom.

The Department of Energy regulates showerheads. Some of them, apparently, are too wasteful. My sunflower-sized rainmaker is on the list to be banned, as are the kinds that squirt water in all directions (those seem nice) and the kind that emit a steamy fog. In other words, if it somehow leavens the act of bathing, raising it up from dull routine to a tiny glimpse of the spa lifestyle, well, the DoE is against it.

Manufacturers of such showerheads are being fined — this spring, the federal government fined four such companies a total of about $150,000, just for making a showerhead that people want — and stern warnings are being sent out on Department of Energy letterhead.

To an environmental bureaucrat, the world looks better when it’s dingier. Bright lights are too festive. Powerful showerheads are too luxurious. To maintain the proper downcast attitude, they want to make sure we’re all a little less comfortable.

It’s all about less with them. As far as the environmental movement is concerned, we’re running out of everything — polar icecaps, sea turtles, crude oil — and the trick is to cut our appetites down to size, to stop wanting to stand under a gushing showerhead in a bright morning bathroom and think, I can handle what’s coming at me today.

It’s not about showerheads and wattage. It’s about optimism. Either you think a more prosperous world is a good thing — that prosperity and ingenuity can solve most of our pressing problems — or you don’t. Either you think that being able to afford an expensive showerhead is a component of a complicated web of incentives designed to inspire the next Thomas Edison to invent something useful — like, say, a battery-powered car or a brighter energy-saving light bulb — or you think that we’re done, we’ve invented everything already and we need to divvy up a shrinking pie. For the Left, there are no light-bulb moments in the future.

In the Battle of the Bathroom, the environmental bureaucrats have the optimistic hedonists on the run. They’ve taken our bulbs and our rain-showers, so it’s just a matter of time before they focus their regulatory powers on my toilet, with its delightfully surprising — but water-wasteful — nozzles and jets. This, perhaps, is where we need to take our (seated) stand. This is the line they must not cross. When they come to me with their regulations and federal guidelines, I will take a page from the National Rifle Association and say, “From my cold, dead . . .”

Well, you get the idea.

— Rob Long is a contributing editor of National Review and a contributor to Ricochet. This article originally appeared in the October 18, 2010, issue of National Review.

The Trouble with Islamic Outreach

The FBI is hosting some bad actors.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/
October 2, 2010 4:00 A.M.


Sheikh Kifah Mustapha (third from left) touring the National Counterterrorism Center (Photo: FBI)

I wonder if the FBI will be inviting Hatem Abudayyeh to tour the government’s most sensitive anti-terrorism facilities, snoop around the top-secret National Counterterrorism Center, and maybe even pop by the FBI training center in Quantico. Surely he’d be a splendid addition to the Bureau’s next six-week “Citizen’s Academy,” where he could ask our agents searching questions about their investigative practices and anti-terrorism policies.

Oh, sure, he may be at the center of a federal grand-jury investigation in Chicago. And yes, as Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports, the selfsame FBI, armed with a search warrant, did just finish raiding Abudayyeh’s home last week, apparently seeking evidence tying Abudayyeh to support for terrorist organizations. But what’s the big whoop? After all, Mr. Abudayyeh “has never been convicted of a crime and never [been] charged with a crime.”[1]

According to Ross Rice, top flack for the FBI’s Chicago field office, that’s the Bureau’s new gold standard. Yes, you may be a cog in the terror-support wheel. You may be virulently anti-American and committed to the destruction of Israel. But if we haven’t indicted you yet, you’re okay in our book — c’mon in and see what we’ve got.

To be fair, Bureau spokesman Rice wasn’t talking about Abudayyeh. He was speaking instead of Kifah Mustapha. Sheikh Mustapha is a recent graduate of the Citizen’s Academy, where he got the full lowdown on our nation’s most sensitive domestic-security locations and practices. Prior to that, Mustapha was best known to the government as “unindicted co-conspirator no. 31” in the most significant terrorism-financing case ever brought by the Justice Department: the Holy Land Foundation prosecution in which several of the sheikh’s confederates were convicted of sending millions of dollars to Hamas.

It was in the HLF case that the government revealed the FBI’s discovery of documents proving an Islamist conspiracy to “destroy” the U.S. “from within” by means of “sabotage.” The trove in question, describing what conspirators called their “civilization jihad,” had been seized from the home of a top Muslim Brotherhood operative. The Brotherhood’s top U.S. priority, the documents showed, was to support the terrorist operations of Hamas, the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, which is — the government has declared and Hamas’s own charter brays — dedicated to the annihilation of Israel.

The Brotherhood coordinated Hamas support in the U.S. through an outfit called the Islamic Association of Palestine. The IAP and other Brotherhood fronts set up the HLF to be Hamas’s American piggy bank. As terrorism analyst Patrick Poole recounts, Mustapha was the registered agent of the HLF in Illinois. The purported “Islamic charity” paid him more than $154,000 for his efforts between 1996 and 2000. Moreover, at the HLF trial, an FBI agent testified that Mustapha sang in an HLF-sponsored band that regularly featured songs dedicated to killing Jews and glorifying Hamas.[2]

What a guy! Obviously, the Brotherhood thought so. Mustapha was soon made the imam of the infamous Bridgeview mosque in Chicago. As the Chicago Tribune observed in a probing 2004 report, that mosque’s leaders “are men who have condemned Western culture, praised Palestinian suicide bombers and encouraged members to view society in stark terms: Muslims against the world.” They also exhorted Muslims to resist “melting into American society, culture and lifestyle,” executing the Brotherhood’s “voluntary apartheid” strategy of establishing Muslim enclaves throughout the West, to be governed by Islam’s authoritarian sharia law. Bridgeview’s Muslim community became a bastion of Hamas support. Indeed, upon being captured by Israeli forces for funding Hamas, a Chicago academic and Hamas operative named Muhammad Salah confessed that he’d been recruited into the Muslim Brotherhood at the Bridgeview mosque.

Mustapha’s participation in the Citizen’s Academy so soon after his identification as an unindicted co-conspirator has been a source of supreme embarrassment to the FBI. At first, outraged citizens who called the Bureau’s Washington headquarters to complain were told that reports of Mustapha’s inclusion in a sensitive-access FBI program were false — and even that a picture showing Mustapha with other participants (see Pat Poole’s Big Peace report)[3] must have been photo-shopped. Alas, that story had a couple of holes: The class picture was an official Bureau photo and the class had been covered by a local ABC correspondent who remembered the sheikh quite well.

Thus came explanation number two: Yes, Mustapha was there, and yeah, maybe that means we took a Hamas supporter through a few top-secret locations, but don’t look at us — blame Chicago. Headquarters thus started referring irate callers to the Chicago field office, where Mr. Rice now labors through explanation number three: Sheikh Mustapha is our guy.

Come again? Rice dutifully explains that if the Feebs had really thought the unindicted Hamas coconspirator “was a security risk, we wouldn’t have included him.” But he was included because “he is a very influential leader of the Palestinian community here and imam of the largest mosque and was a welcome addition.”

Of course he was. After all, the “Citizen’s Academy” is part of the federal government’s top national-security priority. Would that be choking off Muslim support for terrorism? Surely you jest. Our principal objective is “Muslim outreach.”

That’s why you might find Hatem Abudayyeh down there at Quantico any time now. Sure, he may be caught up in an investigation of terrorism support, but why should that make a difference? Mustapha was not just suspected; the Justice Department actually went to the trouble of designating him as a coconspirator and proving his Hamas ties in its case against the HLF. As far as the FBI’s Chicago field office was concerned, that makes him an asset and puts him at the head of the class.

Plus, Abudayyeh already has an even more prestigious credential: He’s been through White House Muslim outreach. As Josh Gerstein explains, Abudayyeh was among a select group invited to the White House in April for a briefing by the Office of Public Engagement on what the Obama administration says involved issues of “concern” for the Arab American community.

Clearly, Abudayyeh is very concerned about such matters. That’s why, for example, he strenuously objected in a 2006 interview to the American description of “Hamas, Hezbollah, and the other Palestinian and Lebanese resistance organizations as ‘terrorists.’” Instead, “the real terrorists are the governments and military forces of the U.S. and Israel.”

Sounds like an ideal “outreach” partner, no?

By the way, it is sentiments like those that landed Abudayyeh at the Arab-American Action Network, where he is currently executive director. Why does that get you a White House briefing? Well, it probably helps that the AAAN was founded by President Obama’s good friends Mona and Rashid Khalidi. That would be the Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi, the guy who used to be Yasser Arafat’s mouthpiece.

Did I mention that the AAAN got started with seed money from the far-left Woods Foundation — whose board members at the time included former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers and his friend, a Chicago community organizer turned pol named Barack Obama?[4]

There’s nothing like outreach.

– Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Links:

[1] http://www.politico.com/blogs/joshgerstein/1010/Target_of_FBI_terrorsupport_raid_visited_WH.html

[2] http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/006/685mkanq.asp

[3] http://bigpeace.com/pspoole/2010/09/27/fbi-escorts-known-hamas-operative-through-top-secret-national-counterterrorism-center-as-outreach-to-muslim-community/

[4] http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/226104/i-l-times-i-suppresses-obamas-khalidi-bash-tape/andrew-c-mccarthy

A conversation with P.J. O’Rourke

"I’ve been shot toward, not shot at," says a modest P.J. O’Rourke about his decades as a war heckler. He’s been to some dicey places — Afghanistan, Iraq, LaGuardia Airport. It was at the latter that he was most nearly blown to bits.

By KYLE SMITH
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
October 3, 2010

"Long before I was ever a war correspondent, my first experience with pieces of dead bodies — was at LaGuardia. It was Christmas 1975, and I was upstairs when the bomb went off in the locker on the level below. Killed 11 people. The presumption was that it was Puerto Rican nationalists. They were the bombers of the day.

"So I’m sitting at the bar at LaGuardia, waiting for my plane. Ka-WAMMMM! I had just ordered a Jack Daniels on the rocks. Bartender turns to me, says, ‘You want to make that a double?’ Swear to God."

So O’Rourke, whose cousin lived a couple of blocks from the West 11th Street townhouse where several members of the Weather Underground accidentally blew themselves up in 1970 and whose girlfriend was in the crowd when National Guardsmen killed five student protesters at Kent State two months later, is amused by chatter about "polarization" today. "Bull - - - -," he says. "Anyone who lived through the Civil Rights era knows this is nothing compared to the polarization — anger, hatred, murder — that went on then. Or to take a better example, 1860. That’s polarized. This is arguing."

O’Rourke, the reformed ex-radical, editor of National Lampoon during the "Animal House" era, war correspondent and, lately, target of what he calls "ass cancer," continues the anti-statist argument in his new book, "Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards" (Atlantic Monthly Press). References to Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Adam Smith (to whose "Wealth of Nations" he once devoted an entire volume) prove O’Rourke can do the philosophical heavy lifting — yet make it all float on a fluffy cloud of wit. Among his best one-liners:

* "The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can’t pass a law making ourselves weigh 165. Liberals and leftists think we can."

* "We’re individuals — unique, disparate, and willful, as anyone raising a household of little individuals knows. And not one of those children has ever written a letter to Santa Claus saying, ‘Please bring me and a bunch of kids I don’t know a pony and we’ll share.’ "

* "The most sensible request of government we make is not, ‘Do something!’ But ‘Quit it!’ "

* "Conservatism is a flight from ideas. As in, ‘Don’t get any ideas,’ ‘What’s the big idea?’ and ‘Whose idea was that?’ "

O’Rourke, 62, is a cool Republican. It’s a lonely job. What can the rest of the party do to join him?

"I don’t think Republicans have ever been cool," he says. "Abraham Lincoln tried growing a beard."

Yes, and look what happened to him.

"It’s always going to be cooler to have wild visionary ideas for society and the future. All we can really do is see that we’ve got a society where as many people grow out of cool as fast as they possibly can."

Even O’Rourke admits "I thought it was pretty cool myself" to be part of an America that elected a black president. But if his new book barely mentions President Obama, Sarah Palin or any other topical punchline, it’s because "I wanted to write something that, 20 years from now, people don’t need footnotes for."

Dressed like a CEO in a sober suit, he looks unscathed by the colon cancer that attacked him a couple of years ago.

"Touch Formica, things are going well," he says. "I spent about six months being treated. It was early stage, it was not particularly invasive. I got my two-year checkup a couple of months ago. They said I was good to go."

Some friends have been less fortunate. O’Rourke reeled when his friend of 30 years, "The Breakfast Club" director John Hughes, dropped dead of a heart attack while walking on West 55th Street last year.

O’Rourke, who in the book cops to being "a little to the right of Rush Limbaugh," says Hughes was "quite conservative."

Hughes, once a hot creative at a Chicago ad firm was O’Rourke’s first hire when he took over editing National Lampon around the start of 1978. "One of the things John and I saw alike was a larval conservatism. We disliked [Jimmy] Carter. We weren’t upset when Reagan was elected."

Later, O’Rourke says, he and Hughes didn’t see the need to talk politics much because they agreed on everything. Is conservatism in Hughes’ films, though? "It’s there for those who care to see it," says O’Rourke. " ‘Home Alone’ is all about self sufficiency, freedom and responsibility, basically. The kid eats all the junk food in the house then watches all the terrible movies and then he has to bring himself together."

O’Rourke was once an irresponsible brat too, a semi-pro rioter who ranted about the fascist pigs "in stints between the water bed and the water pipe." Then "I became a Republican when I had to pay taxes. I became a conservative when I had kids. Everybody is a conservative with their kids.

"Obama very much absorbed the lessons that we in the ’60s were trying to put forth," O’Rourke says. "While most of us who actually tried the ’60s got over this, he didn’t, because part of it went on that long march through the institutions that he was obviously influenced by — without, perhaps, the hedonism. He’s like a fun-free ’60s."

The progressive mindset, O’Rourke thinks, amounts to a faith that "if you could just get the smartest people in the world together in a room, then by golly you can figure out a health care program. It’s this kind of contempt for the ordinary person’s expertise and what is best for him or her — contempt for the fundamental principle interest of self-interest that the world rests on — that [Obama] took away from the 1960s in large bags and cartons."

But the ’60s ultimately gave us Reagan. Obama has already given us the Tea Party and useful instruction on just how little can be accomplished by even the most eloquent and appealing of leaders. "We don’t vote to elect good people," O’Rourke says. "Certainly not great people, because they aren’t too great. We hold elections to throw the bums out."

As for another ex-communist who took a deep breath and re-evaluated, O’Rourke says he sent Christopher Hitchens a long e-mail about cancer treatment.

"This should probably be off the record," O’Rourke says. "I said, just make sure your doctor is generous with the painkillers. I said doctors must know this, but don’t tell you, that Scotch and Percocet happen to go together perfectly."

Off the record? Really?

O’Rourke considers. "Oh, go ahead."

Bruce Springsteen explores a time of 'Darkness'

By Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/
October 1, 2010


Glory days, circa 1978: The E Street Band was Roy Bittan, left, Clarence Clemons, Garry Tallent, Max Weinberg, Bruce Springsteen, Steve Van Zandt and Danny Federici.

Photo By Frank Stefanko

NEW YORK — Bruce Springsteen still writes songs the old-fashioned way. Which is to say The Boss keeps his initial creative process low-tech.

"I've got this big fat notebook," he says, holding his hands out for emphasis and flashing a distinctly self-deprecating grin. "It's the same kind I've always used, with everything written in longhand."

In the documentary The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, which makes its debut Thursday on HBO (9 p.m. ET/PT), black-and-white footage shows a 27-year-old Springsteen leafing through such a notebook while working on Darkness on the Edge of Town, the 1978 album that cemented his reputation as a great American troubadour. A three-CD, three-DVD box set including the film, due Nov. 16, features an 80-page simulation, complete with facsimiles of his scribbled lyrics, song ideas and recording and personal notes from that era.

Its blue cover suggests an item favored by schoolchildren since long before the Information Age. "My new notebook looks just like that," he confirms. "Maybe the color's different, but that's all."

Perhaps that's fitting, given the 61-year-old rock icon's response to watching himself and his longtime collaborators in the E Street Band as young men in director Thom Zimny's film. It premiered to wide acclaim in September at the Toronto Film Festival.

"A lot has changed, and yet not very much has," Springsteen says, looking fit and relaxed in a plaid shirt and jeans as he chats in a Midtown hotel room. "We all know a lot more about what we're doing now, which is good, because we were truly amateurs at the time. But the same intensity remains about making music — the idea that it should matter, that it should be worth thinking hard about."

A turning point

Indeed, The Promise — which juggles footage of rehearsals, studio sessions and performances from 1976 to 1978 with new interviews with Springsteen, E Streeters and other colleagues — traces the recording of Darkness and the hard-won personal and artistic growth marked by the album, Springsteen's fourth.

Darkness was delayed by a lawsuit pitting Springsteen against then-manager Mike Appel, who had co-produced previous albums, including Born to Run, the 1975 epic that made the singer/songwriter a superstar. Appel appears in the documentary, in which he and Springsteen speak about each other without acrimony. Springsteen states that the suit was a bid not for money but for control of his career. (In 1977, freed from contracts with Appel, he hired current manager and Born to Run and Darkness co-producer Jon Landau, a major presence in the film.)

Darkness also was haunted and enriched by Springsteen's struggle to come to terms with his success and with a growing sense of social awareness. He wrote most of the songs while living on a farm in Holmdel, N.J., not far from the working-class neighborhood where he was raised.

"I became interested in the mystery of my family life, and in its larger social implications," he says. "Initially you're not very interested in your parents as people, but in my late 20s, I started to have enough distance to see their story, and I found it compelling and provocative."

The plaintive song "Factory", for instance, was inspired by Springsteen's father, who lost his hearing after working amid the noise in a plastics plant, as he recounts in the film. "I wanted to delve into the personal and try to connect it to the political, and to write about things that were permanent. Work, family, relationships — generation after generation, those things are the essence of our experience."

The resulting songs are leaner and grittier than the majestic soundscapes of Born to Run. Though Darkness has sold 3 million copies to date, about half as many as the previous album and only a fraction of the 15 million sold by his 1984 smash, Born in the U.S.A., critics consider it a pivotal work.

Reviewing the album in Rolling Stone, future Springsteen biographer Dave Marsh wrote: "Occasionally, a record appears that changes fundamentally the way we hear rock & roll. ... I have no doubt that (Darkness) will someday fit as naturally within that list as the Rolling Stones' 'Satisfaction' or Sly and the Family Stone's 'Dance to the Music'."

Time clearly hasn't diminished the pundits' enthusiasm. "It's the record where Bruce grew up," says Rolling Stone contributing editor Anthony DeCurtis. "Born to Run, tremendous as it was, was like a last wail of adolescence, of the romantic agony that you go through as a young person. On Darkness, he takes a hard look at what people's lives are really like, at who gets opportunities and who doesn't. There's no longer that sense that somehow rock 'n' roll is going to save everything."

Springsteen, too, sees Darkness, with its vivid depiction of everyday lives, dreams and disenchantment in now-classic tunes such as "Badlands" and "Racing in the Street", as a transition point. "Some of the big themes I started to write about here, you'll spot them intermittently on my first three records. But it was really on Darkness and then (1980's) The River and (1982's) Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. that they came to the fore."

The band wasn't just trying to make a record, he says, "we were trying to make an essential record. So that if you were interested in rock music, interested in what was at stake in the late '70s culturally, then you had to deal with this particular piece of music. That became a blueprint for the way we continued to work, and I think that thoughtfulness has resonated over the long haul. The songs are still a vessel for the topics I want to discuss."

Since his youth, Springsteen has viewed popular music as a "natural freedom promoter. You listened to Elvis' records or Woody Guthrie's or Hank Williams' and suddenly you had more breathing room, more license to be who you wanted to be. I've always felt that there were enormous political implications to Elvis' career. As a very feminized man who crossed racial lines, he was a bit of a precursor to the sexual revolution and the civil rights era — without uttering a political or rhetorical word in any of his songs."

For Springsteen, the more politically conscious songs on Darkness "haven't become dated" in the 32 years since its release. "If anything, they're more relevant right now." He notes that the album was crafted "during the Carter recession." The country's mood has darkened, he acknowledges, since the 2008 presidential campaign, when he supported Barack Obama.

"It's tough, because when people are out of work, they're hurt and angry. But we've been living through economic troubles for years. One of the biggest issues right now is the disparity in wealth, and that's been growing through all the boom times. We've worked with a lot of food banks over the past 25 years. There are constantly people dropping out of the middle class."

Still scribbling notes

Of Obama's performance as president, Springsteen says: "I continue to have great faith in him. There's that quote that says you campaign in poetry and govern in prose — or you campaign as a visionary and govern as a legislator. Maybe that's something he suffers from, or something people are struggling with. But I think President Obama is very smart and very steady."

With The Promise, Springsteen hopes to flesh out his own image, particularly for younger fans who had not seen or heard his work with the E Street Band before the late '80s. "After I got the band back together again in 1998 or 1999, we did a few tours and made some good records, and I realized that there were a lot of kids coming to the shows. I thought it would be nice to put together a record of what we did at that earlier time."

For the old faithful, the coming box set The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story will include 21 previously unreleased songs, also available on a two-CD set, The Promise. The tunes include Springsteen's recordings of "Because the Night" and "Fire", respectively hits for Patti Smith and the Pointer Sisters.

"All the tracks except one were recorded 30 years ago," Springsteen says, but didn't make the final cut. "I just decided that I wanted to say something else at the time. I wanted to wait until I felt I could have an essential conversation with my audience."

It hasn't yet been determined when that conversation will resume in the form of a new studio album. At the moment, Springsteen is focused on seeing his 16-year-old son, Sam — the youngest of his three children by wife and E Street member Patti Scialfa— through his junior year of high school. But he's still finding time to scribble in notebooks.

"I want to write some more good songs, play some more good shows," Springsteen says. "I want to come back and look again into all those wonderful faces that I've been looking into for the past 35 years. I just do what I do, you know?"

Concert Photos by Jym Wilson, USA TODAY
Taken at The Montreal Forum, 11/8/1978