My weekend: Mandela and 6-hour Italian movie

Went to two great things this weekend.
One, at the Riverside Church, where Nelson Mandela spoke. He spoke in a very strong voice, thanking the U.S. for helping South Africa to become free. What a place is Riverside Church! A living and still influential relic of Civil Rights days, when the church and the left were strongly aligned, unlike today's diabolical alliance between Christ and Capital coagulated in the Republican Party, where the rich use the religious to attack the poor with, for example, the new bancrupty laws written by the credit card companies. Harry Belafonte introduced Mandela, and fiercely attacked the World Bank as a continuation of colonialism in Africa. David Dinkins got a surprisingly loud and long applause. Gone but not forgotten. Mandela did not mount the steps to the stage or any of the two podiums, and said this would be the last time he came to the U.S. because people his age should not cross large bodies of water. He is getting old now. He speaks with a smile in his voice, always. A man of the greatest moral authority, and still mischievous. One could not help wonder about the pigmies that bestrode the world stage today compared to this giant. Especially the unholy pigmies in charge of our country.

I saw The Best of Youth, the two-part 6-hour Italian movie now playing at the Cinema Village on E12th St near Union Square. If you live in NYC, go see it. It was like reading a lovely novel. The lives of an Italian family, from the 60s to 2002. The kind of movie Renoir could have made -- a true affection for people and this world. Comedy, tragedy, and real people, not movie actor people (one of the male stars was really handsome in a non-movie way and might become a big moviestar on his looks). I cried, I laughed, I loved every second of it, and one could not help but wonder about the movies of male aggression that the pigmies of Hollywood pump out for our "entertainment."

Our country's pop politics and pop culture suck. Pop is too salutary. Junk politics and junk culture. What do they say about us? They are my enemy. I hate them. I wonder what kind of an insecurity lurks deep in the American Dream that we're ruled by aggression and acquisitiveness, and that these two qualities are valorized above all others. Movies are about men out-machoing one another. And so it seems, is public life. We don't appear to be far removed from monkeys, with the rudest alpha males, constantly posturing, in charge. Why does America spend its time stroking the dicks of men who are assholes?