He was 69. I was pretty young during his heyday in the 1970s, but I still remember the sheer spectacle that was Evel Knievel. He would appear on ABC's World Wide of Sports, doing these lunatic motorcycle jumps. But the thing of it was -- sometimes he'd crash! The spectacle was authentic, it was sheer excitement and suspense. You'd never know quite what he'd do.

Thinking about it now, I don't think Knievel would be the quite the same sensation today. We're too high tech. Through Hollywood special effects, through the virtual reality of video games, we've been turned somewhat immune to something as low tech as a motorcycle jump. I can fly whenever I want in Second Life...

But for a kid, back then, he was a thrill. He was a media sensation, a made-for-TV daredevil. A real life superman. I'm not sure we've ever seen anyone like him since.

RIP, you crazy m-f-er you.

Paul Waldman, over at TAPPED, says Huckabee dodged the WWJD question, but it was only a partial dodge. He did say it was a deterrent, a "warning to others that some crimes truly are beyond any other capacity for us to fix."

But the problem is, not only isn't it a deterrent, but what would likely give Jesus pause when considering the death penalty is that we kill innocent people. The Innocence Project has documented "208 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States," and, of them, "15 of the 208 people...served time on death row."

That's the central problem with the death penalty, and one, it seems, someone running on a platform of piety and politics should more carefully consider.

In a recent discussion here, there was a tangential thread on Westerns, and I said they were all crap. Well, not all of them. But it was Sam Peckinpah who taught 'em all how to make a Western.

And I was told, paraphrasing of course, that I was an idiot. And that I should watch films such as "The Searchers."

Well, last weekend, AMC ran a John Wayne marathon, and, conveniently enough, included "The Searchers." My verdict?

It ain't all that.

The problem I have with it, and the entire genre up to Peckinpah, is the utter lack of realism. The dialogue in "The Seachers," the "aw shucks, maw and paw" banter, just seems so contrived and so fake.

The complete *lack* of violence is another, much bigger, problem -- at one point, after finding the corpse of one of the captured daughters (off-screen, of course...), Wayne's character yells something like, "Ya want me to spell it out for you???"

Well, yes, I do.

Peckinpah, on the topic of violence, is quoted this way:

"The point of the film," he would later say," is to take this facade of movie violence and open it up, get people involved in it so that they are starting to go in the Hollywood television predictable reaction syndrome, and then twist it so that it's not fun anymore, just a wave of sickness in the gut...It's ugly, brutalizing and bloody awful. It's not fun and games and cowboys and Indians. It's a terrible, ugly thing. And yet there's a certain response that you get from it, an excitement because we're all violent people."

It's not gratuitous, but violence for effect. Violence as more than metaphor, but a "feeling of" the reality. A reminder, perhaps, of what we all can be.

Part of this distance between these two movies is, of course, cultural. "The Searchers" is a product of its times, and is mainly caught in the 1950s "Father Knows Best" format. And, within those constraints, it actually did push boundaries -- it explored the issues of racism and Native American genocide.

But is still lacks a measure of reality, and the timeline in which the film was set was an ugly reality. And without reflecting that reality, by relying on contrived dialogue and off-screen suggestions of violence, it falls short.

At least to a viewer in this day and age.

"The Wild Bunch" was also a product of its time, informed mostly by the reality of the Vietnam War. In that sense, "The Wild Bunch" was really the result of television, as, up the that point, no medium had brought home the ugly reality of war better than television news.

All this is not to say that violence isn't used gratuitously today. It often is.

Not everyone can be Sam Peckinpah.

Bush Supporter Rhetoric:

The president has thrown himself an end-of-term party and the world is showing up, wearing smiles and bearing gifts. Maybe it isn't as cool as getting the Stones to play your 60th birthday party, but Annapolis will have its moments.

Annapolis Moment:

Olmert (to Bush): If we move from the podium they will see us shaking hands.

Bush: Yeah, come on.

Was is Mark Halperin that called Bush a "wildly talented" politician?

Yes, I believe it was.

Something curious at work here, a user making comment after comment in old posts with what seem to be commercial links. See here, here, here, and here.

Is this a spam-bot, or something else?