66

May 15, 2007

An unexpected pleasure of watching any Spider-Man movie—and the new release of the third is no exception—is that it allows the viewer to be a voyeur of a largely abandoned ideology, the perspective of the Old, Old Left. The film, and the ideological structure of Spiderman’s world, not only shows us how wrong the Left was way back then; it reveals just how much the class-conflict view of economics has had to adjust in order to stay viable at all.

67

May 12, 2009

For reasons I don’t entirely understand, conservatives bitterly attacked the movie Reds when it came out in 1981. After all these years, the movie holds up as one of the most intellectually interesting and visually powerful portrayals of lost history that I’ve seen.

68

May 28, 2003

There are some great libertarian themes in Catch Me If You Can, the DVD of which was released earlier this month. Leonardo DiCaprio stars in the more or less true story of Frank Abagnale, Jr., a kid and master of deception who managed to work as a teacher, a physician, an attorney and prosecutor, and an airline pilot, all before his 18th birthday.

69

June 20, 2001

Hit-in-the-head movies are usually pathetic. Some guy takes a fall and learns to see the world a new way, which invariably involves becoming more politically correct and marrying a feminist, or some such thing. Memento is not to be confused with one of these. It is surely one of the most brilliant and innovative films to come along in years.

70

January 11, 2002

It occurred me last weekend that children should not grow up without a thorough exposure to the great cartoon from 1962, The Jetsons. Its celebration of technology and commerce, its retro-style optimism, its hilarious dovetailing of bourgeois normalcy with gizmo-crazed futurism, its complete absence of political correctness (excluding, of course, the atrocious 1990 movie by the same name)—all combine to make this one of the great cartoon achievements of any time.

71

January 14, 2009

Some personal history on my impressions of Richard Nixon:

My earliest memories of Nixon involve Watergate, and my father’s outrage that a third-rate burglary would be the stuff of national scandal. He figured it was a racket.

The public school distributed copies of the Weekly Reader, packed with pious propaganda and high dudgeon over the entire incident. I was alone in my elementary school to rise in his defense, thereby outraging teachers and administrators.

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P  |  R  |  S  |  T  |  U
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Abagnale, Frank Jr., 339

Adoption agencies, 212

Jeffrey Tucker is editorial vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, editor of its website Mises.org and its monthly newsletter The Free Market, an adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Institute, a lecturer at Acton University, managing editor of Sacred Music, author of Sing Like a Catholic (2010), writer for many diverse venues including Markets and Morality and Dappled Things, and contributor to many blogs including the New Liturgical Movement.

Gold, Peace, and Prosperity