Trivial thoughts.

[uvula_fr_b4]

A couple of thoughts that aren't exactly "senses-shattering" (as many a blurb on a Marvel Comics cover in the 1960s and 1970s would have it) that occurred to me this weekend:

• After watching the second Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force -- this is the one with (SPOILERS!) the execution squad on the police department being secretly run by the lieutenant (Hal Holbrook) who is Harry Callahan's (Clint Eastwood) boss -- and the feature "A Moral Right: The Politics of Dirty Harry," I was amused to see that much was made of the polarized politics in the U.S. of the day, given that the main villain in the first movie was a "liberal" (note the sinister, stylized peace symbol on the serial killer's belt buckle, as well as his nom de crime, Scorpio) while the killers in Magnum Force are "conservatives" (although two of them briefly flash the peace sign -- or perhaps, being good Churchillians, they meant it to be understood as a "V for Victory" sign -- at each other, which gave me pause as I watched the movie, and went unremarked in "A Moral Right"); apparently the first four Dirty Harry movies (#3 was The Enforcer, with Tyne Daley as Harry's partner, while #4 was Sudden Impact -- the only Dirty Harry movie I'd seen until the last week [I saw it in the theatre when it was out in first release, with my parents and grandmother, no less] -- which was the one with the line "Go ahead; make my day" that Reagan and Bush #41 liked to quote) alternated in their main villains from "liberal" to "conservative" and back again. (The main thing I remember from Sudden Impact is that damn, flatulent bulldog of Harry's, and how my dad guffawed at it, which should pretty much tell you all you need to know about my dad's sense of humor.)
  
  "A Moral Right" noted that, in the late '60s / early '70s, leftists' opponents would frequently call them communists or socialists, while people disagreeing with the right wing or conservatives would accuse them of being fascists.
  
  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
  
  
• While picking my way through Frances Yates' The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979) -- specifically Chapter 9 ("Spenser's Neoplatonism and the Occult Philosophy: John Dee and The Faerie Queene") -- I came across this arresting paragraph, on page 117:
  
  "The first book of The Faerie Queene is about the Red Cross Knight who represents Holiness and is accompanied by the lady, Una. It is a solar book....full of solar imagery."
  
  This made me think of Marvel Comics' Captain Marvel, the Kree soldier Mar-Vell, and wonder if writer Roy Thomas -- or possibly Stan Lee himself, given that he wrote the character's first appearance in Marvel Super Heroes Vol. 1, #12 (Dec. 1967) -- took the name of Mar-Vell's lady-love, the medic Una, from the first book of The Faerie Queene; Mar-Vell, or Marvel, certainly became a "solar knight" of sorts after his second major reinvention (in Captain Marvel Vol. 1, #17 [Oct. 1969], but more particularly after his third major tweaking (in Captain Marvel Vol. 1, #29 [Nov. 1973]), where his hair was changed from white/silver to blond and he became "cosmically aware" thanks to the intervention of the cosmic entity Eon).
  
  However, this is probably just one of those happy coincidences -- like the Superman villain Brainiac's real name being Vril Dox; "vril" of course being the paranormal energy source of the subterranean beings called the Vril-ya in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1871 novel The Coming Race, as well as the name of a putative Nazi secret society founded in 1921 -- that make being a comic book nerd such an absorbing and fascinating experience.
  
  Yes, it's pretty weak tea; but happiness is best achieved when you learn to adjust your expectations downward. Waaaaaay downward.