“There has always been something uniquely brilliant about America,” said Mitt Romney at the University of Chicago yesterday. “I don’t believe this president understands this fundamental secret of America. And day by day, job-killing regulation by regulation, bureaucrat by bureaucrat, he is crushing the dream and the dreamers. If we continue along this path, our lives will be ruled by bureaucrats and boards, and commissions and czars.”

When I hear Romney and other Republicans and other businessmen complain about regulation, I am reminded of the first two minutes of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. where the outlaw Butch Cassidy cases out a bank to rob, and finds, to his sorrow and dismay, that once vulnerable bank has become fortified with locks, vaults, alarms and a guard, who explains why he was hired by the bank. “People kept robbing it.” he tells the thief.

Think about that. Who complains about laws? Outlaws!

“Regulation erodes our freedom,” says Romney. Yes–our freedom to rob, steal, defraud and scam.

Now wonder people say that Romney is not a conservative. He’s not. He’s an anarchist.

It’s pretty rich for Romney to complain about how regulation hampers the economy. We have just finished more than three decades worth of financial deregulation, and as much as anything, it was the elimination of conservative regulations and business practices that led to the mortgage fraud, the over-leveraging, the hidden markets in derivatives and so on that brought on and accelerated the financial collapse. The problem that has hampered our economy for the last four-plus years is a function not of regulation, but specifically of deregulation.

At one point in his speech, Romney hearkened back to America’s innovative past. “A regulator would have shut down the Wright Brothers for their ‘dust pollution.’ And the government would have banned Thomas Edison’s light bulb. Oh yeah, they just did.” Here he was speaking of new regulations that mandating new minimum performance of light bulbs. Well, for one thing, I’m sorry if the Wright Brothers would have been shut down, but I thought we all kind of agreed that health and safety standards were a good thing for workers; if Romney wants to run on a pro-black lung, pro-brown platform, well, I think he will have at long last found a position Rick Santorum can’t get to the right of. For a second thing, I doubt any inspector would have banned Edison’s light bulb for failing to meet an efficiency standard, given that Edison was establishing the efficiency standard. But is he against efficiency standards? How competitive would America’s car companies be if they were still producing the eight miles-per-hour Oldsmobile Toranado?

Nobody likes regulation. Anyone who has stood in an airport security line since 9/11 and thrown away a shampoo bottle understands how annoying regulation can be. Anyone who has put an addition on his house and dealt with local planning boards knows about dictatorial bureaucrats. We absolutely should get rid of stupid regulations, and it should be mandated that at least once a decade, every agency should audit its regulations with an eye towards eliminating and streamlining rules and procedures . The problem is that Romney and his ilk seldom point to actual stupid regulations. In this speech, he named an Idaho couple named Mike and Chantell Sackett who have run afoul of the EPA after making good-faith efforts to comply with the law (see this article). Well, if the EPA is in the wrong, it needs to be stopped; agencies needs to live within the rules, too. My friend Joe Plumeri, the head of the international insurance brokerage Willis Holdings, has pointed out how much his company spends complying with fifty different state insurance regulators, instead of one set of national regulations. That seems to be an excellent example of the pointless cost of over-regulation.

You want to complain to me about a specific regulation and why it should be changed or repealed? I’m all ears. You want to complain about how regulation hurts the economy? I’ll tell you to go talk to the people who invested in or worked at Enron or AIG or Lehman Brothers. I wonder how they feel about regulation.

Simon Doonan had a wonderful article in Slate last week about his experience designing the installation for the auction of Marilyn Monroe‘s effects for Christie’s in 1999. Doonan says the process of cataloging her belongings took months, but “Right away, I discovered that Marilyn was shockingly and unimaginably slender. She was sort of like Kate Moss but fleshier on top. Didn’t see that coming, did you? When it came to finding mannequins to fit her dresses, I simply couldn’t. M.M.’s drag was too small for the average window dummy.” Doonan says he developed alternate ways to show Monroe’s famous dresses, with the lone exception of the famous Jean Louis number Marilyn wore for JFK’s birthday, for which a custom Lucite mannequin was made. Says Doonan, “When you look at Marilyn on-screen and . . .realize that the busty, ample gal brimming over Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot is literally one-third your size, you have every right to become suicidal.”

Doonan’s second great observation was that Monroe was not materialistic. “Marilyn Monroe. . .owned diddly-squat. . . . There were no Renoirs or Picassos. Her knickknacks were pedestrian. Her cookware was greasy. Her spatulas were bent. Even her Golden Globe was broken. The majority of her clothing showed surprising wear and tear. She had worn it all repeatedly and there just wasn’t that much of it. Her jewelry? With the exception of her DiMaggio wedding ring it was a bunch of paste danglers and costume crap. Shoes? Yes, there were several pairs of black suede Ferragamo stilettos with worn heels. But Marilyn—brace yourself for another shocker—was more into books than shoes. Her poignant desire to cultivate her mind and give herself an education resulted in an extensive library of first editions.”

I love that!

In one of those bits of harmonic convergence that we used to call coincidence, on the same day I read Doonan’s article, I read that Eve Arnold had died. The brilliant photographer had created many stunning images of celebrities and nobodies alike, but she was perhaps best known for her pictures of Monroe. You can see why.

With the premiere of Iron Lady approaching at the end of December, we are certain to be treated to a heavy dose of Margaret Thatcher‘s greatest hits. None will be more pertinent to the issues of this moment that the point she made in her final Question session as prime minister in 1990, shown in the clip above. In the merry, feisty exchange, a Labor MP respectfully asks her if she regrets that disparity between rich and poor widened during her tenure. Thatcher denied the relevance of such statistics, and instead argued that people of all classes had benefited during under her administration. And that, she said, was the difference between her and her opponents in a nutshell: “He would rather the poor were poorer as long as the rich were less rich.”

Well of course this is a false choice: the poor could certainly be less poor without the rich becoming richer, but that is neither here nor there. Thatcher came up with a phrase that has served as the underpinning for at least fifty years of American policy. Ever since that old sailor John F. Kennedy pointed out that a rising tide floats all boats, it has been widely accepted by nearly all Americans that as long as everyone is improving, we can accept wide discrepancies in wealth. As even the great American mafioso Barzini acknowledged in The Godfather, “After all, we are not communists.” Our social contract accepts the reality of the rich, as long as things overall are improving for everyone.

But as Paul Krugman once again points out today in the Times, things really aren’t improving for anyone. He cites a Congressional Budget Office report that showed that between 1979 and 2005, “the inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. The equivalent number for the richest 0.1 percent rose 400 percent. For the most part, these huge gains reflected a dramatic rise in the super-elite’s share of pretax income. But there were also large tax cuts favoring the wealthy. In particular, taxes on capital gains are much lower than they were in 1979 — and the richest one-thousandth of Americans account for half of all income from capital gains.”

In other words, the rising tide has been channeled into the Yacht Club’s marina. The super rich have been getting richer, while almost no one else has enjoyed very much of a gain at all. And much of what the super rich have gained has come through government tax-cutting, which has exacerbated the deficit, which hurts everyone. Far from Thatcher’s trade-off, the rich have grown richer precisely at the expense of the poor and middle classes.

I wonder what the Iron Lady would say about that?

Sidney Lumet, the great film director, died on Saturday. He made some of the greatest movies of all time–dramatic, entertaining, thought-provoking, Here are scenes from three of the best: Dog Day Afternoon, The Verdict and the peerless Network.

In my interview with Robert Redford for Parade, the noted environmental activist had some pointed words about the current state of the environment:

On how America is dealing with environmental issues.
“Sadly, not well. The attempts of the previous administration to do away with all the laws and regulations that were put into place over the last 30 years to protect the people of this country had a devastating effect. They attempted to cynically take out the EPA, to do away with the Bureau of Land Management, to open up everything to gas and oil exploration, which are non-renewable resources. I’ve been involved with the environment for years, and I always will be. People need to wake up. The climate’s changing. Water doesn’t reach its destination anymore. We need to realize that this planet is home to all of us. There’s not a lot one person can do alone, but I will sleep better at night knowing that I did whatever I could.”

On whether President Obama has addressed environmental issues the way Redford hoped he would.
“I’m sympathetic to everything the president has to deal with–the world around us is in chaos. It’s a tough job for anybody. Is he doing as much as he could [for the environment]? No. I think he has not used the political capital he has been given. I think he could do better if some of his advisers weren’t from some of the Old School places. So I’m disappointed, but I think he’s doing okay, better than anybody else would have. What worries me is that our political system is so degenerated that there’s nothing but a war zone. There’s no cooperation, there’s no moderation, there’s no compromise. There is no middle, there’s just a demarcation line. Somebody just doesn’t see the bigger picture, and we’re going to pay.”

On his hopes for the future.
“I do have hope, and it sits with the young people. As we see in the Middle East, it’s the young people and the women who are stepping up, at the risk of their lives. What I notice is that Lions for Lambs [his 2007 film] was about the end of the generation of people asking, ‘What’s in it for me? I’m not going to join the political system, it’s a waste of time. I’m going to Silicon Valley and get into games.’ They became cynical and apathetic, and they didn’t take education seriously, just as something to get a job. This generation now, boy, do they want to get the reins! They’re saying, “Don’t talk to us about Baby Boomers! We don’t want to hear it. Just give us the reins! We know what to do.” The hope of this country is with young people, it really is.”

Thanks to good luck and good connections, I got to write not one but two articles about The Conspirator, the new firm opening this week about the trial before a military tribunal of Mary Surratt, one of the alleged conspirators who joined with John Wilkes Booth to kill Abraham Lincoln and attack other high government officials. One of the pieces, assigned through old and new connections at the Times, introduced me to Joe Ricketts, the founder and former chairman of TD Ameritrade, who founded the company that underwrote the film, The American FIlm Company, and to James Solomon, the screenwriter who began the script 18 years ago. Congratulations to them both. It was great to be back in Arts & Leisure, and also to work once again with my former Us magazine colleague Kathy Heintzelman, now of Parade, who recruited me to interview the director of the film, Robert Redford, one of the very few people for whom phrases like `icon’ and `living legend’ actually seem like les mots juste. It was a pleasure to talk to him; I’m sorry our conversation last only an hour. One of his best comments was about the parallels between this post-Civil War period, when anger and grief over LIncoln’s assassination drove the government’s handling of the prosecution of the conspirators, and our current moment, when similar feelings about 9/11 seem to have dominated administration policy:

Obviously, I could see the parallels to the present, and I knew that this could be dangerous for me, because people see me as a liberal and might pigeonhole me and the film as having some partisan point of view. But I don’t feel that the political films I’ve made have been partisan criticisms of the left or right, but criticisms of the political process itself. I’m not inventing anything [about Mary Surratt’s trial]—I’m just putting a spotlight on it. The other factor for me, having experienced what I’ve experienced in my lifetime, is how could I not see patterns in our history? And one of the biggest patterns I’ve noticed is that whenever there’s chaos, there’s ambiguity, and where there’s ambiguity, there’s fear. And fear gets manipulated.

Rocky, Raging Bull, Cinderella Man, Million Dollar Baby: I’m not so crazy about boxing, but I love boxing movies, David O. Russell‘s The Fighter is one of the best, because, like the other great ones, it’s less about the pugilism than it is about the people. The fighter of the title is the promising but aging perpetual underdog Irish Micky Ward, but the film is not only about him: it’s about his lost, crack-addicted brother Dickie; Micky’s flinty girlfriend Charlane; his tough, exploitative mother; his tribal, “flying Irish” sisters; and the whole dismal, declining, prideful town of Lowell, Massachusetts. The film is full of great performances from Christian Bale, Melissa Leo and Amy Adams, and most generously, from a restrained Mark Walhberg, who appropriately underplays the stoic, internalized Micky, and allows the peacocks around him to strut, but without ever yielding his centrality. Well written, directed, and performed; excellent choice of music, too: Russell uses familiar songs like Heavy’s “How You Like Me Now” and Poison’s “Here I am Again” in ways that make them seem fresh, like revelations. Between his performances and his very smart choices as a TV producer (Entourage, Boardwalk Empire), Walhberg has established himself as a Hollywood power.

Ginny and I had the pleasure yesterday of going to the Jacob Burns Center and not only seeing The Way Back, the new film by Peter Weir, but also hearing the great Weir talk about the movie in an interview with Janet Maslin. The Way Back is a fictionalized version of The Long Walk, Slavomir Rawicz‘s 1956 memoir of his escape from a Russian Gulag during World War II. In the film, six prisoners break out of a prison camp, and walk out of the Siberian wilderness, across the Gobi desert, and across the Himalayas. Some of them reach freedom in India. The film stars Jim Sturgess, Ed Harris, Colin Farrell, and Saorise Ronin.

This is the first film Weir has made since the great Master and Commander seven years ago, although he was attempting to get other projects off the ground in the meantime. He said he is drawn to stories of survival, and to the different “survival styles” exhibited by the various characters. The film is highly naturalistic, and that is one of its great strengths. Weir said he deliberately avoided Hollywood conventions in the storytelling; that often works well for him, but it does lind of leave you with a big chunk of movie that is about walking, pain and hunger. Still, weir made the film he wanted to make, and I always admire that.

After the session, I asked Weir if he thought we would ever see another film based on Patrick O’Brian‘s great Aubrey-Maturin seafaring novels. He said he doubted it. “The film made money but not enough money to justify a sequel,” he said, “and there have not been any technological developments that would lower the costs.” But he said that all of the creative people would have been willing to return to the subject, and with a smile he dangled this small morsel of hope: “Russell Crowe is still working on it somewhere.” Hang in there, Russ baby!

One of the hardest things to do is to explain to a young person what it was like when something that has become established and famous was brand new. This clip of Mel Brooks appearing on The Dick Cavett Show offers a small bit of what it was like when he was first rolling out The Producers. Brooks is his usual frantic, funny self, but his best line comes near the very end of the clip: “Tito had the car.”