Fedora's Lurk, Like Reza Aslan

The prolonged Cold War—that Manichean drama of projections and counterprojections; the Vietnam War—not generally acknowledeged as the longest war in American history (1954-73); the protests against the Vietnam War, which forcibly divided the generations-- Joyce Carol Oates, ferocity shrew

Dashiell Hammett could teach those rushed kindle authors a few things about making light surface fiction interesting. I have studied him more than once under Jewish and Gentile liberal. James Joyce may rouse my hostility as an unforgiving fuck who smirks his way into the apologia of the dimmer dial, but Hammett doesn't thin his gruel for the sake of the puzzle, and The Maltese Falcon is one of my favorite commercial novels. My money is on Sam Spade teaching alien archaeologists more about civilization than the joke on Leopold Bloom. James Spader seems to embody a bit of each character, the Manichean detective, the corrupt and corrosively mocked Jew. It manifests itself in his early and quixotic role in Stargate, a breathtaking speculative cinematic otherworld. follows him in Wolf, manifests a wickedly promising menace in Boston Legal, only to fizz in The Practice. It is a menace of more complex nuance than that offered by Christopher Walken. Walken carries a bit of jingoism in his ruthless irony, but Spader leaves one unsure, as if he is a fervent convert to Satanic possibilities, or a Crusader who just discovered the potency of salvation. We're never sure which in his manipulative antipodes.

It is not enough for The Blacklist, which is patently ridiculous. No one man can manipulate die hard gum shoes and the ruthless hardened criminals and stay three moves ahead of either, not even America's unifying KGB statesman. With that qualification, the show may be of use, in its idiotic television way (Ukrainian ordinance guerrillas apparently inhabit the capital and spring to life for the convenience of the screen writer's guild, but hey, who is starving in corrupt government housing methodologies, not screen writers!). Good and bad each have debilitating costs and secrets, in the measure of how far brutality has come, gut stabbings are routine in gratuitous teleplay, a delight! If producers wanted to do it right, they'd anglicize a Persian and twist his balls in a confused identity matrix. The real Islamists can't be killed fast enough, but multicultural humanism on an American campus is a pasturized entry pass.