The Week - News Briefs

-- Some fifty high-level executives from the entertainment industry met with presidential adviser Karl Rove at a Beverly Hills hotel to discuss how Hollywood might help the war effort. Topics discussed were along the lines of public-service announcements to be shown in cinemas ("Careless matches aid the Axis!" and so on), USO tours, and the showing of new movies on military bases and warships. Everyone was at pains to make clear that the administration does not want to dictate the content of movies and TV shows. All very well, but if those movie moguls want our two cents' worth, here it is: How about retiring the military or ex-military psycho character that has been a staple of U.S. moviemaking for 30 years or more (Apocalypse Now, Dead Poets Society, American Beauty, etc.)? Oh, and while we're at it, how about a moratorium on movies in which smart lawyers outwit thick-skulled military brass trying to cover up shameful malfeasances (A Few Good Men, The General's Daughter, etc.)?

-- In our previous issue, we addressed what is known as the "mainstreaming" of pornography (or the "pornographication" of the mainstream). A recent story in the New York Times built on the theme. It interviewed a stripper (and author) named Lily Burana, who said, among other interesting things, that she used to find outfits for her act only at "boutiques that catered to the sex industry" (as the Times put it). "By 2000," however-this is Miss Burana talking now-"I was buying my outfits at Contempo," which is a shopping-mall chain aimed especially at young people. "The clothes for teenagers have become so strippified. I was a little alarmed. . . . All of a sudden I had this mad flash of protective conservatism. It was a cultural marker." Exactly-and there are lots of them. Cultural markers. The whole country needs "mad flashes of protective conservatism."

-- Very few things the U.S. government has done in our time contributed more to the advancement of human knowledge and the lifting up of the human spirit than the unmanned-and therefore relatively cheap- exploration of the solar system. Forty years ago, our neighbor planets and moons were no more than fuzzy blobs in our most powerful telescopes. The remoter ones were not even that; they were mere points of light. Now we have closeup photographs of all the known planets but one, and of a comet and several asteroids. We have tallied dozens of previously unknown moons and rings. We have landed our clever little devices on the rocky surfaces of the moon and Mars and sent them plunging into the atmosphere of Jupiter. Only distant Pluto has remained unvisited by U.S. spacecraft. Now Congress has approved $30 million for a robot mission to Pluto, to be launched in 2006 on an eight-year journey. If successful, this mission will complete the mapping of the solar system: an adventure in pure knowledge that has been pursued-sometimes with more, sometimes with less enthusiasm-under every administration since Kennedy's, to the everlasting glory of the United States and her people.