29 April 2005 @ 8:29AM >> This is the kind of innovative thinking I wish we saw more of in government (emphasis mine):

Construction of the first major expansion of the Capital Beltway in a generation could start as soon as next year, Virginia transportation officials said yesterday after signing a deal with two private firms to build toll lanes for a speedier ride on 14 miles of the chronically clogged highway.

The deal calls for adding two lanes in each direction of the Beltway, separated from other traffic, between Springfield and Georgetown Pike near the Maryland border. The high-occupancy toll — or HOT — lanes would be free for vehicles containing three or more people; other drivers would pay to use them. To keep the lanes from clogging, tolls would increase with the amount of traffic.

The state would not have to pay anything for the new lanes. The private companies would invest the entire $900 million cost of the project in exchange for all or part of the toll revenue.

“For drivers in Northern Virginia, it’ll mean new capacity, which is something that has not been offered in a long time,” said Transportation Commissioner Philip A. Shucet. “It means a new opportunity for HOV and transit, and it means a choice for drivers who want to pay for a faster commute.“

[...]

Critics once derided such lanes as “Lexus lanes” — arguing that they favor the wealthy and were a double tax on roads that motorists already pay for — but have changed their minds because studies have shown that they are used by people of all incomes and, in this case, because no state money is being used.

Not only that, but everyone benefits because the drivers who choose to pay for a ride in the “first class lanes” will alleviate traffic in the free lanes.

State officials said that Fluor Enterprises Inc. and Transurban Group will pay to build the lanes, which could open in 2010. They will also operate and maintain them. State and company officials said they haven’t worked out how the firms will recoup their investment, but a likely scenario is that they will receive revenue through 2065. State officials added that there would be a cap to prevent “obscene” profits.

Sounds like this part of the deal was necessary to placate the government bureaucrats who fear capitalism. Who defines obscene? The market can define obscene quite well: if the prices are too high, not people enough people will use the lanes for the companies to recoup their costs. And if enough people do use the lanes at a price point that leads to very high profits, isn’t that a sign the operating companies are doing something right, not something wrong?

Still, despite this little nugget of socialism thrown in, this sounds like an important step forward: citizens get served without it costing a dime in taxpayer money, commuters get a new transportation option that benefits them even if they choose not to use it, and businesses get a chance to thrive in a sector normally monopolized—and mismanaged—by government; a win-win-win situation.

26 April 2005 @ 9:30PM >> Words of optimism from Michael Totten:

Lebanon may be the only place in the world where you can buy a necklace with a Christian cross and a Muslim crescent moon fused together as one. What other country would even think of making something like this? I’ve never seen one before. But now I own two.

Lebanon is approximately 40 percent Christian and 60 percent Muslim - that is if you count the Druze as Muslims, something they themselves don’t do. Most people who live here - but sadly not all - have had enough of hatred and sectarian violence. They desperately want to bury the past. They spent the last 15 years learning to tolerate one another without going on rampages. Now they are moving beyond mere tolerance and are learning to like each other. It’s so easy to break a truce. Much harder to break a friendship.

...followed by a plea.

25 April 2005 @ 11:00AM >> CBS News isn’t the only establishment media organization in the business of manufacturing news that fits its political agenda:

The BBC was last night plunged into a damaging general election row after it admitted equipping three hecklers with microphones and sending them into a campaign meeting addressed by Michael Howard, the Conservative leader.

The Tories have made an official protest after the hecklers, who were given the microphones by producers, were caught at a party event in the North West last week. Guy Black, the party’s head of communications, wrote in a letter to Helen Boaden, the BBC’s director of news, that the hecklers began shouting slogans that were “distracting and clearly hostile to the Conservative Party”.

These included “Michael Howard is a liar”, “You can’t trust the Tories” and “You can only trust Tony Blair”.

[...]

Last night, the BBC claimed that the exercise was part of a “completely legitimate programme about the history and art of political heckling” and said that other parties’ meetings were being “observed”. However, The Telegraph has established that none of Tony Blair’s meetings was infiltrated or disrupted in similar fashion.

[...]

Last night a BBC spokesman said: “This is a completely legitimate programme about the history and art of political heckling. The programme observes hecklers at other parties’ campaign meetings and not just the Conservatives. The hecklers were not under the direction of the BBC and their activities did not disrupt the meeting in any way. The incident at the Michael Howard meeting only plays a small part in the overall programme. However, we will be investigating the complaint very fully and will be replying in due course.”

Some people will undoubtedly argue that this is perfectly legitimate. If the program discusses political heckling, then why not do this? Let’s grant the BBC the benefit of the doubt and assume that, in the future, the network would have done something similar at a Tony Blair rally. Like an insurgent attack where cameras just happen to be in place to get the perfect shot, we have to ask whether the presence of the cameras create a different outcome merely by encouraging certain behavior. If that’s the case, then the BBC was complicit in generating news.

But the BBC went far beyond merely having cameras present. They apparently had cameras focused on the hecklers, and had the hecklers pre-wired with mics.

In some crowds, hecklers might lose their nerve. Maybe they shout a little less, or not at all, or clean up their language because they feel intimidated by those around them. Maybe potential hecklers sometimes recognize they have better things to do than engage in an infantile display of disapproval and decide not to show up in the first place. The BBC’s actions precluded all of those possibilities and virtually guaranteed that the hecklers would heckle, and would try to create the biggest spectacle possible while doing so. After all, the type of folks who make a hobby out of stifling the speech of others are probably starved for attention. The BBC came along gave each of them a chance to be a star.

Chalk it up as one more example of the establishment press creating news rather than reporting it. Like NBC’s bottle rockets under GM cars and CBS’s forged memos, I’m sure the BBC was convinced it was just reporting the truth. The trouble is, in each of those cases, the reporters thought the truth needed a little goose to get going. And that’s precisely when they stopped being reporters and started acting like Ashton Kutcher in some political version of Punk’d.

23 April 2005 @ 2:25PM >> Reader Court Sansom wrote in to ask about my recent article “The Campus Political Establishment“:

From: Court Sansom

Subject: Re: The Campus Political Establishment

Date: 20 April 2005 10:59:56 PM EDT

To: Evan Coyne Maloney

Hi Evan!

I had to e-mail you about this little sentence here:

“When some female students saw that the [Women’s Resource Center] was in the business of arranging trips to political protests, they asked for similar help setting up a trip to a rally with a different political philosophy. The students were turned down.”

I’m just curious if you have any additional details about which rally we’re talking about here. I could almost feel you batting your eyelashes innocently when I read that, so I’m wondering if these other female students weren’t attempting to be demonstrative. I know in the past here at [my university], I’ve seen exactly this type of behavior. A group is offended by some attention their opposition is receiving from the University, and asks for permission to do something completely out of the question just to get the “no” answer. It’s happened *quite* a few times recently.

On the other hand, I’ll just go ahead and concede your general point that these groups tend to be affiliated with more liberal than conservative philosophies. Except at Bob Jones University...

Hope all is well!

Always,

Court

Court,

The rally that the Women’s Resource Center sponsored was the “March for Women’s Lives,” which was billed as a pro-choice rally, but from all the pictures and videos I’ve seen, it was indistinguishable from any other anti-Bush administration rally. (Perhaps there was a higher percentage of hand-drawn vaginas on signs that bore the slogan “Bush out of my Bush,” but I’ve seen those at anti-war rallies as well.)

The female students approached the WRC about sponsoring a trip to an anti-abortion rally.

Their request seems pretty fair and legitimate to me—perhaps not to others, the WRC being an obvious example—and in my mind is another bit of evidence showing that the WRC has a political agenda that goes beyond merely “serving women.”

Thanks for writing,

Evan

23 April 2005 @ 2:10AM >> If Michael Bloomberg fails to get re-elected as New York City’s mayor, he can always apply for a job as a zoo keeper.

22 April 2005 @ 12:15PM >> Tina Brown is a hateful person. For evidence of this, look no further than her recent column discussing the election of Pope Benedict XVI. The bigotry begins right in the second sentence, and it doesn’t let up:

For those of us who came to Manhattan precisely because you’re guaranteed never to meet anyone who has read the “Left Behind” series, America’s much-celebrated spiritual revival can have its trying moments.

While this is obviously hyperbole, all hyperbole is built upon what the writer believes is an underlying truth. In Tina Brown’s mind, anyone who has read any of the “Left Behind” religious-themed books is not someone she even wants to meet. Now, I don’t consider myself a religious person, but I will admit a sympathy for them, since it seems that the religious are one of the few groups left in America that it is acceptable to openly despise. Maybe my sympathy stems from my experience in college, where this straight white male learned real fast that I was an “oppressor” who could be blamed personally for events that occurred centuries ago.

Virtually every time a person of faith is shown in pop culture, for example, it is for the purpose of ridicule. This, of course, would not be acceptable were any other group consistently disparaged in such a way, but Tina Brown and her colleagues in the business of creating pop culture have no problem demonstrating their open scorn of religious people. There’s not even a word for those who, like Tina, hate religious people. Hate black people? Okay, you’re a racist. Hate gay people? A homophobe. But what are you if you hate the religious? Maybe a liberal, if we are to take our cues from Tina Brown.

One of the greatest hypocrisies of the cultural left is that they demand tolerance and acceptance from everyone but themselves. I guess it’s human nature to harbor irrational disdain towards “the other” among our fellow man. But I have a real problem with the liberal scolds who harangue others about tolerance while displaying so little of it themselves.

20 April 2005 @ 11:32PM >> ...and so do the parties.

20 April 2005 @ 12:49AM >> TechCentralStation has an article discussing an aspect of the “Wal-Mart effect” that gets little attention: namely, that by providing everyday commodities at drastically lower prices, people who live in Wal-Mart communities have more disposable income to spend on boutique items, locally-grown foods, etc. So, while it may be true that Wal-Mart has driven out some “Mom and Pop” stores that distributed commodity merchandise inefficiently (i.e. at higher-than-necessary prices), those stores are being replaced by other “Mom and Pop” shops selling specialty items that, by definition, will never be sold by mass-merchandizers like Wal-Mart. This creative destruction can lead to a renaissance of downtown areas in communities that are served by Wal-Marts on the outskirts of town.

19 April 2005 @ 10:48PM >> Arthur Chrenkoff reports on a new poll of Iraqi citizens:

Do you support the pull out of foreign troops?
At once	12.56%
According to a future timetable	81.80%
Do not know	5.64%
Has the security situation improved since the start of the new government?
Yes	55%
No	35%
No change	10%

Also noted in Chrenkoff’s post is apparent mis-reporting by U.S. media. That simply can’t be!

17 April 2005 @ 10:24PM >> The New York Times reports that more mass graves have been found in Iraq:

Investigators have discovered several mass graves in southern Iraq that are believed to contain the bodies of people killed by Saddam Hussein’s government, including one estimated to hold 5,000 bodies, Iraqi officials say.

[...]

If the estimated body counts prove correct, the new graves would be among the largest in the grim tally of mass killings that have gradually come to light since the fall of Mr. Hussein’s government two years ago. At least 290 grave sites containing the remains of some 300,000 people have been found since the American invasion two years ago, Iraqi officials say.

Armies of the self-proclaimed compassionate marched across the world to keep Saddam Hussein in power. A reckless cowboy, a dangerous warmonger, a stupid, conniving cretin stood up to the masses. If not for the cowboy, the compassionate would have succeeded and murders would still be rolling corpses into those mass graves. Now all that’s left of the thugs is weakening insurgency and an aging leadership rotting in jail. The Iraqis defied threats of death to go out and vote, and by doing so, they validated the actions of that idiotic cowboy and gave the finger, tipped in purple, to the compassionate whose actions would have consigned them to a lifetime of oppression. Peace might come to the world much faster if only there were more of those cowboy criminals.

15 April 2005 @ 9:37AM >> Arthur Chrenkoff, well-known for his Good News from Iraq series of posts, has some great advice for arguing against leftists.

14 April 2005 @ 10:42PM >> Some days, it’s not easy being a terrorist:

The U.N. General Assembly approved a global treaty Wednesday aimed at preventing nuclear terrorism by making it a crime for would-be terrorists to possess or threaten to use nuclear weapons or radioactive material.

Upon hearing the news, Osama bin Laden sounded despondent. “I guess we’ll just have to pack it in,” the al Qaeda leader said. “The last thing we’d want is to be considered criminals, least of all by the U.N. Those powder blue helmets scare the shit out of me. People with such atrocious fashion sense are clearly not pansies.”

Reached for comment somewhere in western Iraq along the Syrian border, Abu Musab al Zarqawi struck a bitter note. “We’ve been busting our asses for years to get our hands on that material. Now they go and make it illegal? And not even the courtesy of a little advance notice! What’s up with that? All those calls to Sudan...you know how big my satellite phone bill is? Verizon’s been breaking my balls on overages.”

Bin Laden, resigned to his new fate, appeared more serene than his Jordanian counterpart. “It isn’t easy switching careers at my age,” the lanky leader said. “But what choice do I have?” Though he’s now applying for a job as a mule groomer in Kandahar, bin Laden remains proud of his past accomplishments. “We had a good run.”

14 April 2005 @ 12:40AM >> Some kind, compassionate, tolerant, pacifist New York liberal(s)* have recently taken to posting George W. Bush shooting targets—complete with simulated bullet holes penetrating various parts of the body—around town. This picture was taken on the west side of Second Avenue, between 72nd and 73rd Streets.

Despite the cartoonish look, it is a bit eerie that these posters, which implicitly advocate the assassination of a sitting U.S. president, could remain unmolested in the nation’s largest city for days on end. (No, I won’t be taking it down, since it stands as a graphic monument to the mentality of today’s left.)

PowerLine and Michelle Malkin have recently noticed similar examples. One has to wonder whether we’re seeing a modern fascist movement being born before our very eyes.

* Yes, I am making some assumptions here. Since I don’t actually know who’s been posting these, perhaps it is a bit unfair to be blaming liberals. Still, given the prevailing political views of New York City residents, combined with my extensive first-hand experience witnessing liberals advocating violence, I feel fairly comfortable making this assertion.

13 April 2005 @ 11:58AM >> Asked and answered.

13 April 2005 @ 1:36AM >> As someone who has to file and pay taxes quarterly—gotta love working on 1099—I think this is a great idea. Deroy Murdock explains tax choice:

President Bush’s bipartisan tax reform commission should endorse a powerfully simple idea that would ease the pain of many taxpayers: Let Americans choose between today’s tax system and a 19 percent flat tax.

For now, Americans contend with a federal tax code that has grown luxuriant after 10 years of Republican congressional dominance. As Cato Institute tax analyst Chris Edwards reports, federal tax rules that filled 40,500 pages in 1995 stretch to 60,044 pages today. A decade ago, 50 percent of Americans hired tax professionals, versus at least 62 percent now.

Last year, Americans spent 6.5 billion hours wading through the 529 different tax forms the IRS scrutinizes. Completing the standard 1040 tax return and Schedules A, B, and D required 21.2 hours on average in 1995, compared to 28.5 hours in 2004; painting Uncle Sam a numerical portrait of one’s finances typically requires more than 3.5 work shifts. Add this temporal insult to the economic injury of sending the Treasury money.

Tax compliance will cost U.S. individuals, businesses, and non-profits at least $223.7 billion this year, the Tax Foundation estimates. Every dime of this fortune could be employed more productively in the stock market or any home loan agency. Economists call this “deadweight loss.” Regular folks call this “cash down the toilet.”

As is the case whenever citizens want greater freedom from government, there will be many large, powerful interests opposed to it. Convoluted tax laws ensure a continual boom in the tax preparation industry, and the government has a huge bureaucracy built up around the maintaining the tax code. Any simplification would result in drastically less income for professional tax preparers and lost jobs for the IRS employees who implement and enforce the laws. Naturally, these folks will fight vigorously against tax simplification. I just hope the rest of us—we who sacrifice hard-earned money and countless hours contending with this incomprehensible mess—can make our voices heard by the politicians who have the power to clean it up.

11 April 2005 @ 10:06AM >> Many colleges and universities have permanent political offices staffed by paid university employees. These offices exist to push their views on students, and if you’re a student, parent, alumnus or taxpayer, you’re paying for it. More >>

9 April 2005 @ 1:14PM >> PowerLine has some thoughts on a perplexing image chosen by Time to sell magazines.

8 April 2005 @ 3:48PM >> This Sunday at 7:00PM, Brainwashing 101 will be screened at Princeton University in the Frist Campus Center, Room 302. The event, sponsored by the College Republicans and the Princeton Tory, is free and open to the public. I will be on hand for the screening and will answer questions afterwards.

7 April 2005 @ 11:18PM >> In exchange for an early look at Columbia University’s report absolving itself of charges of bias in the classroom, The New York Times agreed not to speak with any of the students who lodged the complaints:

With a highly sensitive report coming out about allegations of misconduct by anti-Israel professors, Columbia University officials turned to the news organization they trusted most to handle the delicate subject: the New York Times.

Representatives of the two institutions then struck a deal: Columbia would grant the Times exclusive early access to the report if the Times agreed that its reporter wouldn’t seek comment on the report from interested parties, or do additional reporting until the next day when the report was made public. As it happened, the newspaper, with Columbia’s permission, did seek comment from a faculty member whose conduct was criticized in the report, Joseph Massad, but it kept its promise not to solicit comment from the Jewish students who had come forward with the complaints against the professors.

This deal, first reported by The New York Sun’s Jacob Gershman late last week, allowed Columbia to present its spin in The New York Times unchallenged by the students until the following day, when the Times produced a follow-up report that included quotes from the students. Today, the Times finally acknowledged this egregious oversight in journalistic ethics:

The article did not disclose The Times’s source for the document, but Columbia officials have since confirmed publicly that they provided it, a day before its formal release, on the condition that the writer not seek reaction from other interested parties.

Aside from the Times and the school’s own Columbia Spectator, no other media outlets were given a sneak peek at the report. In fact, when a reporter from the Sun went to Columbia seeking a copy of the report (it has since been made public), she was threatened with arrest.

It’s no wonder the school favors the Times; in all the reporting of the recent controversies at Columbia, the Times has consistently provided the most favorable coverage to the university. But what does the Times get out of the deal? A one-day scoop on a report that makes no news? (”Stop the presses! Huge organization investigates self, finds self innocent!”) Or it is another example of the Times using its news pages to push its political views? (”There’s no bias in the classroom. Seriously! The people who run the classrooms told us themselves.”)

For several days earlier this week, I called Karen Arenson—the Times reporter who filed the story—requesting more information on this deal. None of my calls were ever returned. I guess now I know why.

7 April 2005 @ 12:42PM >> RNN, a regional cable news network covering New York City, Connecticut, New Jersey, the Hudson Valley and upstate New York, will be airing an hour-long special on campus political environments and academic freedom. I participated in a panel discussion taped for the show yesterday at Columbia University. Clips from Brainwashing 101 may also be shown.

The program runs from 8PM to 9PM (ET) tonight on RNN. If your cable provider does not carry RNN, you can watch the program on the web as it airs. (Unfortunately, the show is only streamed and not archived; if you miss it, you will not be able to view it on their site in the future.)

Throughout the show, the network solicits viewer feedback on the topics presented. If you wish to call in or have your e-mail presented on the show, you may contact RNN at:

comments@rnntv.com
1-888-RNN-CHAT (766-2428)

Don’t be shy about calling in or writing! The producers asked me to publicize this information to help ensure a balanced response from the audience.

Update: Unfortunately, it looks like RNN cut out the most interesting portions of the discussion, such as when Donna Lieberman from the NYCLU compared conservatives with holocaust deniers to explain why conservative views are so vastly underrepresented in higher education. I called her on that, and it got quite heated.

7 April 2005 @ 8:55AM >> Turns out the mystery Schiavo memo came from a staffer of Republican Senator Mel Martinez. The staffer has resigned, as he should have, not only for his putrid politicization of the issue, but also because, according to some of the drafts I’ve seen online, he is an atrocious speller.

Still, as PowerLine points out, the news of the memo’s source does not absolve the media of charges that it reported the story erroneously. For example, Washington Post referred to the memo being “distributed to Republican senators by party leaders.” A staffer of a man who has not even been Senator for a quarter year does not a “party leader” make.

Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg quotes Senator Martinez denying knowledge of the memo prior to it being made public:

[Chris Wallace, Fox News]: Senator, how do you explain, then, these talking points, which have been circulated among Republican senators? And let’s put them up on the screen, so our viewers can see them.

[...]

Martinez: And I reject those. I’ve never seen them before today. And I’ll tell you, they’re not a part of what I think this case is about.

It may be possible that Senator Martinez’s staffer passed around a memo that he himself never saw. But is it likely? Looks like Mel’s got some splainin’ to do.

As with the much else in the Schiavo case, nobody seems to come out of this looking good.

5 April 2005 @ 4:00PM >> I have argued for some time that the United Nations is structurally incapable of fulfilling its own charter, which says the organization exists “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person” and “to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”

Now it has been revealed that fully one-third of the nations listed by Freedom House as “the world’s most repressive regimes” also happen to hold seats on the U.N.’s Commission on Human Rights. (These countries are: China, Cuba, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe.)

Perhaps the theory is that the nations least likely to recognize human rights are also the ones that most understand the importance of those rights.

5 April 2005 @ 8:24AM >> If you are using an RSS reader to browse Brain Terminal, please be aware that the URLs for the feeds have changed. For the new URLs, scroll down to the “Syndication Feeds” section in the right-hand sidebar on any content page.

Previously, the content pages of Brain Terminal were built by two separate software packages. I’ve been consolidating the two to better integrate the Journal with the rest of the site. Now that the integration is complete, the Journal is no more. As a result, I’ve been able to merge Brain Terminal’s two RSS feeds into one, which should make things easier for everyone who’s had to subscribe to both feeds in order to keep current with the site.

3 April 2005 @ 11:58AM >> You don’t have to be Roman Catholic to appreciate the legacy of Karol Wojtyla, better known to the world as Pope John Paul II:

Lech Walesa, founder of the Solidarity movement that toppled communism in Poland in 1989-90, recalled the power of John Paul’s visit to Warsaw in 1979. It was the first to his homeland after becoming pope a year earlier, and he ended Mass with a prayer for the Holy Spirit to “renew the face of the Earth,” words that became a rallying cry.

“We know what the pope has achieved. Fifty percent of the collapse of communism is his doing,” Walesa told The Associated Press on Friday. “More than one year after he spoke these words, we were able to organize 10 million people for strikes, protests and negotiations.

“Earlier we tried, I tried, and we couldn’t do it. These are facts. Of course, communism would have fallen, but much later and in a bloody way. He was a gift from the heavens to us.”

[...]

Anna Bohdziewicz, who helped distribute underground books around the time of the pope’s first visit to Poland, recalled the electrifying feeling in the huge crowd that formed even the day before the pope arrived, among people walking to Victory Square in Warsaw where he was to speak, and later during his Masses.

“This feeling was something absolutely new because people were together, happy and somehow free, because they came because they felt like it, putting flowers on the square where the Mass was supposed to be,” said Bohdziewicz, 54.

“And the next year you had Solidarity, and it was the same feeling. I think it broke some kind of fear — I’m sure because suddenly people saw that there were a lot of people who feel the same, who think the same, and this was a kind of power.”

As a catalyst for Solidarity, Pope John Paul II stirred one of the first movements that began to rot the Soviet Empire from within the iron curtain. Perhaps that’s why the Soviets tried to assassinate the Pope in 1981; he was remarkably effective.

Karol Wojtyla, the people of the world thank you.

1 April 2005 @ 10:52AM >> Over at OpinionJournal.com, Bridget Johnson surveys Hollywood’s contributions to the idolization of Communist murderer Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries and beyond:

Now that “Motorcycle” has ridden into the awards sunset—ironically, considering the nature of communism, also picking up two Independent Spirit Awards—the sequel to Che canonization is on the horizon. Filming is scheduled to start later this year on “Che,” a Steven Soderbergh (”Traffic”) vehicle starring Benicio del Toro as the famed Marxist. The plot line as listed on the Internet Movie Database: “An epic about Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara, who fought for the people.”

Wait, there’s more. IMDb lists another movie titled “Che” currently filming, written and directed by Josh Evans, son of Ali McGraw. If one can assume that Sonia Braga’s “Celia” character is Guevara’s mother, are we in store for another innocent, youthful portrayal of the guerrilla in “The Tricycle Diaries”?

Annoying as the Che adulation is, a recent comment by a 14-year-old on an online movie message board was truly disturbing: “I just saw The Motorcycle Diaries, which further made me question: Why is communism bad? ... Young people are told how bad communism is, but we are not told why. ... The Motorcycle Diaries showed me how Ernesto Guevara wanted to help people. ... But this did not explain why he was such a ‘bad’ person and apparently deserved to be murdered by the U.S.”

Is this a legacy of dangerous ignorance that the makers of “Che” wish to continue? Might this teen be taught that the product of Guevara and Castro’s “revolution” is a nation whose inhabitants still risk their lives to escape—and an estimated one-third die trying? A nation where neighbor spies on neighbor, where dissent lands one in the clink—or worse—and persecution is punishment for everything from religion to homosexuality?

What feature films have showed the true nature of communism? There was “The Killing Fields,” showing families torn apart, cities emptied, forced labor, bones littering the Cambodian landscape. Adding to the authenticity was its star, Oscar-winner and real-life survivor Haing S. Ngor, who would have been summarily executed had his intellectual background been discovered by the Khmer Rouge. As a cinematic achievement, it ranks as one of the best films of all time. As a historical testament, it shows that communism had nothing to do with betterment of the masses but stripped away everything that comprised the individual. Though this film should be required high-school viewing, not much else springs to mind that could counter the effects of pro-Marxist cinema.

Usually Hollywood’s antipathy towards capitalism comes through more subtly. Businesspeople are almost invariably portrayed as corrupt people bent on destroying the environment or ruining the lives of workers. The heroes are usually those who fight against the evil corporations. That’s the typical script on the micro view capitalism, so it isn’t much of a surprise that on the macro level, Hollywood also glorifies enemies of capitalism.

Hollywood apparently doesn’t understand the irony of making money by selling such films...unfortunately, neither do audiences.