1. I’ve fallen sick this week and ended up staying home yesterday.

2. Before that, however, I was telling my US history students about the Rebel Yell. They weren’t quite getting it, so I tried to demonstrate (poorly, since I’m not Southern).

I then had to admonish them, “Guys, don’t do the Rebel Yell in class.”

3. Snow White has been in the news and on the mind lately, claiming a place as one of the most hated films in recent memory before it’s even released. It’s almost the perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with modern filmmaking and storytelling: the only way it could be more so is if they gender-swapped the Prince (though that would get in the way of the anti-male agenda).

What stands out to me about the whole frame, of Snow White needing to be made a ‘stronger’ character is that the whole core theme of the fairy tale and the original film is the immense power given by femininity. The Queen is jealous of Snow White because she is obsessed with her own beauty – the embodiment of female power – and determined to maintain it at all costs. Even though, as I pointed out in my essay on the film in The Wisdom of Walt Disney, it is the natural course that such power should fade over time and that the blooming young girl should take the place of the aging matriarch. The Queen’s response is to use coercion, murder, and black magic to maintain her position.

Snow White, on the other hand, humbly adopts a domestic role, which grants her far greater and more secure authority than the Queen. The moment she walks into the dwarfs’ cottage, she immediately becomes the most important person there, just because of who and what she is (the lady of the house). And, though the story doesn’t directly address this, that is an authority that is never going to fade or be replaced.

In other words, Snow White is a story about female power and where it actually comes from. Consequently, modern Hollywood is constitutionally incapable of understanding it.

4. One of the elephants in the American living room is the fact that the most popular and historically well-regarded Presidents are not the ones who adhere most strictly the Constitution, but the ones who freely ignore it whenever it gets in their way. Your Andrew Jacksons, Abraham Lincolns, and FDRs, to take only the most obvious examples. Those who try to hold faithfully the Constitution – your James Buchanans, Grover Clevelands, or Calvin Coolidges – tend to have a reputation of mediocre at best.

5. By the way, on the subject of Lincoln, I actually don’t blame him for shredding the Constitution to keep Maryland in the Union. Allowing the nation’s capital to end up on foreign soil in order to stick to the letter of the law does not seem to me to be a praiseworthy commitment to principle, but rather a dereliction of duty. Part of the purpose of a monarch is to recognize where the law needs to be suspended, and I think Lincoln did what needed to be done, given his position and responsibilities.

I have plenty of criticisms of Lincoln (e.g. I think he jumped to a military response much too quickly and without the ability to make it count), but that’s not really one of them.

6. Last week’s movie night was Wall Street (I was in an ’80s business’ mood). A very well-written film with some great acting, especially from Michael Douglas as a truly classic villain. Charlie Sheen is pretty forgettable as the main character, but daddy Martin was cool in his role as Sheen’s character’s blue collar father.

By the way, I really have to wonder whether Darryl Hannah’s decorations are meant to be hideous as part of the satire, or whether the audience is actually supposed to admire them.

7. Something I found interesting and on-point was the fact that there’s a subtle throughline of Gordon Gecko presenting himself, and perhaps even conceiving of himself, as a ‘populist’. Or at the very least, he’s shown to be very thin-skinned. The contemptuous way he talks about “WASPs”, his contemptuous comments on how his marginally-less-corrupt British counterpart is, like all Brits, “convinced he’s better than us,” and so on. The famous “greed is good” speech is him positioning himself alongside the investors against the ‘detached’ managers of the company he wants to get control over.

This strikes me as very on point: Gecko may be an ultra-rich plutocrat, but he still feels like people are looking down on him and it rankles him. This fits with the film’s thesis on the disconnect between wealth and character. Gecko can make all the money in the world, but he’ll still be a fundamentally small person, and on some level he senses that.