At a time when conservatives regularly promote limited government and condemn further encroachment by the federal government into the nation’s health insurance system, the last thing they should be doing is lending support to a program that will increase the government’s role in citizens’ lives. Unfortunately, that is exactly what one noted conservative is doing when it comes to education in America.

Thomas B. Fordham Institute President Chester Finn encourages conservatives to follow his lead endorsing the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), a set of national education standards developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. CCSSI will be the bridle by which the federal government controls schools that willingly accept Race to the Top Fund sugar. According to the National Association of State Boards of Education

the Obama administration is supporting this initiative to develop common standards by allocating part of the [$4.35] billion “Race to the Top” funds towards the common core initiative, including $350 million for the development of common assessments.

In pitching CCSSI to conservatives, Finn noted that CCSSI

emerged not from the federal government but a voluntary coming together of (most) states, and the states’ decision whether or not to adopt them will remain voluntary.

Neal McCluskey, Associate Director of Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, not surprisingly, dissented from Finn’s CCSSI endorsement. McCluskey wonders

Why would Finn make voluntarism and freedom from the feds major selling points? Because conservatives know that federally imposed standards would be subject to federal politics, and that means control by the teachers’ unions, administrators’ associations, and other interest groups that have outsized political power in education.

Most States, it seems, are more than willing to accept federal standards if doing so brings some of that government cheese. Forty States, as of January 19, have applied for RttT grants, which the Department of Education states will “dramatically re-shape America’s educational system.”

The federal government’s role in education, since establishing the Department of Education under Carter to Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and now to Obama’s “Race to the Top” gets bigger and bigger year in and year out. How, exactly, has that limited government’s growth?

Chester Finn’s intention is surely not to increase the federal government’s scope and reach into our lives. Unfortunately, CCSSI, coupled with Race to the Top funds, will do exactly that. So when Finn asks conservatives to endorse CCSSI, what, exactly is he asking them to support? A good education in America’s founding principles of limited government, liberty, and personal responsibility? Or is he, unintentionally, asking conservatives to conserve Big Government’s status quo and a one-size fits all federally mandated mode of education?

Education is a key inoculation factor that boosts a citizen’s immune system against the encroaching disease of Big Government. Organizations like the Culture Alliance, Intercollegiate Studies Institute and Cato Institute exist to increase the number of those inoculated. Chester Finn, inadvertently, makes it more difficult for these organizations to spread America’s foundational values by lending his support to a disease that, as it ravishes the body politic, creates an ever-smaller citizen.

Mark Valley in 'Human Target'

As the recent passing of Mission: Impossible star Peter Graves reminds us, the mid-’60s were surely the heyday of adventure fiction on television. In addition to MI, there were numerous other TV series devoted to action and adventure in the decade—fondly remembered shows such as The Man from UNCLE, T.H.E Cat, It Takes a Thief, The Wild, Wild West, The Fugitive, The Avengers, The Saint, The Prisoner, Secret Agent (aka Danger Man), Amos Burke: Secret Agent, Honey West, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and others. Their characters’ combination of optimism and determination makes them still refreshing and enjoyable today.

Various TV networks occasionally try their hand at reviving this tradition, and the time is probably ripe for it given the ability of CGI effects to allow the filming of action scenes at less expense. The new Fox show Human Target (Wednesdays, 8 p.m. EDT) is one of the best attempts thus far.

Based on a DC comics character, the show chronicles the adventures of Christopher Chance (Mark Valley), a professional short-term bodyguard who protects people from specific threats. Chance looks to be in his mid to late thirties and is very smart, experienced, resourceful, courageous, and skilled at all sorts of combat. He is also very personable and sympathetic toward others.

He’s even sympathetic to the villains who commit the crimes. In episode 2, “Rewind,” for example, he offers a job and a new life to a woman who has helped arrange the abduction of a computer software developer. His concern for characters’ personal redemption adds to the interest of the series beyond the spectacular, suspenseful action elements.

In sum, in his skills and personal character, Chance is about as close to perfect as people get. However, the narratives also make it clear that he has done something highly reprehensible in his past for which he is striving hard to make up. Even that, however, represents an appealing characteristic: he’s clearly not in it for the money or the thrills. Instead, it’s quite evident that Chance really wants to use his unique skills in ways that help people in distress.

Thus although the show does heed the contemporary rule of giving every good character a dark side, its emphasis on Chance’s habitual benevolence is quite refreshing.

Chance’s desire to renounce his shady past and find and develop the basic goodness within him lends the character complexity, as does his bantering relationships with his two coworkers, Winston and Guerrero. Square-jawed Mark Valley, a West Point grad, does a good job of making the character convincing: he looks the part, and his easy-going, jokey personality keeps the viewer from thinking too deeply about the incredible situations and astonishingly inventive and implausible action sequences.

The jobs Chance takes on typically end up leading to some potential catastrophe that threatens to kill not only the intended target but also numerous innocents. Preventing these disasters requires Chance to show great ingenuity and bravery, and it also calls on a serious talent for improvisation.

The dramatic situations Chance and his charges get into—a runaway bullet train, a passenger jet disabled in mid-air, a monestary about to be blown up, etc.—are so dire and spectacular as to be risible to anyone whose critical faculties are functioning, but the stories move along rapidly and enjoyably enough to avert that particular disaster. They’re good fun and provide occasions for real moral choices by both Chance and others, including the villains.

Chi McBride and Jackie Earle Haley are excellent as Chance’s boss (Winston) and computer expert colleague (Guerrero), respectively. Winston serves as business manager and nominal team leader, and also as the Cassandra character, warning Chance when he fears the latter is risking life, limb, or profitability. McBride’s formidable physical presence makes his worried nature that much more amusing.

Guerrero, played superbly by Haley (Watchmen), is the truly reckless one in the team, and is the most openly contemptuous of authority and the government. He’s an interesting character, sort of a hacker-style libertarian with a refreshingly cynical, amusingly politically incorrect attitude. He’s the type of person you want on your side even though you can’t really manage him and aren’t sure what his real agenda is. He’s that brilliant.

In all, Human Target does an excellent job of recapturing that mid-’60s adventure spirit, with the same optimism, can-do attitude, and sympathy for the underdog that characterized those shows. If you enjoy 1960s-style action-adventures, you’ll get a kick out of Human Target. If you don’t enjoy this sort of thing, evidently you’re in need of a rescue yourself.

Mainstream critics’ hostility toward The Blind Side is shamefully political, argues Doug Patton. Article here.

The new crime-drama series Justified premiered on FX Tuesday night at 10 EDT. The show, which combines elements of the police drama and the Western, is quite good and is based on a story by Elmore Leonard. Leonard, a first-rate writer of both crime novels and Westerns, endorses the show. Story here. Rerun schedule here:

Justified, Episode 1, “Fire in the Hole,” FX Network (all times EDT):

Friday, March 19, 11. a.m.

Sunday, March 21 2:02 a.m.

Sunday, March 21, 11:30 p.m.

Stephen King brings vampires to America’s Old West in a newly published comic book. Unfortunately, probably the most prolific author working today displays a penchant for clichéd dialog and a theme near and dear to Michael Moore.

Stephen King’s properties have been adapted to comics before with The Gunslinger Born, The Long Road Home, The Stand Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 and others. American Vampire, however, is the first time King produces his own comic book script.

In an interview with King, The Daily Beast reports that the American Vampire’s

arc will trace the origins of the first American vampire, Skinner Sweet, as he goes fang-to-fang with even nastier vamps, a group out to get rich by damming up a river to create a new town.

If you’re still uncertain about the approach he’ll take, King make the book’s ideology perfectly clear:

“It’s really the vampire as American capitalist gone totally wild.”

And it takes “a real, undomesticated animal,” as King refers to his main character, to stop them.

Not only is the theme a cliché in comics, but sadly so is King’s writing. That, however, should not be a surprise. In his Commentary magazine review of King’s latest doorstop novel, Under the Dome, Sam Sacks writes,

Nobody since Sancho Panza has relied on clichés as much as King does [in Under the Dome]. Characters get out in one piece, are prepared for the worst, and watch each other like hawks; they get egg on their faces, see stars, find laughter to be the best medicine, and greet good news as music to their ears; hearts are chilled, drop, and rise in throats; dust settles, cats are out of bags, -other fish are fried. “Big Jim was exultant,” we’re told, and why? “He had them exactly where he wanted them: in the palm of his hand.”

It appears that American Vampire continues King’s reliance, in his writing, on cliché. By the first issue’s second page we get this scintillating bit of dialog:

James Book, Pinkerton Agent: How about you shut up and take a nap?

Swisher Sweet: I’ll sleep when I’m DEAD. …

Book: … Where’s Ronnie Jeeks and the Blackmouth Twins? …

Sweet: That’s for me to know, and you to find out!

Well, color me unimpressed. King has received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, won the O. Henry Award for best short story, and is compared to Victor Hugo and James Joyce by the New York Times. And this is the best he can come up with?

The sad thing is, the comic buying crowd will probably eat up this Left-wing anti-capitalist agitprop because “it’s Stephen frickin’ King, man!” As history has made fully clear, that’s actually good reason to avoid it.

Sack notes, in his review, that King was once extremely successful in creating stories that “visit the macabre upon the ordinary.” Over time, however,

a shorthand had emerged in King’s writing, in which massaged clichés (a garden of fear, suffocating fear), redundancies (utter loathing and contempt), laundry-list sentences, italics, and, elsewhere, the CAPS LOCK key do all the work on the writer’s behalf. In these books even the dialogue, once original and often comic, begins to parody itself, exaggerating the New England dialects and salt-of-the-earth aphorisms. King’s small-town backdrops feel increasingly like movie sets that he can trundle from one book to the next.

The Daily Beast interview shows that we may not see a return to King’s glory days any time soon. It seems that a conversation with Mr. King is as cliché-ridden as is his writing. When asked about how comics have changed since he was reading “Caspar, the Friendly Ghost,” King states, “They used to be kind of the fallen woman of literature, but they’ve really been spiffed up, and they’ve got a lot of their reputation back.”

Massaging clichés might just be what Stephen King is all about.

Actor Peter Graves died at his Los Angeles home on Sunday at the age of 83. Story and brief bio here.

Graves appeared in dozens of movies, including the classic Stalag 17, and was best known for his lead role in the entertaining 1960s TV series Mission: Impossible. Some may remember him better from the Airplane movies.

Alice in Wonderland crushed Matt Damon this past weekend—bless her heart. The Johnny Depp-Tim Burton 3D extravaganza pulled in another $62.7 million, while Damon et al. had to settle for a measly $14.3 million.

Damon, who became a box office force in the Bourne trilogy of espionage-action films, decided to use his big-screen appeal as a bully pulpit from which to attack the Iraq War in The Green Zone, even though numerous other stars and filmmakers had already stumbled with films critical of U.S. involvement in Iraq. In its first week of release his movie got steamrolled by a witty 3D Victorian fantasy. You are invited to draw your own conclusions.

Between eight and ten thousand sequential art, science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts gathered within Seattle’s Washington State Convention Center to celebrate the comic book and pop culture this past weekend. The fans came, some in costumes, seeking personal sketches and autographs from the gathered artists. Artists and writers came to meet their fans and to network with publishers in order to advance existing careers or establish new ones.

In contrast to San Diego’s massive event, which draws over 10 times the number gathered in Seattle, the Emerald City Comic Con (EC3) caters far more to the sequential art form that inspired the convention. The San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) has become a multimedia extravaganza drawing stars and directors from Hollywood to preview what they hope will the next blockbuster or the next television ratings hit. At SDCC booths for production companies like Fox and Warners Bros, share floor space with television studios, toy companies, and, yes, even comic publishers. Moreover, a single event hall In San Diego, where fans will spend an entire day watching trailers and movie clip previews, can accommodate nearly all those gathered in Seattle.

SDCC is a massive cultural event where panelists are escorted in and out of events by Con personnel. EC3 is a show where comic book enthusiasts can literally indulge a cigarette, if they’re so inclined, on the Convention Center’s smoking pad with a creator of their favorite titles.

The show began for me with Skewed and Reviewed’s Gareth Von Kallenbach, and his one-man panel on upcoming films. Some of the items Gareth relayed were:

• Hugo Weaving is set to play the Red Skull in the upcoming Captain America movie
• Adrian Brody is staring in a “Predators Planet” movie
• The Thing prequel, in which we learn what happened at the Norwegian Camp, is set to start shooting March
• Disney has a Tron Legacy television series in the works, the advancement of which depends on film’s success
• Missile Command and Space Invaders classic video arcade games may hit the big screen
• Steven Seagal can pick off the heads of matches and Q-tips with a firearm at more than 150 ft (Note to self: Don’t mess with Mr. Seagal)

During Gareth’s free ranging discussion, there was much derisive laughter at the plethora of 3-D films in the works, as well as to the numerous sequels and remakes. Since Comic Con fans are almost certain bank and a reliable source of pre-release buzz don’t expect the sequel/remake trend to change any time soon. The comic convention crowd has a “sequel jones” that must be fed and the studios are more than happy to feed it.

I had hoped to catch presentations by Will Wheaton, Leonard Nimoy and Stan Lee but the room in which they took place filled and remained so for each hour these gentlemen held court. Instead, I caught Erin Gray, who I grew up watching as Col Wilma Deering in “Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century. “

Ms. Gray built a career, post Buck Rogers, on the fan convention circuit. She created a business, Heroes for Hire, in which she helps science fiction and fantasy television and film stars meet their fans. It began when Gil Gerard (Buck Rogers) and Marc Singer (Beastmaster) asked her to help them get into the convention circuit.

It was a lot of fun listening to Ms. Gray’s stories about how she built Heroes for Hire, her experiences on her first big break with Evening in Byzantium, and being the first Sports Illustrated swimsuit model to don a thong.

An aspiring actor asked Ms. Gray about breaking into the business, which gave her a chance to pitch her book, Act Right. The book is intended to teach actors everything they don’t learn in acting classes. She realized that actors simply did not know how to behave on a set because no one gives them the scoop on studio protocol. The book grew out her experiences on sets and from conversations with crewmembers that saw actors as unprofessional.

Much of my time, at the convention, was spent, like most folks, wandering the exhibitor hall. At one booth, I had the pleasure of meeting James Fletcher, owner of Heroic Fine Art. James hails from North Salt Lake, UT. What struck me about the work he displayed was it conspicuously avoided politically charged material. Specifically, he did not display Alex Ross’ “Bush as Vampire on Lady Liberty” nor his “Super Obama.” James did offer several of Ross’s superhero work. James noted, when I mentioned what was missing, that he didn’t particularly care to inject politics into the art he sold, which should be clear from his gallery’s name: “Heroic” fine art, not “political” fine art.

If you browse HeroicFineArt.com online gallery, you may find yourself wondering about the pricing. The thing to remember is that James Fletcher runs an art gallery and the works he displays are art. If you want comics, go to your local comic shop.

Finally, just to draw the distinction between the smaller conventions, like ECCC, and the massive San Diego Comic Con. I got my ticket for ECCC three days before the convention took place, and there were still plenty of tickets sold at the door. Tickets for all four days of SDCC sold out last November, and currently the only single day tickets left are for Sunday, July 25. If you were planning on going, and don’t have a ticket, prepare to part with a sizable chunk of change when people start putting their Comic Con tickets up for sale on E-Bay.

James Bowman has kindly responded to my comments on his assertion that “fantasy is not Art.” ‘Kindly,’ on second thought, might be stretching things a bit, given that he begins by marginalizing those who disagree with him as nothing more than blog-dwelling trolls*:

You can imagine the reaction in the blogosphere— which, as you may or may not know, has way more Lewis and Tolkien fans in it than the population at large. I wonder why that is, by the way? [Emphasis in original.]

I’ll bet there are far more readers of Mr. Bowman’s latest blog entry in the blogosphere than in the population at large, but I digress. After establishing a suitably dismissive tone with those lines, Mr. Bowman begins his defense with the following:

I wonder if it is too late to protest that I did not say what Mr Crandall says I said. What I did say was that fantasy — by which I meant the fantasy actually being produced in our culture today, the fantasy of Avatar or The Dark Knight or that which is, in one way or another, merely derivative from Tolkien or Lewis — represents a break with the Western mimetic tradition to which the fantasies of yesteryear still, more or less, belonged.

Mr. Bowman did far more than attack fantasy “produced in our culture today.” Allow me to remind you of exactly what he wrote in his New Atlantis article:

But those who, like Hawthorne’s clockmaker, carry over the ambition to produce a new creation in traditional art forms should not continue to call those forms “art.” We may call this fantasy-art “art” as a courtesy to a tradition coterminous with humanity itself, but fantasy is not art, at least not in the sense that the term has been understood within the Western mimetic tradition going back to Homer. Indeed, Western culture is so intimately bound up with the tradition of imitation in art — the tradition of making things that are like reality precisely so as to make claims to know reality and thus to distinguish it from fantasy — that the now more than century-long vogue for fantasy art, beginning with George MacDonald, J.M. Barrie, and Kenneth Grahame and continuing through Lewis and Tolkien to the more unrestrained science-fiction and fantasy cinema of our own time, should be seen as a repudiation, conscious or unconscious, of that Western tradition. [Emphasis added]

I will grant that the majority of Mr. Bowman’s article focused on Avatar, but he went far beyond that film with the paragraph above.

His self-defense continues:

I am accused of by Mr Crandall and his supporters on The American Culture website … [as] if I had attempted to claim that Lewis or Tolkien or anybody else, for that matter was not a “real” artist. But I didn’t. I don’t even know what it means to be a real artist — as opposed, presumably, to an unreal one. I believe the question to be an unprofitable one, even if I knew how to answer it.

He not only does not “know what it means to be a real artist” but also claims that he would never “make such a crude generalization as to say that anything fantastical in a work of art disqualifies it as art.” Yet he writes that fantasy resides outside “the Western mimetic tradition” and that anything outside that tradition is “not art.” I wish he’d make up his mind. Either that or have the courage to stand with his assertion that fantasy-art is “not art,” and, therefore, fantasy-artists, by definition, are not artists.

Mr. Bowman’s response displays a longing for the good ole days. I can’t help but sense a certain wistfulness when he writes this:

“When Lewis and Tolkien were writing, fantasy literature was a largely unvalued cultural sideline, an out-of-the-way corner of literature that, if it was recognized at all, was quite likely to be despised or condescended to. It existed in a ghetto and was assessed not with respect to “serious” literature but with respect to other S-F and fantasy lit.”

Oh, for those happy days when fantasy artists were confined to the fringes! A rather amusing moment, in Mr. Bowman’s diary entry, came in response to my query about whether Shakespeare believed in magicians who manipulate weather and donkey-headed men:

The answer is that we can’t possibly know what Shakespeare himself believed in or didn’t believe in, but we can know that he wrote in a cultural context that was characterized by belief in many more fantastical things as they now seem—than these, and that this fact cannot be irrelevant to the meanings of these and others of his plays.…

This was a world in which magic was only beginning to be distinguished from science. Fairies were believed in by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as recently as a hundred years ago, and I would not take my oath that Lewis and Tolkien did not believe in them too.

Let me see if I can get my blog-dwelling troll head around that: according to Mr. Bowman’s argument, if some people believed stupid, crazy things during the time an artist was working, that person can be a artist even if he or she wrote about people with donkey heads. OK, then, but that would surely exonerate Lewis and Tolkien as well, unless Mr. Bowman believes that the premises of Nazism and Communism were terrific ideas. And it would of course exonerate the current day purveyors of movies Mr. Bowman doesn’t enjoy.

I find the analyses of such fiction by Lewis and Tolkien themselves much more convincing, literate, and useful. There is much, for example, in Tolkien’s essay “On Faerie Stories” that responds to Mr. Bowman’s point that a general cultural belief in a story’s fantastical elements is necessary in order for that work to be considered “art.” These sentences, I think, are quite instructive:

But when we have done all that research—collection and comparison of the tales of many lands—can do; when we have explained many of the elements commonly found embedded in fairy-stories (such as step-mothers, enchanted bears and bulls, cannibal witches, taboos on names, and the like) as relics of ancient customs once practised in daily life, or of beliefs once held as beliefs and not as “fancies”— there remains still a point too often forgotten: that is the effect produced now by these old things in the stories as they are.…

Such stories have now a mythical or total (unanalysable) effect, an effect quite independent of the findings of Comparative Folklore, and one which it cannot spoil or explain; they open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe. [Emphasis added]

*For the record, I do believe that blog dwelling trolls exist. Therefore, by Bowman’s definition, these comments do not qualify as fantasy.