Where feminine hygiene is no laughing matter ...Rick's Cafe Americain

In “The Searchers”, Wayne plays the same honor-bound macho guy he usually played.  This incarnation is named Ethan Edwards.  At the start of the film, Ethan’s family is attacked by marauding “savages”, and Ethan sets off on a years-long journey to hunt down the perpetrators.  Along the way, he is the epitomy of Noonan’s “manly man”:  he never wavers in his convictions, never gives up, refuses to turn back, or to depart from his “code of honor”.  These are apparently the characteristics valued most highly by women like Noonan and men like George W. Bush.  Like Dubya, Ethan tends to see things in terms of black and white, right and wrong, human and savage.



As the search continues, however, Ford and Wayne show us the other faces of “honor”: fanaticism, obsession, paranoia, racism, senseless violence, and self-destruction.  When Ethan discovers that his niece has been kidnapped but is not dead, he resolves to find her—and then kill her, as his code demands, for she has been “contaminated” by the “savages” she has been living with.  The final shot is a classic, and is a poignant depiction of how “men” like those Wayne often portrayed—“manly” men who have no truck with ambiguity, compromise or change—have no place in the modern world.



In “The Searchers”, Ford gives the lie to the myth of the American Western and deconstructs the “man of honor”—who never really existed as such, except on the silver screen.  Until intelligent, educated people like Peggy Noonan and George W. Bush can divorce themselves from obsolete and dangerous manichaeist notions of “honor” and “evil”, or until the electorate can cure its dependence on mythology and hero-worship, we will be led down the same path that Ethan Edwards walked in “The Searchers”.



As an aside, I am hardly a John Wayne scholar, but I think I’ve seen enough of his movies to say, with some confidence, that most of the men he played, the kind of man Noonan gets all trembly over, would probably have decked her long before that rambling, sycophantic, desparate paean to phantoms of lost machismo had hit its stride.

Perhaps it is unfair to blame the new administrator, barely a month into his job, for policies that may have been in the works since before he has been at the job.  Then again, he hardly distanced himself from those policies.  To the contrary, he took a classically Bush-ian approach:  he touted what is essentially a fundamental step backward in environmental regulation as progress.  Leavitt announced that his EPA would “move forward with the first-ever regulations addressing mercury emissions from power plants”.  What he didn’t say was that the Bush administration has radically re-written regulations that would otherwise have gone into effect in two weeks, and in a way that smacks of “collaboration” with the power plants.

Leavitt mentioned technology several times in his speech. “More. Better. Faster. Newer. That’s the tune you will hear from me,” he crowed.  That may be the tune, but the dance is “Not too much.  Not too Fast.  Better for the Industry.” The existing plan called for mercury reduction using “maximum achievable technology”.  The new plan calls instead for a more flexible, cap-and-trade system, under which power plants would be assigned “points”, which they could buy and sell, allowing them to pollute more or less depending on the number of points they had.  The cap-and-trade system is a viable method of environmental regulation—it has been successful in combatting acid rain, for example.  However, even environmentalists who have supported cap-and-trade for other pollutants say that it is a dangerous approach for mercury, because of its extreme toxicity. 

Coal-fired power plants are the nation’s largest source of unregulated airborne mercury pollution, sending an estimated 48 tons into the atmosphere annually. The airborne mercury quickly falls into our lakes, streams and rivers, thus entering the food chain and threatening public health, especially for children and pregnant women who eat tainted fish.  The EPA itself has acknowledged that “mercury has been identified as the toxic of greatest concern among all the air toxics emitted from power plants,” causing neurological and developmental defects, particularly in pregnant women and children.

Leavitt and others in the Bush administration will no doubt tell us that the new proposal is a grand step forward.  Proponents of the plan will point out that it will reduce annual output of mercury pollution from power plants by nearly 30% by 2010.  They probably won’t mention that this would still leave 34 tons a year in emissions, eight tons more than the limit promised by the Bush administration as part of its “Clear Skies” initiative.  Or that the plan set to go into effect on December 15 of this year, the plan Leavitt’s EPA is about to replace, would have required pollution controls by 2007, not 2010.

The CDC recently found that 8 percent of women of childbearing age have mercury in their blood exceeding levels deemed safe by the EPA.  Do you know more than 12 women who might become pregnant between 2007 and 2010?  If so, you might ask if any of them is pleased with the “cooperation” between the EPA and the energy industry that has resulted in a giant step back from the rules that would have gone into effect two weeks from now.  That new spirit of “cooperation” makes it far more likely that at least one of them will have a baby damaged by mercury poisoning.

Here is the Challenge Question this week from King of Fools:

Also speaking of awards Wizbang, one of our permanant judges, has started the 2003 Weblog Awards at his site! Check it out!

The always delightful Dawn posted an impassioned plea for a return to objective journalism in the wake of the President’s recent “secret” visit to the Baghdad airport (by “objective”, she apparently means “doesn’t intentionally lie to the at the request of the government”—ridiculously high standards, if you ask me).  In response to a comment suggesting that the American people had paid an awful lot of money for the President to have a photo-op, one of Dawn’s frequent readers suggested that most people in this country don’t think about “politics” (i.e., the cost of the president’s actions), but rather focus on “real stuff” like “car payments and kids and school”.  She further opined, however, that the Baghdad photo-op “changed some opinions . . . from not caring to admiring."


I took issue with that, as it seemed that Kashei (an ardent Bush-lover) was implicitly conceding that the visit was a bit of costly fluff that had the intended effect of duping the ignorant masses into admiring Bush (a cowardly draft-dodger) for no good reason.  So I responded (you can read the whole thing here):

Kashei: Do you count yourself among the ignorant unwashed who ignore Shrub’s damaging policies and actions and just think he’s “cool” because he likes to dress up in military costumes and pretend to be a part of an institution and a country he turned his back on years ago? Because every once in a while it sounds like you might be aware of how pernicious this administration is, and I can only conclude that you just don’t give a shit. Which leads me to conclude that you are either rich or stupid (or some combination thereof). If you’re going to give yourself over to hero-worship, there are certainly better candidates.