Five Seconds

Five seconds; not long is it?

In my hotel room, I was watching the Will Smith movie, Legend. There was very little light except for the glow from the laptop screen and just a narrow shaft of light that made it's way across the bed through the partially drawn curtains. The air conditioner was set low and the air was crisp. Condensation had formed droplets of water on the outside of the single large pane causing an eery distortion that prevented clear vision through the haze and I could see no defined objects, buildings or trees.

With the light green glow of a street light filtering through the window, in that short moment, probably five seconds, I struggled mentally just to remember where I was. Where was I? Hawaii? Minnesota? California,? Winter? Summer? No, St Augustine, Florida in mid August, but for five very long seconds I was disoriented and had no clue. Five seconds to decide if I was in familiar surroundings; five seconds to determine if I was safe, well, in a welcomed place or even what planet I was on.

Five seconds is a long time.

Jesus Switch

The air conditioner in my room at the Hampton Inn plays a little game with me. I can set it to 60, 70 or 75...it simply doesn't matter. When I left it this morning, the thermostat was set at 70° but when I arrived from work this afternoon, it was clearly in the mid 70s. As I walked through the door, it immediately perked up and began to hum. Brrrrrrrrmmmmmm.... The same thing happens at night. That thing will freeze me out when I go to bed and the down comforter that's on the bed is really great. Somewhere in the night, when there's no movement in the room it gets warm and I begin kicking off covers. If I have to get up to go (what do I mean, "if"?) to the bathroom, the motion in the room kicks it back on again and the temperature drops again. It reminds me of the T-Shirts and bumper stickers I see, "Jesus Is Coming......Look Busy!"

English as an Inconvenient Second Language

Last week, my son dropped by a Baton Rouge Po-boy establishment to grab a couple of sandwiches. As he entered the shop, he noticed the sign on the glass. "Attention!!! All extra salad dressing and sauces (and gravy) will cost an additional 30 cents - Sorry for the Incontinence - Management".

Thinking it was some kind of offbeat humor, he beckoned a plain vanilla south Louisiana redneck employee and asks, "Are you serious??"

"Absolutely," the sandwich artist responded, "we charge for all extras, sauces, dressings and extra gravy."

My son now realizes all this has gone over the guy's head. "Let me show you something," leading the man to the sign in the window and pointing to the words on the poster, "Incontinence means............well.....(whispering)...you can't hold your pee-pee."

The guy blinks, stares at it a moment then calls a middle eastern lady (management) over to the sign and relates the issue fully to her. Whether in embarrassment or chagrin, she rips the sign down and disappears to the back of the sandwich shop.

While being from another country and trying to hack it out in America brings its challenges with a second language, half the humor is lost in the fact that she had locals working for her and hundreds of Louisiana public educated customers probably passed by that sign and never once caught it either.

So, the joke is really on us all.

OPINION

What Bush and Batman Have in Common

By ANDREW KLAVAN
July 25, 2008; Page A15

A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . .

Oh, wait a minute. That's not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a "W."

There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

"The Dark Knight," then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year's "300," "The Dark Knight" is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

Conversely, time after time, left-wing films about the war on terror -- films like "In The Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and "Redacted" -- which preach moral equivalence and advocate surrender, that disrespect the military and their mission, that seem unable to distinguish the difference between America and Islamo-fascism, have bombed more spectacularly than Operation Shock and Awe.

Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth? Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense -- values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right -- only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like "300," "Lord of the Rings," "Narnia," "Spiderman 3" and now "The Dark Knight"?

The moment filmmakers take on the problem of Islamic terrorism in realistic films, suddenly those values vanish. The good guys become indistinguishable from the bad guys, and we end up denigrating the very heroes who defend us. Why should this be?

The answers to these questions seem to me to be embedded in the story of "The Dark Knight" itself: Doing what's right is hard, and speaking the truth is dangerous. Many have been abhorred for it, some killed, one crucified.

Leftists frequently complain that right-wing morality is simplistic. Morality is relative, they say; nuanced, complex. They're wrong, of course, even on their own terms.

Left and right, all Americans know that freedom is better than slavery, that love is better than hate, kindness better than cruelty, tolerance better than bigotry. We don't always know how we know these things, and yet mysteriously we know them nonetheless.

The true complexity arises when we must defend these values in a world that does not universally embrace them -- when we reach the place where we must be intolerant in order to defend tolerance, or unkind in order to defend kindness, or hateful in order to defend what we love.

When heroes arise who take those difficult duties on themselves, it is tempting for the rest of us to turn our backs on them, to vilify them in order to protect our own appearance of righteousness. We prosecute and execrate the violent soldier or the cruel interrogator in order to parade ourselves as paragons of the peaceful values they preserve. As Gary Oldman's Commissioner Gordon says of the hated and hunted Batman, "He has to run away -- because we have to chase him."

That's real moral complexity. And when our artistic community is ready to show that sometimes men must kill in order to preserve life; that sometimes they must violate their values in order to maintain those values; and that while movie stars may strut in the bright light of our adulation for pretending to be heroes, true heroes often must slink in the shadows, slump-shouldered and despised -- then and only then will we be able to pay President Bush his due and make good and true films about the war on terror.

Perhaps that's when Hollywood conservatives will be able to take off their masks and speak plainly in the light of day.

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Mr. Klavan has won two Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America. His new novel, "Empire of Lies" (An Otto Penzler Book, Harcourt), is about an ordinary man confronting the war on terror.