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Bob Anderson, the man who took over over for David Prowse in the Darth Vader costume to perform Vader’s light-saber duels, died this week. He was 89, and now he’s as dead as Darth Vader is dead, but Vader’s example still lives, and it lives everywhere. Just yesterday it was living in Orlando, Florida, where a 28-year-old man, deep into that nether realm where night gives way to morning, wandered onto a construction site, deserted and darkened, wearing a Darth Vader mask. Police later reported that he did not appear sober. They asked the man to leave; the man became violent. He punched and kicked at the police officers before being arrested and charged with various batteries and assaults and resistings of arrest. His mother claims that he was having a manic episode— that they had previously sought help from the state and been denied, deemed too healthy to merit treatment. That’s a typical story, and let’s hope that, in this instance at the very least, it changes. It probably will.

Darth Vader’s spirit also lives in Europe, where a fast-food chain called Quick is soon coming out with a Darth Vader-themed cheeseburger. It’s a tie-in for the 3D release of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. The thing about the burger is that its bun is black—as in, Vader-helmet black. They’re calling it the Dark Vader Burger, and if you’ve ever seen anything like it, you were probably looking at a sandwich whose bread was about five years expired. It’s obvious from the reception this news has received that people are going to be more than willing to take their chances about what all that darkness might be concealing. They know what Vader fans have always known—that it’s worth exploring the boundaries where taste and sanity give way to their opposites, if only to find out what it may be like way over there, on the other side.

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The problem has gone as wide as possible, because money knows no culture, even in the best of times. One grower told the Times that, out of the several million pounds of pecans he will harvest this season, he’s counting on tens of thousands of pounds being stolen. That’s never going to be a problem with something like fruit, no matter how precious, because fruit quickly perishes, and though it grows on trees, it typically stays there. Pecans, meanwhile, fall to the ground, often of their own accord, and remain there, forever fresh, just waiting for the looters to scramble after them.

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Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus has just been fined more than a quarter-million dollars for the way some of their animals get treated in putting on the Greatest Show on Earth. At $10,000 incurred for each violation of the Animal Welfare Act, that’s a brand-new record, although I don’t suspect you’ll see it stamped on the posters with which they lure lovers of animals–or, at least, lovers of animals insofar as the animals can entertain.

A couple of prominent animal-rights groups tried to bring this suit back in October, but they couldn’t make it stick. They keep strong counsel over there at Ringling Bros., you see, which means another try was what it took to effectively levy the penalty. Now the USDA is able to hold them accountable for the way they like to chain elephants’ legs to keep them domesticated between performances, or drag them around by their snouts with a metal hook.

Siegried and Roy made the issue public eight years ago when one half of the duo was attacked by his own tiger, and, a few years following that, Michael Vick made the general matter high-profile as well, when he was convicted for dog-fighting. But the folks at Ringling Bros. must not have paid too much cognizance to those incidents, since the one came as a result of animals who knew how to fight back, and the other was an incident of such absurd illegality they couldn’t even relate to it.

Which is why it’s important that the U.S. is still out there, doing its Big Government thing in some of the right places: observing victimed crimes that might otherwise go unobserved, unreported, and unconvicted–and then applying a price tag to those crimes that reads $270,000 but really counts for much more, in bad publicity and potential loss of revenue. “We look forward to working with the USDA,” their CEO was saying yesterday, “in a cooperative and transparent manner that meets our shared goal of ensuring that our animals are healthy and receive the highest quality care.”

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Harold Glenn Rodman, 52, charged in Virginia with abduction with intent to defile, aggravated sexual assault, forcible sodomy, and object sexual penetration

That a TSA officer committed sexual assault is no big deal. It’s perfectly normal, and it happens every day. That he allegedly committed sexual assault while not even on the job is highly unusual indeed. Normally, those guys have to be on the clock and in uniform if they’re going to do a thing like that. To this officer’s credit, he did meet the second of those requirements–he was in uniform. He had his badge on and everything, outside his home in Virginia. He even made a point of brandishing the badge, as if proud, or as if authenticating his relevant credentials. He did things exactly as he thought he was supposed to do, exactly as he’d been trained to do, except that he forgot to remember the context, and he forgot to remember that, really, context can count for so much.

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Since his death, J. Edgar Hoover’s had one hell of a strange career at the movies. Not quite as strange as the career he had as director of the FBI, for 48 years while still alive, but still, there are times when I wonder. I got to wondering all over again just last week, when I saw Clint Eastwood’s brand-new J. Edgar.

Those who are partial to the strangely and boldly hagiographic Hoover (2000; Ernest Borgnine doing his one-man-act thing in a performance that does not add up to even that, with a script that adds up to even less) will not like J. Edgar as much as those who are partial to The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977; a more sane, sober-minded, and altogether more factual production). Most of us, these days, are partial to neither, and it’s we who Eastwood has served above all.

No one will ever get all of Hoover into a film, certainly not a film of a mere two-and-a-half hours. One would have to go and give him the full Nixon (1995): would have to do for Hoover—or to Hoover—what Oliver Stone did for Richard Nixon (or to him) in his much-maligned, when not sadly neglected, three-hour masterpiece.

That’s okay–I’ve long given up hope on anyone ever making a biopic as excellent as Nixon (especially the three-and-a-half hour director’s cut, available on DVD). So I wasn’t disappointed with what I found when I saw J. Edgar, for I found exactly what I had expected to find: a perfectly competent restatement of the major mythology; a sensationalistic and speculative scenario (though perfectly plausible) involving Hoover and his very close friend and assistant, Clyde Tolson; and some questionable but not too egregious history. (What I wasn’t expecting to see was Leonardo DiCaprio, in his make-up as the elderly Hoover, resembling nobody so much as the late Charles Foster Kane. Is this an homage, or just a creepy coincidence, or unavoidable imitation? Nixon, for its part, is rife with Citizen Kane parallels, but they’re all intentional.)

With one exception, the only egregious history in J. Edgar, appropriately enough, turns out to be much of the history inside Hoover’s own head. It’s revealed, throughout and in the end, to be bogus–an alternative text that Hoover tries, in the film’s organizing conceit, to turn into a literal text, with some help from a series of stenographic ghostwriters. The ghostwriters question, object, and seek clarification. Hoover objects to their objections, and continues with his tale.

Some of the fantasy is Eastwood’s own, and I’m sure he had his reasons. Does it matter that Hoover, in spite of the callous manner he exuded in his call to Bobby Kennedy informing him that “The president has been shot,” did not actually hang up the damned phone in the midst of their conversation? And does it matter that the infamous letter the FBI sent to Martin Luther King’s home, along with a reel of tape containing surveilled evidence of an affair, was not actually dictated by Hoover to his assistant, Helen Gandy, but was in fact written by Hoover’s assistant director, William Sullivan? And does it matter that Hoover did not snub a waving President Nixon during Nixon’s inaugural parade, because Nixon (for reasons not at all irrelevant to his Kennedy obsession) was riding in a closed car, and did not really wave to anybody?

These are questions every viewer has to answer for himself. Eastwood is obviously trying to emphasize Hoover’s coldness in the call to Kennedy, his complicity in the letter to King, and his distrust of Nixon. All biopics do this kind of thing, most of them not as subtly as they’ve been done here. Much more troublesome is the way Eastwood lets his Hoover get away with dismissing Joseph McCarthy as “an opportunist” rather than “a professional,” and letting this be the last and defining word on the matter of Hoover’s attitude toward McCarthy. This dismissal of McCarthy by Hoover came much too late—and too privately, besides—after Hoover had already played a big role in giving the opportunist some of his earliest opportunities, in hunting down alleged communists and ruining innocent lives while doing so.

Which brings us back around to Nixon. Nixon was someone whose earliest opportunities were not bestowed by the hand of Hoover. In fact, Nixon had applied to Hoover’s FBI fresh out of law school and been rejected. Nixon knew how to hold a grudge, but even he couldn’t hold this one. During the Red Scare, Nixon made his name at the expense of Alger Hiss. Some 20 years later, while Nixon was safely seated as president (or so it still seemed), Hoover died. This was 48 years after Hoover had become director of the Bureau, and just 35 years after Nixon had applied for the job of special agent within it.

So much had changed since then, and it was Hoover who’d changed a lot of it. He was, as Eastwood depicts, at the vanguard of fingerprinting and other forensics analysis; he was, for a time, a righteous enemy of crime, in the 1920s and ‘30s when Americans glamorized criminals entirely too much; and his earliest forays into wiretapping did come at the authorization of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

That doesn’t make a thing right, or even legal, as Nixon himself was to discover long after it was too late for Hoover to help him (and in spite of his infamous remark to David Frost to the contrary). In fact, Nixon, during the Watergate investigation, would semi-privately rue, on the surreptitious recordings he made of his own offices, that those very recordings would never have gotten out had Edgar been alive. That’s not necessarily true. Hoover knew how to handle these things, sure, as the disappearance of his own files plainly attests. (Eastwood makes sure to get that part right.) Hoover’d been the one to first make Nixon aware of the taping system’s existence in the Oval Office, a carry-over from the Johnson administration. (Hoover did not, however–in spite of how Stone has it in one of his deleted scenes–recommend that Nixon install the voice-activated monster that created his menace and masterpiece.)

But Hoover’s power, by then, was already slipping. He was remarkably old, for one thing: 77, and showing every day of it. What’s more, his ferocious disgust with the communists had not dissipated, even though the communists themselves certainly had, at least in America, and his public support was eroding. Hoover’s jealous guarding of the FBI’s secrets—even among other law-enforcement agencies, including the CIA—would create a division in America’s intelligence community whose consequences are still being manifested. Meanwhile, the president Hoover both loathed and leaned on (a taxing relationship he’d had with all his presidents, with the arguable exceptions of Herbert Hoover and LBJ) had already opened up diplomatic talks with Red China, and would soon withdraw from the fight against Vietnamese communists. So J. Edgar Hoover was already gone, in so many ways, before he really went. And when he went, he left behind a world he no longer understood, even if it was a world he’d done so much to create.

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Jose Pimentel, 27, arrested in Manhattan for constructing pipe-bomb with terrorist intentions

The suspect identifies with al Qaeda, even if al Qaeda does not identify with the suspect. He once tried to reach out to Anwar al-Awlaki, all the way up at the top of al Qaeda’s organization, but those attempts were not answered. So Jose Pimentel knew he had to make noise on his own. When al Awlaki was killed by America’s drones in September, Pimentel picked up his plans’ pace, as if to avenge the death of his hero. The police finally picked him up yesterday, with drill holes in the cylinder of a planned pipe-bomb, but they’d been watching him and waiting ever since 2009.

“We knew for the last two years he’s been reading a lot of jihadist information and talked a lot of inflammatory rhetoric,” said NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly. “But it appears at this juncture the death of Anwar al-Awlaki motivated him and made him increase his tempo.”

It was the cops in New York who got him—that’s where he was arrested and that’s where he’ll stand trial. But the charges, naturally enough, are federal: conspiracy to construct a bomb for terrorist purposes, along with possession of a bomb. His intended targets were U.S. service-members returned from the Middle East, as well as local post offices, on which he meant to test-run his explosives.

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