[fight_truth_decay]

The Bond we meet in "Casino Royale" is very much a man of his time. He smokes three and a half packs of cigarettes a day (a custom blend of Balkan and Turkish tobaccos) and has a sharp eye for ethnicity (large earlobes are a giveaway that their owner is Jewish). He also has a strictly utilitarian view of women, or "blithering women," as he puts it. They were "for recreation," he muses. "On a job they got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around ... Why the hell couldn't they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men's work to the men?" (Whether or not this attitude was in any way connected with Bond's enthusiasm for cold showers, Fleming doesn't say.) Unlike many Bush-phobic Brits of today, however, 007 is fond of his transatlantic cousins — some of them: "Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them came from Texas." --'Casino Royale': The Bond Book That Got Away, By Kurt Loder for MTV

[james500]

Dr. No was entertaining and Jack Lord's CIA guy was professional. After that, it seemed like there was a pathological need to portray American military/intelligence as either unnecessary, wrong, or in the way. They degenerated into a collection of dumb gadgets and one-liners and I lost interest. I don't know if they're still like that though.