Happy Memorial Day Weekend! Hillary Clinton and the Liberation of America's Elites Michael Gerson points out that Hillary Clinton is indeed running on a big issue: A declaration that the ethical standards of openness, honesty, and financial self-interest for our elected leaders are way too high, and it is time she and the people around her be enabled to pursue what they want, when they want, however they want, with no disclosure whatsoever. This attribute of backbone in a dubious cause — in a very different moral context — has been on full display in Hillary Clinton's presidential launch. Everybody knows that there are no secrets in the age of Snowden and that transparency is now a requirement for the political class. But Clinton conducts public business on a private server, destroys 30,000 e-mails of her choosing and provides the rest in boxes of unsearchable paper records. Everyone knows that social media and the 24-hour news cycle create an insatiable demand for content, which presidential campaigns must strive to fill. Clinton grants media access in frothy little dollops even as large controversies unfold… In the five weeks since Clinton announced her candidacy, she has had a normal politician's lifetime quota of scandals. During a brief recent media availability, questions covered foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation, ties to a former aide under investigation, the pace of disclosure of her already purged State Department e-mails and speaking fees that put her (as conservative columnist Byron York tweeted) in the 1 percent on a single harvest day in Silicon Valley. "I want those e-mails out," she told reporters, having made it technically difficult. "I'm proud of the work [the Clinton Foundation] has done," which is relevant only in an argument that ends justify means. Bland and bold. I've done what I've done. Get used to it... If Clinton succeeds, it would expand the boundaries of the permissible. It would again define deviancy down. Americans would have rewarded, or at least ignored, defiant secrecy and the destruction of documents. Future presidential candidates and campaign advisers would take note. Americans would have rewarded a skate along the ethical boundaries of money and influence. Future donors would see a green light, no matter what candidate Clinton says about campaign finance reform. I was chatting with a couple of bright minds last night, veterans of the conservative-media world and political campaigns, who observed that the mood of the Republican party has rarely been more populist. We concluded that the GOP has some good reason to feel populist! One of the biggest problems facing the country, one worsening in the past two decades or so, is an increasingly inter-connected network of political, economic, and cultural elites that is increasingly brazen in pursuit of its own self-interest. Progressive elites don't really care if they live up to their own "rules" on paying taxes, paying minimum wage, making sexist comments or mistreating women, forsaking gun ownership, carbon emissions, use of public schools, or watering their lawns during California's drought. They are quite comfortable with the concept of a functional aristocracy, with special rights and privileges that the general public doesn't get to enjoy. TARP was a giant accelerator of this perception; while millions of Americans endured hard times, the federal government was willing to hand over billions upon billions in taxpayer money to save wealthy bankers from the consequences of their own bad decisions. Meanwhile, the liberal-dominated world of higher education turned itself into the exorbitantly expensive entry gate to the middle class, setting aside quite a few slots for the offspring of current elites. After college, corporate America's recruiters "sought candidates who were not only competent but also culturally similar to themselves in terms of leisure pursuits, experiences, and self-presentation styles. Concerns about shared culture were highly salient to employers and often outweighed concerns about absolute productivity." A vote for Hillary is a vote for "this is how it ought to be." A Lot to Chew Over in This Week's Pop Culture Podcast In the pop culture podcast this week, a discussion of the Boy Scouts' ban on water guns — we offer the rallying cries of "from my cold, wet, hand," "if you outlaw water guns, only outlaws will have water guns," and "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a water gun… is a good guy with a water gun." I also get to chew over Fox's summer series Wayward Pines, the deliberately Twin Peaks-esque story of a man seemingly trapped in a strange town. Most critics are liking Wayward Pines, but I'm completely unsold. In fact, I'm finding it most useful as a genuinely illuminating lesson in how an intriguing idea can get lost if you don't get the characterization and pacing right. If you're going to do a "strange town full of secrets" story, you need to give the audience someone to latch onto, an entry point into the narrative, someone to care about while we're reacting to all the weirdness of the supporting cast. Yes, my adored Twin Peaks was considered one of the most surreal and weird shows to ever air on television, but if you look back, that opening hour was very careful in how it dolloped out weirdness, instead focusing on an unsettling, ominous tone.  Most of the key characters in that first hour — Sheriff Truman, Laura's parents — aren't particularly weird. And we're grabbed by an instant mystery: Who killed Laura Palmer? You need someone or something to ground us in, and that's where Wayward Pines fails. Wayward Pines gives us a weird town full of mysteries, being explored by a protagonist who's full of mysteries. He's a Secret Service agent, who appears to have survived a car crash, but there's no evidence of a crash. He's married with a teenage son, had an affair with his partner, and the partner recently disappeared. He blames himself for failing to stop a terrible terrorist bombing. He may be suffering from hallucinations. That's a lot of questions and unknowns about our main character, and apparently he's the "normal one" whose eyes we see the story through. The mysterious, sometimes-nightmarish town seems assembled from other, better movies and shows: Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner, the constant monitoring and manipulation of The Truman Show, Nurse Ratchet from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and every unhelpful small-town sheriff cliché you've ever seen, featuring Terrence Howard. There's a suggestion that time travel is at work, vast government conspiracies, evidence disappearing in a manner that suggests magic, roads that double back on themselves, altering the laws of physics…. It seems like layers upon layers of ominous mystery, before answering that key question, why do I care? Then we moved on, reacting to an essay by actor Simon Pegg, clarifying his suggestion that blockbuster movies may be contributing to the "infantilization of society." (It's a curious lament from the star of Star Trek, the Mission: Impossible movies, the stoner alien film Paul…) …the infantilization of society. Put simply, this is the idea that as a society, we are kept in a state of arrested development by dominant forces in order to keep us more pliant. We are made passionate about the things that occupied us as children as a means of drawing our attentions away from the things we really should be invested in, inequality, corruption, economic injustice etc. It makes sense that when faced with the awfulness of the world, the harsh realities that surround us, our instinct is to seek comfort, and where else were the majority of us most comfortable than our youth? A time when we were shielded from painful truths by our recreational passions, the toys we played with, the games we played, the comics we read. There was probably more discussion on Twitter about the The Force Awakens and the Batman vs Superman trailers than there was about the Nepalese earthquake or the British general election. As a right-of-center guy, I've more or less given up on most Hollywood films telling me anything useful or insightful on "inequality, corruption, economic injustice," or any of the other issues I care about. Multimillionaire movie stars and directors lecturing us about economic injustice is pretty insufferable. It usually amounts to a declaration that "all of you people should have a lot less take-home pay." My co-host Mickey noted that Pegg is ignoring an avalanche of usually heavy-handed "message movies" in the past decade or two. Even if Hollywood didn't have such political groupthink and an overwhelming temptation for hypocrisy in discussing others' sins, should we be looking to movies for solutions to society's problems? The conventions of storytelling in movies — which usually require a clear hero and a clear villain — don't lend themselves well to resolving a complicated, multifaceted problem, where everybody is convinced they're acting in their own, well-justified self-interest. If you're reducing a complicated question like, "How should our society handle addictive controlled substances?" or "What keeps people trapped in poverty for multiple generations" or "How do you create an economy with the maximum amount of opportunity for everyone?" to a familiar narrative of a good hero and an evil villain, you're not likely to do justice to the topic, or to be reasonably accurate. ADDENDA: NRO's spring fundraising drive is underway. I know. You hate it. We hate doing it. To quote Don Cheadle's first appearance as "Rhodey" in Iron Man 2, "Look, it's me, I'm here. Deal with it. Let's move on."  "I know, I used to look a lot more like Terrence Howard." Now that we've established that you don't like being asked for money, and we really don't like asking, you can surmise that the only reason we do it is because it's necessary. | 
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