Otherworldly?

Just became aware of the publication last May of Stephen Benedict Dyson's Otherworldly Politics: The International Relations of Star Trek, Game of Thrones, and Battlestar Galactica.  I would have expected some of the Duck of Minerva people to have mentioned this book; perhaps they have.  (I've never even seen 'Game of Thrones', so this is not really up my alley.)

Dueling mandarins: Vidal & Buckley in 1968

One of the better moments in The Best of Enemies, the currently playing documentary about the TV encounters between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. in 1968, is a three-minute side-by-side comparison of the two men's origins.  Both came from privileged if not especially 'old money' backgrounds, both went to elite prep schools, both rode horses well as teenagers, or so the photographs on the screen indicate.  Both were intellectuals.  Both spoke with the sort of upper-class accent that has now almost vanished.  Both ran for office (Vidal more than once).  A Marxist -- or anyone else, really -- from another planet might wonder how in the world these two men ended up calling each other names on prime-time TV during the Republican and Democratic presidential nominating conventions in That Year, 1968.

Class is not always destiny, would be a five-word answer to that question.  And yet, as one of the many (too many) interviewees in this movie suggests, it is possible that each man saw a bit of himself in the other, maybe just enough to nudge dislike over the boundary into loathing.  Despite -- or, who knows, perhaps because of? -- his utterly despicable political and ideological stances, it is Buckley whose charm and air of insouciance (for lack of a better phrase) are more evident when the two square off in front of the ABC-TV camera.  Vidal was, as the person with whom I saw the movie remarked, more self-contained, his gestural, non-verbal language a bit less naturally suited to TV.  There was nothing shabby about Vidal's verbal performance, however, even if, as Hendrik Hertzberg points out with reference to the most infamous exchange, it was not actually true that Buckley was a crypto-Nazi, though he was unquestionably a reactionary.  Still, it's not difficult to see why Vidal, responding to a somewhat loaded question from moderator Howard K. Smith and faced with an annoyingly interrupting Buckley, reached for an insult.

The Best of Enemies is a thesis movie, i.e. it has an argument, and that argument is that the Buckley-Vidal encounter was the ur-moment that shaped TV punditry as it came to exist in the U.S. in the ensuing decades.  Maybe, though I think the argument is pressed a bit too hard.  I have no recollection of watching the Buckley-Vidal encounter at the time: my memories of 1968, somewhat sketchy in general given my age then, are not primarily televisual, though I do have a couple of memories of the Democratic convention that I think must derive from having watched some of it.

In the end, despite this movie's best efforts to convince one otherwise, the Vidal-Buckley debates must be considered, I think, basically an interesting footnote to a tumultuous, historic year -- even if it was a footnote that generated subsequent essays and lawsuits by the protagonists -- rather than a central event.  However, as many of us know, footnotes are not necessarily unimportant; and The Best of Enemies, despite its flaws as a movie, will help ensure that this particular footnote will continue to be remembered.

The Pakistan floods and the media

It has been noted that the flooding in Pakistan has been getting less TV coverage than the Haitian earthquake did. That may be true, but the TV news that I watch (when I watch any), namely the NewsHour, has been covering the flooding quite extensively. Yesterday there was an interview with Holbrooke about it.

Jupiter and Mars

With protests in Greece, an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference in New York, and various other things going on, is it frivolous to post about a song? Of course, but this blog flies under the radar to such an extent that I've decided it doesn't matter.

Last night's 'American Idol' (yes, I do watch it occasionally) reminded me how much I like 'Fly Me to the Moon,' made popular by Sinatra (though others have sung it, and someone else, perhaps Tony Bennett, might have sung it first). Unfortunately, a quick search of Youtube just now did not yield a version that I especially like. The closest was this 1966 TV clip of Sinatra singing it in front of Nelson Riddle's orchestra. The decor and everything else has a rather dated feel, but it can't spoil the song.

The clip is here.

(And/or you can go to the 'Idol' website and watch last night's performance of the song by Aaron [don't remember his last name], which was quite good.)

Wherein the break is briefly interrupted

The local PBS station just aired Daniel Goldhagen's film about genocide, Worse than War (made to accompany his book of the same name). It has some powerful and emotional moments.

It also has an argument and a set of policy recommendations, none of which I have the time or inclination to go into, at least not now. But one or two reactions may be worth noting. Most of Goldhagen's scholarship (including his prize-winning undergraduate thesis and his Ph.D. dissertation, which became the famous and controversial book Hitler's Willing Executioners) deals with the Nazi genocide of the Jews. This film however deals with genocide in general, focusing on various instances of it, especially fairly recent ones (e.g., Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s; Guatemala in the '80s; Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge; and Darfur).

Goldhagen argues in the film that genocidal political leaders are not "crazy" but are "rational calculators" (his phrase) who weigh costs and benefits; if they are made to realize that genocide will not 'pay' because they will be punished swiftly, then they will not order it. This description may very well apply to Slobodan Milosevic or Omar al-Bashir. Goldhagen does not say explicitly, however, that this description applies to Hitler. And whether the "rational calculator" label applies to perpetrators, as opposed to leaders, is less clear still. (As Goldhagen mentions at one point, surviving concentration camp inmates were sent on forced death marches in the very last days of Nazi Germany, even after officials in the Nazi hierarchy had ordered killings to stop; the organizers of the death marches ignored those orders.) Goldhagen also observes that genocidal leaders mobilize and play on prejudices that people already have; of course, since such prejudices are usually irrational, "rational calculators" have to know how to mobilize and harness irrationality. In the process, however, isn't it possible that these "rational calculators" may come to believe the myths that they start out by exploiting? If so, does that make them less rational? These questions were not really addressed in the film; perhaps they are addressed in the book.

[The break from posting will now resume.]

A little thought experiment

The Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, who was hanged by Nasser's regime in 1966 and whose fundamentalist version of Islam contributed to the ideological formation of al-Qaeda, spent some time in the U.S. at the end of the 1940s. As a student in Colorado, Qutb had a variety of experiences that, shall we say, rubbed him very much the wrong way and helped persuade him of the moral bankruptcy of American culture.

In the opening chapter of his 2006 book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright described Qutb's reaction to a church dance in 1949 (Qutb at the time was a student at the Colorado State College of Education, now the Univ. of Northern Colorado):

"On Sundays the college did not serve food, and students had to fend for themselves. Many of the international students, including Muslims like Qutb, would visit one of the more than fifty churches in Greeley [Co.] on Sunday evening, where, after services, there were potluck dinners and sometimes a dance. 'The dancing hall was decorated with yellow, red, and blue lights,' Qutb recalled on one occasion. 'The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips, and the atmosphere was full of love.' The minister gazed upon this sight approvingly, and even dimmed the lights to enhance the romantic atmosphere. Then he put on a song titled 'Baby, It's Cold Outside,' a sly ballad from an Esther Williams movie that summer, Neptune's Daughter. 'The minister paused to watch his young charges swaying to the rhythms of this seductive song, then he left them to enjoy this pleasant, innocent night,' Qutb concluded sarcastically."

Imagine what Qutb would make of certain aspects of American culture if he were still alive and happened to plop down on either the East or West coasts today (or any other part of the country, probably, but let's stick to the coasts for this thought experiment). For example, on a December weekend in Miami Beach he would see young women in scanty bikinis posing for fashion-shoots at hotel pools and in hotel lobbies. Everywhere he would see youth, physicality, and sex being used to sell every imaginable product. He would turn on a re-run of a TV program like 90210 and see actors in their 20s who look like they have stepped out of the pages of fashion magazines pretending -- badly and unconvincingly -- to be high-school students and operating on the premise that their school is simply the venue in which their complicated "romantic" (read, sex) lives unfold. He would be pursued by "seductive rhythms" or merely insistently obtrusive "music" in virtually every public space, rendering sequential thought a challenge and reflection even more difficult. Given his reaction to a church dance in Colorado in 1949, what would be Qutb's reaction to these and similar aspects of American culture today? The mind boggles.

Frontline: 'Obama's War'

Everyone should see this program, which aired this evening. If you missed it, you can go to the PBS website and watch it online.

I'm not going to write at great length about it, but of the various disquieting aspects -- and there were several -- perhaps the most disturbing was to hear the Pakistani Interior Minister and the Army spokesman deny that the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network are even in Pakistan (let alone that the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, has been supporting them). And then to hear, after that, Richard Holbrooke say he was sure the Pakistanis know these groups are a threat to them as well as Afghanistan. Know they're a threat? The Pakistani officials don't acknowledge they're even in the country!

"Obama's War" is a well-done, informative piece of journalism, with the scene shifting between Helmand province, Kabul, Islamabad, and Washington. The counterinsurgency position in the current debate, about which I had lots of doubts to begin with, seems even less persuasive to me after watching this. I don't think that's because the program is unbalanced but because the difficulties involved become so evident, particularly in one moment in which a Marine, with an inadequate interpreter, interacts with some local people in Helmand. He asks for their help and they reply: "how can we help you? We don't even have swords. If you can't defeat the Taliban with all your weaponry, then we can't help you." Their reply mostly misses the point -- he wasn't asking for their military help -- but it underscores the difficulties involved in what is euphemistically called "cross-cultural communication" as well as the broader difficulties of entrusting this kind of mission to well-meaning but -- to the local population -- very foreign young men with guns. You can't overgeneralize from one encounter, but the effect nonetheless is very sobering.

Cronkite and Vietnam

We've been reminded in recent days of Walter Cronkite's broadcast of Feb. 27, 1968, when he declared, after having traveled to Vietnam in the wake of the Tet Offensive, that the war was going to end in a stalemate and the U.S. should embark on negotiations.

Kathleen Parker, in an appreciative column about Cronkite, notes that his critics say the Tet Offensive was a defeat for the Viet Cong (the NLF) and that his famous broadcast ushered in an era of supposed media bias. (Actually Parker refers to the North Vietnamese not the NLF, but it was mainly an NLF operation.) In truth, the Tet Offensive was both a defeat and a victory for the NLF: in strictly military terms it was a defeat, but in psychological terms it was a victory. It showed that the NLF, after several years of being subjected to American air power and fighting American ground soldiers, was capable of launching and carrying out a sustained operation against a large number of population centers in the South, and the NLF's penetration of the U.S. embassy in Saigon was a major propaganda coup. Cronkite's reaction was entirely understandable in view of the official American assurances that the war was being won and that the enemy was on the run.

Fleeting expletives, foolish nonsense, and some other reflections

In a culture where daily exchanges are often saturated with expletives, a culture where a four-year-old can hear more "bad words" on a pre-kindergarten playground than in a whole day of watching TV, the U.S. government has a regulatory agency, the Federal Communications Commission, which makes it its business to police the broadcast airwaves for expletives. The Supreme Court recently held that the FCC's fining of Fox in connection with the broadcast of "fleeting expletives" does not represent an "arbitrary and capricious" exercise of agency authority.

Some Supreme Court cases are important; many others are not very important, except for the parties immediately concerned; and some cases are just foolish nonsense. The fleeting expletives case is in the last category. It is a largely pointless case about a pointless, irrational, and probably unconstitutional policy (the constitutionality of the policy was not passed on by the Supreme Court in its recent decision, which dealt solely with the question of whether the agency had acted unlawfully). That time and resources were expended in adjudicating this nonsense is a travesty. The FCC's indecency policy is irrational and should be removed from the books.

This is partly by way of prelude to a comment on the recent news that Justice David Souter is retiring from the Court. I remember when George H.W. Bush nominated him. No one outside a small group of legal scholars knew much about him. No one imagined he would turn out to be the kind of justice he has been. Does his replacement matter? Yes, but probably not quite as much as many people think. Elaboration of the reasons for my saying that will have to be left for another day, but I can offer a hint of the reason: the importance of the Supreme Court is usually exaggerated. What?!! What about Bush v. Gore? Roe v. Wade? U.S. v. Nixon? Boumediene v. Bush? Brown v. Bd. of Education? Etc. What about the entire period of the Warren Court? Good questions. Re-read what I said: "importance is usually exaggerated" does not equal "unimportant." Sorry, that's all the elaborating I have time for right now.

Combustible Hardy on 'Masterpiece'

For years -- make that decades -- Sunday at 9 p.m. generally has meant one thing to me: Masterpiece Theater. [1] Now split into three -- Classic, Contemporary, and Mystery -- it is still what it has always been: very good, and occasionally even superb, entertainment. I know it's not some people's cup of tea, and I know that others have derided it as middlebrow since the days when the late Alistair Cooke was the host. [2] If middlebrow denotes unchallenging and readily accessible, then ninety percent of television is middlebrow, so leveling this criticism is like firing a blunderbuss at a sparrow.

Middlebrow, shmiddlebrow. Take Masterpiece Classic's version of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the second and last installment of which I saw this evening. The score was a bit overbearing, but the acting was excellent. Indeed, the chemistry between Gemma Arterton (as Tess) and Eddie Redmayne (as Angel Clare), particularly in the last half-hour or so, was such that if they had generated any more heat, the screen might have caught on fire. A friend recently said to me, apropos of sex in the movies or on television: "Less is more." I'm inclined to think this is true. Which is more erotic: on one hand, a movie like Body Heat or -- to take the closest thing to an X movie ever given an R rating -- Boogie Nights, or on the other hand something like this adaptation of Tess? There's no comparison. Hardy wins.
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1. Except for those (not insubstantial) periods of time when I didn't have a TV.
2. Cooke was irreplaceable, which is why, after one or two false starts, they decided not to replace him. The host/ess (typically a youngish, attractive, often well-known actress or actor), now stands, rather than sits, and says much less than Cooke or his immediate successor, Russell Baker, did.

Afghanistan: Can "a disastrous situation" be salvaged?

I've just finished watching the excellent Frontline (PBS) program "The War Briefing" about the situation in Afghanistan. (That is, I was watching when I wasn't twisting the antenna and cursing the picture on my non-cable TV.)

The quotation in the title of this post is from former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, who declared in an interview in the program that Afghanistan is "a disastrous situation for the U.S." It's hard to disagree with him on the basis of the evidence summarized by Frontline. Here are some of the essentials: 1) a weak central government widely perceived as corrupt, opposed by 2) a resurgent insurgency taking advantage of sanctuaries in Pakistan and benefiting from support by the growing Pakistani Taliban movement, with 3) a grossly insufficient number of U.S. troops on the ground (33,000) given the size of the territory (larger than Iraq), leading to 4) an over-reliance on airstrikes that have produced significant civilian casualties (civilian deaths generally have doubled in the past two years), which in turn 5) increases support for the insurgents. There's a lot more going on, but that boils it down to a few of the basics.

You don't need to be a strategic studies or counterinsurgency expert to realize that the current U.S./NATO policy is failing and that one or two more brigades, as Scheuer said, are unlikely to solve the problem. Nor, probably, will getting rid of the so-called 70 caveats -- the current restrictions on rules of engagement (see earlier post and comments). Nor will more monetary support from non-fighting NATO countries, though I'm sure it would be welcome.

Someone should be, and perhaps is, asking: What will be the security consequences for the U.S. of a re-takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban? Maybe the consequences will not be as dire as some suppose. In that case maybe the best course is to try to negotiate with the Taliban, with a view perhaps to either some power-sharing arrangement with Karzai or even a de jure division of the country into separate spheres of control. That might allow the U.S. and NATO to cut their losses in Afghanistan and focus more attention on the situation in Pakistan which, as Colin Kahl says in the program, is potentially a much more serious situation for the U.S., given the recent increase in strength of the Pakistani Taliban and the fragility of the current Pakistan government. That this is not a totally crazy thought is indicated by very recent reports that the U.S. is considering the possibility of negotiating with at least elements of the Taliban. Moreover, as David Ignatius discussed in a recent Wash Post column, Saudi Arabia has begun to host a mediation effort involving the Karzai government and the main Afghan insurgent groups. Obviously it's too early to say whether anything will come of these developments.

In the meantime, it seems unfair to the 33,000 U.S. troops, and British, Dutch, Canadian, and other NATO soldiers in Afghanistan, to continue under-resourcing their operations. Of the roughly 15,000 additional U.S. troops slated for (or requested by generals for) Afghanistan, only 4,500 are currently available, according to the Frontline program. This at a time when 28,500 U.S. troops are sitting in South Korea, and thousands more are in Japan and Germany. It creates at the very least a perception of skewed priorities. I'm sure someone at the Pentagon might have a reasonable-sounding explanation for this, but few members of the public have heard it because no reporters, as far as I'm aware, have bothered to ask the question. And as I've indicated before, I do not think "reasonable-sounding" means a simple appeal to our alliance with South Korea. There is no reason the alliance cannot survive a reduced U.S. troop presence there.

Update: The exchange in the comments has got me re-thinking this last paragraph.

Hoarding and panicking

Watching coverage of the financial crisis some hours ago, I heard one or two commentators say that people are "hoarding cash." The verb "to hoard" has a somewhat old-fashioned ring to my ears, conjuring up images of misers in Victorian novels mooning over their gold and silver. Presumably what it means in this context is that people are withdrawing cash from their banks and storing it (or secreting it) in their homes. If this is indeed occurring, it suggests that "panic" (from the Greek panikos: of sudden fear, as supposedly inspired by the god Pan [to quote my dictionary]) may be the right word to apply to the current situation. (Alternatively, "people are hoarding cash" could just be a dramatic way of saying "people are not spending as freely as they ordinarily do.")

On a somewhat although not totally unrelated note, the PBS news program 'Worldfocus' made its debut in this area today. The idea -- a half-hour program drawing on the reporting of various news organizations -- is a sound one, though I thought the first show's execution and content were uneven. It did include a good report on the impact of rising food prices on the poor (and the not-so-poor) in Kenya.

Spectacles

Broadcast networks in the U.S. are for-profit enterprises, needless to say, but they are also required by law to serve "the public interest, convenience, and necessity," in the words of the federal Communications Act of 1934. How did ABC discharge this obligation on the Friday night that has just turned into Saturday morning? By giving us the bathetic spectacle of John Edwards confessing to his extramarital affair. Episodes of this kind bring out some of the worst aspects of American public life, in particular its faux-puritanical, hypocritical, sensationalist, and generally repulsive focus on the private (and usually irrelevant) conduct of public figures. (I say "usually" irrelevant because in isolated cases, such as that of Eliot Spitzer, it can be argued that ordinarily private conduct does have public implications.) In this case the spectacle came complete with the host of ABC's Nightline intoning his words as if the fate of the republic hinged on the details of the Edwards matter. A quite revolting performance by Nightline and ABC News.

Over at NBC, which carried the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics (occasionally stunning even on a very small screen), things were better. Better but not perfect, as some of the commentary seemed to have been lifted from a bad junior-high school textbook: e.g., one announcer saying that Swaziland is called the Switzerland of Africa "because of its mountainous terrain and its neutrality in international relations." Is this really the most important thing for Americans to know about Swaziland? (In fact, without an explanation of what "neutrality" means in this context, the comment doesn't convey much of anything.) What kind of weed are they smoking in the NBC research department? All in all, quite a night on the airwaves (and I've only scratched the surface).

And by the way, as long as this post is degenerating, what was the U.S. Olympic team wearing? Designed (I think I heard) by Ralph Lauren, the white berets and grayish-dark-bluish outfits looked horrible. Especially the berets, worn by both the women and the men. Michael Phelps did not participate in the opening march because the swimming events are early and I guess he needed to rest -- lucky guy, he missed having to wear that stuff. And finally, the happiest-seeming athlete I saw in the "parade of nations" was Rafael Nadal -- not surprising, considering what he's accomplished lately.
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p.s. To anyone who may be wondering why I haven't posted anything on Georgia/Russia/S. Ossetia, it's because I don't have anything to add to what is being written elsewhere (e.g., Duck of Minerva, among others).

The Enderlin affair

The Weekly Standard is not one of my usual browsing stops, but this piece by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet about the long-running journalistic and legal controversy in France surrounding an iconic image from the second intifida is worth a glance if you're interested in journalism, France, and/or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Caution: she has a definite point of view, and without having read anything else on this case I'm not in a position to endorse what she says.

Niall Ferguson on WW2

I've had a mixed reaction to the first two installments of Niall Ferguson's three-part television lecture-with-pictures (for that's basically what it amounts to) The War of the World, based on his book of the same name. (I think it was shown in the U.K. last year, but it is just now being broadcast in the U.S.)

The second installment, 'A Tainted Victory,' dealt with the run-up to World War II and the main events of the war itself. Though much of it covered familiar ground, the opening segment on Stalin and his minorities policies (a "pioneer of ethnic cleansing"), and the closing segment on the war in Pacific, emphasizing the barbarity and dehumanization of the enemy on both sides that characterized it (including footage of American soldiers shooting wounded Japanese soldiers -- I don't think we saw that in Ken Burns's The War), were effective.

The middle part focused on the German-Soviet war (from the June 1941 invasion) and more briefly on the 'Final Solution'; here Ferguson, I thought, had some trouble finding new or particularly interesting things to say. He emphasized the battle of Kursk, known to all military history aficionados as the most massive tank battle in history, and noted that U.S. supplies and planes contributed to the Soviet victory. Basically, though, it was a huge bunch of tanks ramming into each other over a period of more than several days and a big land area. Update/correction (February 2015): I have crossed out the preceding sentence because it is not an accurate description of the battle. A glance at the Wikipedia article on the battle of Kursk, which seems to be an umbrella designation for several engagements with their own names, and then following some further links, makes this clear. Tanks did not ram into each other: this is a misconception popularized by a book on the battle that is mostly inaccurate, apparently.
 
At one point Ferguson asked why the police battalions made up of 'ordinary Germans' showed, on the whole, apparently so few qualms about participating in the mass shootings of Jews on the Eastern Front. His answer: It was partly a matter of self-preservation (easier to shoot at civilians than at Russian troops who were going to shoot back). He also noted that not long after V-E Day the Soviets started housing political prisoners in the former Nazi concentration camps they had liberated, the suggestion being that it is at least slightly ironic to refer to the Soviets as having "liberated" the camps. To the Jews and other camp inmates they freed, however, the Red Army's soldiers were liberators, a point he could have acknowledged.

At the end, Ferguson took care to note that he was not drawing a moral equivalence between Auschwitz and Hiroshima, but he went on to conclude that the Allies' victory was a "tainted" one, inasmuch as they adopted some of the same tactics (notably, targeting of civilians) as their opponents. In this sense, the war, he said, was not "good vs. evil" but "evil vs. lesser evil." In the longish view of history, I think this conclusion is defensible (though I would say "much lesser evil"). But I am also aware that Ferguson was born well after the end of World War II, and I suspect that many of those who lived through and directly experienced the events of the period will have a somewhat different perspective.

Thrill ride at Torrey Pines

I've always thought that golf is boring, compared to, say, tennis. That wasn't true of the just-concluded U.S. Open. The parts I saw over the last couple of days had a measure of excitement and were even thrilling at several moments. And luckily you didn't have to understand the differences between a cut, a fade, and a draw in order to appreciate what was going on.

One perhaps pedantic cavil, which arises from the pairing yesterday of Tiger Woods with British golfer Lee Westwood: I wish American sports announcers (and other announcers) would learn to refer to the UK as Britain, not England.

Does the Mole speak Spanish?

Would someone (can someone) explain to me the appeal of reality TV shows? "The Mole" (ABC) involves a group of mostly youngish Americans, of varying though generally considerable degrees of obnoxiousness, who have been plopped down in Chile and are being made to go through a series of seemingly pointless, mildly sadistic exercises at the end of which presumably someone will be exposed as saboteur of the whole project (hence the title) and/or someone else will walk away with a lot of money. One of the contestants in the part of the show I happened to see a couple of hours ago was using his ability to speak Spanish to advantage, an ability resented by the other competitors, though the line between envy and resentment was blurry.

A game theorist might have some fun with these sorts of shows, if she or he had the patience to sit through them. Not being a game theorist, I just find "The Mole" rather boring, even if, at the particular moment in question, it was marginally less awful than everything else being broadcast.