Errol Flynn

Errol Flynn is one my favorite movie actors. I like his movies and his performances in them. I think that people will be watching and enjoying Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk and a few more long after many of the more actor-ly and pretentious films of his contemporaries (and ours) are properly forgotten. It is often said that he was not a very good actor. That of course raises an interesting question. If what he did was so easy and unremarkable, why had no one else been able to match or duplicate it in all the years that have followed?

A couple of nights ago I saw Lauren Bacall on a short on TCM saying that Flynn was always dissatisfied because he wanted to play more “serious” dramatic roles. If that is true, it is sad. For he was the best there ever was at doing what he did, playing the swashbuckler, just as John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart, respectively, were at playing the Westerner and the score-knowing, tough guy loner walking down the world’s mean streets. That should have been enough for anybody.

Unserious on Warming

Whatever one thinks about the science of global warming (and I accept that human produced CO2 contributes to warming but am agnostic as to whether it does so to a significant degree), the politics are fascinating. In particular, it is quite clear that the politicians waving the scorching shirt on this one are completely unserious about it.

For all the talk about danger and crisis and even apocalypse, the glaring fact is that the politicians are rather uninterested in doing anything about their concerns. To see this, consider a policy maker who took the claims at face value. His reasonable response would be to try to find ways to decrease CO2 production that would be acceptable to the public, consistent with economic growth, feasible with present technology, and economically doable and then to push for those solutions like mad. In other words, he would be screaming for more nuclear and hydroelectric power plants, supplemented by wind, now.

Instead we get moralistic demands for austerity, sacrifice, punitive taxes, fascistic controls over everyday life, and a diminished standard of living coupled with dreamy infatuations over putt-putt cars, corn liquor engines, solar panels, and buses running on bacon grease. Any political realist can tell that the American people are not going to go for being impoverished and regimented to prevent hypothetical contributions to global warming. Yet that is the agenda.

That of course suggests that the people beating the drums don’t really believe what they are saying in any operationally serious way (just as people who whine about the abysmal state of public education but won’t look at serious reforms or challenging the teachers’ unions don’t really care about fixing that mess) and are just grabbing at power and playing to the “green” gallery. This is perhaps another reason not to lose much sleep over global warming. For if its most dogmatic proponents don’t really take it seriously, maybe the rest of us shouldn't either.