Forgive me for piling on, but I'd like to note for the record that the New Republic blog post that got Gregg Easterbrook in so much trouble would have been narrow-minded and ignorant even if he'd never veered off into language about "Jewish executives" who "worship money above all else."

In the post, Easterbrook seems to be channeling the ghost of an upright citizen of the 1950s who assumes payola and greed are the only possible explanation for the fact that all those juvenile delinquent teenagers want rock and roll at their sock hops -- after all, it's self-evident that the stuff is just noise, isn't it?

Easterbrook doesn't like Quentin Tarantino's movies. That's fine -- I don't like them either. The near-dada chatter, the half-human characterizations -- I just can't get with the program. But I'd never say, as Easterbrook does, that "Tarantino does nothing but churn out shabby depictions of slaughter as a form of pleasure" in his movies, that "preposterous violence" is "all Tarantino has ever put onto film." That's ridiculous. You don't have to like Tarantino's movies to know that he's trying to concoct clever stews of B-movie action, comic-book storytelling, and slacker-style nods to pop-culture trivia, and that his audiences come for the stew, not just the violence. For me it gets tiresome, but for fans, Pulp Fiction was about Samuel Jackson's Jheri curls and Travolta and Uma doing the Batusi and the shaggy-dog story about the watch -- and the dialogue (fans found "Royale with cheese" endlessly amusing, and, hell, even I'll admit that at this point the phrase "get medieval on his ass" belongs in Bartlett's).

There are intelligent things to be said about the juxtaposition of smirking humor and violence in modern pop culture -- but Easterbrook is too blinkered to say any of them. Lots of people bleed in Tarantino's movies, so, to Easterbrook, they are pure evil, they may lead to terrorist violence (yes, Easterbrook actually says something to that effect), and those who finance them are bad, greedy Jews (or ... er... perhaps non-Jews).