Here's a perfect illustration of the iconography of freedom. Marilyn Monroe displays a picture of Abraham Lincoln, The Great Emancipator, in a sleek convertible with the open road beckoning.

Automobiles represent freedom.

Try and remember when you were a teenager yearning for your driver’s license so you could hop into daddy’s car and go, go, go. It didn’t matter where, you just wanted to burn rubber and escape into the far horizon.

The brilliant, exhilirating and touching American Grafitti, 1973, is the ultimate expression of American car culture. Almost every single scene takes place in a car.

Los Angeles was the first America city built to accomodate the automobile. And the movie stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, most born dirt-poor, expressed delight in their sudden prosperity and fame by purchasing and posing with their dream machines.

Contrast cars with trains.

Trains and subways are an expression of the collective. Individual identity is erased. You are at the mercy of a state run system that turns  the citizen into a small cog manipulated by unmotivated, inefficient government bureaucrats.

That’s why Progressives-Liberals-Leftists are obsessed with high-speeed rail. The freedom of the road is repellent to statists who want to regulate/control diet, education, light bulbs, health care, your very geography.

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So many big name stars, singers and sports legends have visited Washington over the years, the city is often referred to as “Hollywood on the Potomac.”  So, that’s the title of my new book (available now at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Borders) featuring over 200 photographs and stories that detail the fascination between Hollywood stars and Washington power-players — from Presidents Truman through Obama. 

Here’s an excerpt: (more…)

7pm PST - You’ll Never Get Rich (1941) A Broadway dancing team splits up when the male dancer is drafted. Cast: Fred Astaire, Rita Hayworth, Robert Benchley, John Hubbard Dir: Sidney Lanfield BW-89 mins, TV-G

Those 63 seconds say more about this charming film than any number of words ever could. Astaire and Hayworth were giants because in a simple scene with simple choreography, simple costumes, a simple setting and simple dialogue they still somehow managed to completely win you over. The way Hayworth looks at Astaire for those first few seconds is absolutely priceless. You can’t write chemistry and you can only barely direct it. What you need are movie stars, and Fred and Rita are immortals.

After a month of celebrity videos ranging from creepy to disturbing, maybe this will help to take the edge off: