The conversation continues, but is it an awakening or plain old partisan Hollywood?

The discussion rolls on about V for Vendetta, and an interesting exchange between James Greenberg and Butler Shaffer highlights the comments at Wally Conger's Out of Step. "This film will ultimately be meaningless in the pursuit of freedom," Greenberg asserts. Ah, Shaffer replies, but "Too many commentators on this film fail to appreciate its main value: to get people to consider the interplay between peace and violence; between liberty and tyranny."

After a year that brought us examinations of tyranny in Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, Serenity and now V for Vendetta, it's easy to believe that the mainstream entertainment world is starting to "get it." I'd be even more encouraged if I believed for a second that this has to do with a genuine rediscovery of the principles of liberty. More likely this string of freedom films will grind to a halt after a few Democratic victories over Republicans at the polls. Hollywood loved, or at least ignored, Clinton's wars and Clinton's assaults on liberty. Inability to recognize Tweedledee's similarity to Tweedledum is the central dysfunction in America as we know it today.

Fanty for president; he's prettier than Mingo.

P.S. Whoa! In searching the Internet for images of Yan and Rafael Feldman, the twins from Serenity, I landed on this nugget of information at imagesjournal.com: "The Big Combo (1955), Allied Artists' seedy B-noir directed by Joseph H. Lewis and photographed exquisitely by John Alton, opens with Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace) splashed in slanting shadows as she runs through tunnels along a boxing ring. She's chased by two hitmen, Fanty and Mingo ..." Am I the last or the first to discover where the interplanetary traders got their names???