Over at Slate, David Haglund attempts to make the case that the Big Lebowski works as an anticipation of the perfidy of the neocons:

Watching The Big Lebowski in 2008, it becomes clear that appreciating Walter is essential to understanding what the Coen brothers are up to in this movie, which is slyer, more political, and more prescient than many of its fans have recognized. Perhaps that’s because Walter, with his bellowing, Old Testament righteousness and his deeply entrenched militarism, is an American type that barely registered on the pop-culture landscape 10 years ago. He’s a neocon. If that seems like a stretch, consider the traits Walter exhibits over the course of the film: faith in American military might (the Gulf War, he says, “is gonna be a piece of cake”; in the original script, he calls it “a fucking cakewalk”); nostalgia for the Cold War (“Charlie,” he says, referring to the Viet Cong, was a “worthy fuckin’ adversary”); strong support for the state of Israel (to judge from his reverent paraphrase of Theodor Herzl: “If you will it, Dude, it is no dream”); and even, perhaps, past affiliation with the left (he refers knowingly to Lenin’s given name and admits to having “dabbled in pacifism”). Goodman, who has called the role his all-time favorite, seems also to have sensed Walter’s imperialist side. “Dude has a rather, let’s say, Eastern approach to bowling,” he said in an interview. “Walter is strictly Manifest Destiny.”

So, yeah, all the points of comparison do line up kind of conveniently, like Haglund says. But if we’re going to be interpreting the movie this way, why stop with Walter? The entire cast of characters, one could say, represents a skewering of the entire American political landscape. When you start to make pat interpretations, it’s hard to stop: There’s the dude (Sixties radicalism as a spent force), Maude Lebowski (Europhilic coastal elites), Jeffrey Lebowski…the other Jeffrey Lebowski (a straigh-from-central casting, cigar-chomping GOP corporate welfare case), and Donny (the “silent majority” in America’s flyover country, who can’t get a word in edgewise over all the partisan bickering). Indeed you can make a good case for these and many more readings, but by doing so, don’t we lose a little of the magic of the original?

As The Dude himself might put it, “No, you’re not wrong, Haglund. You’re just an asshole.”

As usual, Reihan is on to something:

The Palin pick is the politicial equivalent of bear-baiting. Yes, ridiculing Palin as a hick and a rube, and devaluing her experience, comes naturally to the kind of people who take Barack Obama seriously as a presidential candidate. Philip Gourevitch discussed the parallels between Palin and Obama — but of course Palin is in many respects the cultural and stylistic opposite of Obama. Obama speaks to the highest aspirations and self-conceptions of a certain kind of urban liberal. Palin, in contrast, speaks to the highest aspirations and self-conceptions of a different set of Americans. That’s why insults and ridicule are counter-productive for Democrats. Why? Because the kind of Americans inclined to like Obama, without the aid of Joe Biden or free factory-reviving supercars, will never vote for a Republican. The kind of Americans inclined to like Palin might vote for a Democrat, particularly this year.

There are at least four pitfalls for Democrats in Palin’s biography: 1) The “experience” charge. As Sonny has explained better than I could, it invites Obamaphiles to give in to their temptation to mock flyover country (not a good strategy to win those Western battleground states, is it?). But this charge is at least covered over by a patina of respectability. The other charges, not so much: 2) The “pandering” charge. To criticize McCain for picking this woman, as if just any woman would do to bring in woman voters, may only serve to remind Hillary’s disgruntled supporters that Obama himself could have chosen a (supposedly) eminently qualified woman but chose not to. 3) The “her family’s too young and too big for her to be VP” charge. Probably not the kind of argument that should be made by a party that has had trouble winning over married voters with children. 4) The “Alaskan secessionist” charge. Admittedly it’s a bizarre one, but not so strange that the Times didn’t see it as fit to print. And as for candidates with associations to fringe organizations, well, at least the Alaskan Independence Party hasn’t set off any bombs.

But that said, I have to part company with the conservatives who are thrilled with the Palin pick and count myself with Peggy Noonan, raw and uncut. The fact that Obama is also inexperienced doesn’t make McCain’s choice of an inexperienced running-mate any less troubling.

UPDATE: I forgot to add that #3 above isn’t a charge that will endear Obama to feminists, either.

Sunday Post, page M01: “Watch ‘Em and Weep: Let the Credits and the Tears Roll. Aren’t Movies—Sniff—Grand?”

Why do we cry at the movies?

Maybe it is the movie or the psychological baggage we schlepped in with us. Or is it empathy, or you-are-so-busted guilt? Maybe genetics or cultural conditioning. Or were we simply bursting to spill that night because the boss refused to give us a week off for Christmas?

This much we do know: All of us do it in varying degrees of blubbitude. Some of us are waterfalls, soaking fellow moviegoers with our public displays of empathy (PDE). Others are Saharas for whom tears are about as rare as oases. Most of us fit somewhere in between.

Blubbitude? PDE? I couldn’t make up such hackery if I tried for weeks.

The only reason soppy milquetoast garbage like this gets published at all is that there’s a tradition of filling up pages upon pages of newsprint on Sundays. The sooner that tradition goes the way of the dodo, the better for society as a whole.