Anyway, though I feel I am grasping for content, I promised in my last blog that I would write about stuff. So now we have some rather unrefined remarks about a film I just saw, Secretary. I liked it. It was fine. But, as opposed to my expectations, I don't really have an opinion on it. I mean, I liked it because there were two unhappy central characters at the beginning of the film who became happy by the end of it, and they did so without hitting any jangling bum notes in the intervening telling. That's nice. Also, because of the dominant/submissive aspect of their love story, I really liked that the film ended with the heroine looking directly at the camera, as if daring anyone to judge her. That was nice. But still, not really an opinion on the opinion-making subject matter the movie throws at us. Sexual mores, etc. I think I'll have to wait to hear a forceful reaction of denouncement or acclaim before I have the ingredients necessary to establish a position. Until then, it's a good love story told with subtlety and respect.

So, onto other matters. Hillary Clinton makes me cringe. Whenever she talks or, as recently, writes about herself and her life, she does so in a way that is overproduced to the point that its only effect is emptiness. Now, I do not want to be another in the long line of blags who has accused her of calculating coldness. To be contrary, I will rather accuse her of calculated warmth, which has the effect of nullifying what it sets out to showcase. It feels to me that she has fixed upon a character, a persona, that she considers winning, and so she mercilessly treats us to her best impersonation of what we are to consider as a wounded woman who nonetheless, and bravely, perserveres in her duty with the aid her good humour, her accrued wisdom, her grace and her dignity. Oh, and her profound faith. I don't know, it just seems ghastly. It's all vague optimism and barely hinted at ideals, and a decline into the meaningless evocation of 'values' - meaningless because the vagaries of such terms are not leavened by individual attempts at establishing their meaning. What do you mean by that? What do you mean by that? This is my response to her every offering. Inscrutable, unsatisfying. Listen, I don't wish to know particularly how she feels, but if she is going to make announcements about it that pretend to particularity, then I am allowed to feel that her words ring hollow when they don't account for her. They don't account for anyone. I have no idea that she has any powerful feeling about things, issues, what have you. From what bedrock of ideals does she negotiate her public life? What does she fight for? I don't wish to attack her. I just feel the need for a firebrand, and this week, she is the most prominent non-firebrand. Also, it feels like she is so prone to talioring her tone that speaking her mind is not the object of any exercise she undertakes. She's not hateful or anything, just lousy. And she's lousy dressed up as the best we can expect in the mainstream, where the power is. Shit.

Now, just to state the obvious, we seem to have reached a point where the media is simultaneously at its most omnipresent and most impotent. Thus, we are bombarded with much talk of values and their importance in such troubling times, but provided little evidence of them from those disseminating the bombast. I do not deny that these are troubling times. When Tony Blair visited British troops and said that the war on Iraq would be regarded as one of the most significant events of the 21st century, I didn't disagree with him. Invading Iraq was most definitely a significant event, and though I dread this eventuality, I do think that this century will bear out its significance. Just not in the way Blair foresees it. You see, we have crossed a line. Rather, a line has been crossed. The most evolved and established - or at least, the most powerful - democracies in the world have seriously screwed things up. We just witnessed a war people! Violence and killing as a solution, without the need of a reason, and without much pressure to provide one. No established threat to other nations. No! That's unnecessary this century! Just a flurry of assertions and then, in the confusion they caused, bang! And it was a blinding success apparently. And the UN should be grateful that the US is still talking to them after all their niggardly 'qualms' and 'concerns', because, irrespective of all that weapons of mass destruction bizzo, it was liberation baby! And despite the superabundance of coverage, we are never going to find out what happened, and we are never going to be made to feel that, on the whole, it was a disastrous and shameful thing. No shit will hit the fan. Thus, in the 21st century, power will be bullying and implacable, unbound by law, unsteadied by principle, unheedful of precedent and, quite alarmingly, unrepentant. Seriously. Shit.