WE JUST BLOG IN IT

The late and great Michael Kelly located modern America’s Original Sin–and sinner–here:

“One man, strolling onto the set at precisely the right moment in the youth of the Entertainment Age, made himself the prototype of the age’s essential figure: the iconic celebrity. The iconic celebrity is the result of the central confusion of the age, which is that people possessed of creative or artistic gifts are somehow teachers-role models-in matters of personal conduct. The iconic celebrity is idolized-and obsessively studied and massively imitated-not merely for the creation of art but for the creation of public self, for the confection of affect and biography that the artist projects onto the national screen.

And what Frank Sinatra projected was: cool. And here is where the damage was done. Frank invented cool, and everyone followed Frank, and everything has been going to hell ever since.”

James Piereson, in his new book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism convincingly locates that Sin elsewhere:

Edward B. Driscoll Jr.:

Even simply looking at photographs, it’s obvious that a decade that began with Sinatra and Miles Davis in cool sharkskin suits and ended in the mud of Woodstock had undergone a enormous cultural shift. …

“In 1963, you have a fairly conservative country, culturally,” Piereson notes. “You have a communist assassinate the president, a popular president. In 1968, the country has kind of gone off the rails, especially liberal-left culture as you find in the universities, and places like that. The students are taking drugs, and they’re demonstrating, and they’re rioting against the war in Vietnam.

“Their hero is Castro, and people like Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse Tung,” Pierson says, noting the surfeit of Castro and Ché-style army fatigues being worn on campuses. “So how do you get, really, from this place in 1963, where Kennedy is shot by a communist, to ’68 where communists like Castro are heroes to the left?”

And further to that place in 1975 when Democrats totally sold out JFK’s legacy by surrendering to the Communists? You get there because the Liberal Establishment could not process JFK’s murder as a Communist act, so they chose–and choose–to Blame America instead.

And nothing has been right with them since.

On the occasion of Joey Bishop’s death, Mark Steyn republishes his review of the Ocean’s Eleven remake:

When Sinatra died and the networks dusted off their old footage of him and Dean on stage, tumblers in hand, wreathed in smoke, the announcers all but prefaced the clips with “Don’t try this at home, boys and girls”. The assumption is that Rat Pack fever is ironic and post-modern, like practically everything else these days. It seems more likely that 21st century Rat Packers, after growing up with parents who’ve inflicted plonkingly earnest rockers like Sting on them for 20 years, dig these cats for real. Ditto, Clooney, Pitt and Damon. Any irony in the new Ocean’s is a cover: they’d love to be able to smoke and booze like Frank and Dino, but they know, sadly, that guys will never be allowed to have that much fun again.

My favourite Sinatra movie line was in Tony Rome (1967). Sinatra, a soured Chandleresque gumshoe, has been nabbed by some punks and is coolly watching them as they pour chloroform on a dish-rag obviously intended for him. He says: “When.”

And now Frank is George Clooney. And Sammy Davis is Don Cheadle. And Angie Dickinson is Julia Roberts. And Dean Martin is Brad Pitt.

When.

Note to self: must stay on Steyn’s good side.