Viewed through the unripe eyes of Calhoun’s 13-year-olds, the collapse of the Twin Towers might have been a natural disaster. Captions tell us that the “The loss was sudden and great”; “Smoke and dust were everywhere”; and “The streets were empty.” For all the project’s pretense to chronicle, nothing indicates why. “People donated blood.” So? Blood drives are commonplace. “The people were afraid.” But of what? Yes, “people still miss the Twin Towers.” But why are they gone? Did they just fall down of their own accord? Might their destruction have had something to do with the lethal ideology of Islamist jihadists? Or with Islam’s theological imperative toward war with the infidel and the religiously sanctioned violence of classic Islamic jurisprudence? The display keeps mum on the critical matter of responsibility.

— 9/11: Through Young Eyes is on view through October 8, 2011, at DC Moore Gallery in West Chelsea. The exhibition consists of work made in 2001 by an eighth grade class at the Calhoun School, after seeing an exhibition by Jacob Lawrence at the Whitney (oh and, I guess, also the devastation of downtown). It is also, according to this absolutely scathing review, a heaping pile of ahistorical garbage. Also: "An oddly truncated exercise in sanitized storytelling that sacrifices historical understanding to a bien pensant avoidance of the obvious." HAHA WOW.

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Whatever the crimes committed by Wallis Simpson – marrying a king, sparking a constitutional crisis, fraternising with Nazis – it's doubtful that she deserves the treatment meted out to her in W.E., Madonna's jaw-dropping take on "the 20th-century's greatest royal love story." The woman is defiled, humiliated, made to look like a joke. The fact that W.E. comes couched in the guise of a fawning, servile snow-job only makes the punishment feel all the more cruel.

Or could it be that Madonna is in deadly earnest here? If so, her film is more risible than we had any right to expect.

—Okay, but how did you like the rest of Madonna's new film?

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This also marks the ultimate in acceptance of extraordinary restaurants in fairly terrible places. After M. Wells made Long Island City a place to eat, and Roberta's made Bushwick a viable dining expedition, I am afraid to contemplate what is next. We can only pray for Washington Heights over Gravesend.

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Seth Colter Walls: both within and without the state of being connected / the Internet makes me feel online

Mary: Of course this is where you begin. I'd have started with the Saint Joseph Domaine Laurent Betton with the peppery finish that we murdered last night at Bar Boulud.

Seth: Oh sorry, HK, my mind is still a touch scrambled from the last of the three short "operas" we saw last night. As you know, the libretto for the last one was written by Samuel Beckett. The rhythms are still a bit in my head. But let's start at the beginning.

Seth: As everyone has been properly notified, City Opera is currently presenting a night of three short, modern one-act operas, which are being rubric'ed under the heading of "Monodramas"–on account of how there is only one singer per piece. (All sopranos, as it happens.) You can read several quite favorable standard-issue operatic reviews in the Times and in the Post (and in another town's Post) if you'd like–though what follows will be more of a user-experience conversation for the non-specialist.

Mary: And I went in totally cold. I do not have the recordings, LIKE YOU DO.

Seth: Truth–or at least for the two that HAVE been been recorded. And so here is the point where we say the titles and composers. First off was John Zorn's "La Machine de l'etre" (The Machine of Being), written in 2000, and which was 10 minutes long, only. Plotless. Also: wordless. Just emotive sounds from the soprano over a gnarly orchestra. And it's meant to be based, somehow, on the late drawings of Antonin Artaud.

Mary: Very KTHXBAI. And it was just a GANG of burqua'd ladies.

Seth: Right. At beginning of this piece, dozens upon dozens of people on stage were in burquas. And the two kind of mannequin-ish actors, dressed up in tuxy-duds, who served as our "guides" to all three works and who stood out in front of the curtain before the lights went down...

Mary: They looked like they were in some sort of synth band!

Seth: Yes, they were very Crystal Sleigh Pink Nothings...

Mary: Yeah, the super hot lady one with bangs and 5" patent leather heels. And the dude.

Seth: Right. He's always going to be called "the dude," when standing next to her.

Mary: And they went around undressing everyone: the soprano, a man in a scarlet suit... before the music even started.

Seth: The whole thing played very much like performance art? But they also gave some odd "structure" to the the night's disparate pieces.

Mary: The thing about the whole performance art bit was that at times it was almost like a comedy skit–poking fun of EXACTLY something like that. BUT it was all too well done and strangely pleasing in other respects.

Seth: Yes, the audience was supposed to laugh a bit, at the beginning and in-between the pieces. Some slight comic relief amid all the keening, angsty abstraction of the modernist musics.

Mary: The audience laughed because they played so much with the planes of interest. Like the focal points altering jarringly from the projected artwork to the background to the sherpas who move around on the foreground. You laughed because moments were absurd.

Seth: TONS of data to process. Here's also where we describe more concretely to people that one of the burqa'd ladies in the Zorn piece had a huge thought-bubble screen above her head, onto which animations based on Artaud's work were projected.

Mary: Some of the women in burquas looked like nuns, though, when they were skittering about. And the drawings looked like aboriginal boobies.

Seth: And penises... which is why I thought the burqua/nun thing was interesting. And also why the whole conceit of "dressing/undressing" the participants before the first two operas was key. Just the notion of the sheathed self versus the revealed/vulnerable self being the emotional nexus between these works that are otherwise quite dissimilar. And and the reason that we don't get any dressing/undressing in the third act is because the MIND/PERSONA IS UNKNOWABLE TO ITSELF, hullo Beckett!

Mary: Hmm... the thing is some of the burqua'dnuns had mad personality while totally covered. BUT you know that's funny you say that, about vulnerability, it's like all the nuns were space aliens, right? And the audience is an invading space ship, and we're way more powerful than them.

Seth: Uh...?

Mary: And the undressed singing lady head nun or den mother or whatever looked panicked! Like she was making up excuses to us, to protect all the other nuns who were helpless

Seth: Yes, she was gesturing to the animations, to the crazy penises and boobs projected into their speech bubbles, as if to explain their essential legitimacy to us as thoughts.

Mary: But she was also the only one really looking at us. There was something very beseeching about it. Like she was asking us to spare them

Seth: And explain their brains to us.

Mary: It was a weird feeling, and none of us were getting it.

Seth: Which, obviously, was why it was wordless

Mary: RIGHT.

Seth: How cool was the fire at the end?

Mary: It was gonzo. Right so there was a huge speech bubble that they showed the animation on, and then they set it on fire. OR rather, it went up in flames. And it was SO FUCKING BRIGHT.

Seth: How do they make fire so bright that you have to close your eyes, even from that distance? And don't forget the other dude in the red suit also had a competing thought bubble, but his went away and then he was vacummed up into the ceiling. AS ONE DOES in this show. So much flying.

Mary: I was worried for their lumbar support. But I also loved it. Also we forgot the lingerie lady with the t-straps.

Seth: She had a super-kinetic and disjointed dance.

Mary: YES, broken doll club dance w/splayed hands and good hair movement.

Seth: This all happened in 10 minutes!

Mary: It was crazed.

Seth: Correct. And then there was a brief multimedia interlude that came before Arnold Schoenberg's "Erwartung" (Expectation, or Anticipation, or Waiting — people do fight over this), from 1909–which in some ways was the most straightforward, most "plotted" thing of the night. In brief: a woman in the woods is looking for her lover, who is late to meet her.

Mary: A total wackjob woman, btw. I mean she is basically straight up making out with a dead man.

Seth: She comes across a dead body (it's him!) and mistakes it for a tree trunk at first. Later she realizes he's dead, but then keeps wondering about the "other woman" homeboy had been seeing of late.

Mary: That's what made her totally nuts! Well, you know I felt deeply for the animated interstitials, because they felt good on my brain and as though I was DUMB high on very good marijuana. AND reminded me of the BEST kenzo floral prints from the 70s.

Seth: That was video art of the seasons changing in the woods, courtesy of Jennifer Steinkamp. Thought it was a bit long. But it was a nice way to disguise the need to have a 5-minute set change after the Zorn piece.

Mary: What did YOU think of the second one?

Seth: I thought it was the least successful staging of the night. Like all the stage business revealed the director's lack of trust regarding what actually happens in the piece.

Mary: So she sees her dead lover, is maaaaaybe making out with him the whole time, and talking to him about how sad she is, and how desperately she loved him.

Seth: After killing him and forgetting it.

Mary: And THEN she gets PISSED! Because she DECIDES he was having an affair with some chick with "white arms." I also noticed this was the production with an Asian lady in it.

Seth: Meantime: so many rose petals falling onto the stage from above.

Mary: Gorgeous rose petals.

Seth: Too many?

Mary: Yes. And then we think maybe she killed him. BUT also I really like their little empire waist dresses, with the pretty little balloon cap sleeves, AND there was a super pretty doll house in that one too. OK so let's get to your favorite, the LAST ONE.

Seth: Morton Feldman's NEITHER!

Mary: The #disco one.

Seth: Describe the set?

Mary: It looked like the walls were covered in fish scales

Seth: I feel like this was opera as it would be staged at Club Silencio from Mullholland Drive?

Mary: Without a doubt. I LOVED the disco balls that were just spinning mirrored boxes.

Seth: Very General Zod. And also they reflected this refracted pinwheel morph-zone of intense colordrom, right?

Mary: YES. The reflections off them shits were really uncomfortable in a way I liked.

Seth: But viz a viz the sheathing and unsheathing of the women in the first two, there was no getting INSIDE the woman in the final piece.

Mary: Oh none. We were in it, but there was no inside to be had.

Seth: The boxes spinning all around her were the antithesis of the doll house (look inside), and the animations (look inside my head).

Mary: YES. I mean, it starts off elegant and beautiful ... and then...

Seth: A bit disturbed and keening and repetitive, but rhythmically varied. And sometimes very softly played. To the point where when a new phrase or momentum was created out of the pointalistically realized orchestration... your hair was just blown back.

Mary: And the words!

Seth: "to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow / from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither"

Mary: Bro: "UNSPEAKABLE HOME"!

Seth: The final words!

Mary: By then, you're like, WERD. CHURCH.

Seth: One other moment? When once of the dancer woman is trying to hold onto the man who is flying away, and she's holding onto his shoes?

Mary: Very no strings attached/*NSYNC (not Portman-Kutcher).

Seth: LOLLL ... anyway, it reminded me of the protagonist in opera number 2 holding onto the dead body that had weirdly risen, undead-like, at the end.

Mary: YES.

Seth: I thought it was a nice callback, just as the boxes that were animated in the first piece were the disco boxes in the last piece. I think the director, Michael Counts, did a great job "tying" together these pieces thematically without putting too much of a BUTTON on the whole deal.

Mary: Agreed. Man those disco boxes were crazy feeling on the brain. But that's the thing. That piece JUST ENDED. It was like being sprung form a sensory deprivation tank into times square. What did we call it?

Seth: That you are refreshed, but also kind of dazed that you elected to sleep with all the lights on and windows open.

Mary: And slightly headachey.

Seth: And still in your SKINNY JEANS.

Mary: And needing to pee. BUT, in a good way that you should pay money to go do.

Seth: $12 tickets and $25 tickets remain for all the remaining presentations of "Monodramas" — which is cheaper than all the things we ate and drank afterward. Otherwise: did the music ever become beautiful to you? Or did it stay space alien-y the whole time?

Mary: It was beautiful the whole time, and space alieny the whole time

Seth: DUALITY, BITCHES. Also, parts of this night contained some of the most exciting opera-making I have seen on any NYC stage this season.

Mary: It was uncomfortably beautiful–and draws you into its crazy immediately. It's like a really hot crying chick.

Seth: Again: LYNCH.

Mary: VERY VERY LYNCH. Importantly so.

Seth: I wonder what we'll see next?

Mary: First we have to go to our jobs again, though.

[EXUENT ALL, TO MEETINGS]

Seth Colter Walls and Mary HK Choi are a mite sluggish today.

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The introduction ends with this rather disturbing mission statement: “This is my America, from my heart, and by my heart. I give it now to my children and grandchildren, and to yours, so they will always know what it was like in America when people were free.” (Just for starters, this presumes that there will still be books in this near future when people are no longer free.)

Best line: “I have a kind of internal compass that keeps me sane and grounded when the media attack dogs bark and the days on the road get long.” This metaphor is more mixed than a cement mixer at a singles mixer.

Chapter One – We The People

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is the kind of “happily, unabashedly pro-American” movie Hollywood doesn’t make anymore. For those unfamiliar, the movie is the story of an unelected Senator’s effort to saddle our children with debt by taking out a federal loan to buy some land for an exclusionary special interest to set up a boys’ camp.

A study in contrasts: Sarah is “obsessed with constitutional theory,” whereas progressives want “Supreme Court justices who will violate their oath of office.”

The chapter gets going when the topic moves to race. You can tell we are going to have an open, honest discussion on the topic when Sarah writes, “The worst thing you can say about a fellow American in politics is that he is a racist. It just doesn’t get any more damning than this accusation.”

Sarah remembers the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act and asks, “Wouldn’t it be more constructive to celebrate these great achievements instead of dwelling obsessively on the problems that made them necessary in the first place?” These days, Americans are too busy to be racists. Still, “It’s a shame that not everyone wants to quote Dr. King these days.” She then (I’m guessing here) kicked a can, put her hands in the pockets of her denim overalls, twirled a big toe on the ground and sighed.

On the Civil War: “Hundreds of thousands of Americans died, but slavery finally died with them. And in an important and overlooked way, our Founders began this painful process.” To be clear, she’s praising the Founders—she capitalizes that way throughout the book, as if they were a minor league baseball team or something—for helping start a war that took place after they were all dead over a horrible institution they enshrined in law. Awesome.

Best line: “Thomas Jefferson … owned slaves and may have had a sexual relationship with one of them.”

Two – Why They Serve

As this chapter’s title shows, Palin is in the awkward position of trying to take credit for being troop-friendly without ever having been one herself. It’s a little Chris Farley Show-esque.

Her son Track (a troop, himself!) gave up his seat on a flight home on September 11, 2009 to accommodate a fellow soldier who had a medical scare, which forced him to spend an additional month in Iraq waiting for another flight. (Or did he?)

Iraq War movies bombed (sorry) because they were anti-American, but no opinions on the actual Iraq War are offered. Oh, and John McCain called one of the North Vietnamese guards in his POW camp “The Prick.”

Best line: “Believe me, nobody is more demanding when it comes to going to war than our military moms. If you’re going to send our sons and daughters into harm’s way, you’d better have a pretty good reason.” For context, here’s the time she pretty much endorsed bombing Iran.

Three – America the Exceptional

America’s awesome. There, I said it. And nobody disagreed? We can move on, right? Nope, this chapter stretches for  29 more pages.

To prove this point further, Palin quotes Charles Murray, the co-author of the 1994 book The Bell Curve, which most famously drew some controversial conclusions regarding intelligence and race. Is this a clever ploy to win over the important racial-eugenicist market, or am I reading too much into this?

Best line: “I wish [Milton Friedman] and his wife, Rose were still with us today to defend free market principles from the likes of Michael Moore.”

Four – Raising (Small-r) Republicans

Sarah Palin runs off a litany of Bristol’s activities from her high school days, then says, “she was doing all that, thankfully, so she would be too busy for anything else—or so I deluded myself.” So, the claim is that Bristol had just enough time to have a boyfriend, but not enough to ever have sex with him. This is not entirely believable.

For those of you keeping score at home, Palin has claimed that Americans are too busy to be racist, and she thought her daughter was too busy to have sex. Idle hands (no Devon Sawa) are the devil’s playground and everything, but will even Sarah Palin SuperFans buy this reasoning?

I'm not saying this book has a lot of filler, but on pages 99-100, she runs a lengthy excerpt of an Onion article.

Warning: If people saying insensitive things about Hurricane Katrina bums you out, just skip the next paragraph of Sarah Palin’s thoughts on the topic and rejoin when we’re discussing Murphy Brown.

“Hurricane Katrina revealed something other than government incompetence. It revealed a population of Americans dependent on government and incapacitated by the destruction of the American family.” And what was the difference between many areas of the Gulf Coast and New Orleans? “In many cases, the difference was strong, intact families.”

Bringing up the Murphy Brown/Dan Quayle thing like this reminds me of a five-year-old protecting a classmate from a bully, only the five-year-old doesn’t realize that the victim was was not being mocked for his support of two-parent households so much as his decision to dedicate a speech to attacking a fictional character—the analogy falls apart a little at the end. It’s cute that she tried to defend him, but ultimately pretty silly and pointless.

Palin addresses how Murphy Brown relates to her own family situation, but misses the point again when she says that people mock Bristol’s newfound support of abstinence as hypocritical. The bigger thing—as the argument against abstinence-only education always has been—is that it’s unrealistic. If even playing basketball, chairing the Junior Prom Committee and working in a coffee shop couldn’t doesn’t guarantee abstinence, what will?

In other Bristol news, “she engaged in an uplifting, family-oriented show called Dancing with the Stars.”

Best line is this magnificent segue that follows the Palin family update section: “But while my family has been growing and developing, America and the American family have been under almost continuous assault."

Five – Rise of the Mama Grizzlies

Women: You get a chapter! You get a chapter! You get a chapter! All of womankind gets a chapter!

Palin goes from referring to herself as “an Alaskan chick” to being really angry that in 1993, people were saying more women get beat on Super Bowl Sunday to Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis in a matter of eight pages. The takeaway: some people think being a feminist requires also being a liberal, but those people are wrong, and quite possibly advocates of Nazi-like eugenics.

Best line: “But if they thought pit bulls with lipstick were tough, wait until they meet a mama grizzly.” Only four more chapters.

Six – Are We Really the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For?

Spoiler alert: no. We are not. Palin talks about how great it was when John F. Kennedy set a goal for America to land on the moon. It was optimistic, utopian, and didn’t really offer a lot in the way of practical benefits. This is somehow infinitely more admirable than trying to insure every American.

Then there’s a bit where she blasts Barack Obama for downplaying America’s greatness in a way that will not “inspire my kids and other American kids to work hard and dream big.” Oh yeah? Well, Barack Obama’s stock autograph for children is “Dream Big Dreams.”  So there.

There’s a heartwarming (seriously) story about how when she was training for a marathon, her eldest son Track, then sixteen, would drive her route ahead of her so that he could leave water bottles and encouraging notes at every mile. Isn’t that nice? That’s nice!

But then I reread the passage and wondered: water bottles? Maybe it was just one? Nope, she says she ran “water bottle to water bottle,” and that she was training for a marathon. Were there days where she was either throwing away or carrying around 20 water bottles? Would Track have to drive around after she was finished and pick up all the water bottles she had discarded? Somehow this is the biggest betrayal of trust and narrative in the whole book.

Sarah Palin is a character in NBA Jam, but so far as I can tell, she is not in NBA Live, and if she were, her awareness rating would have to be like a 3. My evidence? Her second memoir in two years includes the sentence, “I believe in a humbler, less self-involved America.”

Best line: “We may be creating an entire generation of entitled little whiners.”

Seven – The Indispensable Support of Freedom

This chapter is about freedom, by which she means freedom of religion, by which she means public, state-sanctioned displays of religion. She tells the tale of how John F. Kennedy had to go before the American people and basically promise not to let the Pope run America, and is dismayed that this is the way things used to be, but now they’re better. Anyway, she takes the opportunity to dance on Ted Kennedy’s grave: “It is perhaps not surprising … that his brother Ted Kennedy would go on to have a long career advocating positions directly at odds with his Catholic faith (which was by all accounts sincere).”

Boy, wasn’t it great when Mitt Romney didn’t pull a JFK? He insisted that his religion mattered to him. And he’s not just a Catholic, he’s a full-fledged, magic underpants, non-swearing Mormon. From Massachusetts. Did I mention he’s a Mormon from Massachusetts? And good for him for not being ashamed of it. Great guy.

Best line: “Lincoln did not presume to know which side God favored in the Civil War.”

Eight – I Hear America Praying (I promise I didn’t make this up)

Only three pages into this one, and we’re already quoting Newt Gingrich on morality. Not a good sign.

In the last chapter, we learned how religion in the public sphere is increasingly accepted to the point where we expect our politicians to publicly affirm rather than deny their religious commitments.

This chapter though, is about how religion is under attack. Example: “When I was mayor of Wasilla, I had to fight for six Christmases to keep the baby Jesus manger scene on display on Wasilla Lake.” Egad! That’s two more Christmases than Reese Witherspoon had to deal with in the holiday classic, Four Christmases. In related news, amazingly, Reese's direct ancestor John Witherspoon’s 1782 Thanksgiving sermon is quoted at length on page 192.

Palin argues that religion was responsible for abolitionism and the civil rights movement. Not buying it? “Martin Luther King, Jr., was jailed for taking part in a nonviolent protest against racial segregation in Alabama in 1963, his famous ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ was both a refutation of racial segregation and a repudiation of those who opposed civil disobedience in pursuit of civil rights—a refudiation, if you will—cast in explicitly religious terms.”

Seeing her quote Martin Luther King, Jr. like this makes me feel like Kurt Cobain must have felt in that Lynn Hirschberg Vanity Fair article when they’re at a 7-Eleven and he sees a heavy metal dude get out of his van wearing a Nirvana shirt. I’m used to it now, I guess.

Best line, recalling George Bush’s words after 9/11: “‘The prayers of private suffering… are known and heard and understood.’ How I clung to those words in those frightening days.” Isn’t quoting George Bush, mentioning 9/11 and literally talking about how you clung to religion when you were scared a form of low-level entrapment?

Nine – Our North Star

This chapter is most notable for the extended film critiques. Unfortunately, Palin gives Jason Reitman way too much credit for the plot of Juno, when the real pro-life advocate here is the ex-stripper with the tattoo of a redhead in a bikini and bondage.

“A European movie might have had Juno get her abortion in the opening scene and then spend the next hour and fifteen minutes smoking cigarettes and pondering the meaning of life. It would have been depressing and boring.” I guess Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days isn’t on the Palin’s Netflix queue.

Best line: “Many Americans, I think, are a lot like Juno.”

Conclusion – Commonsense Constitutional Conservatism

This section is a bit anticlimactic, and is perhaps most notable because the total number of mentions of Ronald Reagan in this book (33) narrowly passes the number of Reagan mentions in Going Rogue (31).

Best line, describing a lunch with the late Ted Stevens at her kitchen in Wasilla: “That day, he brought me a U.S. Senate coaster, which he had signed and inscribed with the encouraging words ‘Keep up what you are doing!’ I knew then, as I know today, that his heart was always with the people of the frontier.”

Acknowledgements

America by Heart is an instructional guide in to how to generate enough material to write a memoir only one year after your last memoir came out in only three easy steps.

1) Hire a ghostwriter

This one presumably is Jessica Gavora, wife of National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, who is thanked in the acknowledgments and likely responsible for the striking similarities between a section of this book and a recent Goldberg column.

2) Shrink the book:

Based on Amazon’s figures, America by Heart is 128 pages shorter than Going Rogue and has a surface area that is 5.8 inches smaller. It has, however, three more chapters.

3) Memoir real estate is about three things: Quotation! Quotation! Quotation!

The unsung hero of this book is the long quotation. In 304 pages, I counted no fewer than 88 separate block-quoted excerpts that measured at least four lines (see the appendix below), but usually were about half to three quarters of a page—and sometimes actually ran several pages. Quotations have all the added benefit of writing your own words, but without the effort or potential troubles that come with being held responsible for things you’ve put in writing in your own name.

Also, if possible, have an insanely rabid fan base who doesn’t care at all about the content of your book so long as you talk about how awful liberals are and how you’re both awesome and exactly like them. That’s good too.

Appendix: Sources and Pages of Appearance of all Block Quotations in America By Heart by Sarah Palin

1. Calvin Coolidge’s speech on the 150^th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence (xix, 18)
2. Ronald Reagan (xx)
3. Senator Jefferson Smith’s filibuster (4)
4. Ronald Reagan’s 1987 State of the Union (6)
5. Preamble to the United States Constitution (8)
6. Declaration of Independence (10)
7. Barack Obama 2001 interview (13)
8. Supreme Court oath of office (15)
9. An essay by the late constitutional scholar Robert Goldwin (29)
10. Barack Obama’s 2008 speech on race (31)
11. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech (33)
12. William Bennett’s “Twelve Great Reasons to Love a Great Country” from his book The American Patriot’s Almanac (38)
13. 1843 interview between a young historian and ninety-one-year-old veteran of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, Captain Levi Preston (39)
14. John Ford describing the Battle of Midway (41)
15. A poem about veterans that Palin’s uncle emailed her (43)
16. Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” (44)
17. Ronald Reagan’s speech on the fortieth anniversary of the D-Day invasion (44)
18. Captain Tony Simeral on Sergeant Henry Erwin (46)
19. John McCain’s Faith of My Fathers (50, 51)
20. A description of the American military man that Palin’s brother sent her (55)
21. Karl Shapiro’s “Elegy for a Dead Soldier” (60)
22. Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru in National Review (64)
23. Sociologist Charles Murray (66)
24. Ronald Reagan’s 1981 letter to then-Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev (67)
25. John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech (70)
26. The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (72)
27. Ernest Gruening’s speech at the 1955 Alaska Constitutional Convention (73)
28. Thomas Jefferson in 1791 (75)
29. 1947 Indiana state legislature resolution (78)
30. NBC founder David Sarnoff (83)
31. Professor Luigi Zingales (86)
32. Milton Friedman (88)
33. Onion article titled “Miracle of Birth Occurs for the 83 Billionth Time” (99)
34. Tony Woodlief’s Somewhere More Holy (101)
35. Journalist and Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes (103)
36. Whittaker Chambers’ Witness (106)
37. The collected letters of “an emigrant Frenchman turned American farmer with the impressive name of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur” (108)
38. Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams (110)
39. Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams (111)
40. “One of the nation’s foremost experts on the family, Allan Carlson” (112)
41. Political scientist and James Q. Wilson’s Wall Street Journal op-ed on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Dan Quayle’s Murphy Brown speech (118)
42. Reverend Bill Banuchi of the Marriage and Family Savers Institute (124)
43. Columnist and former White House speechwriter Mary Kate Cary (131)
44. Margaret Thatcher (133)
45. National Review columnist Kathryn Lopez (138)
46. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments (140)
47. Author and feminist Christina Hoff Sommers (143)
48. Someone writing about Carolina Nichols Churchill (146)
49. “the wonderfully named Crystal Brilliant Snow Jenne” in 1936 (148)
50. Crystal Snow Jenne’s “Idle Thoughts of a Woman Legislator” (149)
51. Colleen Carroll Campbell in post on the Washington Post’s “On Faith” blog (151)
52. Teddy Roosevelt speech in Chicago, 1899 (162)
53. Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, Up from Slavery (171, 173)
54. American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks’ The Battle (177)
55. Mitt Romney (186, 187)
56. Letter from John Adams to the officers of the Massachusetts militia in 1798 (189)
57. Reverend John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg in a January 1776 sermon (190)
58. John Witherspoon’s Thanksgiving Day sermon, 1782 (192)
59. George Washington’s Farewell Address (194)
60. Antonin Scalia’s dissent in McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky (197)
61. Alexis de Tocqueville (199)
62. George Washington’s letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport (201)
63. Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address (204)
64. Newt Gingrich’s Rediscovering God in America (209)
65. Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” speech (212)
66. Jonah Goldberg (215)
67. 2006 New York Times editorial, “The Gospel vs. H.R. 4437” (217)
68. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (219, 220)
69. Ben Franklin at the Constitutional Convention (222)
70. Antonin Scalia (223)
71. George W. Bush’s speech at the National Cathedral, September 14, 2001 (224)
72. FDR’s D-Day prayer (226)
73. Emily Dickinson’s “I never saw a moor” (230)
74. Badger Clark’s “A Cowboy’s Prayer (231)
75. Alcoholics Anonymous (incorrectly attributed), “Serenity Prayer” (239)
76. Eunice Kennedy Shriver at the 1968 Special Olympics (242)
77. Reader’s Digest’s story of Curtis Pride’s first major league RBI (244)
78. Dr. Charles Stanley’s How to Reach Your Full Potential for God (246, 247, 248)
79. Max Lucado’s It’s Not About Me (249, 251, 252)

Jordan Carr is a student at Stanford and was a 2010 Summer Reporter at The Awl.

Photographs, from Flickr, in order, by asecondhandconjecture, asecondhandconjecture, WEBN-TV, Amir Farshad Ebrahimi, sergio_leenen and FairbanksMike.

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Sasha Frere-Jones: I enjoyed the narrative locomotive, but the movie might as well have been about a struggle over the Enzongium contract in Quadrant K9. I would have liked that more, actually. This is first and foremost a movie about Sorkinese, a language that finds a comfy home in litigation. "The West Wing" was Walking and Talkingâ„¢-The Social Network is Sitting and Talking and Occasionally Dartingâ„¢.

NVC: What kills about Sorkinese is that it doesn't give room for any mode but Pithy.

SFJ: In Sorkinland, people speak as if coked up (even when not) and are always witty and slightly angry.

NVC: The actors barely breathe between quips, except for the Eduardo Saverin character-he crowbarred in some moments of ACTING?

SFJ: He was good at perspiring and breathing.

NVC: It is no country for young men.

SFJ: Everyone is a quote machine in Sorkinland, even dumbos. Moving on: there are a lot of crazytown moves in the actual fabric of the story, and here is just one: almost every collaborative, commercial endeavor could engender a movie like this. Look at The Police. Band struggles over songwriting credits are an epic GOLD MINE.

NVC: YES! WHY ISNT THERE A POLICE MOVIE?! WORLD TOUR NETWORK.

SFJ: The core problem-which I think we agree on?-is that we did not see a movie about Facebook or the Internet. Think of that early moment when Zuck drops the "22,000" bomb. Rashida Jones has to pause and ponder the majesty of his pageviews. But wait-in 2003, there were many sites that could have quickly generated that kind of traffic. Hmm. That fact is not relevant, apparently. The movie's plot driver and its ad tagline is another number: 500,000,000 users. OK-no argument. That is historically huge, no matter how anyone feels Zuckerberg fits into history, or what this movie does or doesn't do. But what does the movie say about all those users? Almost zero, except a little bit about the first, university-based users.

SFJ: And we can probably salute the arc of the pitch. First, you were supposed to want to be on Facebook because only a small elite could join. Now, many stock options later, you need to get on Facebook because all of China and your Dad and your ex is on there. Nice! But is this a typical sales arc, selling exclusivity and then implying losership when it opens up and you're not on it? Or atypical? You know more about products and pitches-what do you think?

NVC: This speaks to my overall beef to the movie: because the real DRAMA with Facebook that merited cinematic exploration is not questions about the creation myth of Zuck or the lawsuits with the Winklevi-but the decisions that came after the million members. The tradeoff between exclusivity and advertising money. I want to know about the decisions to open it up to public universities, to moms, to predators and (and/or) to advertisers.

SFJ: Enter John Seabrook's 1993 piece on Bob Kearns, windshield wipers and the nature of patents, "The Flash of Genius." (The article became the basis for a 2008 movie called "Flash of Genius"-cleaner without the article, isn't it?-that jettisoned the most complicated bits of Seabrook's piece and decided to celebrate the majesty of individual innovation.)

NVC: Goody!

SFJ: The piece seems relevant because it discusses how inventions can be ascribed to one person, and also how they can't. Here is a passage about Thomas Jefferson, who took on the idea of inventions:

Jefferson thought he could fix the basic flaw in the British system. His solution was the principle of examination. The principle is that certain innovations have a quality that elevates them to the status of inventions, and thus makes them eligible to be held as private property, while innovations that lack this quality are the common property of humanity. Learned people can, by study and power of reason, determine which inventions deserve a patent and which do not. Examination is the greatest American contribution to the institution of patents, and it has been copied by virtually every industrial nation in the world. Like a lot of ideas associated with the Enlightenment, it sounds a lot better than it works.

SFJ: Patent law now favors the individual, and rewards him or her with the right to be paid. The idea of "common property of humanity" would sound like Communist pinko talk to most people now. So: did anyone ever cash in harder on "common property" than Zuckerberg? Aside from the very elegant design, which-kudos!

NVC: So why is this entirely forgettable procedural lawsuit movie being hailed as THE SECOND COMING?

SFJ: Nerd alert: I think it is about lexis and mimesis.

NVC: Explain yourself.

SFJ: Let's compare "The West Wing" and "The Wire."

NVC: I'd love to!

SFJ: Sorkin talk makes everybody feel smart and makes the shitty world look OK because making money and being an asshole is fine as long as a deserving nerd wins. This appeals to nerds and anybody who fancies themselves as SMARTS. Further, he goes in hard on lexis-the act of delivering words-and lets the characters walk you through everything that would either be the job of a) acting or b) the audience using their heads. It is a way to load middlebrow content into totally fun speed talk that saves many people some hard work while feeling highbrow, because only smart people can talk that quickly. It's like associating athletic skill with height, de jure.

SFJ: Think of how many Sorkin characters are sort of Flat Erics who talk, rapidly describing every idea that could have been acted out. The advantage is you can cram a lot of action into one episode. The downside is a weird, Aspergersy sameness to every project. Actors become court stenographers in reverse, spitting out Sorkinese and then stepping aside to let the next block of text barrel through.

NVC: Agreed.

SFJ: "The Wire," on the other hand, doesn't mind alienating you. It eliminates spoken exposition (lexis) in favor of mimesis. This is an entire world, it is full, and you had better take notes if you want to keep up. You have to WORK. People who don't look like you may be in charge for a minute, maybe for a long time, and nobody has the moral high ground.

NVC: THERE IS NO PRESIDENT BARTLET IN BALTIMORE.

SFJ: Sorkin loves the abasement that is a by-product of believing in the high ground. It's in everything Sorkin does.

NVC: Might as well be footage of Sorkin sweatily wanking in front of a mirror screaming SAT words (with a hoodie on).

NVC: This brings us to the other big point which is about HISTORY. Here is the challenge thrown down regarding The Social Network: we are still in the middle of this moment; we are at the point where the lava is touching the sea. The lava is still hot!

NVC: David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin have the hubris (rightly or wrongly) to take it on and I think they did not rise to the occasion because it failed to actually be ABOUT anything but a lawsuit.

SFJ: Another flaw in the mimesis (which is part of the selling point, that this is A REAL NOW THING HAPPENING TO YOU) is that the movie didn't summon any particular year. Compare that to the OCD set-design of "Mad Men" or the verité of Panic In Needle Park, which essentially time-stamp all their scenes.

NVC: Ooo, yes!

SFJ: It could have been 1972. It could have been 2012.

NVC: It could have been the dot com boom.

SFJ: Coke off an intern's stomach in 2003? Wouldn't it be Adderall?

SFJ: There is no take on this era. There is no take on the internet.

NVC: I think that's a colossal failure of nerve.

SFJ: Like, I don't think RoboCop says much about robots or cops. Though it does say something about cities.

NVC: This is still a movie about a lawsuit.

SFJ: The movie about the internet already exists and it's called: The Matrix.

NVC: OH DOPE.

SFJ: But we can still value the Sosh Net. Look at that body of work about WWII.

NVC: I often do!

SFJ: Tracing the national attitude towards the war through fifty years of movies-it's bonkers!

SFJ: We just need enough art. This is part of the first wave of internet movies. We need more of them, and then we can sift them in twenty years.

NVC: It's a weak start. I also don't know where to put this work in relation to Fight Club. It seems like Fincher has these really silly notions of rebellion.

NVC: And what I resent after a two-hour creation myth is that: the big Sork/Finch insight is that Zuck is sad about a girl? BECAUSE HE'S A GEEK? AND AN OUTSIDER? I don't buy it for a second.

SFJ: He had the same girlfriend for the entire time period depicted in this movie.

NVC: I'm so EXHAUSTED from this fucking narrative of the love-lorn outsider forgiven for his inability to function because he has a broken heart.

SFJ: Say Anything.

NVC: Right!

SFJ: ZUCK HOLDS UP LAPTOP. AND PLAYS DEATH CAB.

SFJ: (WHAT MUSIC DOES ZUCK LIKE? HE HASN'T FRIENDED ME, SO I DON'T KNOW WHAT HE'S JAMMING TO ON THOSE ENORMOUS AIR TRAFFIC HEADPHONES WHEN EDUARDO IS BUSTING UP HIS PC.)

NVC: CLICK INSTALL CAMERON CROWE APP.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper is a writer and lady in Los Angeles. Sasha Frere-Jones is a writer and a musician from New York.

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78 comments

Natasha Vargas-Cooper: What are your loins telling you about Twilight Part 3. Sparklequest?

Mary HK Choi: WELLZ. I LOVED it!

Natasha: It was exactly what I desired.

Mary: EXACTLY.

Mary: Plus? The dialogue was better this time.

Mary: Last time, I had to re-up my understandingness and suspension of disbelief every 6 seconds because of the dialogue. This time? DID NOT HAVE TO.

Natasha: What was your favorite scene!?

Mary: Well, honestly, I know everyone's gonna be on some bean-diddling masturbation ish with the big "tent scene."

Mary: And of course I too had wondered about the Edward and Jacob "tent scene."

Natasha: Brokeback 2k10!

Mary: With ripstop nylon.

Natasha: MAD HOMO VIBES.

Mary: McGOTES.

Natasha: SOOOO HOT.

Mary: Young pretty homos HOT!

Natasha: I was like, SLEEPING BAG TAG TEAM: ENGAGE!

Mary: Also Bella is on FULL REM-STATE SLEEP mode.

Mary: I could have definitely gone in on some meaningful glances, knuckle grazing with the forefinger.

Natasha: With wolf boy's boner in her back!

Mary: LUPINE TUMESCENCE.

Natasha: Was your audience Team Edward or Team Jacob this time?

Mary: My area (I was sitting with the youngs) were hard core Cullen fans.

Mary: But there was a concentration of TEAM JACOB people clustered in the center of the screening and they were losing their damn minds.

Mary: YO but you know what?

Mary: NEW TEAM: TEAM JASPER.

Natasha: LETS TALK ON JASP.

Mary: I mean, OK, tooootally racist because he was a Confederate soldier,
because Confederate, BUT he was being manipulated by one of your peoples!

Natasha: The Chola Coven of Vampires!

Natasha: This Jasper kid is amazing but can he act?

Mary: No way. Beside the point.

Natasha: Does it matter?? With those rascaly racist eyes!

Mary: Tooootally not the point! His eyes ruuuuuuled in Twilight 1 & 2 and then we were REWARDED and his accent was HILARIOUS and his hair is soooo CRONCHY!

Mary: And I love it all to pieces

Natasha: RUFFLED SHIRT!

Mary: YES BUT, and this is what got me: total merciless killer.

Mary: Cold hearted snake.

Mary: COLD ONE.

Natasha: Killer of children!

Mary: Yes and I dig that. It shows... fortitude.

Natasha: Yes, let's talk about the newborn vampires.

Mary: To me, it was like, blablablabla and I hated that one bunbun vampire baby, zzzzzzzzSNOREzzzzzzz.

Natasha: This how I felt about the reservation scenes! I was like, "Hush up Hawaiians!" I NEED MORE ABS IN MY EYES.

Mary: The folklore!

Mary: GAWD.

Mary: It's like being invited to a party and having to go to CHURCH. Like, ew, really? Fireside tabernacle?

Natasha: Where does your loyalty lie on this 3rd installment? And why are girls Team Jacob in first place?

Mary: You know I am 100% team Edward.

Mary: BUT.

Mary: I was mad at Edward's groomer this installment.

Natasha: WHAT THE FUCK WAS WITH HIS HAIR?

Next: What the fuck was with his hair?

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45 comments

Anyway, it got me thinking about the movie we'd just seen, and about why things become popular with Americans. About how some things that are popular are frauds. Like the Cheesecake Factory: Its fancy lighting, zingy decor, and decadent over-large dinners are like someone's idea of a nice restaurant. But some things, like Pixar movies, are miracles: They are popular because they are actually so fucking good that they couldn't be unpopular. Toy Story 3 is going to make a gazillion dollars, and it deserves every penny. It is amazing.

Certainly you know, from the trailer and from general cultural osmosis and from that horribly depressing Times piece about how kids who were five when the first Toy Story came out ARE NOW TWENTY, that in Toy Story 3, little kid Andy is now college boy Andy and all his favorite toys face obsolescence.

But what you don't know yet is that Toy Story 3 is totally bonkers. It has a mushroom cloud made of a trillion plastic monkeys, and it has a scene in which Buzz Lightyear is tortured under a bare light bulb. It has a terrifying horror-movie flashback. It has the best escape sequence since The Great Escape (or maybe Chicken Run). One of its heroes is a creepy walking, talking tortilla. It features an agonizing scene in which our favorite toys, facing a roaring inferno, close their eyes, hold hands and make peace with death. It makes an adorable teddy bear the terrifying villain and a baby doll his henchman. It toys with the old gag about the sexual identity of the Ken doll, deftly sidestepping offense and instead presenting the most surprising portrayal of gender fluidity in a 3-D family movie since Johnny Depp played the Mad Hatter as Madonna.

Which is all to say that the first eighty minutes of Toy Story 3 make up as funny, rousing, surprising, and exciting an adventure as you're likely to see all year. And it's also to say that nothing in those first eighty minutes prepared me for the final fifteen minutes, which I spent bawling, as did every moviegoer around me. The tears streamed down my face as they had not since... well, since I saw Up. And then before that, the only time I cried at a movie was during... well, it was during Monsters, Inc. And so I wasn't precisely surprised to have my waterworks turned on by a bunch of fucking toys, but still.

It's not exactly hard to fool Americans into thinking they're watching a funny movie. Just kick someone in the nuts.

It's a piece of cake to fool Americans into thinking they're watching an exciting movie. Just cut every action sequence so fast that no one can see what's going on.

It's pretty easy to fool Americans into thinking they're watching a really sad movie. Just kill off someone's dad.

But those movies are frauds. Sometimes they fool Americans, and sometimes, glory be, they don't.

You know what's hard? To actually make a funny movie, and a sad movie, and an exciting movie, and a thoughtful movie, and an artful movie, and a challenging movie, and a sophisticated movie, and a surprising movie, all at once. To make it with integrity and wit, to never insult your audience — whether that audience is five or 35 or 65 — and to do it again and again and again, eleven times and counting. That's a miracle.

That's why the people of Pixar are currently America's most important filmmakers. And that's why Toy Story 3 is the best movie of the year.

Dan Kois writes about movies and plays and comic books, too.

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