Senator Lorax?
Via Colin McEnroe I learn of this New Yorker article about Joe Lieberman by Jeffrey Goldberg:
Lieberman says that he does, at times, feel isolated. He is a liberal on social policy and a conservative on defense, in the bygone style of the late Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson. “I’m the Lorax,” he said. “I’m saving that one tree.”
And if this excerpt is to be believed, Lieberman is kind of an annoying moviegoer:
Lieberman likes expressions of American power. A few years ago, I was in a movie theatre in Washington when I noticed Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, a few seats down. The film was “Behind Enemy Lines,” in which Owen Wilson plays a U.S. pilot shot down in Bosnia. Whenever the American military scored an onscreen hit, Lieberman pumped his fist and said, “Yeah!” and “All right!”
Not only is that some pretty offputting behavior, but it tells me something about Lieberman. The man was cheering at violence in a movie. This wasn’t some live sporting event, and it wasn’t one of his myriad public appearances. Why did he feel the need to cheer? Did he think that if perchance a writer for the New Yorker was sitting in the same theater that he would one day write an article about him not cheering, and so he pumped his fist to keep up appearances? Would the terrorists be emboldened if Lieberman had just sat quietly and enjoyed the film without rooting for Owen Wilson?
Who am I to talk? The last film I saw in theaters was Snakes on a Plane, and I definitely cheered and pumped my fist when Samuel L. Jackson delivered the best line in the motherfucking film.
We’re not so different, Joe and I. He loves violence (as long as it’s not video game violence) and I love gratuitous cursing.
Go read the article. As McEnroe says, it’s “grimly satisfying.”