Andrew Klavan dissects the 2016 GOP debate, framing it as a clash between Western ideals—rooted in Judeo-Christian and classical traditions—and their critics, who mislabel equality and freedom as universal rather than historically specific. He dismisses Rand Paul’s isolationism and Jeb Bush’s ineffectiveness while praising Trump’s "raw energy" and Rubio’s pragmatic border stance, contrasting it with Hillary Clinton’s Syria and tax delusions. Tracing cultural collapse from the French Revolution to Freud’s fading influence, Klavan argues only figures like C.S. Lewis revived Western thought, leaving Democrats trapped in unrealistic fantasies. [Automatically generated summary]
Once again last night the Republican candidates for president gathered to debate how to keep America safe from an enemy dedicated to the destruction of everything we hold dear.
But for all their big talk, Hillary Clinton is still at large.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
I love that trumpet.
We need a theme song though.
We have to get this show a theme song.
We're working on it folks.
You know, little, the people are getting the music together and I'll sing it myself, by golly.
We'll soon have a theme song.
All right, so the debate, I have so much to say today that I have a feeling that I'm actually not going to be able to say it all and may continue into the next day.
You know, I want to talk about the debate.
We sort of have to talk about the debate, but I don't want to talk about it from the position of political opinion.
You know, if you want to talk about national security, you can get a national security expert.
I'm here to talk about the culture, and I just want to talk about my reactions to the culture, my cultural reactions to the debate.
We talk a lot on this show about periods in Western history when Western ideals go out of fashion.
When people, it's almost as if Western thought were a tower resting on the twin pillars of Jesus and Socrates, a Jew and a gay guy.
And the tower is built on them, and we build ideas on them.
And then every now and again, people start to think, oh, we can just leap off the tower and fly after those ideals and touch them like we're flying to the stars.
Because it's not because the people who hate the West are leaving behind Western ideals.
They only think they are.
They want more equality.
They want more freedom.
They want more peace.
As if those ideas kind of dropped like the gentle rain from heaven on their minds, as if they didn't come from somewhere, as if they weren't Western ideals.
They are only Western ideals.
They do not exist around the world.
And they are things that come out of our history leading back to Jesus, leading back to Socrates, and are built by people reasoning through the centuries off their ideas.
And when you leap off that tower, you just fall on your face.
Really, what you have to do is put the next brick on the tower.
And then you got to have kids who put the next brick on the tower, and their kids have to put the next brick on the tower.
And slowly we get a little closer.
We get a little freer.
We get a little more, you know, we figure out how to be more equal.
We include more people.
All those things are doable.
They're all doable, just very, very slowly.
And that's why conservatives who want to go backward, and there are some conservatives who think, oh, we can only go backward, are making a mistake.
What we want to do is go forward in keeping with our traditions.
So we talk about these moments, right, like the French Revolution.
Suddenly, we're just going to throw it all aside.
There's no God.
The kings have to be strangled to death with the entrails of the priests.
And I mean, they really said that.
And suddenly, and they had this idea that you kind of saw in that movie Avatar, that the real thing that we want is to go back into this Edenic world of nature.
And that's exactly what they did.
They went back to nature and just started slaughtering everybody, had a huge world war.
The Napoleonic War was as big a war as anything mankind has gone through.
And then you had thinkers, and I always mention William Wordsworth because I love his poetry and I love his thought, who started to rebuild, who realized this was a mistake and started to rebuild the Western tradition in their own minds.
And Wordsworth ended up becoming a Christian, but before he became a Christian, he started to realize where these ideas came from, the ideas that preserved Britain from the revolution, the revolutionary fervor that took France.
Happened again after World War I.
And what it really is, is these people, these people who want to, who are radicals, who want to leave behind Western thought in order to achieve what they think are just universal goals, but are really Western goals.
These radicals are always there, but it's in moments of failure, moments when the establishment fails, that they sort of take control.
They take the helm.
So after World War I, when this generation was wiped out for no discernible reason, just a war that just erupted out of stupidity, really, and a generation of men was wiped away.
Once again, they came into fashion with this modernist, existential attack on Western values, on the values of literature, on all the things that made the West what it was.
And it took great minds, again, like C.S. Lewis, probably, I've begun to feel C.S. Lewis may have been the greatest mind of the 20th century.
He was right up there.
There's a guy who wrote a book, a Harvard psychiatrist who wrote an interesting book comparing him to Sigmund Freud.
And we'll talk about Sigmund Freud one day because people now forget what an effect he had, what a huge, huge effect.
He was like a cloud that covered all of Western thought and now has kind of dissipated and has disappeared.
He's become part of the culture in some ways, and in other ways he's been thrown away.
But there's a book that compares C.S. Lewis to Sigmund Freud.
And it's written by a Harvard psychiatrist, so not a guy you would think would be in favor of C.S. Lewis.
C.S. Lewis comes off so much better than Freud.
And guys like C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot, who also became a Christian, T.S. Eliot started out writing this despairing poem, The Wasteland, which transformed all of poetry and ended up as the poet of Christianity and a great poet of reform, sort of of going back into that world.
And now it's happened again.
It happened again in the 60s.
And the 60s are very much like the French Revolution.
Remember that old French saying that history repeats itself once is tragedy and once is farce.
If the French Revolution was the tragedy, the 60s were kind of the farce.
But it was sort of the same feeling that everything was new.
It was the age of Aquarius.
And you had to be there to really know that people thought that.
Serious people actually thought.
There were books published that were huge bestsellers that this is the change.
What is the meaning?
I remember one book called The Greening of America.
There's a long discussion.
What is the meaning of bell bottoms?
Bell bottoms are very important because you can't take yourself seriously while wearing them.
I just remember that as a kid reading that passage.
And I thought, yeah, you can't because you look like an idiot.
But Wordsworth said during the French Revolution, he said, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.
That's how exciting it was, what the French were doing, and it all turned to tragedy.
And it was the same way in the 60s.
Bliss was it to be young.
Everything was youth.
It was the youth culture and all this stuff.
And in the same way, it failed terribly.
I mean, the things that they did, the AIDS crisis grew out of that.
So much that followed it was antithetical to this age of Aquarius that was going to come.
Of course, it didn't end war in the least.
And I think it really, it led from the 60s, we got this idea that has always been the underlying idea that Western culture was no better than any other culture.
That there was nothing, that that moment that Shakespeare predicts in Hamlet, that mad scene where Hamlet says nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so, that mad scene came to life and we had this multicultural idea that all cultures are the same and morals are relative.
Very old idea in Western thought.
Certainly the Marquis de Sade, from whom we get the word sadist, he made the argument that one culture, one culture is evil as another culture is good, so you might as well do whatever you want.
Once again, once again, that philosophy is collapsing, as it always does, as it collapsed in the terror of the French Revolution.
It collapsed after World War I because of World War II.
In some ways, we have Hitler to thank for making it collapse because suddenly people thought, oh yeah, there is evil.
Ooh, there he is.
Who knew?
And Ross Duthat has a good book called Bad Religion, in which he talks about the reaction, that moment in the 50s, when people came back to their religion.
Intellectuals, guys like W.H. Auden, one of the great poets, came back and said, you know, wait a minute.
There's got to be something more when we confront this.
Winston Churchill said these are the moments when we realize that we're spirits and that the fight we're in is a spiritual fight.
This is that moment.
This is that moment again.
The failure of Obama.
And don't forget the religious fervor of that election.
You cannot let that slip out of your mind.
The religious fervor of the Obama election has come a cropper.
There can't be anybody in America today who thinks the promise of that election was fulfilled.
You may still be clinging to Obama.
Oh, maybe it was the Republicans who stopped him from doing what he was going to do.
You may still think he's a great guy.
I personally have come to feel he's just not a very good person, basically.
I don't think he's evil.
I just think he's kind of a small-minded, backward-thinking narcissist, basically.
But even if you like him, even if you like him, there's no way you can think that glorious hope and change with people singing hymns to Obama has come to fruition.
It's a failure.
And thank you to our friends, the Islamists, for killing us and reminding us that evil exists.
They're doing the Hitler thing.
They remind us that evil exists and that morality is not, in fact, relative and the West does have the best ideas.
So, one of the things that T.S. Eliot said after he became a Christian, he wrote a beautiful poem called Four Quartets, and it's kind of like a James Taylor song in that it's so personal you can't even understand it unless you read it with notes.
When you read it with notes, it becomes very profound.
But there's a wonderful line in it where he's in a, I think he's looking at a fountain and a bird says to him, go away, go, go, go, says the bird.
Humankind cannot stand very much reality.
Humankind cannot stand very much reality.
And we are at this moment of reality.
And so last night, these poor Republicans, you know, what a bunch of hapless goons because they get stuck with reality because the Democrats aren't going to do it.
And so they get stuck debating reality.
And last night they were debating how they're going to defend America.
And I have this kind of interesting experience because all of us kind of gathered, friends gathered at a bar to watch the debate together.
And I was driving over and I was a little late.
So I was listening to the opening statements on the radio.
And without the distractions of vision, without the distractions of the pictures, you really got this picture of the fact that these guys are now encased in their persona.
There's nothing they can do to escape who they are.
And this was especially true of the guys who I think are finished as serious candidates.
Like when I listened to Rand Paul open.
Play his opening statement.
You'll hear what I mean.
The question is, how do we keep America safe from terrorism?
Trump says we ought to close that internet thing.
The question really is, what does he mean by that?
Like they do in North Korea?
Like they do in China?
Rubio says we should collect all Americans' records all of the time.
The Constitution says otherwise.
I think they're both wrong.
I think we defeat terrorism by showing them that we do not fear them.
Yeah, that'll do it.
So Rand Paul is in his, you know, he's basically an isolationist, Rand Paul, like his father.
And, you know, there's an argument to be made for that, by the way.
There's an argument to be made that Israel has nukes.
Let them defend themselves.
And we just walk away.
We just get out and let them all kill each other.
We don't like any of them.
There's none of them.
Not one country besides Israel in that region is any damn good, so let them all just blow each other to pieces.
Unfortunately, I strongly suspect the world doesn't work that way.
But more importantly, that moment has passed in the American consciousness.
The moment when we said, oh, George W. Bush did this terrible thing taking us into the Middle East.
We'll never go to war again.
That's over.
Thanks to Obama.
He, you know, he blew the victory in Iraq and made it a defeat.
He has let this thing spin out of control.
We now see what happens when the good guys don't lead.
I am, I have to say, I'm a neo-imperialist.
I mean, I don't believe, I fall short of actually believing we should go over and conquer people.
You know, America is the first country, first great country in history that doesn't conquer people.
We actually don't conquer people.
But I do very, very strongly believe that we should belligerently sell our values, belligerently sell our trade, you know, and take over the world through the mind, through ideas.
And so when Rand Paul is basically saying we just have to show them we don't fear them, they don't care whether they fear, they just want to kill us.
They want us dead.
They don't care if we're afraid or not.
We can die nobly.
We can die running away, you know, saying, help, help, help.
They don't care.
As long as we die, they'll be happy.
And it's just a fundamental misunderstanding of this moment in politics.
Different Views on Defense00:14:28
He's done.
I think he should get out.
I think that these guys hanging around has now become harmful.
I don't know what he's pulling at, but it's got to be single digits if single digits.
I think it's 2%.
Is that something like that?
You know, CNN shouldn't let him on the main stage anymore.
It's ridiculous.
And the same goes for Kasich.
I mean, I want to just play a Kasich cut, but Kasich, too, you know, Kasich, I think, is running for vice president because we need Ohio, and he's a popular governor in Ohio.
But listen to his opening statement.
The same thing, trapped in his persona.
Just last weekend, a friend asked one of my daughters, do you like politics?
And my daughter said, no, I don't.
And the reason I don't like it is because there's too much fighting, too much yelling.
It's so loud, I don't like it.
You know, I turned to my friend and I said, you know, she's really on to something.
Not to offend the guy's daughter, but, you know, no, she's not.
I mean, this is what we have to do.
We have to debate.
You know, we have to talk.
We have to argue.
Every time I hear somebody say, you know, we need a bipartisan government, I think that's insane.
I mean, we need bipartisan agreement.
No, we want to argue these things out and let us decide who's right.
We want people on different sides.
I want this in my life.
I want people to argue with me and hone my ideas and help me make sure I'm not wrong.
So they said, oh, there's a lot of screaming and yelling and all this stuff.
And of course, as always, just to finish this thought about persona, people being trapped in the persona, the most entertaining moment in every Republican debate is when Donald Trump beats the crap out of Jeb Exclamation Point Bush.
It's just riveting, riveting stuff.
So here's that moment for your tough business to run for.
I know you're a tough guy, Jeb.
And we need to have a leader that is real tough.
You're never going to be president of the United States.
Let's see.
I'm at 42 and you're at 3.
So so far I'm doing better.
It doesn't matter.
So far I'm doing better.
You know, you started off over here, Jeb.
You're moving over further and further.
Pretty soon you're going to be off the end.
It's got to be still a thing.
Sounds funny to talk to you.
It's sound.
I especially like Carly in the background, like mom.
Boys, boys, stop fighting.
She had a terrible debate.
She kind of didn't show up.
And I think it's hard.
I like Carly Fiorina.
I think she has a problem with her business record is not all that appealing.
She said she's been called every B word in the book.
And I sent out a tweet saying, including bad CEO, you know.
She's like, really, you know, she's just kind of fading away.
But that moment, of course, is just fascinating.
There's something about, there's something about That raw masculine energy Trump has that is absolutely fascinating.
It's the exact same thing that makes us watch the Sopranos and kind of feel for Tony Soprano.
It's exactly the same thing that makes us watch Walter White on Breaking Bad.
And even though he's doing horrible, horrible things, we see him becoming a man in the course of Breaking Bad.
He starts out as completely whipped by his wife, and he's this sad, you know, guy with his slumped shoulders, and he ends up a gangster, but at least he's a guy, you know, and Trump is the same way.
I find it difficult to look at Trump.
I find him just a garish thug.
That whole thing of personal attacks, you're a tough guy, Jeb.
You're a tough guy.
And Jeb makes it easy.
Jeb should pull out of the race.
He should pull out of the race because he makes Trump look good.
Those exchanges just make Trump look like a tough guy.
Let me pause here.
The New York Times, which used to be a newspaper, ran a really interesting little feature on the front page where they just listed all the reactions to the debate from different, and unlike the usual New York Times, it was actually a fair article.
So let me just read to you what different people had to say about the debate.
Chris Christie won big, Ted Cruz won big.
They were the winners of this debate, said Frank Luntz.
He's the Fox News pollster.
Cruz was the one who appeared to hit more of his marks and take fewer hits during the freewheeling and combative events, said Josh Voorhees, a slate writer from Iowa City.
I think Cruz's performance tonight will likely endear him to most conservative voters, and I don't know how many will follow up to realize that he flatly mischaracterized his own position on immigration.
Cruz came into this debate with the most to lose, and I don't think anyone laid a glove on him that will hurt his continued rise in the polls.
It's Leon Wolf, a blogger for Red State.
Trump started ahead.
Nobody laid a glove on him.
His closing hit home.
That was Ramesh Poneru at National Review.
That sound you hear from Las Vegas is the last PSI of air leaking out of Jeb Bush's tires.
Adios, said Michelle Malkin with her usual sweetness.
I hope I never get on the wrong side of Michelle Malkin.
Cruz and Rubio are easily the best debaters, and their exchanges were genuinely interesting.
I actually agree with this.
It's fascinating to watch them as they try to appeal to different bases with their party, but both men argue like U.S. senators, and that's not very attractive to GOP voters.
In an anti-establishment year, Chris Christie did a good job pointing this out.
Trump was Trump once again.
Tagging Goddard, publisher of Political Wire.
Big Commander-in-Chief anti-Congress oration by Chris Christie, well rehearsed and well delivered, said David Axelrod, a former advisor to Obama.
My guess is in the next round of polling, Cruz will edge up.
Trump will stay up.
Carson will recede.
Rubio Bush et al. stay the same.
Joy Ann Reed, liberal MSNBC commentator and author.
While most of the other candidates remain staunchly anti-Russia, anti-Iran, and anti-ISIS, even though the former two are unwaveringly opposed to the latter, Rand Paul was willing to criticize the recklessness of go-to-war with Vladimir Putin over nothing policy.
Robbie Suave of Reason.com's hit-and-run blog.
That may be true, but Paul is finished.
Kasich's awkward body language makes me irrationally angry.
He is wiggling around like a worm, says Megan McCain.
You know, I have to say, she has a point.
There is something, the guy's shoulders, he's got these hunched shoulders.
I don't know.
It's possible he has some kind of spinal problem.
He's got this hunched shoulders, and his arms kind of wave around like, yeah, like he's a robot.
And it really is strange to watch.
And finally, I'm surprised by how rattled Trump got in exchange with Jeb.
A couple of people said this.
Having said that, I don't see anything tonight that knocks him off the spot.
You know, all those things.
I had a different take on the whole thing.
I thought Rubio won.
I thought he won far and away.
Trump basically played it safe.
I don't think anything he did will hurt him.
He has the lead.
He looks like he just doesn't want to do this anymore, though.
I have to say, I think there's like the slimmest possible chance he's just going to walk away from the whole thing.
He talks like it's over.
You know, we started a discussion.
I've had a good time.
You know, I think he may just say, eh, I'm done.
I'm going to go do something else.
You know, I'm going to build another casino.
I'm sure that's just wishful thinking on my part, but he really does look like this is the hardest he's ever worked and he doesn't want to be doing it anymore.
I thought Rubio looked like the president of the United States.
This is what he knows.
This is what he knows.
Play this, his speech on what he would do to defeat ISIS.
We have to understand who ISIS is.
ISIS is a radical Sunni group.
They cannot just be defeated through airstrikes.
Airstrikes are a key component of defeating them, but they must be defeated on the ground by a ground force.
And that ground force must be primarily made up of Sunni Arabs themselves.
Sunni Arabs that reject them ideologically and confront them militarily.
We will have to embed additional American special operators alongside them to help them with training, to help them conduct special missions, and to help improve the airstrikes.
The airstrikes are important, but we need to have an air force capable of it.
And because of the budget cuts we are facing in this country, we are going to be left with the oldest and the smallest air force we have ever had.
We have to reverse those cuts, in addition to the cuts to our Navy and in addition to the cuts to our army as well.
And beyond that, I would say we must win the information war against ISIS.
Every war we have ever been involved in has had a propaganda informational aspect to it.
ISIS is winning the propaganda war.
They are recruiting people, including Americans, to join them with the promise that they are joining this great apocalyptic movement that is going to defeat the West.
We have to show what life is really like in ISIS territory, and we have to show them why ISIS is not invincible by going out and conducting these attacks and publicizing them to those who they recruit.
Right.
Everything he's just said, true, and I wish he had added that not only showing how bad ISIS is, but showing how good America is.
You know, that's the missing piece of this.
They still haven't come to that point where they are ready to engage in intellectual imperialism, let's call it, where they are willing to say, you know, we're right and they're wrong.
This is, you know, yes, yes, maybe we do encourage some kind of sexual immorality that you don't like, but you don't have to do that.
You know, here you can choose to live the life that you want, and you can choose to live a moral life without having to kill the guy next to you.
You can choose to create a business.
You can choose to do all these things instead of this oppressive world.
And I think that we have to not only show what it's like, how bad it is there, we have to show how good our ideas are, and we have to speak them with absolute fervor and absolute assurance.
The thing that got me about Cruz, and I'm a big Cruz fan, full disclosure, I've actually done some writing work for Cruz.
I think he was great.
The reason I did not agree with the people who thought he won was, first of all, he was very weak when Rubio attacked him on cutting back the NSA.
Perfectly good arguments for cutting back NSA intelligence, but this is not the moment, obviously.
This is a moment when you want to come across as being really strong on defense.
And Cruz was reduced to saying, well, I made a campaign promise and I had to fulfill it.
The other thing, we were just, before I came on, I was just having a debate with Jeremy Boring, who is the fellow who makes all this stuff happen.
We were just having a debate about the debate between Cruz and Rubio on immigration.
Very important, but I'm actually of the opinion that Rubio has paid his dues for the Gang of Eight fiasco, and it was a fiasco.
And his point now is that nobody is going to deport all the illegals who are here.
But people will not trust us to build a world in which they can sort of become Americans or have some kind of legal standing until we close the border.
And so first we have to close the border.
First, we have to get E-Verify out there.
First, we have to do all the things that we do to defend ourselves from this wave of illegal immigration.
And then we can start to deal with these people.
And everybody, everybody knows that's true.
And you can pound your fist.
You can do that Trump thing.
I'm going to deport my 11 million people.
He's not going to do it.
unless you like being lied to, unless you think, oh yes, I love it when you lie.
Thank you, Donald.
I love it when you lie to me.
You want to hear somebody tell the truth.
And that's what Rubio is doing.
And I think that Cruz hit him on it and hit him hard on it.
But ultimately, what Rubio is saying now is the truth.
And I think people are going to get that.
But who knows?
40% are still following Trump.
So maybe I'm being too hopeful about it.
I just want to end with, we're talking about humankind cannot stand very much reality.
Let's take a look at Hillary Clinton, at her side of the story.
She was talking here to Charlie Rose.
Right now, we're not going to see a military defeat of Assad.
That's not going to happen.
It might have been possible a few years ago.
It's not going to happen now.
If there's a no-fly zone, which you're advocating, and the Russians invade that no-fly zone, would President Clinton say, shoot it down?
If you give it warning.
Charlie, that would not happen because we're going to put up a no-fly zone where the Russians are clearly kept informed.
I want them at the table.
I pick this clip only because it's so anti-reality.
You know, she talks about we could have gotten rid of Assad a few years ago.
Who was Secretary of State then?
You know what she was saying then?
There's a different leader in Syria now.
Many of the members of Congress of both parties have gone to Syria in recent months, have said they believe Assad is a reformer.
And then later on, it was Assad must go, and Assad is still there.
And then she's talking about sitting down with the Russians.
Chris Christie got this question, this exact question, and he boldly said, yes, I would shoot down Russians who violated the no-fly zone.
That's what a no-fly zone means.
You know, she's a complete fantasist.
I mean, everything she says.
Meanwhile, while they were debating defense, the Wall Street Journal points out that Hillary was debating how to keep American companies from leaving America so they don't have to pay our confiscatory corporate taxes.
And she wanted to basically penalize them and make it harder for them to get out, not reduce their taxes, just make it harder for them to get out.
And my feeling about that is why don't you just build a wall?
You know, Trump wants to build a wall to keep people out.
Why don't he just build a wall to keep people in?
We can call it the Berlin Wall.
You know, we'll put it up and nobody, you know, a company tries to leave or smart people try to leave because their ideas are being regulated out of existence or anybody try.
Workers try to leave because they're not getting work anymore because of your policies.
Just keep them in.
It worked for the Soviet Union, didn't it?
Like Hillary Clinton, Mrs. Clinton, build back that wall.
This is what Hillary Clinton is talking about.
So at least these guys on the right, at least the conservatives are talking about reality.
And that makes them look bad.
And I wanted to end today talking a little bit about this show, Fargo, because it was a really, had a lot of interesting commentary.
I finally got to watch the last episode of it, but I'm not going to do it because I'm almost out of time.
So I think I'm going to come back tomorrow and talk about Fargo.
It had a lot to say.
It was a really, really interesting show.
And I'll try not to give too much of it away.
But it was a really, really interesting show about how America got here.
And it was fascinating both for what it knew and the boldness with which it said what it knew and for what it didn't know and what it got absolutely, what I thought it got absolutely wrong.
But it was a fun show, great to watch.
If you haven't seen it, then you like crime stories.
It's kind of an absurdist crime story.
It goes places you don't think it's going to go and it jumps the shark a lot of times, but really worthwhile.
And I think I'll just talk about it tomorrow because it has a lot to say about this moment that we're in, where these guys, these Republicans, are now trying to cope with the death of a bad idea.
They're trying to cope with the death of this bad idea and they're talking about the real stuff.
And we have to give them credit for that.
The Snow Queen's Absurdist Crime00:04:17
All of them, as I think it was, was it Rubio or Cruz?
I think it was Cruz, who said every one of them on that stage would do a better job protecting this country than the Democrats.
And that is just true going away because look, what is happening now is Obama's failure and it's Hillary Clinton's failure.
And there's no way you can get around it except for if you're being interviewed by guys like Charlie Rose who simply won't bring it up, but will bring it up and people and the opposition is going to bring it up.
All right, let's move on instead to Christmas stuff I like.
And this one, you know, I've been, I think I was getting a little serious.
Yesterday I had this adult drama Christmas story, which I really like, the Holly and the Ivy.
I really like that movie.
But it is an adult drama.
And I was thinking, you know, what about something for kids?
And the thing is, there's not that much good stuff for kids that you don't know already.
You know, everybody knows Charlie Brown Christmas and all this.
Do you guys know Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol?
Yeah, you do.
Everybody knows that.
Okay.
That's what I thought.
Here's one you might not have seen, and it's a little strange, so I'll talk about it a little bit because I don't want to just recommend it with no reservations.
It's an old, old film called The Snow Queen.
I think it was made in 1959, and it's a cartoon that was made by the Russians during the height of the Cold War, and it was brought over as a big deal.
It was brought over and redubbed with the singer Sandra Dee and Tommy Kirk, who was an old Disney actor.
He was in Old Yellow and things like this.
And its animation is primitive.
It's got old-fashioned.
It hasn't got the Pixar stuff and all this stuff.
But there's something about this, and I've watched it recently.
Oh, and by the way, the good version of it that you can get on DVD starts with this long, long Christmas introduction of Art Linkletter, who was a kid's family performer back in the day, way, way back in the day, you know, who would talk to kids, and it has this whole thing that goes on.
It's painful to watch.
But then finally, I think they just must have thought that the fact that it was a Russian, weird Russian cartoon wouldn't appeal to people.
When it gets around to it, the cartoon has this dreamlike, haunting quality that is really fascinating.
I've watched it within a few years, and it's mesmerizing.
And especially at a moment when they've made that picture about the, they made a picture based on the Snow Queen.
What's it called?
I can't remember what it's called.
Frozen, I think.
Yeah, the Walt Disney film.
This is the real story, the Hans Christian Anderson story.
And it's a really, really beautiful, beautiful story about the courage of a little girl searching for her friend who's been stolen by the Snow Queen.
It's just a fantastic story.
And I can remember, I saw this as a tiny kid, and I can remember scenes from it that have been stuck in my head my whole life because of the voice work and the cartoon work, which is very haunting.
Let's take a look.
I brought just a little bit.
This is the grandmother explaining to the two children about who the Snow Queen is.
In that palace lives the Snow Queen herself.
Oh, is she pretty?
You can scarcely imagine how beautiful she really is.
Cold but beautiful.
She is on ice.
Glittering, dazzling ice.
And yet she is alive.
Her eyes shine like stars, but they have no warmth.
There are many strange things in the frozen palace.
There is a mirror of ice.
And when the Snow Queen looks in it, she sees her whole kingdom.
You can just hear that there's something about the voices in this that it's very dreamlike.
And especially, I didn't have a clip of the two kids talking, but the kids have this very, very beautiful communication that just sounds like a dream.
It's old-fashioned, but I think kids will still watch it.
And it's a very haunting, really good story.
That's it for today.
We're going to come back tomorrow.
If the news cycle permits, I'll talk a little bit about Fargo and what it had to say, about how we got where we're at.