Reading the newspaper, it's hard not to get the impression that the main change civilization brings over barbarism is that , while people still act solely out of greedy self-interest, the object of that self-interest is more abstract. When Eric Rabe, the vice president of public relations for Verizon criticizes Philadelphia's plan to set up wireless broadband, "Government doesn't do service well," (NY Times) of course his statement is ridiculous on the face of it. Call Verizon and try to get good service. Verizon, Cox, the phone companies who have changed their names because so many people hated them that they had negative brand value, they all provide terrible service, constrained only by the law (somewhat) and the free market (not really - they just tacitly collude to all uniformly bad service); in contrast my encounters with government services are varied but frequently quite satisfactory. Rabe makes this obviously questionable assertion because he has a job with a company that has a greater profit opportunity if Philadelphia does not provide a particular service. So many quotes in stories are completely predictable in tone simply by knowing the financial interests of the speaker. This may not be an especially brilliant or original observation, but I just had to vent. On the bright side, at least he's just lying to reporter James Dao instead of bashing him over the head and taking his woman and land. Civilization is only a bust compared to our ideals. On a related note, as I'm sure I've written before, the European Union must be considered one of the greatest successes in the history of civilization if only for getting people to argue about regulations in conference rooms Brussels instead of shooting each other in trenches in northern France.

On an even brighter side, An Indiana state bill that would have made it hard for cities to build their own broadband networks was killed on Wednesday. Municipalities are perfectly suited to provide city-wide natural monopolies such as broadband, and they are accountable to their citizens, whereas corporations are accountable to managers and other corporations who stand to make more money by devising convoluted voice mail systems to make you hang up in despair before ever getting your problem fixed.

This article contains SPOILERS for the movie In Good Company.

I got a free online subscription to The New Republic when I renewed my Salon subscription. The New Republic annoys me. One reason is the gratuitously contrarian article summaries. These examples are all from the last week:

• Hosni Mubarak is a nasty dictator who has stymied liberalism in Egypt. But it's precisely for the sake of liberalism in Egypt that he should be allowed to reelect himself one more time.
• The U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal is not really a scandal. It worked exactly as expected. And that's the problem.
• Bush's record on global warming is better than you think.
• Why North Korea's announcement that it has nuclear weapons could prove to be a good thing.
• Holland thought it was a model for Muslim integration into Europe. Unfortunately, it might be.

Yeeahhhhh. Anyway, what I really want to complain about is Stanley Kauffmann. He reviews movies for TNR, and he regularly provides evidence that big chunks of plot and meaning fly right over his head. And I don't mean deep Kurosawa or Renoir subtext. I mean basic plot elements. A recent review provides an example. He writes of In Good Company:

Dan Foreman is an advertising salesman of fifty-one, working for a company that is part of a global conglomerate. A high-level merger shakes the organization of his office, and Carter Duryea, who is twenty-six, becomes his boss. Quite separately (the twist!), with no connection to the office situation, Carter and Alex, Dan's eighteen-year-old daughter, become acquainted and are soon pleasantly involved. The affair blossoms until Dan accidentally discovers it--and Carter discovers that Alex's father is Dan while Alex discovers that Carter is her father's boss. Dan is outraged, fallaciously believing that Carter is exploiting his power over him to make out with his daughter and that Alex is obliging in order to protect her father.

In the version I saw, the first extended conversation between Carter and Alex occurs over foosball in Dan's garage, after Carter has invited himself over for dinner, and many scenes before the affair starts. I could understand forgetting a small detail, just as I'm not 100% sure if Carter already knew Alex was Dan's daughter and Alex knew Carter was Dan's boss before the dinner (they had already met in an elevator), or if they only realized who each other was at the dinner. (I think the latter is true.) But in order to botch things as badly as Kaufmann did in that paragraph, you would have to have forgotten the lengthy dinner scene, and then missed all of the moments when Carter and Alex are afraid of discovery. You would probably have been a bit bewildered by the scene in the office the morning after Carter and Alex first sleep together, and Carter is freakishly nervous around Dan. This isn't deep textual analysis, it's an obvious and overt plot point. After Dan discovers them (he sees them holding hands in the driveway at his birthday party, and later follows her to a restaurant date, where he confronts both of them), there's nothing to suggest that he thinks Alex is "obliging in order to protect her father". The film has made it quite clear that that's not the case, and while it passed through my head that it probably passed through Dan's head, he is furious with both of them, very disturbed simply from the shock and dismay, and never does or says anything to suggest that he invests any credence in that theory, which is never mentioned outright.

Kauffmann misses the point so regularly that, basically, you shouldn't trust him to get even facts right, much less meaning.

I just had to get that off my chest. I'll keep an eye out for his reviews and share with you other gems I see. On a more positive note, his co-reviewer Christopher Orr's review, The director's cut of Donnie Darko explains too much, is well-argued, meshes with other things I've read, and is enough to convince me to avoid the director's cut of this fine movie, which I saw on a bootleg vcd of a bootleg screener tape with iffy tracking on a crummy little PC with tinny speakers, and which deeply entranced and moved me.