So it turns out Rudy can fail...

No, I'm not talking about Clash songs, I'm talking about Sean Astin, perhaps now better known as Samwise Gamgee. He put in an appearance at the Oxford Union last nite, strolling into the great debate hall in a smart three-button suit replete with half, nay, full Windsor pink tie, his lovely daughter Alexandra in hand. We managed to get seats on the floor, in a small section unified by, if nothing else, our support for the introduction of a measure to the effect that "This House believes Rudy is the greatest sports film of our generation." Of course, Oxfordshire is Tolkien country (The Hobbit was written about fifty yards from where I sit, in Staircase Two of Pembroke College), so needless to say there was about as much support in the room for the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame as there was for the Fighting Irish of Belfast. Thus was I fully prepared to see a species of nerdery different than my own take the day, and listen to Astin struggle in vain to satiate the tremendous demand for the inducement of childlike wonder among fan-fic writers and theatre-girls alike.

As chance would have it though, these Serfs of the Ring were doomed to disappointment. Instead, what we got from Mr. Astin was an eloquent, if not at times loquaicious and contrived, treatise on morality and world-view formation. Reading at first from "prepared remarks", Astin managed both to affect the American self-loathing commonplace among liberal apologists with European audiences, and to quote Malcolm X at great length. I will say of him that he is bright and intellectually curious (having worked his way through community college and UCLA on his way to a degree in American Studies), but I wonder in the end if he's really being honest with himself.

Two points struck me as particularly disingenuous. First, a comment about having "spent two-thousand dollars on books, about the war and the president and the politics" and thereupon "spreading them around my apartment, and reading the titles trying to make sense of my worldview"; suffice it to say that the reading of titles does not an education make; a studious trip to the Bodliean will save one both time and money if a spatial arrangement of similarly provocative epigrams is all one is after. But perhaps this is unfair--Astin was speaking in anecdotes, and we can only assume he's read more than just titles. Still, the second comment irked me, and as he was addressing it in response to a question posed by a friend Alex immediately to my left, I can't help but feel that my cringe at its utterance was both recognized by Astin, and cause for his retreat into safer waters.

You see, he was fresh from confessing to us his difficulty in "reconciling free market capitalism and democracy". Fair enough, Goonie. But as your new book, on your own account, deals quite explicitly with the pragmatics of movie deals, agents, franchise rights and the like, it seems as though you've got a working grip on how the market works, and how it works for you. But the the death knell, for me, sounded when Astin implored all of us to see The Corporation, a no-holds-barred documentary that makes Farhenheit 9/11 look like a soft jest from Cheney to Bush. (To be equitable, The Economist called The Corporation "surprisingly rational"). I do not doubt that we all should see this film, or more appropriately that we should avail ourselves to the truths presented therein. But perhaps Mr. Astin ought to see it again, and figure out if he can "reconcile" his admiration for it with the fact that his checks are signed by TimeWarner Inc.

I didn't intend for this post to get so long, and for it to be so unfunny. So I'll finish off by saying that, ceteris paribus, Sean Astin is one of the good ones. An Alec Baldwin or Sean Penn he is not, and he seems genuinely committed to public service (working, for instance, with President Bush's volunteerism board, the Secretary of the Army, and with the Carter Foundation). The case of Astin just goes to show how easily (unavoidably?) we slip into hypocrisy, and how unpalatable that hypocrisy can sound to a kid from Jersey whose parents were not, in any case, Gomez Addams and Patty Duke.*

-Citizen Foster

*I should also note that granting Astin a reprieve was made a great deal easier when, yielding graciously to my request, he helped us all to the Chester Copperpot speech from Goonies, and to a stirring rendition of Charles S. Dutton's famous "Five-foot-nothin, a-hundred-and-nothin" speech from Rudy (the greatest sports film of our generation).