Random Book and Movie Reviews

2012-02-15T03:45:00.000-05:00

From Salon.com

The Hysterical American Decline by Noam Chomsky

Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated — Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example. Others are ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is likely to lie ahead. Right now, in fact.

At the moment, we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s decision to launch the most destructive and murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the long-term effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of the most lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food crops.

The prime target was South Vietnam. The aggression later spread to the North, then to the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and finally to rural Cambodia, which was bombed at the stunning level of all allied air operations in the Pacific region during World War II, including the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this, Henry Kissinger’s orders were being carried out — “anything that flies on anything that moves” — a call for genocide that is rare in the historical record. Little of this is remembered. Most was scarcely known beyond narrow circles of activists.

(Rest of article here)

2012-02-09T00:23:00.001-05:00

...stealing this from my friend's facebook page.

2012-02-03T02:16:00.002-05:00

From Salon.com

I’m pro-life and I support Planned Parenthood

2012-02-01T23:50:00.001-05:00

From the Guardian:

With its deadly drones, the US is fighting a coward's war
As technology allows machines to make their own decisions, warfare will become bloodier – and less accountable

These power-damaged people have been granted the chance to fulfil one of humankind's abiding fantasies: to vaporise their enemies, as if with a curse or a prayer, effortlessly and from a safe distance. That these powers are already being abused is suggested by the mendacity of those who are deploying them. The CIA, which is running the undeclared and unacknowledged drone war in Pakistan, insists that there have been no recent civilian casualties. So does Obama's chief counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan. It is a blatant whitewash.

As a report last year by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism showed, of some 2,300 people killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan from 2004 until August 2011, between 392 and 781 appear to have been civilians; 175 were children. In the period about which the CIA and Brennan made their claims, at least 45 civilians have been killed.

At the risk of stating the obvious, it might be worth comparing this to what would have happened if American citizens had been killed in the same way, and by doing so get a sense of how much a Pakistani life is worth these days.
If these had been American civilians killed, I think someone would have gone to jail for involuntary manslaughter at the very least, not to mention several people losing their jobs.
During the Vietnam War, it was quite obvious that the lives of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian civilians were not important to US government policy makers.
Now are we seeing the same thing with the new war?

14 must-read books for the college rebel (and me)

2012-01-24T00:03:00.127-05:00

Ran across this article in my Internet surfing:
14 must-read books for the college rebel

Although no longer in college, just for fun (and for the sake of wasting time on this sunny afternoon) I thought I'd see how well my reading list would stock up as a college rebel. And if anyone else is up for this, maybe we can make a little blogging game out of this list. Tell me how many of these books you've got under your belt.

Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book

Read it back in freshman year of college. Don't remember it all that well now years later, but remember enjoying it at the time.

(In fact quoted I even quoted from this book in this Chimes article I wrote. Although re-reading it now, I wish I hadn't because that quote isn't really on topic, and just looks stupid.)

Noam Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader

Um, never read the Chomsky Reader per se, but I've certainly read plenty of Chomsky over the years. Does that count?

Howard Zinn, A People’s History Of The United States

As I mentioned in this post, I never actually got around to reading this book cover to cover, although I've read large sections of it at different times.

William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook
Never read it, don't plan to. I certainly remember this book popping up in a lot of conversations back in college, but if you don't have an active interest in manufacturing explosives it sounds like it would be pretty boring reading.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Never read it. Don't particularly plan to.
I'm more of a history nut than a philosophy nerd, and too much philosophy hurts my brain. Plus I tend to associate Nietzsche too much with a Freshman philosophy major. (Although Emma Goldman did mention in her autobiography how much she loved Nietzsche, so maybe I should read him one day.)

Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works
Haven't read this yet, but may someday. Maybe. Or maybe not.
I'm a little bit too much of a philistine to enjoy poetry, but Rimbaud does strike me as an interesting guy. And he lived during a period of French History that I'm interested in. (Rimbaud was around during the Paris Commune days, and although he didn't have much of an active role his name occasionally pops up in history books on the Paris Commune).
May have read some Rimbaud back in college literature classes actually. Don't remember. Tend to get him mixed up sometimes with Baudelaire.

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
Haven't read it. Don't plan to.
It seems most 17 or 18 year olds go through a period when they're fascinated by drug culture.
(At least for men anyway. From my own observations it doesn't seem to be such a big fascination to most girls, for whatever reason. Or am I going out on a limb here?)
Despite not using a lot of drugs, I was fascinated by drug culture. Perhaps those of us who are too cautious to do our own experimenting tend to be all the more interested in doing it vicariously through books. And so I read with great fascination books like "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe.
However having moved on from that stage of life, I have now lost all interest in it, and don't imagine I'll be reading this book anytime soon.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Haven't read it. Don't plan to.
At the risk of reinforcing stereotypes, all of my knowledge of Sylvia Plath just comes from talking to girls who were big fans--the type of girls who thought that they experienced feelings deeper than the ordinary person did. It turned me off of it.

Anton LaVey, The Satanic Bible
Haven't read it. Don't plan to.
(I probably shouldn't say this without having read the book, but I'm of the opinion that Satanism is not so much a real philosophy as it is a boogey-man created by Church Evangelicals on the one hand, and by metal fans who want to shock their parents on the other hand. But if someone out there can convince me that this book is worth reading, I might reconsider.)

Charles Bukowski, Factotum
Never even heard of it.

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
Read it. Reviewed it on this blog. And wasn't overly impressed with it.
(I must be a bit out of it, but at the time I read this book I didn't realize this was a classic back-packers' book. I was just looking to learn a little bit more about Buddhist mythology.)

Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf
Haven't read it. Because Siddhartha failed to make a big impression on me, I doubt I'll be checking out any books by the same author.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
Read it. Reviewed it on this blog. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

This book used to be on my reading list back when I was 18 and really into the beat poets, but I never got around to it at the time and my interests have since moved. Now I doubt I'll ever go back for it.

I did however read "On the Road", and "The Subterraneans" by Jack Kerouac and tried to struggle my way through a couple books of Ginsberg's poetry. Also read "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest" by Ken Kesey and (as mentioned above) "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test". Do I get any points for any of those?

Actually a book like "On the Road" really should be on this list. Which just illustrates once again how random and utterly subjective these kind of Internet lists really are.

So let me make a couple suggestions of my own. (Since my own brain is much more interested in politics and history than poetry and philosophy, my own list would weigh heavily towards those genres. A different person with different interests might create a different list, but that's all part of the fun isn't it?)

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
In my experience hanging out with anarchist groups, this book comes up frequently in conversation. In any group of anarchists guaranteed there's at least one of them who's read this book.
If you're hanging out with Trotskyists, the preferred book seems to be "10 Days that Shook the World" by Jack Reed (something I haven't read yet but plan on doing someday.) Just don't get into a conversation with them about what happened after those 10 days. They don't like talking about that part nearly as much.
"1984" gets honorable mention. It's a little bit too mainstream to be hip, I know. (Anything your high school English teacher is likely to assign to you doesn't get written up as a rebellious book.) But for anyone who's trying to position themselves as anti-establishment, it's always useful to be able to quote from this book and compare it to the current government.

All Quiet On the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
The ultimate anti-war book. Plus it gets bonus cool points for being banned by the Nazis.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller gets honorable mention.

Anything by Marx. (Really, what is a book list for college rebels without any Marx?)
Personally I find his political writings to be much more readable than his philosophical writings.

Ditto for Bakunin.

I'm tempted to add classic leftist history books here like, History of the Paris Commune by Prosper Oliver Lissagaray, but that's probably too obscure. The point of a list like this is to highlight the classics, not list every last book on the subject.

Okay, let me know what I missed, or what other books you would add.

Update: Someone criticized this list for being too white (over in the comments section over at the original post). That's probably a fair criticism. The two big books connected with Black Radicalism that come to mind are:

The Autobiography of Malcolm X
(Which I've read)

And Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver
...Which I haven't read. Although back when I was a college student I did try and track this book down. Calvin College library didn't have it, and none of my local bookstores had it.

Which raised the question: Does anyone still read "Soul on Ice" anymore or is it purely a time piece from the 60s now?

If memory serves, Calvin's library didn't have "Soul on Ice" but they did have Cleaver's born again Christian novel "Soul on Fire". You could make some sort of cheap jibe here about how this is just what you would expect from a conservative Christian college like Calvin, but actually their library wasn't half bad when it came to books on black radicalism. They had several books sympathetic to the Black Panthers, like A Panther is a Black Cat by Reginald Major

They also had "Die Nigger Die!" by H. Rap Brown (A), which I read. And "The Autobiography of Angela Davis" (A), which I also read. And the Autobiography of David Hillard (A) (which I never did get around to reading at the time, unfortunately).
All of those books should probably get honorable mention on this list although probably none of them are famous enough to warrant their own entry.

Okay, what else did I miss?

Link of the Day
Mirror Crack'd

2012-01-16T22:59:00.000-05:00

The 6 Characters You’ll Meet At Every Expat Bar

This has been making the rounds on friends' facebook pages, so I thought I'd steal it and post it here with the following comments.

1). Pretty spot on. More or less.
2). Ouch. Number 2 is a little bit too spot on for comfort. The truth stings a bit.
3). Despite the introduction, I'm not sure this is entirely universal. It's probably true around the world in developing countries but in Japan, for example, many of these characters were absent. (Not much need for overpaid aid workers in a country like Japan.)

Also if I had to add one category, in Cambodia I seem to run into the "pretentious back-packer" a lot. The kind of person who believes that because they have traveled to the far corners of the earth and because they appreciate literature in a deep way, they are somehow better than us ordinary slobs. If you try and talk to them in a bar, they'll quickly try and size you up to see if you're as deep and cultured as they are, and then dismiss you and move on to someone else.
(Perhaps this is just bitterness talking.)

This type of person will also often have trendy tattoos--often Kanji characters that they actually can't read, and will sometimes get defensive if you try and make conversation to them about what their tattoos really mean.

Rest in Peace Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-18T02:53:00.002-05:00

Christopher Hitchens, militant pundit, dies at 62

No doubt this is one of many similar entries all over the blogosphere right now. So be it.

I don't know if I should admit this, but I've actually read very little of Christopher Hitchens. (The only book of his I've read cover to cover is "The Trial of Henry Kissinger".) I find his verbose style a little bit hard to swallow in writing, and I much prefer hearing him speak than reading him. This probably says something about my limited intellect and limited reading abilities.

But I love hearing Hitchens speak. There was about a 2 year period in Japan (when my social life was a bit slow) when I became addicted to listening to him on youtube. In fact over a two year period I spent more hours watching his debates on youtube than I care to admit. Agree with him or disagree with him, he's got a razor sharp tongue and it's always a pleasure to see what biting comeback he will have to whatever remark is thrown at him.

I don't think there's anyone out there who agrees with Christopher Hitchens about everything. He's made a career of not towing the party line, and probably everyone has some dearly held issue he's trampled on.

I passionately disagreed with him on the Iraq War, and wondered how someone so smart could advocate for such a stupid war.
I've heard him recite his reasons for supporting the war ad infinitum, but I never really bought them. I know totalitarian Islamic societies have their problems, but Hitchens has forgotten Robespierre's quote

"The most extravagant idea that can arise in a politician's head is to believe that it is enough for a people to invade a foreign country to make it adopt their laws and their constitutions. No one loves armed missionaries."

Call me cynical, but I still suspect Hitchens was motivated to support that war partly just because of a love off all the attention it brought him. It's the only explanation I can think of to explain the motives behind a man who, in his earlier writings, appeared to clearly understand just how little genuine humanitarian concerns motivate foreign wars.

On the plus side, I found Hitchens thoughts on Jefferson and Trotsky fascinating to listen to. I loved his take downs of Mother Teresa and Billy Graham. And I loved listening to him debate on religion. In fact I think hours of watching Hitchens talk about religion have helped me to move from an ambivalent agnosticism to a more militant agnosticism, so I can claim him as an influence on my own thoughts. I'll miss hearing about him.

Update: Back in this post, I stated that based on my own personal experience talking to Brits, many of them don't even know who Christopher Hitchens is.
At my new place of work, this continues to be true. When news of Christopher Hitchens' death went around the office, all the Americans and Australians knew who he was, but none of the British people I talked to did. Granted this is a completely unscientific survey, but it just may indicate that Christopher Hitchens was much better known across the sea than in his native land.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky at Occupy Boston

I Yell at Someone in the Streets over a Chomsky Article

2011-12-11T02:43:00.005-05:00

Yesterday I was eating lunch with a friend at restaurant in Phnom Penh at a table out on the sidewalk. Another expat walked by and handed us a small little magazine booklet ("This Week" [LINK HERE] published by Lady Penh [LINK HERE]).
I leafed through it. Most of the booklet consisted of advertising. There were movie times for the local cinemas, and a calendar of events for local expat bars. The content of the magazine consisted of two articles: the best places to get coffee in Phnom Penh, and an editorial on Chomsky.

The PDF for this publication, including the article in question, can be read online [LINK HERE].

I read the Chomsky article first, and just sighed. “Look at how terrible this article is,” I said, pushing the booklet across the table to my friend.

“It is pretty bad,” my friend agreed.

Just around that time, the guy who had given us the booklet in the first place came back down the street. “You guys need another one?” he asked us.

“Look at this,” I said, calling him over to our table. “You’ve got an editorial here on Chomsky by someone who admits she hasn’t ever read any Chomsky.”

“So?”

“So it’s a waste of paper! Why would I want to read what she thinks about Chomsky when she hasn’t read anything by Chomsky.” (I may have raised my voice at this point.)

“Okay, wow, um…”

“Look, there are about 3 or 4 articles Chomsky wrote on Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge time. You can find them all on-line. Go look them up and read them. Chomsky didn’t say any of this.”

“That wasn’t actually me that wrote that article.”

“Well tell her then. She’s got her facts all wrong. Chomsky never said any of this.”

“He has.”

“No he hasn’t”

“Yes he has. Recently.”

“No he hasn’t. Get your facts straight.”

He tried to change the subject at this point. “Okay, well you should check out her website. There are a lot of other interesting things there.”

As he walked away, I called out after him, “Go and read the original articles.”

After the guy walked away, my friend looked at me, put his drink down, and said, “Wow.”

“Was I a little bit too hard on the guy?” I asked.

“You sir, are a history bully,” my friend said to me.

“I probably was a bit over the top just then.”

“In that guy’s defense, there was a picture right above the article of the girl who wrote it, and it clearly was not him.”

“Yeah, I know, I just wanted to yell at someone and he was right there. But he was distributing a magazine in which the only other article was about coffee, so he’s got to take some of the responsibility.”

“You’re probably going to call him back and yell at him about the coffee article next?”
He added, “You know, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen you get upset. And it’s over a history article. Well, I guess we all have our buttons. Some people yell at bad waiters or bartenders, you apparently like to yell at people in the streets over Chomsky articles.”

Okay, so I was probably a bit over the top. And it is always counter productive to yell at people. Calm, well reasoned arguments win people over to your side, not raised voices. If I ever see that guy again, I owe him an apology.

So let me take a few minutes to calmly explain my specific objections to the article in question. The Chomsky article in question appears on her blog here [LINK HERE]. If this was just someone’s blog, I wouldn’t bother. The fact that a print version of this article was being handed out up and down the streets of Phnom Penh makes me more motivated to write a rebuttal. 　(The print version of this article is slightly different than the blog form, but I’ll get into that more below.)

Let me start with a bit of background. Among the expat crowd in Cambodia it’s impossible to mention Chomsky’s name without someone bringing up the Khmer Rouge. I was recently discussing Chomsky’s theories with a co-worker, when another woman 3 desks down (who wasn’t even part of the conversation) yelled out, “Never forget he supported the Khmer Rouge. Never forget that.” And this is fairly typical.

Figuring out what Chomsky actually said about the Khmer Rouge is a bit of a headache. On the internet you can find lots of articles attacking Chomsky for his supposed support of the Khmer Rouge, and lots of articles defending him. For example you can read any number of articles by David Horowitz accusing Chomsky of supporting the Khmer Rouge. You can also read Christopher Hitchen's article "The Chorus and Cassandra" [LINK HERE] which defends Chomsky against Horowitz. Then you can read this article "The Chorus and Cassandra: A Response" [LINK HERE] rebutting Hitchens. There's also a very detailed article here which appears to go through everything Chomsky ever said on Cambodia with a fine tooth comb, "Averaging Wrong Answers" [LINK HERE]and Chomsky's response to that article [LINK HERE] and the author's response to Chomsky's response [LINK HERE].
Reading through all these articles and trying to figure out what Chomsky said when, what footnotes he used, and how reliable Chomsky’s sources were is a big mess. I was really having a hard time trying to make heads or tails about it.

Until I got a simple idea: go back and read the actual articles that Chomsky wrote about Cambodia during the 1970s. These articles are all available on line and easy enough to find, and in a couple hours you can read everything Chomsky ever wrote on Cambodia during the 1970s. You can read for example, “Cambodia” (1970), [LINK HERE] “The Cynical Farce that is Cambodia” (1978) [LINK HERE], and the one that Chomsky’s critics most frequently mention, “Distortions at Fourh Hand” (1977) [LINK HERE]. As for recent statements, you can find this 2009 interview with Chomsky on the Khmer Rouge [LINK HERE]. This blog here, which simply reprints without comment articles Chomsky has wrote on Cambodia over the years, is very useful [LINK HERE].
Once I had actually read these articles, I had a much clearer understanding of what Chomsky’s position had been.

You would be surprised how few people actually do this. 99% of the time whenever someone is going off about how Chomsky supported the Khmer Rouge, they’ve never read the actual articles by Chomsky. They just read in somewhere in a Wall Street Journal editorial that Chomsky once supported the Khmer Rouge. (And the Wall Street Journal writer himself never read any Chomsky either. He just read somewhere that someone else said Chomsky supported the Khmer Rouge and on and on it goes.)

Not surprisingly, this is the way distortions happen over time. The accusation goes from “Chomsky was insufficiently critical of the Khmer Rouge” to “Chomsky actively supported the Khmer Rouge” to “Chomsky still supports Khmer Rouge and believes they never did anything wrong.”

This last position is the one taken by Ms. Greenwood in her editorial. Despite the fact that Ms. Greenwood has not actually read anything written by Chomsky, as she admits in her 3rd paragraph.

“I have not bothered to read any of Chomsky’s work previously, and judging from Thayer’s description of his opinions, I doubt I will do so in the future.”

Okay, so she gets points for honesty by admitting this upfront. But why she would then feel the need to write an editorial on Chomsky I can’t fathom. And again, if this were just her blog, I would let it go. (I’m not proud of it, but if you search the archives of my blog, you’ll find me frequently spouting off about topics I’m ill informed on.) But this article was in print form as part of a professional publication being handed out on the streets.
Look, we’ve all talked jive about topics we were ill-informed on. But who takes the time to write up and distribute on the streets an editorial that essentially begins with “I’ve never read anything by this guy, but based on what so-and-so said he sounds like a real jerk.”

Then, based on her interpretation about what some other guy said about Chomsky, Ms. Greenewood goes on to make following claims, “He [Chomsky] still believes the Khmer Rouge atrocities were a mass fabrication, and he still believes that a vast media-and refugee?- came together to demonize the Khmer Rouge.”
Speaking as someone who has actually read what Chomsky wrote on the Khmer Rouge, I think if Ms. Greenwood were to actually read Chomsky she would find he had written nothing of the sort.

And then there’s the headline to this article. Noam Chomsky: “The Khmer Rouge Were Actually Pretty OK, Guys”

Now, this is serious. This would actually be a pretty damning quote if Chomsky had actually said this. But a Google search for these exact words indicates the only place they appear is on Ms. Greenwood’s blog. Which means this isn’t an actual Chomsky quote. This is her interpretation of what she thinks Chomsky believes (based on someone else’s editorial) which she decided to put in quotation marks next to Chomsky’s name.

To be fair, there is actually a difference here between the print version and the blog version. On her blog it’s not in quotation marks. In the print publication being distributed on the streets, it is. I suppose the charitable explanation would be that this was a mistake the printer made.
The less charitable explanation is that Ms. Greenwood does not understand that it goes against the ethics of journalism to make up quotes and attribute them to someone else.

Now this kind of mis-attribution is how rumors get started. Given how few people seem to read Chomsky’s actual articles, it means that there’s going to be several people on the streets of Phnom Penh who believe Chomsky actually said this. And perhaps will take Ms. Greenwood’s opinion that Chomsky is not worth checking out, and never read anything by Chomsky themselves. (Again, if this were just a blog article I would let it go. But this is in an actual magazine being actively distributed.)

It is true that Chomsky has refused to apologize for his media analysis articles written in the 1970s. That is, Chomsky still believes that in specific incidents reporters fabricated or exaggerated information about the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. And Chomsky still believes that the specific incidents of fabrication he mentioned in "Distortions at Fourth Hand" have not yet been proven false. This is what Chomsky is referring to when he says to the best of his knowledge no errors have been found in his writings.
This may be debatable. In some of the articles linked to above there are some questions raised about the accuracy of some of Chomsky's sources. (Go and read the articles yourself and make up your own mind.) But this is a separate discussion.

Ms. Greenwood misinterprets this to mean that Chomsky believes that the Khmer Rouge atrocities never took place. And this is plain wrong.

If a prominent intellectual did still believe that no Khmer Rouge atrocities took place, it would be quite something. This is the type of accusation you would think a person would want to double check very carefully before printing it off into fliers and passing it out to random people in the streets.

So what did Chomsky actually say about the Khmer Rouge? Well the best thing to do is not to take either my word or Ms. Greenwood’s word for anything, but to go read the actual articles Chomsky wrote at the time. To a certain extent I would only be adding to the white noise on this controversy by putting in my own opinion instead of simply redirecting people to the original articles.

However, that being said, my own reading of the whole controversy is as follows: when the Khmer Rouge were actually in power, Western journalists were not actually allowed into the country. Therefore Western Media had to rely mostly on second hand accounts and speculation as to what was actually going in the country. Noam Chomsky was critical of what much of the Western Media was reporting, and of their methods of obtaining information. He believed it was popular to exaggerate atrocities in Cambodia as a way to retroactively discredit the anti-war movement, and that at the same time the media was ignoring comparable atrocities going on in East Timor.
When the Vietnamese invaded in 1979 it turned out that the reports had not been exaggerated, and that things had actually been worse than people thought it was. So Chomsky was wrong.
But if you actually read the articles Chomsky wrote at the time, you will not find an endorsement of the Khmer Rouge. Read, for example, “The Cynical Farce that is Cambodia” and you’ll find him acknowledging that things my well be as bad as everyone says they are. Or if you read his much criticized article “Distortions at Fourth Hand,” you’ll find he has a lot of good reasons for being skeptical about the media reports. In the light of history we now know he was wrong, but he was wrong for some of the right reasons.

But don’t listen to me. Go and read his actual articles and form your own opinion.

The gentleman I met on the streets asserted to me that recently Chomsky has been saying all the things Ms. Greenwood has attributed to him. If so, I can’t find any examples on the Internet. If either of them are reading this, I would be happy to revise my position if you can show me where he Chomsky has actually said this. But don’t point me to an editorial someone else has written about Chomsky. Show me the actual Chomsky article or interview where he says all these things you’re attributing to him.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky Speaks to Occupy: If We Want a Chance at a Decent Future, the Movement Here and Around the World Must Grow

2011-12-08T03:56:00.003-05:00

Why Labour are calling David Cameron 'Flashman'

(Also, for comparison's sake, it's interesting to see how the British version of this same article feels very little need to explain who Flashman is. Cameron like bully Flashman, says Miliband.)

2011-11-28T07:55:00.000-05:00

Best. Controversy. Ever.

Teen tweeter won't apologize to Kan. governor

The Shawnee Mission East senior was taking part in a Youth in Government program last week in Topeka, Kan., when she sent out a tweet from the back of a crowd of students listening to Brownback's greeting. From her cellphone, she thumbed: "Just made mean comments at gov. brownback and told him he sucked, in person (hash)heblowsalot."

She actually made no such comment and said she was "just joking with friends." But Brownback's office, which monitors social media for postings containing the governor's name, saw Sullivan's post and contacted the Youth in Government program.

....

Sullivan's mother, Julie, said she isn't angry with her daughter, even though she thinks she "could have chosen different words."

I don't know which I find funnier: the fact that the Governor's office thought it was a productive use of their time to complain about a high school student who said the Governor "blows a lot" ...

Or the fact that the high school student in question is stubbornly refusing to back down. (I said he blows a lot and I stand by that.)

The French Presence in Cochinchina and Cambodia by Milton E. Osborne

2011-11-10T05:18:00.002-05:00

Subtitle: Rule and Response 1859-1905

(Book Review)

There are unfortunately not many English language books available on the French colonial period in South East Asia, and the few books published can sometimes be difficult to track down.

This book was originally published in 1969, and then re-published in 1997 by White Lotus, a small publishing company in Thailand apparently dedicated to republishing classic works on South East Asian history.

When I was still in the US, I tried to order this book off of Amazon, but was not able to track down a reasonably priced copy.
(In Cambodia, White Lotus history books--or ripped-off photo copied versions of them-- are much easier to find.)

File this book under: dry, but readable. It’s not the most exciting book I’ve ever read, but if you’re interested in the subject material there’s not a lot of other books to choose from.

This book starts out almost immediately where John Cady left off in “The Roots of French Imperialism in Eastern Asia” so the two books compliment each other nicely if you read them in succession.
This is not a coincidence. As a scholar, Milton Osborne is less concerned with history as story telling than he is with trying to fill in gaps in the literature, so he states quite clearly in the footnotes his reluctance to retell what John Cady has already covered.

Also this book is not meant to be a popular history. Instead of trying to tell a compelling story, Milton Osborne wants to examine the nature of colonialism. As such there are a lot of chapters heavy on analysis of colonial systems, and very few chapters dedicated to narrative events.

As someone who prefers narrative rather than analytical history, I found several of these chapters quite boring, and it was a bit of a struggle to force myself to finish this book.

For example Milton Osborne spends several chapters detailing the French efforts to change the Vietnamese written language from one based on Chinese characters to being one on the French alphabet.
This is interesting to a degree. (On my recent trip to Vietnam, it was astonishing to see how the Western alphabet had been so completely adopted to the local language, in contrast to just about every other Asian country which have all maintained their traditional writing systems.) But I wasn’t interested in it enough to go into all the detail that Osborne does.

In the same way, Osborne goes into great detail describing how the French Colonial authorities attempted to set up a legal system in Vietnam that compromised between local traditions and French judicial ideals. Again this is interesting to a point, but not to the detail that Osborne goes into.

All that being said, this book avoids academic speak, and is written in ordinary English prose. So assuming you’re interested in following Osborne through all this analysis, it is easy to read.

The book is divided into two sections, half dealing with Vietnam, and half dealing with Cambodia. Osborne contrasts the different approaches taken by the French to each country.
Vietnam was administered as a proper colony, with the pre-existing government in South Vietnam completely removed, and a new colonial government instituted.
Cambodia was administrated as a protectorate, with the pre-existing monarchy left intact, but forced to surrender much of its power to the French authorities.

The section on Cambodia, partly because it deals with the history of the relationship between the Cambodian king and the French authorities, reads much more like a narrative, and for that reason I found it more interesting than the section Vietnam. But this is a personal taste.

*****************************************************

Further thoughts:

1). This book was originally published in 1969, and it’s not hard to imagine that Milton Osborne must have had in mind the American efforts in Vietnam as a parallel to the French colonialists he was writing about.

Nevertheless, reading it today it’s impossible not to think of the occupation Iraq and Afghanistan.
So many parallels between the French effort to establish a stable government in Vietnam, and the American effort to establish stable governments in Iraq and Afghanistan just leap right off the page at you.

There is for example the assumption by French intellectuals that colonization was good for the native peoples because they were liberating the Vietnamese people from a corrupt and oppressive government. (And actually the 19th Century Mandarin government of Vietnam actually was in some ways corrupt and oppressive, but as Milton Osborne shows the French attempts to colonize Vietnam and set up a new government created more problems than it solved.)

Osborne also details the various headaches involved in trying to create a judicial system that both respected local tradition and was acceptable to the French.

And Osborne goes into the trouble the French had in administrating a colony where they did not speak the language, and where there was a shortage of qualified translators.

Osborne describes the discrepancy between the vast majority of the population, which was hostile or indifferent to French rule, and the small number of collaborators who welcomed the French and actively worked with them. Osborne shows how the French government tried to represent the views of this small minority of collaborators as being representative of the whole population, and used this to discredit the idea that the vast majority of the Vietnamese wanted the French out of Cochinchina.

This brings me to thought number 2.

2). Writing in the post-colonial period, Osborne takes a somewhat negative view of the Vietnamese and Cambodian colonial collaborators. Although he repeatedly emphasizes his desire to understand them rather than to condemn, it is obvious he regards them as a problem that needs to be explained.

Something Osborne never touches on, but perhaps should have, is that during this same time period other leading figures in Asia were advocating learning from Western thought and culture.
Figures such as Sun Yat Sen in China, or Sakamoto Ryoma in Japan are still today regarded as national heroes in their respective countries because of the role they played in modernizing their nations, even though they advocated adopting Western institutions.

It could be that the colonial collaborators in Vietnam and Cambodia also sought to make their nations stronger through adopting Western institutions, and thought the best way to do this at the time was by working closely with the French.

This is an oversimplification of course, but I wish Milton Osborne would have explored the comparison between the pro-French Vietnamese intellectuals to the pro-Western intellectuals in Japan and China.

3) And finally, an interesting note on tropical diseases in Cambodia, that makes one worry a little bit.

Not the least of the difficulties that the French faced was the high rate of disease among the troops that they committed against the Cambodian insurgents. Sudden death from disease was a normal part of life for Europeans in the tropics during the nineteenth century, but the scale on which the diseases affected the troops in Cambodia was extraordinary. None of the columns sent against the insurgents seems to have been exempt. In one notable instance, 75 of a detachment of 120 men had to be hospitalized on their return from an operation. The chief French doctor described the situation following the beginning of the monsoon rains:
The onset of the rains has reawakened malarial infections and intestinal disorders which have assumed a gravity which, up until now, I have never seen before….

(p. 217-218).

Link of the Day
The Pentagon Papers and U.S. Imperialism in South East Asia

Conspirator: Lenin in Exile by Helen Rappaport

2011-11-03T06:19:00.001-04:00

Subtitle: The Making of a Revolutionary

(Book Review)

There are a million and one books about Lenin.

What recommends this book in particular is how well it’s written. Helen Rappaport is one of those rare historians who makes history sound like a story.

I’ll just quote a couple paragraphs to illustrate this. In this chapter, Lenin is travelling across Finland, and being housed along the way by the Finnish underground railroad for Russian politicals. He was supposed to get off the train at Abo railway station, where he would be met by the Borg family. However when he didn’t show up, the Borg family assumed he had been picked up by the political police.

By 2.00 a.m. there was only one logical conclusion that could regretfully be reached: the gendarmes had picked him [Lenin] up en route. And then, suddenly, came a soft thud at the window. Down below, standing in the soft white glow of the snow, stood a lonely figure, clutching a small suitcase. Lenin, fearful of knocking at the front door at this time of night, had thrown a snowball up at Borg’s window to attract his attention.
He had indeed almost fallen into the hands of the Okhrana [Tsarist Police]. Leaving Helsingfors by train he soon spotted that he was being tailed by two agents. When he got off the train at Karis to have some supper in the station buffet the men followed and watched him closely. He had to get away from them; they would arrest him the minute he got off the train at Abo, the end of the line. So, as the train gathered speed out of the tiny station of Littois (Littoinene), the last before, Abo, he slipped out on to the running board, threw his suitcase ahead of him and leaped from the train. Luckily, a deep snowdrift broke his fall. The two agents decided it was not worth risking their necks to follow, and as he watched the red of the train’s tail lights disappear into the night, Lenin heaved a sigh of relief. He picked himself up and trudged off in the crackling frost the seven miles of country road into Abo, his only point of reference in the dark, looming pine forest on all sides.
At Borg’s apartment, seeing that he was frozen, hungry and exhausted, the Finns removed Lenin’s coat and boots. As he lay on the divan to recover, Borg’s wife Ida fed him hot milk with cognac and rubbed spirit on his hands and feet to get the circulation going. By now extremely agitated at the thought of being captured, as soon as Lenin heard there was still a chance of catching the Bore I [the ship], he insisted on being found a sledge so that he could leave straight away. Ludwig Lindstrom, who was to be his guide, told him that it would be very hard finding the way in the snow and the dark and they would have to wait till morning. Lenin was hysterical that the spooks would catch up with him before then. “I’ve already been in Siberia and I don’t want to end up there again!” he exclaimed. If Lindstrom wasn’t prepared to take him, he would set off on foot, alone and head north for the Gulf of Bothnia. He’d walk all the way to the northern border with Sweden at Torneo if he had to: “I’ve walked further distances in Siberia.”

That wonderful storytelling alone is enough reason to just lose yourself in this book for hours at your local coffee shop.

The subject material of this book is fascinating as well. Rappaport makes the decision to cover the beginning of Lenin’s life only very briefly, and to skip the end of his life when he was in power. As the title suggests, Rappaport focuses only on his years as a political exile in Europe.
This was a wise decision. Not only is this the period usually neglected by other writers, but it’s arguably the most fascinating part of Lenin’s life. The games of cat and mouse with the police, the fierce political squabbling among the exiled Russian community in Europe, and the idealistic pre-revolution socialist community in Western Europe are all fascinating.

Although Lenin is the most well-known of the Russian socialists, in some ways his story is the least interesting, and Rappaport will sometimes use Lenin’s life as a jumping off point to describe some of the various adventures of the Russian socialist community at the time (dodging police while smuggling in illegal literature or gun running).
Rappaport is particularly interested in highlighting some of the women in the Russian underground, who have largely been left out of history, but about whom she has fascinating stories to tell.

As for Lenin himself:
For the amateur historian, it’s hard to get an accurate picture of a polarizing figure like Lenin. Every book I’ve read on Lenin has given me a completely different picture of the man than the one before it, to the point where I’m not sure what to believe.

In this book, he is portrayed as an obsessive intellectual who spends hours in the library everyday, and who sometimes ignores the political events in the real world around him because he is so obsessed with working out his theories. (Rappaport writes that both the 1905 Revolution and the 1917 Revolution caught Lenin off-guard).
In today’s world, where politicians are thought of as almost anti-intellectual, it is surprising to think that Lenin, so obsessed with books and having such poor social skills, was able to manipulate his way into being the leader of a large country.

Which is not to say Lenin wasn’t a politician. The Lenin in this book is a Machiavellian type personality who uses all sorts of dirty political tricks to get his way. He splits the Russian Socialist movement into two parts—Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, then fights bitterly to make sure his Bolshevik faction gets into control. He demands total obedience from those in his faction, and won’t tolerate any views dissenting from his own. Based on the picture Helen Rappaport paints of him, it’s not hard to see how this would be the same Lenin who would go on to create a very authoritarian regime. At one point in the book Lenin is having a talk with a constitutional democrat, and he ends by saying, “Someday we’ll be hanging people like you off of the lampposts.”

Rappaport also highlights the women in Lenin’s life such as his long suffering wife and mother-in-law (who accompanied Lenin on his travels all over Europe) and a woman Lenin appears to have had an affair with—Inessa Armand. Rappaport tries to counter decades of hagiography which make Lenin into some sort of asexual revolutionary monk and instead portrays him as a man with sexual desires who might well have looked for satisfaction outside of his marriage.

A very well-written book, well worth checking out.

Link of the Day
Status of Forces Agreement

2011-10-28T21:30:00.001-04:00

From The Guardian
Google: US law enforcement tried to get videos removed from YouTube

The technology giant's biannual transparency report reveals a 70% rise in takedown requests from US government or police

Google faced down demands from a US law enforcement agency to take down YouTube videos allegedly showing police brutality earlier this year, figures released for the first time show.
...
Figures revealed for the first time show that the US demanded private information about more than 11,000 Google users between January and June this year, almost equal to the number of requests made by 25 other developed countries, including the UK and Russia.

Unfortunate. But worth remembering the next time you hear people clucking their tongues about government censorship of the Internet in other countries.

The Game by Neil Strauss

2011-10-27T06:06:00.003-04:00

Subtitle: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pick-up Artists

(Book Review)

From the back cover:

Nothing you have heard about The Game will prepare you for it. Neil Strauss reveals the bizarre world of the PUA (pick-up artist)—men who devote their lives to seducing women. None of this is fiction. PUAs have their own language and codes of honour, they trade strategies on-line, attend each other’s seminars and share houses called Projects.
Strauss lived among the players and survived—but not before he proved that the game works. He transformed himself from a balding, skinny writer into the smooth-talking Style, a man irresistible to women. Once an AFC (average frustrated chump) he became a legendary PUG (pick-up guru).
Here he describes not only his techniques of seduction, but his unforgettable encounters with everyone from Tom Cruise to Courtney Love, from Paris Hilton to Britney Spears. And that’s before things start to get really strange.
Shocking and hilarious, The Game is compulsively readable. It will change the lives of men and the way women understand them.

I came across the book by accident in the bookstore. I picked it up, looked at the back cover, flipped through it briefly, decided this wasn’t the kind of book I usually read, and then put it back on the shelf and moved on. Why waste my time reading junk like this when there were so many more serious history books on my reading list?
I walked on to look at the next book shelf, but then found myself walking back and picking up this book again. Was this just a marketing gimmick or was this for real? Was there really a secret way to pick-up women? And if I didn’t read this book, would I spend the rest of my life wondering?

So I ended up buying it.

For better or for worse (I’ll get to the flaws of the book later down) I found it to be a highly addictive read. I’m usually the kind of person who takes weeks to finish a book, but I had a hard time putting this down and blitzed through the whole book in a couple of days.

This book first came out back in 2005, and apparently was a best seller and a cultural phenomenon (W) long before I got around to it. So, as usual, I’m once again behind the times (one of the consequences of living abroad for so long I suppose).
Friends of mine who saw me reading this book mocked me for being interested in it, and then said they had read it years ago.
So, this review may be commenting on a cultural trend a few years too late. So be it.

The topic of this book pretty much sells itself—every male is interested in learning about the secret to picking-up women. With these kind of guaranteed sales, you might expect this to be the kind of book that the publishing industry simply cranks out and dumps on the public.
It is therefore a pleasant surprise to find out that this book is also well written.
Neil Strauss is a talented writer. He has an engaging style—the right combination of an eye for picking up little details, but a narrative that doesn’t get bogged down by them. To quote a sample piece:

When we arrived, the social workers led him down a long, dark hallway and into a claustrophobic cubicle with a sheet-vinyl floor. The therapist sat behind a desk, running a finger through a black tangle in her hair. She was a slim Asian woman in her late twenties, with high cheekbones, dark red lipstick, and a pinstriped pantsuit.
Mystery slumped in a chair across from her.
“So how are you feeling today?” she asked, forcing a smile.
“I’m feeling,” Mystery said, “like there’s no point to anything.” He burst into tears.
“I’m listening,” she said, scrawling a note on her pad. The case was probably already closed for her.
“So I’m removing myself from the gene pool,” he sobbed.
She looked at him with a feigned sympathy as he continued. To her, he was just one of a dozen nutjobs she saw a day. All she needed to figure out was whether he required medication or institutionalization.
“I can’t go on,” Mystery went on. “It’s futile.”
With a rote gesture, she reached into a drawer, pulled out a small package of tissues, and handed it to him. As mystery reached for the package, he looked up and met her eyes for the first time. He froze and stared at her silently. She was surprisingly cute for a clinic like this.
A flicker of animation flashed across Mystery’s face, then died. “If I had met you in another time and another place,” he said, crumpling a tissue in his hands, “things would have been different.”
(From page 6).

My friend said of this book, “A lot of people think it’s a book about how to pick up women. But it’s not that at all. It’s a story about the kind of guys who pick up women.”
It is true that this book is first and foremost a memoir. However it does integrate all sorts of tidbits of pick-up wisdom.
In addition to his story telling abilities, the second part of Neil Strauss’s genius is his ability to integrate this pick-up information into a narrative structure. And this is a lot of what makes the book so addictive. On one hand you’re caught up in the story about this fascinating world of pick-up artists (and the soap opera like personality conflicts they have with each other). On the other hand, you’re learning tons of information about how to pick up women in bars.
As I read this book, I was constantly thinking to myself, “Aha, is that what I’ve been doing wrong all these years?” It can be a real eye opener.

Neil Strauss is also very compelling as the narrator. He approaches the world of the pick-up artists as a complete naïve, and his own admitted lack of success with women makes him the perfect everyman type narrator for this type of story. Because I identified so much with him and his social awkwardness, it made it a lot easier to see this whole world through his eyes.

It is no easy feat to sign up for a workshop dedicated to picking up women. To do so is to acknowledge defeat, inferiority, and inadequacy. It is to finally admit to yourself that after all these years of being sexually active (or at least sexually cognizant) you have not grown up and figured it out. Those who ask for help are often those who have failed to do something for themselves. So if drug addicts go to rehab and the violent go to anger management class, then social retards go to pickup school.
…
A man has to primary drives in early adulthood: one toward power, success, and accomplishment; the other toward love, companionship, and sex. Half of life then was out of order. To go before them was to stand up as a man and admit that I was only half a man.

…

The reason [we were] here [at this workshop] …. was that our parents and our friends had failed us. They had never given us the tools we needed to become fully effective and social beings. Now decades later it was time to acquire them.

(from p. 16 and 21)

Unfortunately, this likable everyman narrator does not stick around for the whole book. As Neil Strauss completes his transformation from average frustrated chump to master pick-up artist, he gets more and more full of himself.

He brags about how he was voted the best pick-up artist by the online community, and how the rest of the newer generation of pick up artists began emulating all his tricks.
The lowest point is perhaps when he devotes a whole chapter to listing his sexual conquests.

I realize the purpose of his bragging is to emphasize his transformation, but it still rubbed me the wrong way.

Finally, the book is written as a memoir. As memoirs go, I thought it was pretty good, but it does also suffer from the limitations of the genre.

For one thing, we’re limited to the perspective of Neil Strauss, who has clearly swallowed the kool-aid of the pick-up artists’ method.
As the book progresses, Strauss does question many elements of the pick-up artists’ lifestyle. He questions whether the obsession with finding routines and programs to pick up women turns the men into “Social Robots”. He questions if the obsession with picking up women comes at the expense of developing an unrounded personality, particularly with the younger members of the pick-up community who lack life experience. He questions whether any of them are any good at holding down a long term girlfriend. And he details how many of them are complete narcissists or control freaks.

But one thing he never questions is that these methods do definitely work to pick up girls. And that even the most socially backward person, by attending these workshops and practicing these techniques, will grow into a confident person able to successfully pull girls.
It sounded a little bit too good to be true, and I at times wished for the inclusion of a more objective outside view.

In fact, if one were inclined to be cynical, you could read this whole book as one long infomercial. Neil Strauss is still engaged in the business of the seduction community, and is selling books and DVD courses (W) related to it. Could his portrayal of his own social awkwardness at the beginning of the book be exaggerated to make the transformation that much more dramatic? Could his unquestioning view of the success of seduction techniques be related to his desire to drum up business for it?

For that matter, if one wanted to be really cynical, could this book also be designed to discredit his business rivals?

Which brings us to the second common failing of the memoir genre: the author comes off as the most likable and sane person in the whole story. Everyone else is at fault except him.
Even the friends of Neil Strauss, like Mystery (W) and Courtney Love (W) come off as likeable enough, but obviously mentally unstable.

His rivals, like Tyler Durden (W) come off much much worse.
(One of these days I’m going to have to research what the finer points of the libel law are. Obviously Neil Strauss got away with it, but one can’t help feel a bit sorry for Tyler Durden and Papa, hardly high profile figures outside of the seduction community, and the very public trashing they got in this best selling book. If they really are the manipulative scheming figures Neil Strauss portrays them as, then I guess they kind of deserved it. If…)

Final verdict: Highly entertaining, very addictive read. But judge for yourself how much of this is truth and how much of this is fiction.

************************************
Additional thought:
I’m thinking the writers of “How I Met Your Mother” must have all read this book. So much of the character of Barney Stinson and the theories he always spouts seems lifted right out of this book.

Link of the Day
The Meaning of Vietnam

2011-10-26T03:43:00.000-04:00

The Iraq war is finally over. And it marks a complete neocon defeat

Well-written article on the legacy of the Iraq War

Scottsboro: An American Tragedy

2011-10-20T02:29:00.000-04:00

(Movie Reviews)

I actually saw this movie a year ago.

I didn't write up a review at the time because I considered it an episode of the PBS TV show American Experience (W) and thus falling outside the scope of my movie review project.

The other day, however, I was doing a google search to see if anyone was comparing the Strauss-Kahn case to the Scottsboro boys (more on this below).
And I discovered that this film had originally been released as a documentary film, had a brief theatrical run, and even has its own Wikipedia page (W). So I thought I'd do a belated review of it.

My memory of it is not as sharp as it would have been if I’d done this review immediately after watching. So treat this review with caution. But I think I can still write down maybe one or two thoughts that have stuck with me over the months.

Thought 1:
For one thing, I remember this documentary as being extremely interesting. It held my interest from start to finish. It has lots of court room drama, and unexpected revelations or plot twists all artfully worked into the narrative by story tellers who knew what they were doing.

Thought 2:
I remember briefly covering the Scottsboro Boys case in a college level course on African American history. Outside of that, I'd never heard anything else about it until seeing this documentary. It’s a part of forgotten history that has gone down the memory hole.
Which makes it all the more interesting to watch this documentary and realize what huge news the whole thing actually was at the time.

Thought 3:
The Scottsboro Boys case stands as one of the more positive moments in the history of the Communist Party. It was the Communist Party that made the Scottsboro Boys case into an international incident, and saved these 9 black men from being legally lynched.

(Actually the prominence of the Communist Party in this case might go a long way to explaining why it has been largely left out of history.)

Although I identify myself more with the libertarian wing of the socialist movement (W ), I think it is important to give credit where credit is due.

The makers of the documentary, however, seem reluctant to give the Communist Party their due credit. Perhaps this is because there is an unwritten rule that Communists always have to appear as the bad guys in any mainstream American production (and this documentary was financed with money from PBS). Although the film makers could hardly avoid talking about the Communist Party's role in the whole affair, they feel the need to emphasize that after the whole court case was over, the Communist Party only provided minimal support to helping the Scottsboro Boys re-adjust to normal life, and imply that the Communist Party only used the Scottsboro Boys for their own purposes, and then discarded them once they were no longer useful.

I think this is unfair. The Communist Party was not buying a puppy. There was no commitment on their part to provide life long care for the Scottsboro Boys after the acquittal. They saw a case of gross mis-justice happening, and they did what they could to stop it, and I find that admirable.

Thought 4:

The case of the Scottsboro Boys show how race and class can be unfairly used in a rape case. Because they were black and poor, they were assumed guilty of the rape. If they had been rich and white they would no doubt have gotten off easily.
Although I suppose you could argue that the Duke Lacross team rape scandal (W ) a few years ago was the Scottsboro boys case in reverse.

However both cases provide examples of rushes to judgment.

Rape cases perhaps represent a difficult dilemma. On one hand we want to protect women, but on the other hand we should protect the Anglo-American judicial tradition that the benefit of the doubt must lie with the defendant, and that a defendant is assumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
For this reason I sometimes get uneasy when people talk in undefined terms about how we should make it easier to be prosecute rape cases. If the rape case is reduced to nothing more than a he-said/ she-said scenario, I don’t think anyone should be sent to jail.
Which is why the Strauss Kahn case made me remember this movie.

(I know this is a sensitive topic. If I’m wrong, go ahead and tell me so in the comments section.)

Thought 5

Actually forget about my review--read this review over here [LINK]. It's a much better summary of the film's strengths and weaknesses.

Thought 6
This is not the first time that this review project has been tripped up by the line between real movies and TV movies. For other examples see here and here .

Link of the Day
Vietnam: How Government Became Wolves

2011-10-11T00:18:00.000-04:00

from the Los Angeles Times:

A GOP assault on environmental regulations
Republicans, though correct that environmental regulations cost money, are oblivious to the public health consequences of pollution and the economic costs of inaction.

Stealing from Facebook

2011-10-09T01:33:00.001-04:00

Blogs are seeming more and more outdated. All my friends now use facebook to link to interesting articles and post their opinions.
But me, I'm still sticking with the blog. So here's a few things I thought I'd steal from my friends' facebook pages.

For starters is this poster that's making its way around facebook. I couldn't agree more.

While on the subject, Salon.com recently did an excellent take down of the conservative arguments against the Occupy Wall Street movement:

Fox News, unsurprisingly, has been devoting more and more time to trying to discredit the protesters. Here's a Monday segment with Steve Moore of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, who calls the protests a "scary" attack on capitalism:

"As that one dumb woman was saying, 'if only rich people would share their wealth, we'd all be prosperous.' Look you don't get prosperous by taking other people's money, you get prosperous by producing," says Moore, apparently forgetting the multi-trillion dollar bank bailouts of the last few years that represent one of the biggest grievances of the protesters.

Next, a bit late in linking to this, but from my sister here is a rather disturbing article:
The GOP War on Voting
In a campaign supported by the Koch brothers, Republicans are working to prevent millions of Democrats from voting next year

And finally, one of my facebook friends wants as many people as possible to check out this site:
Oppose the Cambodian NGO & Associations Law

(This may be of limited interest to you if you aren't in Cambodia, but maybe if more people outside of Cambodia are informed about what's going on, it will result in more pressure for them to clean up their act.)

Link of the Day
The Soviet Union Versus Socialism

Carlos

2011-10-02T09:32:00.001-04:00

(Movie Review)

This is another case of a movie that is hard to categorize. According to Wikipedia (W) it was released both as a 5 and a half hour film and as a mini-series on French television. Maybe it belongs under the category of TV miniseries instead of a proper movie, but I’m deciding to include it on this movie review project anyway.

I’ve been looking forward to seeing this movie for a while. Back when I was at college, I remember reading about the life of Carlos the Jackal on-line and thinking to myself, “Man, what an interesting story! This would make a great movie.”
(In fact, that same website that got me so interested back in the 1990s is still online. For some fascinating reading, check out their multi-part history of the life of Carlos the Jackal [LINK HERE]).
A few years ago, when I was wasting time creating a blogging list of the top 10 biopics I would like to see, Carlos the Jackal was one of the top of the list.

So, naturally, when I found out about this new French production, I was very curious to see it. I managed to track down a copy here in Cambodia, and watched it the other week.

This is a movie that’s purely for the history nerds. If you’re not interested in history or politics, it will probably be a very long 5 and a half hours for you. Sure there are some explosions and gunfights, but there are also a lot of politics as you have to keep track of which group is being sponsored by which country and for what reasons.

However if you are a bit of a history nerd, like me, you’ll find this movie absolutely fascinating. Although the focus of the movie is only on one man, through the story of Carlos’s life we get a glimpse into several of the terrorist groups of the 1970s and how they were inter-related with each other.

It is a long movie. At 5.5 hours, I wouldn’t recommend watching it all in one sitting. However broken up over 3 days I found it to be a fantastic viewing experience. The length of the movie allows the filmmakers to fully flesh out the events without rushing through anything.

The challenge of making a movie about the life of Carlos the Jackal is that the filmmakers have to make him charismatic and interesting enough to hold the attention of the audience, but they don’t want to glorify him.
This film does a remarkably good job of walking that line. They attempt to explain Carlos’s motivations, and show how he viewed what he was doing against the backdrop of the counter-revolutionary terror that was occurring across South America at the time (Carlos was Venezuelan).
At the same time, they don’t glorify him. They show him as having a callousness towards human life that borders on psychopathic. And in his relationships with women they portray him as a controlling and sometimes sadistic.

I would highly recommend this movie/miniseries to any other history nerds out there.

*******************************************************
Other Thoughts:

* It’s interesting that, aside from the Arabs, the two groups that Carlos ended up working with are the German Revolutionary Cells, and the Japanese Red Army. A lot of comparisons have been made between the West German and the Japanese student movements in the 1960s. In both countries, the 1968 generation was horrified at what their parents’ generation had done during the war, and believed that fascism was in danger of returning (partly because the old fascist guard really was being rehabilitated into high level government positions in the name of anti-communism). Both groups of students saw parallels between the Vietnam War and what their parents’ generation had done . Both countries had a violent student movement that spun off into terrorist factions. And in both countries once the Vietnam War finished, the leftover radical factions turned their attention to the Palestinian cause.

The Japanese Red Army (which for a time operated out of Paris blending in with all the Japanese tourists) is given a prominent part in the beginning of this movie when they work with Carlos to take over the French Embassy in The Hague in 1972.

As for the German radicals:
One of the great ironies of history is that during the late 1970s, the German radical movement began to confuse anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and therefore came full circle to repeating the mistakes of their parents which had so horrified them to begin with.

To the filmmakers’ credit, they don’t dodge this issue but take the time to show the irony and explore it. When German terrorists hijack a French plane, they separate out the Jews from the rest of the passengers (W).
Another German radical Hans-Joachim Klein (W) is so appalled by this that he resigns from the movement. “Bose (W) separated out the Jews, just like at Auschwitz. I never thought a German of my generation could have done that,” Klein exclaims.

* This film is also fascinating because of the look it provides into international politics of the 1970s. It takes place during a time when the Communist bloc was loosely allied with Arab nationalism, and the film hints at backroom deals that went on between the governments of these countries. We get glimpses into the relationship that the KGB had with the East German Stasi, and the Hungarian government’s relationship with Moscow.
Arab leaders who have been in the news recently like Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein also play a prominent part in this story.

* In this post here, I questioned why there were no observation decks at airports back in the US. After having seen this movie, I no longer have that question. (In the film German terrorists attempt to shoot an airplane with an RPG missile fired from an observation deck.)

******************************************************************

Minor Quibbles:
* As this is a French film, and as it takes place all over the globe and has an international cast of characters, several different languages are spoken (French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, et cetera). So if you don’t like reading subtitles, you’re out of luck.
However for me, the most difficult parts of the film to follow where the parts in English. The volume was so low I had trouble understanding what the characters were saying without the subtitles. (This may actually have been due to the poor quality of the DVD I obtained in Cambodia. I’d be interested to hear what other people thought.)
Actually a fair amount of the film was in English, because whenever characters from two different nationalities conversed, they used English as a common language. (If I were to rely solely on my stereotypes of the French people, I would have assumed they would have insisted on making French the international language in this film. But they graciously acknowledge English as the lingua franca.)

However several of the actors were using English as their second language and at times I think it showed. Their pronunciation was fine, but sometimes their delivery was a little off, and some of the lines sounded a bit cheesy. Either that or some of the acting was bad, I’m not sure.

* Some of the shoot out scenes were hard to follow. I’m not sure if this was intentional or not, but the camera moved a bit too fast for me, and sometimes I couldn’t tell who was shooting whom until the action had finished and the dead bodies were lying on the floor.

* If this had been a Hollywood production, I think the soundtrack would have been amped up a lot. As it is, there were a lot of key scenes that I thought could have used some more dramatic music. Maybe this is just a stylistic difference between American and French cinema, I don’t know, but I often found myself thinking, “This scene would be a lot better if they added some really dramatic sounding music to it.”
The few times when they did have music, it didn’t seem to fit the mood of the scene very well. There was even one instance where the music got caught off very abruptly, and I got the impression that whoever was in the editing room was just asleep at the wheel, or that the soundtrack was just thrown together at the last minute.

Link of the Day
International Terrorism: Image and Reality

2011-09-20T22:30:00.000-04:00

Article in the LA times the other day--well worth reading

America's costly war machine: Fighting the war on terror compromises the economy now and threatens it in the future.

Forwarded E-mail

2011-09-14T04:05:00.003-04:00

This was in my inbox today from one of those stupid e-mail forwards. Nevertheless it made me chuckle, so I thought I'd throw it up on the blog for whatever it's worth.

Stating the Obvious

2011-07-28T08:50:00.001-04:00

It seems that lately all I've been hearing about is the budget crisis. And yet in all the coverage I've been reading, I haven't yet heard anything about the financial impact of all the wars the US is currently involved in. Maybe I've just been reading the wrong articles. But allow me to state the obvious here:

At some point, someone is going to have to pay for all these wars.

At every other point in American history up until now the government has always raised taxes when it went to war. This is in recognition of the basic principle that wars cost money.

The Bush administration was the first administration in history to lower taxes while fighting a war--two wars. (Even after Bush went to war, he continued to cut taxes--LINK HERE.)

We are now, by some estimates, currently involved in 4 wars (Afghanistan, the lingering presence in Iraq, Libya, and the operations in Pakistan). All of these wars have all been funded by borrowing money.

I know it's unpopular to say this, but at some point somebody is going to have to pay for these wars.

Link of the Day
The war everyone forgot

X-Men: First Class

2011-07-26T00:48:00.003-04:00

(Movie Review)

Whatever else you may say about these X-Men movies, there’s no denying they’re ambitious.

It’s not enough for them to simply do the standard action-fest, choreographed fighting, and special effects extravaganza we’ve come to expect from superhero movies. They have to add pathos as well. They want us to care emotionally about their characters, and to care about the relationships these characters have with each other.
And they even attempt to address social issues like discrimination and alienation from society.

The success with which the X-Men movies accomplish their aims is debatable. (Whenever a comic book movie attempts to explore social issues, there’s a temptation for it to get overly heavy-handed or patronizing. And at various points I think the X-Men franchise has been in danger of crossing over into this territory, at least with the issue of discrimination. The theme of young people feeling alienated from society I think they pull off a bit better.)

The complex relationships in the X-Men are also ambitious as the line between enemy and ally are often blurred. You have enemies who are friends (Charles Xavier and Magneto) and allies who are often in danger of becoming enemies (the rivalry between Wolverine and Cyclops, the confrontations between Pyro and Iceman, and of course the Jean Gray saga.)

Again, how well the film makers actually handle all of these dramatic possibilities is debatable. But I don’t think it’s possible to walk out of the theater and not have a bit of admiration for the ambition of what the filmmakers were trying to pull off.

The first 3 films in the X-Men series I saw before I stared up my Movie Review Project, so I’ll start out by doing a brief recap of my impressions here, before I get into the newest film.

X-Men 1: Didn’t do much for me to be honest. Okay but not great.
X-Men 2: They absolutely nailed it with this movie. Possibly the best comic book movie ever. From this point on, I considered myself a fan of the series.
X-Men 3: You know, I actually liked this movie. I know a lot of other people didn’t like it, and I’ll probably have to re-watch it someday to give it a more intelligent review. But at the time I remember thinking it was pretty cool.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Haven’t seen this yet. Someday, maybe. But I’ve always thought Wolverine was the least interesting character in the X-Men series anyway.

Alright, so with that recap out of the way, how does this new movie fare?

Really well I thought.

Maybe I was a bit biased, because I considered myself a fan of the series, and I went in wanting it to work. But I thought they did a really good job.

The plot was a bit convoluted at first, as 3 separate story lines had to be converged into one. But actually I like plots that keep me on my toes a bit, so no problem for me here.

I thought the movie did a good job of creating dramatic suspense, particularly in the beginning. There’s one or two scenes near the opening of the movie where the scene does a good job of milking the suspense to build up to the dramatic climax, with the appropriate crescendo in the music letting you know something is about to happen.

The characters are engaging—or at least the main characters (some of the later additions to the X-Men team are just blatantly there for no other purpose than to fill the team out.)
This film continues the theme, established in the early X-Men movies, that a character’s inner demons are just as much of a threat as their outside enemies. And so we see a number of characters struggling with, and sometimes giving into, their inner demons.

The acting is quite good as well. Admittedly the two lead actors have some big shoes to fill. (In retrospect, that was quite a coup the first X-Men movies had landing such talented actors as Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen). But both actors pull it off well.

So, all in all a good movie. Below are a few more observations on various issues.

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On Continuity

I know that to even broach this topic is to open ones self up to accusations of geekdom. And to the extent that any time spent contemplating a fictional universe is time not spent on chasing girls, drinking beer, or building muscles, I suppose the accusation is fair enough. (I probably should be in a bar right now winking at some cute girl instead of writing this.)

But if a viewer is to spend his time and money watching this series, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for it to be consistent. Otherwise you can’t take it seriously. And if nothing else, these X-Men movies want to be taken seriously. They want us to care about the transformations these characters undergo.

Many people on the internet are already way ahead of me on this. For a run down of many of the continuity errors introduced in X-Men, see for example this list {LINK HERE}. And for a way to explain away many of the same continuity errors, see for example this list here {LINK HERE}.

Most of the minor points don’t bother me so much. I’m more concerned with how this film fits into the overall story the filmmakers have been telling.

The previous X-Men films have already established that Professor Xavier, and Magneto, despite being enemies also have a continuing friendship, and it’s implied that they have a long history. Exactly what this history was is mostly left up to the imagination of the viewer, and perhaps it was more interesting when it was vaguely defined. From what was said in the previous movies, I had always imagined this friendship had carried on over a period of several years. In this movie we get only a period of several months before they have their split.

I’m not sure this brief friendship lasting only a few months would be quite enough to sustain the admiration and mutual respect they seem to have for each other 40 years later in the original X-Men movies. But this is somewhat open to interpretation.

Actually, according to this movie, the person Charles Xavier really does have a long history with, and deep affection for, is not Magneto, but Mystique, who we find out is his adopted sister, and who he is obviously very fond of (and she of him). Therefore this movie does a better job of setting up a complicated relationship between Xavier and Mystique than it does between Xavier and Magneto. And yet this relationship is totally absent from the first 3 movies.

I’m somewhat torn about this, because on the one hand the Mystique we get in this movie is much more interesting and developed. But it will, I fear, ruin the series for anyone trying to watch them back to back.

**********************************************************

On the 60s setting

For a summer block-buster superhero movie, the choice of a retro setting is pretty unique. The normal trend is for Hollywood to take old comic book superheroes, and try to modernize them as much as possible. This movie takes characters established in the public mind by recent movies, and takes them back to the 1960s. It’s unusual, but anything different is good, and this is a pleasant change of pace from the usual superhero movie.

Unfortunately the film makers don’t take full advantage of the retro-setting. If they had made a bit of an effort, they could totally have gone the route of “Mad Men” and worked really hard to recreate the period with the clothing, the hair styles and the music of the early 60s.
What we get instead is a partial effort. Every now and again a character will say “daddy-O” or “groovy”. Some of the clothing looks a bit retro-ish, but even here the filmmakers at times seem to be confusing the Kennedy years with the 1970s.
Many of the hair styles look much more modern than retro, particularly with the new young X-men recruits. (I suspect because somewhere in the studio hierarchy, marketability won out against period authenticity, and the studio wanted good-looking young stars sporting fashionable modern haircuts on all their advertisements.)
It’s a minor quibble, admittedly. It didn’t spoil the movie for me, but I thought it would have been a lot cooler if they had gone to more effort to create more of an atmosphere.

**************************************************:
On the Cuban Missile Crisis:

The Cuban Missile Crisis, like many events in American history, has developed a sort of mythology that bears almost no relationship to the actual facts of what happened. The version I learned at school was that the Soviet Union unilaterally breaking the peace by putting missiles in Cuba. Kennedy was forced against his will into a situation where he had to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war, and fortunately his great leadership caused the Soviets to back down.

What was never told to me in school was that the US had missiles stationed in Turkey, aimed at the Soviet Union, which were actually closer to the Soviet Union than their missiles in Cuba were to us. And so when the US complained about missiles in Cuba, the Soviet Union (rightly) pointed out that this was completely hypocritical. They then offered to remove their missiles from Cuba if the US would agree to remove their missiles from Turkey.

Privately, the US government acknowledged that the Soviets had a legitimate point. But it was felt that if the US was the first to remove their missiles, it would look like Kennedy was caving in to Soviet pressure, and would endanger his re-election prospects. And so for this our government brought us to the edge of a nuclear holocaust.

It is very rare that this side of the story is ever acknowledged by the US media. You might recall that Kevin Costner movie that came out about 10 years ago “13 Days” (W) in which they spent the whole movie on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and never once acknowledged that we had missiles in Turkey, or that Kennedy could have ended the whole crisis at any time by simply pulling our own missiles out of Turkey.

I fully expected this movie to take to the same view.
Imagine my surprise, then, when X-Men: First Class goes out of its way to set up that the US government first created the crisis by placing missiles in Turkey. (Granted in the world of X-Men, it is evil mutants who are blackmailing the US army to do it, but still an acknowledgment nonetheless.)

So, the movie gets an extra point from me for this little piece of historical accuracy.
(Sad though that we have to go to X-Men movies for historical accuracy.)

*************************************************

One last, final thought before I finally lay this review to rest:

I read another review of this movie I want to respond to briefly.

Yeah, I know. It’s a losing battle to try and respond to everything on the Internet. But just indulge me in this.

The review is from Slate.com
I don't necessarily want to be the guy who tries to hang a discount-store T.S. Eliot essay about the Death of Culture on yet another mediocre Hollywood sequel, but there's something a little depressing about all the hype and excitement surrounding "X-Men: First Class," the new Marvel-Fox product that's expected to be among the summer's biggest hits. Are zillions of people genuinely psyched about an Anakin Skywalker-style back story prequel to a comics-based movie franchise that almost everyone agrees had run out of juice after four installments? (Just from inspecting cast lists and plot synopses, I can't even tell you for sure whether I've seen all of them.) And if so, why?
Oh, OK, I know why. I'm just playing Socratic idiot. It's summertime in spirit if not in fact, and people are covered in beer and bug-juice and have collectively lowered their expectations. They've convinced themselves that they want to see a big, exciting adventure with cool guys and pretty girls and maybe the faintest hint of moral significance but not much resemblance to real life. I suppose a ridiculous yarn about how a group of superhuman genetic mutants in silly costumes intervene to resolve the 1963 Cuban missile crisis (after starting it in the first place) fits the bill, somewhat. But I'm pretty sure that those who are claiming that "X-Men: First Class" is actually good are engaged in the kind of brainwashed magical thinking that goes along with a culture where the entire media and most of the public have to behave like savvy insiders all the time. This is a movie that definitely could have been worse. (Put that on your poster!) It looks good and has some nice acting moments; as a friend of mine used to say about poetry readings, it's better than some TV. If it makes a butt-load of money, all of us parasites on the sweaty underbelly of the film industry are hypothetically better off, so we might as well like it.

And it continues on in that same patronizing tone for several more paragraphs.

This writer’s argument would be helped somewhat if he could point to what heights our culture has fallen from. Was it in the 90s, when the Batman franchise and the Matrix movies were top box office draws? Or in the 80s with Return of the Jedi and Tron? Or the 70s with the Superman movie and the Planet of the Apes franchise? Or the 60s with the Adam West Batman movie? Or the 50s, with “The Beginning of the End” and the Tarzan movies? Or the 40s, with the Flash Gordon movie serials?

You get the idea, and can probably add your own examples as well as I can. The point is that every generation has their high brow art, and their low brow entertainment, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We’ve had movies based on comic book characters since the 1940s, and will likely continue to have them for many years to come.

The way to effectively critique these movies is not to get into a snobbish fit about the fact that comic book movies are once again dominating the box office, but to compare these movies against their genre. In that respect, I think you could make the argument that these X-Men movies have shown that the comic book movie genre is expanding the range of themes it is willing to take on, and thus represents a sign that the culture is getting more intelligent, not less.

In the same vein, Allen Ginsburg once claimed that The Beatles song “Eleanor Rigby” represented a cultural high point. He didn’t argue it was a cultural high point because The Beatles handled themes of alienation better than any poet ever before them, but because these themes were being attempted by a bubble gum pop band at the height of their fame.

In the same way, “X-Men: First Class” may not be high art, but I don’t think its popularity is any indication that our culture has gone down the tubes.

Link of the Day
Stability, a cold code word with US

The Roots of French Imperialism in Eastern Asia by John F. Cady

2011-07-18T23:53:00.000-04:00

(Book Review)

Every schoolchild knows that the about the French colonial legacy in Indochina. But how exactly did the French get over there in the first place? Given the fact that the British dominated the sea lanes of the 19th Century, and given the fact that 19th Century France was notoriously - politically - unstable, how did the French find time to set up an empire in Eastern Asia?

Well, if these questions have ever kept you up at night wondering, then this is the book for you.

This book was published way back in 1954. (Ironically enough, the same year that the French would lose their empire in Indochina, although I think that’s just by coincidence. The author says he began his research for the book back in 1938.)

It is, as you would expect of an academic history book from this era, a bit dry and dull reading in parts. It’s not badly written, but it’s not written for the general public. The author is clearly more interested in filling in a gap in the historical research than he is in creating the next bestseller.

It’s also one of those academic books that is littered with footnotes. There’s not a single page that doesn’t have several footnotes at the bottom.
(In my humble opinion most of the footnotes should have been integrated into the text. It’s a bit disorientating to constantly have to refer down to the bottom of the page, and a lot of the information contained in the footnotes seems to be important, so I’m not sure why it is buried at the bottom of the page. But then I’m no expert on academic writing conventions.)

The only reason you would subject yourself to this book is if you were interested in its subject material. And as it happens, I was. Having moved to Indochina, I decided I wanted to fill in this gap in my historical knowledge and learn a bit more about why the French had been in this area to begin with.

All that being said, some sections of this book are more interesting than others. The political sections I thought were fairly interesting. I enjoyed reading Cade’s description of the various political factions during the Orleanist Monarchy, or of the conflict between Liberal Catholicism and Conservative Catholicism, or how Louis Napoleon’s need to gain political support among the Catholics would lead him to undertake ventures to safeguard Catholic missionaries in Asia (which in turn would be the start of French Imperialism in that region).

In contrast, some of the chapters describing the long slow back and forth diplomacy between the Chinese and French diplomats are not so interesting. But I sucked it up and kept reading anyway.

As the title implies, the book only looks at the roots of French Imperialism in Eastern Asia. It describes the French policies leading up to the conquest of Vietnam in the 1880s, but stops short of actually describing the conquest itself. To find out how the French actually gained control and ruled in Indochina, I suppose I’m going to have to turn to other books on my reading list. But this book does a good job of describing all the developments leading up to the French acquisition of Indochina.

The author posits two duel reasons for French imperialism in Asia. One is the need to enhance French prestige, especially in light of the growing British Empire in Asia. The second is agitation by French Catholic missionaries to establish pro-Christian regimes in Asia.

Napoleon III, clearly aware of how fragile his legitimacy was, did all he could to court Catholic support as a way to hang onto power. And that lead him to attempt to set up Catholic empires in Mexico and Vietnam.

The bulk of the book doesn’t actually deal with Indochina, but with the French in China. (Imperialism in Indochina is presented almost as an afterthought when the French Imperial ambitions in China were thwarted.)

The French were competing with other Western powers for influence in China, and in order to tell the whole story there are some chapters were Cade feels it necessary to spend as much time talking about the British, American and Russian diplomats in China as he does the French.

In particular, the French rivalry (and at times entente) with Britain make up much of the book. Cade spends a whole chapter describing the diplomatic events that lead Britain and France to form a joint alliance during “The Arrow War.”

[This book, which focuses heavily on the European reaction to the Taiping rebellion, and also on the Anglo-French expedition to Peking, covers most of the historical events dramatized in “Flashman and the Dragon”, which I just finished recently. Had I read this book first, I probably would have been able to give “Flashman and the Dragon” a more intelligent review. On the other hand, sometimes it’s more interesting to read the historical novel first, and then once your interest has already been aroused later go back and read the real history afterward.]

************************************************************
Various stray observations:

Interesting to think that at the time the author was writing (1954), the American War in Vietnam had not yet actually begun, and so the subject matter had not yet acquired the polarizing connotations that it would have ever since.
There are a few passages in this book however which eerily seem to foreshadow the American involvement.

For example, when trying to persuade the French government to occupy Vietnam, the Catholic missionaries proclaimed that the Vietnamese people actually wanted the French to invade them and liberate them from their oppressive government.

“Abbe Huc, a former Lazarist missionary…had written and spoken volubly on the subject, finally gaining a hearing at court. In a secret memorandum prepared for Louis Napoleon in January, 1857 Huc argued that….The suffering Annamite [Vietnamese] population would receive the French as liberators and benefactors, and only a short time would be required to make them entirely Catholic,” (page 178-179).

Napoleon III actually takes the bait and invades Vietnam, only to find out that the Vietnamese desire to be invaded by the French had been greatly exaggerated. The French army encounters fierce resistance, no native support, and suffers heavy losses.

And another passage which seems prescient of American involvement appears.

“During these years [the 1860s], Saigon was a prestige liability for the Emperor [Napoleon III] rather than an asset. One informed nationalist spokesman in 1864 levelled a trenchant attack against the whole Indo-China venture on the ground that it had not been thought out in advance in terms of defined objectives and the difficulties and sacrifices entailed,” (p.277).

[I suppose it would probably be all too obvious to point out how these passages also relate to the current Iraq and Afghanistan wars.]

***************************************************************

Unfortunately one does not emerge from this book with a very positive view of Christian missionaries. The 19th century Catholic missionaries seemed to have been unable to separate their evangelizing mission from their belief in imperialism.

This history presents the Catholic missionaries as actively driving imperialism. The missionaries lobbied the French government to provide them with protection in countries which were hostile to Christianity, such as China, Korea and Vietnam. And the missionaries would encourage the French government to invade and set up French protectorates in all of these areas. In the cases of Korea and Vietnam, missionaries who had been in the country evangelizing would take advantage of their presence inside the country to provide the French military information about the country’s internal defenses, and advice about the best route to take on an invasion.
In the case of Korea, this advice was ignored. But in Vietnam, the first joint French-Spanish invasion of the country was a result of missionary lobbying and missionary advice.

One would hope that this era of Christian history is now over. But there’s no denying that Christian missionaries have had a very mixed historical track record. And this history is no doubt better remembered by the colonized countries than by the colonizers.

I had at least one Calvin professor who implied that China’s reluctance to allow foreign missionaries into the country was in part based on this history legacy, and that the aggressive pushing by some evangelical groups to enter China showed an insensitivity to this legacy.
It’s worth remembering the next time you see one of those church bulletins complaining about how China (or Vietnam) is curtailing missionary activity again.

********************************************

This book has long been out of print, but in this day and age you can find anything you’re looking for on Amazon. And, if you don’t mind reading things off of a computer screen, the whole text is also available online [LINK HERE].

Link of the Day
Q&A with Noam Chomsky

To Kill a Tsar by Andrew Williams

2011-07-11T23:47:00.003-04:00

(Book Review)

I’m a big fan of historical novels. But there’s no denying the success rate of the genre is low. Many historians don’t make good novelists, and many novelists don’t make good historians.

This book gets full marks for the history, but the fiction parts of it are weak.

The historical events around which this book is based are absolutely fascinating. In 19th Century Russia, radicals, frustrated with the slow pace of reform, embarked on a campaign of terrorism against the government. Foremost among these groups was “The People’s Will.”

“It was the contention of The People’s Will that by 1879 peaceful protest had demonstrably failed and that change was only possible through direct terrorist action. The party was socialist, but democratic in character, committed to an elected assembly, freedom of speech and religious worship,” (from the Author’s afterward, p. 430).

Several government officials were gunned down in the street, but their primary target was Tsar Alexander II.

The elaborate schemes that The People’s Will concocted to assassinate Tsar Alexander II are fascinating. The sheer luck by which Tsar Alexander II survived most of them is equally fascinating (he appears to have had more lives than a cat.)

The People’s Will send a gunman to shoot Alexander II. The gunman misses.
The People’s Will tunnel under the railway, and set off a bomb just at the precise moment that Tsar Alexander II’s train car is passing over. The Tsar survives because he switched train cars at the last minute.
The People’s Will plant a bomb in the Tsar’s Winter Palace, and blow up half the palace during dinner time. Alexander II survives because he was late to dinner.

Eventually they do succeed in assassinating Alexander II by ambushing his carriage procession, first throwing grenades to stop his carriage, and then hurling a bomb at his feet once he steps out of his carriage.

(Given the title of the book, I trust I’m not spoiling anything by revealing this.)

Throughout the 2 years that The People’s Will were active, they were constantly in a game of cat and mouse with the Russian police. For most of this period they were able to stay one step ahead of the police because they had a well placed double agent among the police, who would feed them vital information about the police investigations.

All of this proves the old saying that the truth is always stranger than fiction. (A co-worker of mine once said, “The thing I love about history is that it’s always so much more interesting than fiction. The things that happen in history—you couldn’t make that stuff up if you tried.”)

Andrew Williams has certainly chosen an interesting subject matter to explore. I’m not sure his novel entirely takes advantage of the story’s dramatic possibilities, but I give him credit for choosing his subject material well.

As for the literary aspects of this book:

On the plus side, one of the better decisions Williams makes is to dramatize both sides of the story. We see the activities of The People’s Will, but almost equal time is given to the police investigation. Through the dramatization of real historical police figures like Count von Plehve and criminal investigator Dobrshinsky, the reader gets to see the investigation methods as well as their interrogation procedures of 19th century political police. (Interestingly enough, even though Tsarist Russia was a totalitarian state, the criminal investigator didn’t use torture to extract information, but instead first won the trust of the prisoners, and then afterward was able to extract information from them.) From the police side, we also see their frustrations in trying to track down the mole. They know somehow information from the police office is getting out to the People’s Will, but they don’t know who is doing it.

Now onto the negatives:
When writing historical fiction, I think it’s a good rule of thumb for the author to assume that the actual historical figures are always much more interesting than any fictional characters he can create. Williams, unfortunately, does not follow this rule. The bulk of the book is therefore consumed by the story of a fictional romance between the fictional young English doctor Frederick Hadfield and the fictional revolutionary Anna Kovalenko. I didn’t find either of them particularly interesting as characters, and I didn’t care about their romance at all.

It’s a pity because the focus on the fictional Hadfield and Anna pushes all the much more interesting real historical figures and events into the background. And it’s particularly a pity because neither of them are necessary to the narrative.
(With some historical fiction, the historical events that the author is trying to dramatize are disparate enough that composite fictional characters are needed to tie everything together into one story. But The People’s Will appears to have been such a small tightly knit group that their story could easily have been told without inventing extra characters.)

Anna Kovalenko in particular I found to be an annoying heroine, because she is one of those cliché fictional heroines who is always described as being fierce, determined, outspoken and angry, but with a hidden soft romantic side.

Often in his effort to emphasize Anna’s fierce and angry personality, Williams’ prose will become repetitive.
For example, on page 125, Anna encounters 3 suspicious looking men who are barring her way down the street.

“My friend likes you, love,” the first man said. His hand was still open in front of her.
“Then he won’t mind stepping out of my way, will he?” [said Anna.] This time there was steel in her voice. She was angry. Who were these men to accost a woman at night?

Ideally, I think Williams should have let the situation and the dialogue stand by itself, without having to constantly remind the reader how fierce and angry Anna can be. But unfortunately this is all too typical of his writing style. And it gets even worse a little further down the same page…

“Murderers!” And she kicked out blindly at the first man rising to his feet. Angry, she was so angry, grinding her teeth with anger.

[Sigh. Really, where were the editors? Did anyone proof read this book before publication?]

And this kind of one-note characterization is unfortunately true of how many of the characters in this book are written. We get very little life like or 3 dimensional characters in this book. Instead the revolutionaries are mostly card board cut outs who constantly talk in clichés, and who will suddenly launch into political speeches at dinner parties with no preamble.

Granted, it is difficult to fully bring these sort of people to life in fiction. These people really were political zealots in real life, and I think it is all too easy to just write them off as one note characters in fiction. This is perhaps why revolutionary movements make very interesting history, but they seldom make good fiction. Very few authors can actually pull it off: Victor Hugo was perhaps one of the few who could do it well. And Leo Tolstoy (although not writing about a revolutionary period per se, I think Tolstoy did a very good job of showing how a character’s political obsessions are also intertwined with their other emotional needs.)

Final verdict: If you’re a fellow history nerd, I think there’s enough interesting history in this book for me to give it a cautious recommendation in spite of its literary flaws. If you’re not a history buff, don’t bother.

*************************************************

A search on Amazon reveals that there is another book with the same title on the same topic published the same year, and that also appears to be a historical novel: "To Kill a Tsar" by G.K. George (A).
This raises the following questions:
1). What gives? Did someone in the publishing industry decide that this was the year when everyone would suddenly become interested in reading historical novels about the assassination of Tsar Alexander II?
2). Don’t the publishers usually watch out to make sure this kind of title confusion doesn’t happen?
3). How do the two books compare to each other? At the moment I can’t say, but I might someday be interested in tracking down and reading this other version.

*************************************************************

For more on “The People’s Will” don’t forget about this BBC radio program. [Tsar Alexander II's assassination: LINK HERE]

Link of the Day
"The West Is Terrified of Arabic Democracies"

The Scramble for Africa: 1876—1912 by Thomas Pakenham

2011-06-25T23:29:00.002-04:00

(Book Review)

This book is much more interesting than it looks.

The cover is a boring brown color without any pictures or illustrations (at least on the version I have, which I bought at a used book sale). AT 738 pages, it is also a fairly large book. It looks suitable for stopping doors, but doesn’t look like anything you would actually want to read through. And the title of the book sounds like an academic treatise.

But if you give it a chance, you’ll find this book is a terrific armchair history. For people who like to read history as a hobby, and want to be entertained by history, this book is definitely worth checking out. (I would take this book with me to my local coffee shop and just lose myself for hours at a time being thoroughly absorbed in the stories Pakenham tells.)

As the title of the book indicates, it deals with the period from 1876 to 1912, when Europe was gobbling up pieces of Africa as fast as it could. But given that Europe had known about Africa for thousands of years, why was Africa ignored for all this time, and then why in 35 short years was all of Africa swallowed up by Europe? And why were the European governments suddenly at each other’s throats over the Scramble for African colonies?

This is the central question of The Scramble, and it’s a question Pakenham never answers directly. After posing the question briefly in his introduction (and listing off some competing theories) Pakenham then goes on to write a narrative history of the Scramble. From reading this narrative history, I think it is possible for the intelligent reader to tease out on their own what the some of the various causes of The Scramble were. But Pakenham doesn’t bog down his story with any heavy analytical sections.

If you want a book that tries to analyze the causes of the Scramble, I’m sure you could find it elsewhere. But what makes Pakenham’s book so engaging is that he writes the history as a series of interconnected stories. And if you like reading history as a story, I think you’ll really enjoy this book.

You might not think narrative story telling would be the best choice for a subject that encompasses two whole continents, 35 years, and a cast of thousands of players. But Pakenham does a surprisingly good job at this. Each mini-incident in the Scramble is broken down into its own separate chapter. (There are 37 chapters, each roughly about 20 pages.) The end of one chapter usually ends by setting up the conflicts that will need to be resolved in the next chapter, so that Pakenham is able to keep a narrative flow despite everything that is going on. Inevitably some of the events in the Scramble overlap a bit, so occasionally he needs to jump slightly backwards in time when switching topics. But on the whole the narrative has a strong forward momentum that propels you from one event into the next. And although each chapter is its own separate story, there are many story threads that are woven throughout the entire book, such as the　growing British quagmire in Egypt, or King Leopold’s plotting in the Congo.

But what really makes this book a pleasure to read is just how well it is written.
The best way to illustrate this I think is just to quote a section of it. So I’ve decided to give a rather lengthy quotation below. It is a rather long quotation, so I apologize for the length of it, but I think a sampling of the author’s actual writing is worth more than my describing it.

The following passage is from the chapter “Three Flags Across Africa”, which describes the explorations of the British-American Henry Stanley. (Stanley is probably most famous in pop culture for the phrase, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”)
As is typical of Pakenham’s style, he starts the chapter out in the middle of the action describing Stanley’s explorations in Africa. Then he jumps back in time for a couple of pages to give some background on Stanley’s character. After describing Stanley’s painful childhood, Pakenham continues with the following passage.

*************Begin Quote*************************

The months exploring Lake Tanganyika with Livingstone overwhelmed Stanley. He wept like a boy of eight, he said, when they parted. He had expected a crusty misanthrope. He found a man whose serenity transcended every frustration, a man so gentle and tender-hearted that he shrank from punishing his African servants when they cheated him. Livingstone told Stanley that his own mission was not so much to preach the gospel to Africa. What could one or two men do in that respect? The first step was to preach to Europe what they must do about the horrors of the slave trade, to stop it once and for all. Later the regular missionaries would come, systematically organized, teaching the gospel, tribe by tribe, district by district. Stanley had pledged himself to Livingstone’s service. He would be Livingstone’s disciple and mouthpiece. That was the way he saw himself in his own serialized articles in his book, “How I Found Livingstone.” His writings touched the hearts of millions, on both sides of the Atlantic, who had never read a word of Livingstone’s own writings.
Stanley had written solemnly in his private diary:

May I be selected to succeed him in opening up Africa to the shining light of Christianity! My methods, however, will not be Livingstone’s. Each man has his own way. His, I think, had its defects, though the old man, personally, has been almost Christ-like for goodness, patience,…and self-sacrifice. The selfish and wooden-headed world requires mastering, as well as loving charity.

The “mastering” on which Stanley himself relied in Africa came more from the Old Testament than the New: “chastisement” of his enemies, he called it, and it soon made Stanley notorious.
The trouble was that in 1872 there had been many people who found the idea of Stanley as Livingstone’s disciple too incongruous to stomach. They had greeted “How I Found Livingstone” with derision and disbelief. They did not merely doubt Stanley’s motives: it was plain he had never met Livingstone ; those letters were forgeries; the trip to Africa a stunt; the whole story a pack of lies.
To be called a forger and imposter dealt Stanley a would that never fully healed. As he wrote years later: “All the actions of my life, and I may say of my thoughts, have been since 1872 coloured by [that] storm of abuse” He had good reason to be touchy. He carried deep scars from his own childhood in the workhouse—the double stigma of pauperism and illegitimacy. He had tried to conceal them by assuming the identity of a full-blown American, sometimes bending, in trivial respects, the facts to fit his own story. (For example he claimed to have served as an officer in the U.S. navy, whereas he had really been a clerk.) His own sensitivity made him acutely insensitive to others.
The storm of misrepresentation that burst on his head after discovering Livingstone came from the three sources: from rival much-racking newspapers, jealous of the New York Herald’s amazing scoop; from eminent men of the Royal Geographical Society, humiliated by their own amateurish efforts to resupply Livingstone; and from personal friends of Dr. Kirk (later Sir John), the British Agent at Zanzibar, whom Stanley had denounced for not giving prompter aid. Stanley had no talent for disarming this kind of enemy. He beat them to the ground or, as happened increasingly, he ignored them. As he said himself: “So numerous were my enemies that my friends become dumb, and I had to resort to silence as a protection against outrage.” Silence can be golden. It can sometimes be reckless too. It made him seem less vulnerable by concealing his acute sensitivity. It hardly served to defend his reputation the next time abuse came down on his head. And soon, like tropical rain, the abuse came down once more.
[…]
In April 1875, on his return from Mtesa’s court, sailing in the Lady Alice down the western shore of Lake Victoria, Stanley had fallen foul of some tribesmen at a small island called Bumbireh Island. They had refused him food, threatened him with their spears and arrows, pulled his hair, as though it had been a wig, dragged the Lady Alice forcibly up the shore, and stolen her oars. Stanley extricated himself with difficulty from this encounter, killing fourteen of the enemy but suffering no casualties himself, not even a man wounded. In fact, he lost nothing but his dignity—and his oars. The oars were soon recovered, and four months later Stanley captured and chained up the petty chief of the island and offered him to his overlord in exchange for a suitable ransom. When the offer was refused, Stanley decided to make an example of the people of Bumbireh.
His own published account of the incident was vivid, too vivid for his own good. He wanted “to punish Bumbireh with the power of a father punishing a stubborn yet disobedient son.” The method he chose was to return to Bumbireh and empty box after box of Snider bullets into the ranks of the tribesman while staying just out of range of their spears and arrows. He claimed to have shot down thirty-three men and wounded a hundred, many fatally. “We had great cause to feel gratitude.” The “victory” had put everyone in excellent heart. “We made a brave show as we proceeded along the coast, the canoes thirty-seven in number containing 500 men [including native allies] paddling to the sounds of sonorous drums and the cheering tones of the bugle, the English, American and Zanzibar flags flying gaily in union with a mot animating scene.”
A more subtle man than Stanley would have pretended that he had hatred for business. Stanley seemed to have rather enjoyed　it and—worse—enjoyed writing about it. If he had been, as he once was, a reporter describing a fight with Red Indians, his tone would have been more acceptable. In Africa, the conventions were different.
Protests were made to the Royal Geographical Society and to the Foreign Office: such incidents disgraced the British flag Stanley boasted of carrying alongside the American one. Stanley’s fellow explorers, like Baker, shook their heads. It was “quite new” for simple explorers to go around “plundering villages” and “shooting natives”. “Neither Speke, nor yourself,” Baker wrote to Grant, nor “Livingstone nor myself ever presumed upon such acts, but suffered intrigue and delays with patience.” Worst of all was Stanley’s inability to keep his mouth shut. “There is an amount of bad taste about him that is simply incurable.” If Stanley ever returned to England, he would need friends. Why go out of his way to alienate people?
But would Stanley return? Stanley was himself far from certain of that in September 1876, despite his voyage in the Lady Alice around Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika, as he set off for the Lualaba to try to solve the last great mystery of African geography.

*******************End Quote********************* [From pages 26-29 with one paragraph ellipted]

Obviously I took that completely out of context. Hopefully it still makes sense. And again I apologize for the length of the quotation. But if you found that interesting, I think you’ll like this book. It’s a fair representation of how the entire book is written.

First, you’ll notice Pakenham’s habit of creating suspense in the narrative. As a matter of historical record, of course, he knows full well whether Stanley will return to England or not. But he’s not about to tell the reader just yet. He leaves the question hanging, and hooks you into reading the next passage.
And the whole book is written in this style. You’re constantly left in suspense about how events will resolve. Will the reinforcements reach Gordon in time? Is the Emin Pasha dead, or is he still out there somewhere in the Sudan? Who will reach Fashoda first, the French or the English? And will the French and English actually go to war over Fashoda?

Like a skilled story writer, there is a lot of foreshadowing going on, but no important plot points are given away before their time. Even basic facts, like which countries will get what colonies in Africa, are all kept hidden in suspense . (Of course if you get impatient you can always just flick to the map in the back to see how Africa ended up. And I frequently did this when I got impatient.)

Secondly, the above excerpt is a good representation of the rich character portraits Pakenham creates. One of the things I liked about this book is that Pakenham writes about real 3-dimensional human beings with complex motivations. He doesn’t write about “good” or “bad” people, but instead works to see what makes them tick, and what makes them do the things they do.

And Stanley is only one of many fascinating characters that you meet in this book. There’s also Brazza, the young idealistic French/Italian explorer (and Stanley’s bitter rival) who is convinced that peaceful free trade will help Africa only to become appalled 20 years later at the horrible human rights abuses carried out in the name of Free Trade in the French Congo colony that he had founded.
And there is Charles Gordon, who is sent by the British government to evacuate the troops out of Khartoum, and ends up instead deciding to stay in Khartoum and try and hold out against the enemy (creating a huge political crisis back in London).
And there is Cecil Rhodes, and his dream of a British Empire stretching from Cape Town to Cairo, and the founder of Rhodesia.
And the Scottish missionary Alexander Mackay who tries to evangelize the subjects of the brutal King Mwanga.
And Luggard, the British general who is sent to Buganda to protect the missionaries there, and instead ends up getting into a power struggle with the French Catholic missionaries which has deadly results
And Emin Pasha, a German convert to Islam, who is rumored to be holding out in the mysterious corners of the Sudan with the remnants of Gordon’s army while European expeditions try to figure out whether he was alive or dead.
And many many other fascinating figures who populate this book.

Pakenham also uses his skill at story telling to describe the political side of the story that was happening back in Europe.
I would never recommend this book to anyone who didn’t like history. But if you like history, and if you enjoy some of political and diplomatic intrigue, you’ll find that in this book also. And you’ll also find plenty of rich characters populating the chambers of European politics.
Like Gladstone, prime minister of England and the “Grand Old Man” of the English liberal party. He is firmly convinced imperialism is evil (and has campaigned on this platform for years). But because of political pressures he gives in to the empire builders at several key points.
And Lord Salisbury, whose policy is to use diplomacy rather than war to obtain British colonies in Africa.
And Bismarck, who skillfully uses The Scramble in Africa to try and keep all of Germany’s enemies off balance.
And King Leopold, who through years of secret diplomatic negotiation is able to turn the tiny European power of Belgium into a great colonial power in Africa.
And “Bulldog” Morel and Roger “Tiger” Casement, two British humanitarians who work tirelessly to expose the horrible atrocities going on in the Belgium Congo.
And Winston Churchill, young rising star in the British Colonial Office, who struggles to keep the colonial governors under control.
And many many others.

And finally, like all good history books, this is not only entertaining, but you learn a lot from it. In particular, it gives you a very good idea of why the map of Africa is drawn like it is. And perhaps, as a result, goes a fair way to helping you understand African politics today. In fact, given how little we Americans know about Africa, this book goes a long way to filling in a very important gap in our historical knowledge. In fact since I learned almost nothing about Africa in my school years, I almost wish someone had made me read this book back then. I think it would have been a lot more informative than any number of other books I read at school. If I were teaching a college history course, I think I’d make sure this book was on the curriculum.

And in addition to learning about Africa, the book also teaches you about a lot of the prominent statesman in Europe during the period. And it also shows how The Scramble for Africa helped build into the lead-up for World War I. (The period of The Scramble ends only two years before the outbreak of World War I, and by the end of the book the alliances that will pit England, France and Russia against Germany have already been formed.)

********************************************************************:
Negatives:

Any negative comments I have about this book are just quibbles, compared to what on the whole I thought was a really excellent book. But here are my quibbles nonetheless:

* There are an incredible amount of dramatis personae to keep track of. Because the author gives most of them memorable descriptions (see the above example for Stanley) they usually stick in your mind, and for the most part you can easily remember who is who. Around page 400 or so, however, I will confess to being a bit overwhelmed with names. Particularly some characters who I hadn’t seen for a few hundred pages would sometimes make reappearances, and the author would assume I still remembered who they were. This may be unavoidable with such a vast subject matter. But at any rate, the index (very thorough, and very accurate) was a great help for flipping back a few pages and reminding yourself who was who.

* As part of his literary style, Pakenham will often start his chapters out in medias res . He will often start out with the central conflict of the chapter, then moves backwards in time to show how that conflict developed, and then move forward to show how the conflict was resolved. This is a deliberate choice as part of his story-telling technique, and for the most part it works pretty well. Once or twice I got a bit confused about the chronology though. Nothing I couldn’t figure out after going back and re-reading parts of the chapter, but it did cause me brief confusion once or twice.

* I’ve seen some on-line reviews criticize this book for being Eurocentric. To my mind, though, that’s just the nature of the subject matter. “The Scramble for Africa” is about the European nations scrambling against each other. It’s inherently about the colonizers, not the colonized. (Of course their story deserves to be told as well, but that would be a different book.)
It is noticeable, however, that the Africans almost always appear simply as the antagonists or victims of the Europeans, and seldom get the same in depth character examinations that Pakenham gives his European characters.

* Not all events all covered with the same thoroughness. I suppose it’s inevitable that given the nature of the subject matter, Pakenham has to pick and chose somewhat. He sometimes seems to have a bias towards his native Britain, and we get much more insight into the political situation in Britain during the scramble than we get into any other country.
Some parts of the Scramble are barely covered at all. For example, since Libya has been in the news a lot lately, I was hoping to learn a little bit about their colonial history, but the Italian acquisition of Tripoli is only given a couple sentences.
Likewise, very little is said of Portugal and its colonies: Angola and Mozambique. There’s a good reason for this, since Portugal actually acquired it’s colonies before the period of The Scramble began. But it still would have been interesting to learn how Portugal was reacting to The Scramble, or what was happening inside its colonies during this period, especially since the colonial legacy caused so much trouble in Angola and Mozambique during the 1970s and 80s.
But I suppose it is impossible to include everything in one volume. At 738 pages, the book is probably long enough already.

* I would have liked to hear more about what happened to many of the main characters in this book. Pakenham is very good at introducing new characters (and often going into their history). But once a character’s part in the action has finished, they are never heard from again. Stanley, for example, we follow on several adventures through this book, learn about his childhood, his insecurities, his love life, and his character defects. But then once his part in the action has been played out, we never learn what finally became of him. And that was true of many of the characters in this book. After having gotten invested in all these characters, I would have liked to at least learned how they ended up.

Again, all of these are just quibbles. None of them spoiled the book for me, but if I had to come up with some negatives, these would be them.

***********************************************************************

And lastly, a series of stray observations. These are things that are probably only of interest to me, so I’ve put them down here at the bottom. Feel free to read through them or ignore them as the fancy strikes you.　They are numbered, but in no particular order:

1). Personally I’m sympathetic to the socialist theory that imperialism is a result of the capitalist crisis of overproduction, and the need to seek out new markets in order to deal with this crisis. I think it helps explain why the age of imperialism corresponds with the birth of modern capitalism—Why Africa and Asia were ignored by Europe for so long, and then why suddenly Europe was bent on colonizing them as fast as possible, or fighting wars to forcibly open them up to trade. Since Pakenham doesn’t deal with any of this in his book, this review isn’t the place to get into that can of worms. But if you have the time, it might be worth reading up on further. (Unfortunately I can’t find any good links that explain this theory as clearly as I would like, but here’s a couple links on overproduction (here and here, and actually the Wikipedia here article isn’t bad either) and on how it relates to imperialism (here).

2). In reading this book, I think one can’t help but think of some modern parallels.
For example, the financial constraints that Europe placed upon Egypt, to ensure that repaying European investors was a higher priority than feeding the peasants in Egypt, struck me as similar to the Structural Adjustment Policies used by the IMF today.
The suppression of a popular nationalist uprising in Egypt, under the justification of maintaining stability, also struck me as having modern overtones.
It’s also noticeable how often invading armies are sent in “for the good of the native people.”
(I’m sure someone else might notice different things, but this is what jumped out at me.)

3). Sometimes when reading history (or for that matter when reading current events) it never ceases to shock you what one human being is willing to do to another human being for the sake of financial gain. And there are plenty of examples of that in this book.
And yet this is not the barbaric dark ages. The Victorian and Edwardian period is not so far removed from the morals of our own society. Modern humanitarianism was beginning to emerge, and in many of the European parliaments there was now an established socialist opposition.
On one hand there are the atrocities committed by the Belgians in the Congo. On the other hand there are the humanitarians in Britain and the United States who campaign tirelessly to stop these atrocities. There are imperialist like Cecil Rhodes, but there are also anti-imperialists like William Gladstone.
The incongruity of this period is perhaps best illustrated by the Joseph Conrad quote Pakenham includes on page 656. “It is an extraordinary thing that the conscience of Europe which seventy years ago has put down the slave trade on humanitarian grounds tolerates the Congo State today. It is as if the moral clock had been put back.”
It is this conflict between naked aggression on one hand and humanitarian concern on the other that makes this period in European politics so fascinating (and perhaps so like our own period).

4). There’s a short 10 page epilogue on the decolonization process in Africa. The books shows its age (it was published in 1991) when Robert Mugambe is described as a “pragmatist” and a “statesmen in the making” (p. 671).

5). Somewhat amazingly, Pakenham claims in his introduction that before he wrote this book, no single volume history of The Scramble for Africa existed.

6). I know this is only of interest to me, but this book ties in nicely with a number of other books I’ve read the past few years.

*Much of this book overlaps with “Three Empires on the Nile” by Dominic Green. “Three Empires on the Nile” deals with the British quagmire in Egypt and the Sudan, which are also covered in this book. Although both books cover the same events it is of course always interesting to see the different focuses different authors will put things. There are a number of in interesting antidotes in “Three Empires on the Nile” that Pakenham overlooks, and vise-versa. Both authors are excellent writers and master story tellers, and both books are recommended.

*Because this book starts out in the 1870s, many of the prominent French and German politicians of the period are the same ones who were featured in the Franco-Prussian War and were described in “The Fall of Paris” by Alistair Horne: men like Jules Ferry and Leon Gambetta on the French side and Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm I, and Crown Prince Fredrick III on the German side.

*There are also some scenes in this book which reminded me a bit of “King Solomon’s Mines” and I think I’m able to understand the inspiration for that book a little better now. Also the author Rider Haggard makes a brief appearance in this book as a clerk in South Africa.

* This book takes place after the time of Richard Burton, but at least at the beginning of the book some of the geographical issues he had been concerned with (such as the source of the Nile) are still under investigation. Burton’s name is mentioned once or twice.

* And finally, as I mentioned before Charles Gordon, Henry Loch, and Sir Garnet Wolseley were all featured both in this book, and in “Flashman and the Dragon”.

7). I’ve been reading this book on and off since about December. I started reading it as a way to procrastinate on writing my thesis. Predictably then, I had to stop reading it once thesis crunch time came.

When I picked the book up again, I had trouble remembering who some of the character were, so I ended up re-reading the first 200 pages because I was worried I had lost the thread of the story. (That was probably just me being anal retentive about it. I probably could have just struggled on if I really wanted to. But the book was so interesting that I found I didn’t really mind reading it a second time.)

Anyway, I was still living in Melbourne back when I started this book. And I discovered one night while walking around the city that Melbourne had a statue of General Charles Gordon (W) erected next to their parliament building. On the sides of the statue platform were engraved pictures detailing Gordon’s exploits in China and in the Sudan.
To the best of my knowledge, Gordon never set foot in Melbourne. But as a city in the British Empire, I imagine Melbourne erected the statue in the shock after Gordon’s death at Khartoum.
After reading about General Gordon in Pakenham’s book, I got a real kick out of seeing his statue in Melbourne, and in fact the last couple months I was in Melbourne I always used to try and make excuses to walk by the statue when I was out with friends so I could launch into a description of the history behind it.

Link of the Day
South Africa, Israel-Palestine, and the Contours of the Contemporary Global Order

2011-06-22T20:15:00.001-04:00

I don't usually agree with George Will, but his latest column on NATO and Libya really hit the nail on the head.

Flashman and the Dragon by George MacDonald Fraser

2011-06-12T05:45:00.008-04:00

(Book Review)

The eighth volume in the Flashman series. (See also: Flashman, Royal Flash, Flash for Freedom, Flashman at the Charge, Flashman and the Great Game, Flashman's Lady , Flashman and the Redskins and the original source material Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes.)

This book follows England’s greatest scoundrel on yet another adventure, and shows him yet again engaging in acts of tremendous cowardice, whining, groveling, backstabbing, and womanizing and somehow managing to come out of it all with a hero’s reputation.

But in addition to Flashman’s usual antics, as always Fraser serves up lots of historical details for the history buff to chew on.

This story takes place entirely inside China　(aside from a brief epilogue in Singapore) but there is more than enough happening in China to keep Flashman busy. During the course of the story Flashman gets mixed up in both the Taiping Rebellion and the Arrow War (Second Opium War.)

I had studied both the Taiping Rebellion and the Opium Wars before, but I had never realized that they had been going on simultaneously. (Interestingly enough, George MacDonald Fraser shows that the British army was involved in both conflicts at once.)

One of the strengths of the Flashman series is the eye for interesting historical details that George MacDonald Fraser has. This is not a bland retelling of impersonal armies meeting each other on some obscure field of battle. Fraser has obviously thoroughly done his research, and he has a talent for picking out the more bizarre episodes of history (the kind of stuff that you think is made up until you check the endnotes in the back and see that it is all documented), and integrating these parts into the book.
For example, there’s a true historical incident where a drunken Scottish private is killed of refusing to kow-tow to his Chinese captors. Flashman is there. A party of British diplomats is ambushed and captured by the Chinese government to use as hostages. Flashman is of their number. A French priest is executed by the Chinese in retaliation for a military defeat. Flashman is the last European to see him alive.
It is this eye for fascinating but forgotten history that always makes the Flashman series so interesting to read.
Granted, as always the plot has to be a bit contrived to get Flashman to all these various events. Especially since Flashman, the incurable coward, never goes into any place remotely dangerous of his own accord, the plot always has to force him into all these situations. (In just about every Flashman book there’s a section where he gets captured and forcibly taken somewhere. In this book, it happens multiple times.) But once you forgive these plot contrivances and just go along with it, it can be a lot of fun of the story.

In addition to the interesting events, Flashman always manages to meet the most interesting historical figures. And the tradition continues in this book. He is on intimate terms with the leading British diplomats and army generals (Grant, Elgin, Parks, Loch) and he meets several of the rising stars of the British army in China (Wolseley and Gordon both of whom would later achieve infamy in the Sudan).
Flashman has several run-ins with American solider Ward, the original founder of the Ever Victorious Army which General Gordon would later lead to victory against the Taipings. Fraser claims that because Ward was later overshadowed by Charles “Chinese” Gordon, today most people have never even heard of him, but Ward plays a major part in this book.
Flashman also meets, and gives detailed descriptions of many of the leaders of the Taiping Rebellion (Loyal Prince Lee, Hung Jen-kan, and the half brother of Jesus Christ himself Hung Hsiu-chuan).
In the Manchu government, Flashman has an audience with the Son of Heaven, Emperor Hsien Feng, ends up on intimate terms with the woman who would later become the Dowager Empress of China, and becomes involved in her power struggles against the other Chinese nobles (Prince I and Sang-kol-in-sen).
Add in an interlude in which Flashman travels with female bandit leader Szu-Zhan, and this small little book is more than packed full with enough interesting historical details to keep any reader interested. I may not agree with all of Fraser’s viewpoints (more on that below), but I can’t deny he writes interesting books.

During the first half of the book Flashman is caught up in the politics of the Taiping Rebellion. The second half of the book concerns the Second Opium War, and Flashman is on the march to Peking.

The Taiping Rebellion was a massive uprising against the Manchu government led by a former Cantonese clerk Hung Hsui-chuan who claimed to be the half brother of Jesus Christ.
This is something that I covered during my college history courses, but at the time the scope of the war hadn’t really sunk in. When doing a survey course of Chinese history, the Taiping Rebellion had seemed like just one more event in a long list of upheavals. But Fraser draws attention to how massive this rebellion really was.
From the endnotes:

“The Taiping Rebellion was the worst civil war in history, and the second bloodiest war of any kind, being exceeded in casualties only by the Second World War, with its estimated 60 million dead. How many died during the fourteen years of the Taiping Rebellion can only be guessed; the lowest estimate is 20 million, but 30 million is considered more probable (three times the total for the First World War). When it is remembered that the Taiping struggle was fought largely with small arms and only primitive artillery, some idea may be gained of the scale of the land fighting, with its attendant horrors of massacre and starvation….The bloodiest battle ever fought on earth was the Third Battle of Nanking in 1864, when in three days the dead exceeded a hundred thousand.” (p.293)

It’s odd to think that in China, the land of Confucianism and Eastern philosophy, the most massive civil war in their history was inspired by a sort of pseudo-Christianity. And from the European perspective, Fraser brings out this awkwardness fully.

Since the Flashman books are from the perspective of the British, Fraser shows the split in the European community. Some of the Europeans favor the Taipings as fellow Christians and democrats. However some of Europeans are anti-Taiping because they regard the movement as a heresy and there are reports of great cruelty from the Taiping army.　　The British government tries to maintain an awkward neutrality, but it is forced into the war when the Taiping Rebels advance on Nanking. (The Taipings, for their part, expect help from the European nations because they are fellow Christians, and are confused when it is refused.)

Although he quotes sources from both sides in the endnotes, Fraser is of the opinion that the Taipings started out as an egalitarian movement, but quickly developed into a movement that was much more cruel and bloodthirsty than the Manchu government they sought to replace.
Flashman, after being taken on a tour through a Taiping controlled city, sees the contrast between the luxury the Taiping leaders live in, and the poverty in which the ordinary people live.
“I made a mental salute to the Taiping Rebellion—like all revolutionary movements (and for that matter all governments) it was plainly designed to ensure the rulers an abundance of fleshpot, while convincing the ruled that austerity was good for the soul. But baring the Papists, I couldn’t think of a regime that had the business so nicely in hand as this one” Flashman says on page 105.

If this wasn’t obvious enough, Fraser draws the comparison between the Taiping revolution and Chinese Communist Party even more clearly in the endnotes.

“One revolution is probably very much like another, and readers of Flashman’s narrative will no doubt detect resemblances between Taipingdom and Communist China a few decades ago. The Taipings were, of course, a socialist movement….The pronouncements of the Heavenly King seem to have been received with the same kind of reverence later accorded to the thoughts of Chairman Mao.” (p.310)

This is a reminder that popular revolutions have a history of turning into brutal dictatorships even before the communist revolutions of the 20th century. For those of us sympathetic to revolutionary politics, this should be a cautionary note.

[There is another perhaps another point that deserves to be made about the Taiping Rebellion. It shows historically how quickly messianic movements can spring up, and how easily people will believe it. Fraser doesn’t make this point explicitly, but it struck me while reading the book. If we credit that Hung Hsui-chaun was not the son of God, and that the millions of Chinese peasants who flocked to his cause were sharing a mass delusion, it seems to me we should apply the same skepticism to the claims of his alleged half-brother Jesus Christ.]

The second half of the book deals with Arrow War (otherwise known as the Second Opium War) and the British and French advance on Peking, culminating in the burning of the Emperor’s Summer Palace.

Today this is considered one of the worst vandalisms in history, and even at it’s time it was controversial. (Karl Marx in “The Civil War in France” said that the French and British bourgeois had no right to be appalled when the Paris Communards burned down the houses of the rich, because the bourgeois armies had done the same thing in China.)

George MacDonald Fraser shows all the events leading up to the burning, and even recreates the debate surrounding the decision. By the end of it all, you can understand why the British army makes the decision, even if you don’t entirely agree with it. It almost seems like a rational decision in light of everything that happened.

…almost, that is, if you overlook the fact that the British and French armies didn’t have any right to be in Peking in the first place. And this is some context which is lacking from Fraser’s book. Somehow with all his many historical notes, he never gets around to talking about the origins of the Arrow War, and the flimsy justification by which British and French armies claimed the right to march on Peking.

And that brings me to the last point. At times this book seems to have an anti-Chinese bias. There are very few sympathetic Chinese characters in the book, and both the Manchus and the Taipings characters are portrayed as being either insane or sadistic, or Machiavellian.
Granted the era Fraser is writing about is not one of the high points in Chinese history. The Taipings were really religious fanatics, and the Manchu government was really incredibly corrupt. But I couldn’t help feeling that a more sympathetic novelist would have tried to humanize what was going on, instead of simply type casting the Chinese in the role of the exotic “other”. Once again Fraser seems to be engaged in Orientalism in which instead of seeking to understand the Chinese, he seeks to exaggerate the differences in order to create a strange and mysterious land for his European characters to have adventures in.

By contrast, all the British leaders are portrayed as honorable gentleman. Grant, Elgin, Parks, Loch, Wolseley et cetera are all portrayed as respecting an honorable code of war that and diplomacy that is completely absent from the Chinese side. Flashman himself is portrayed as a totally reprehensible human being (masquerading as a British war hero), but unfortunately this satire on Victorian imperial culture extends no further than the title character—in this book, at least. (In some of the other books Fraser has been more critical of the British military ruling class.)

I’m no expert, but just reaching for what is already on my bookshelf, there is at least one book which gives a very different view of the war. “The Chinese put up a strong resistance, which was rewarded by corresponding carnage. Women were raped and men were ritually humiliated: their queues (long pigtails) were cut off and they were made to kowtow,” (From “The Decline and Fall of the British Empire” by Piers Brendon (A), p.108)

This is a view of the war completely absent from the Flashman book. In Fraser’s retelling, all the inhumanity is entirely on the Chinese side. The looting of the Summer Palace by British and French soldiers is described, but that’s about it. And even in this case Fraser goes out of his way to quote Wolseley, who suspected that Chinese villagers plundered more than the British and French forces.

[I’m not sure if Fraser’s politics changed as he aged. I felt like I was largely on board with him in the first few Flashman books, but the past few books I’ve been wanting to distance myself from his views more and more.]

**************************************

Karl Marx, in his columns for the New York Daily Tribune, wrote extensively on the Arrow War. His writings on China have been collected at this website here [LINK HERE]. Although Marx is today remembered mostly for his economic philosophy, these political writings are fascinating to read. The way he sharply cuts through the official government and newspaper reports to get to the truth reminds one of Noam Chomsky's writings today. (Although Engels actually wrote many of these articles credited to Marx. But still.)

To his credit, Fraser does mention Marx's writings on the Arrow War in his footnotes to this book.

********************************************************

One final addendum: because this is a period when the British army spanned the globe, some of the characters in this book, General Charles Gordon, Sir Garnet Wolseley, and Sir Henry Loch, also figure prominently in the Scramble for Africa, which is the other book I’m currently reading. But more about that in my next book review (coming soon.)

Link of the Day
There is Much More to Say by Noam Chomsky

Disturbing Article

2011-05-27T08:52:00.001-04:00

(Dated March 17th, but I'm just coming across it now.)

Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media

The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

(Follow the link to read the rest of the article.)

Osama's Death

2011-05-03T00:48:00.001-04:00

I was debating whether or not to do a post on the celebrations surrounding Osama's death, but Phil's post has saved me the trouble. Read it here.

Culture Smart! Cambodia by Graham Saunders

2011-05-02T01:01:00.002-04:00

(Book Review)

This was one of three books I bought on Cambodia in preparation for my trip out here. The other two were "Moon Handbooks: Cambodia" and "Lonely Planet: Cambodia."

Both of those other books, although extremely useful, were more reference books, and not the kind of thing you would read straight through.
"Culture Smart! Cambodia" may not be very big, but it is easily possible to read it all the way through. And so I'm reviewing it on this book review project.

As someone who, so far, knows little to nothing about Cambodian culture, I can't comment on the accuracy of the information contained within this book. So I'll have to contain my comments to peripheral issues such as the readability.

It's a bit on the dry side, actually. I wouldn't go as far to say it's poorly written (everything is easy to understand) but it's not well written. Compared to the warm friendly writing style of "The Lonely Planet" guide (which really sucks you in) this is written in a rather boring way. The author is trying to convey a lot of information to you in a short amount of space, but you get the feeling he's not really enjoying what he's doing, and that this is just another chore for him.

Several times when reading this book, I would come to the end of the page, and then realize I had been so bored by what I had been reading that I hadn't absorbed any of the information, and then go have to go back to the top and start again. (Fortunately the pages are pretty small.)

The author's page also contains an interesting biography.

"Graham Saunders has a Ph.D in East Asian studies from the University of Hull, England. An Australian by birth, he spent twenty-eight years teaching in East Malaysia and Brunei, and has made numerous visits to the countries of the region, including Cambodia."

Oh, well, thank goodness they were able to find someone who at least dropped by from time to time.
Given what a large expat community there is in Cambodia, I'm surprised they didn't get someone who had at least lived in the country.

On the plus side: the book is small, portable, and (assuming you don't get bored by it) can be read in a very short time. It covers all sorts of relevant topics very succinctly, so it's excellent to use as a crash course on Cambodia. Which I guess is all you really expect from a book like this anyway.

Link of the Day
The Chomsky Sessions - Education and Economics

The Fighter

2011-04-25T18:22:00.001-04:00

(Movie Review)

I don't need to tell you that this movie has been highly praised by the critics and the Academy Awards. Plus every one I know who has seen this movie has recommended it to me. And I really like Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale.

I was still reluctant to see this movie, just because I don't generally like sports movies.

I'm not a sports fan. I never understood why it should matter to me why one person I don't know won a boxing match against someone else I don't know. Plus I find sports movies to be pretty predictable.

I suppose someone who just admitted to still watching Batman cartoons (see previous post) can't really become an intellectual snob about sports movies. But logical or not, we all have our instinctive likes and dislikes.

Not being a sports fan held me back from embracing this movie completely. I didn't really accept the premise that the whole self-worth of Mark Wahlberg's character relied on him winning boxing matches.
And I never understood why I should want him to win instead of his opponents (who presumably had trained just as hard.)

But, this is also a film which aspires to be a lot more than just a sports film. There is a lot of family drama. And this film is about a man trying to assert his own individuality against a family that wants to swallow him up.
And Christian Bale's story arc (about hitting bottom because of drug addiction) gets almost equal time with that of Mark Wahlberg's story. I know Bale won best supporting actor in this flick, but he's really almost a co-star.

And this film gets another point from me for having a great feel good soundtrack. Thanks to this film I've discovered a new great band, "The Heavies". Their high energy song "How you like me now" does a great job of starting the movie. (And if you're unfamiliar with this song, check it out on youtube--link here.)

Not that I agreed with every single song this film used. (I've always thought "Here I go Again" by Whitesnake was pretty cheesy.) But on the whole it's a great soundtrack.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky: Solutions for Central America

Batman: Under the Red Hood

2011-04-23T13:14:00.003-04:00

(Movie Review)

One of the disadvantages of doing a movie review project, in which I review every single new movie I see, is that I can no longer hide my guilty viewing pleasures.

So, as much I would like to say I spent the other night re-watching "Citizen Kane," the truth is that I was (sigh) watching yet another cartoon movie about comic book superheroes.

Guilty pleasures, almost by definition, can not be defended intellectually. But if I were asked why, as a grown man, comic books still held some sort of attraction for me, I would answer that it was the idea of collaborative story telling being extended over a period of several decades. (I used this same excuse previously in another post, when reviewing "Inheritance," and discussing the evolution of some of the former teenage sidekicks in the DC comic book universe.)

This is what fascinated me as a kid: the idea that modern comic books were continuing a story that had started 60 or 70 years ago, and that a comic book written today could reference some past event from another comic book written 20 or 30 years ago, and tie it into a story arc going on now.
And, although I no longer regularly read comic books, to the extent that I still keep half an eye on what the industry is up to, this continues to be the attraction for me.

Not, of course, that the industry always takes full advantage of the artistic opportunities offered to it by this medium of story telling. Not by a long shot. Most of the time they're just out for quick buck rather than trying to re-create Faulkner's tapestry of interconnected stories. But I still find the inherent potential of the medium interesting.

(There's a certain type of person who is interested in this kind of thing. We're called geeks. If you're not already one of us, I suppose the appeal probably can not be explained to the uninitiated. I have no hopes of making converts here-- I'm just trying to explain why some of us find it interesting.)

This particular movie is based on a story arc that played out in the comic books in 2005-2006, and as most comic book stories do, it ties together threads from several previous comic book stories.

There is a superhero called Batman (created in 1939) who adopted a young orphan named Dick Grayson, and trained him to be the first Robin (1940). Dick Grayson eventually grew up, and left the role of Robin at age 18 to become Nightwing (1984). Batman adopted a new young boy named Jason Todd, and trained him to become the second Robin (1983). Jason Todd was eventually killed by the Joker (1988). But then Jason Todd returned from the dead (2005), this time disguised as the Red Hood. (The Red Hood, of course, being the Joker's former identity before he fell in the vat of acid and went insane (1951).)

[A quick sidenote here:
I remember in 1988 when Jason Todd was killed off. I was still in elementary school, and I didn't yet have access to comic books at the time. (I wouldn't be able to get my hands on comic books until I had some money in my pocket and a driver's license to take myself to the store--so I didn't start collecting until I was 16.) But like all young boys I was interested in comics, and the death of Robin was one of those big media events that made it into the general culture. I suspect other people my age may remember some of the buzz around this.
My classmates at school talked about Robin's death, and I was absolutely horrified that DC would kill of my favorite character. (Watching Superfriends, or the old Batman cartoons, I always identified with Robin because he was supposed to be around my age.)
It wasn't until years later, when I actually started reading comic books for myself, that I realized the Robin they had killed off hadn't been THE Robin, Dick Grayson, but rather just the replacement Robin, Jason Todd. This was perhaps a bit of dishonest marketing on DC's part. (They had advertised it as the death of Robin, without any qualifications.) But it definitely got people's attention.]

Anyway, remembering the death of Jason Todd as being a pivotal moment in the comic books of my youth, I was curious to see how his return played out.

The movie starts out with the Joker beating Jason Todd with a crow bar. And right from the beginning we see that, although this movie is a cartoon, it has earned it's PG-13 rating.
(At the risk of sounding like a media prude, I've got to say I've got mixed feelings about mixing this kind of brutal violence with comic book superhero movies. This scene is straight out of the comic book, but because of the different nature of the medium, it didn't seem quite as gruesome on the page as it did played out on the screen. I'm not sure I feel comfortable with this kind of bone breaking brutality mixed in with my escapist fiction.)

Shortly after Jason Todd is killed, we cut to 5 years later when a new mysterious supervillian, The Red Hood, is trying to intimidate Gotham's existing crime lords. Because of the sudden transition between scenes, it should be obvious to anyone with any intelligence at this point that the Red Hood is connected to Jason Todd. (One of the reasons I haven't been worried about revealing any spoilers in this review is because the movie doesn't even try to hide the surprise. I guess they figured that most people who would rent this movie probably already knew the story anyway.)

However there are several chase and fight scenes between Batman and Jason Todd (with Nightwing making a few cameo appearances) before Batman finally figures everything out.

The movie has several high adrenaline fighting scenes, so I guess you get what you expect with a comic book movie.
And even though this is a low budget direct to DVD movie, they don't hold back on the quality of the action scenes. There's plenty of choreography that looks like it took a bit of time for the writers and animators to plan out.

Although by the end of the movie, the fighting did get repetitive. At least it did for me.

"Batman: Mask of the Phantasm" (to compare with another animated Batman movie), did a good job of mixing up the various action scenes, so you don't get too bored with any one thing. There was fighting on motorcycles, fighting on an airplane, fighting with a jet pack, a giant suction engine, et cetera.

"Under the Red Hood" by contrast has a lot of fighting and chasing scenes that are all pretty much the same thing. It's well done for what it is, but I found myself getting slightly bored.

The plot is decently complex for a comic-book movie. There are several different players involved with different motives. Batman is fighting the Red Hood, who is fighting the Black Mask, who is trying to establish control of the other Gotham crime lords. And the Joker is also involved, switching his alliances as the events suit him.

If you're a comic book fan, it's probably worth the rental. If you're not a fan, don't bother.

[Second side note:
Over the years there have been a lot of snickering comments about Batman's need to surround himself with young boys. After Dick Grayson grew up, Batman immediately replaced him with another Jason Todd. And when Jason Todd was killed, he was immediately replaced by yet another young boy as the 3rd Robin (Tim Drake, 1989).
Of course from a marketing standpoint, it's easy to see why DC comics is doing this. Batman and Robin are a well established brand, and for the brand to remain familiar to the general public you always have to have the same old Batman, and some sort of recognizable Robin. You can kill off one of these characters to temporarily increase sales, but then you better replace them with someone who looks almost exactly the same.
The obsession in comic books with protecting the brand recognizability, rather than focusing on story telling or naturally evolving characters, is the major thing hindering the potential of the medium. (I wasn't clued into just how big a deal brand recognition was in the comic book world until I started reading the blog of former DC insider "Occasional Superheroine").

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky critiques ideas by both politicians and citizens to achieve Mideast peace

Also: From Peter's blog, an interesting post explaining the real reason the Michigan economy is in such bad shape.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

2011-04-21T20:25:00.002-04:00

(Book Review)

So here I am, only now as an adult finally getting around to reading this classic piece of children's literature. (Although I suspect I might be in good company on this. I'd be curious to see if most other people read this book as a child or as an adult.)

As a child I never cared to read this book. Partly because I was so over-exposed to the story that there didn't seem any point in actually reading the book.
As a child I saw multiple versions of this story on film. Mainly the Disney version (which, as a big fan of Disney animation I watched more times than I can count). But school teachers also seemed fond of showing us other movie versions back in elementary school. And at least once (in fourth grade I think it was) my class all got taken to a play of "Alice in Wonderland." Also in my house we had the Fisher-Price deluxe comic book and tape set of Alice in Wonderland, which retold the story in an abridged form.

So, like a lot of childhood classics, this story was spoiled for me by overexposure long before I developed the reading ability to try it for myself. (It's a shame, most children's classics are probably spoiled for children in this way.)

But also I have to say that I never really particularly cared for the story of Alice in Wonderland.
For one thing, at the end of the story the whole thing turns out to be just a dream, and as I child I always hated stories that turned out to be just someone's dream. (I'm still not wild about these kind of stories actually.)
Also I didn't much care for the episodic nature of the story, and the fact that it did not have any sort of linear plot. And, I also shared Alice's frustration with the way everything in Wonderland refused to make sense. It's not that I didn't understand all the puns and jokes. I got them, but I didn't think they were all that funny, and I shared Alice's frustration that none of the characters in Wonderland were able to give up their literal view of looking at words and so the conversation just went round in circles.
(I don't know if this says anything in particular about the kind of child I was, or if this is just common for lots of children.)

But, now as an adult, I've decided to finally go back and check this book off my reading list. Why?
1). The standard desire to be a well read person and work my way through all the great classics
2). Because of my interest in Victorian era history, I've also been trying to read more Victorian era literature.
3). Increasingly it seems like more and more authors I read quote from Lewis Carroll anyway, so I thought it might be worth while to go back and read the original book for myself.

For example Stephen Pinker in his book "The Language Instinct" quoted often from Lewis Carroll to illustrate the peculiarities of English grammar. When describing a dummy element in a sentence that exists only to satisfy the rules of syntax, Pinker quotes the following passage from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland."

I proceed [said the Mouse]. "Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him: and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable--"'
`Found WHAT?' said the Duck.
`Found IT,' the Mouse replied rather crossly: `of course you know what "it" means.'
`I know what "it" means well enough, when I find a thing,' said the Duck: `it's generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?

And indeed, the whole book is filled with these types of plays on the English language.
As is probably true of any story that relies excessively on puns for humor, there are some real groaners mixed in as well. Observe:

”If I’d been the whiting,” said Alice, whose thoughts were still running on the song. “I’d have said to the porpoise, “Keep back, please: we don’t want you with us!”
“They were obliged to have him with them,” the Mock Turtle said: “no wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise.”
“Wouldn’t it really?” said Alice in a tone of great surprise.
“Of course not,” said the Mock Turtle: “why, if a fish came to me, and told me he was going a journey, I should say, “With what porpoise?’”
“Don’t you mean ‘purpose’?” said Alice.
“I mean what I say,” the Mock Turtle replied In an offended tone

I leave it to you whether the pay off for that joke was worth the set-up.

[Quick sidenote: reading this book did get me curious as to how "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" is translated. Because I know it is popular in many other languages. While I was living in Japan, for example, I knew the books was available in the Japanese language as "Fushigi na Kuni no Alisu." I never really thought much of it at the time. Most Western classics are popular with the Japanese in translation. But after having read this book myself, I can only imagine how much headaches it must have caused the translator.]

Just as some of the word play in this book struck me as better than others, so I found large sections of this book to be quite clever, and other parts seemed just silly nonsense.

Although after having consulted the wikipedia entry on this book, I am wondering now if large parts of this book I did not appreciate because it was simply over my head.

For example, consider the excerpt below:

"I'll try if I know all the things I used to know," [said Alice]. "Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is - oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate! However, the Multiplication Table doesn't signify: let's try Geography..."

When I read this I just thought: "well that's pretty stupid. Is this what passes for humor?"

According to Wikipedia, however: This explores the representation of numbers using different bases and positional numeral systems: 4 x 5 = 12 in base 18 notation, 4 x 6 = 13 in base 21 notation, and 4 x 7 could be 14 in base 24 notation. Continuing this sequence, going up three bases each time, the result will continue to be less than 20 in the corresponding base notation. (After 19 the product would be 1A, then 1B, 1C, 1D, and so on.)

Well that went right over my head. Now that wikipedia explains the joke to me, I can appreciate it, but I certainly didn't get it at the time.

Likewise, a lot of the nonsense poems that pop up in this book I thought were just pretty stupid the first time reading them. After wikipedia explained to me that Lewis Carroll was parodying other poems already in existence, I appreciate them a lot more.

I was in the bookstore once, and I saw a book called "The Annotated Alice" (W), which has extensive margin notes explaining everything. I regret to say I didn't buy it. But if I ever read this book again, I think I should get the annotated version.

A couple other sidenotes:
1). I'm not sure the characterization of Alice in this book was entirely consistent. She seemed to be very childlike and naive at sometimes, and very adult like and intelligent at other times. It seemed to me that in any given situation she just had whatever reaction was needed to set up the joke or pun. But maybe I'm being harsh.

2). I was a bit surprised to find out that many of the characters and poems I associated with this book (Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, the Walrus and the Carpenter) never actually made an appearance. Turns out (again according to Wikipedia) that they are all from the second book "Through the Looking Glass." (Maybe I'll have to read that one next.)

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky - Anarchism (Rare UK Radio Appearance)

Chinatown

2011-04-19T15:36:00.001-04:00

(Movie Review)

Well, another film classic I can now check off my list as having seen.

For years now, Chinatown has been one of those movies that has been vaguely on my list of movies to see. Every time I would go to the video store, I would see it staring back at me from the racks. And I would think to myself, "This is supposed to be a great classic film. I really should see it."
And then I would usually think, "I don't know if I'm in the mood for a great classic film tonight. Why don't I numb my brain for a while by watching something stupid?" And then I would go and rent some junk movie or something.

A few years ago, when I was on my classic hard-boiled - detective - movies - kick, I would see "Chinatown" in the hard boiled section. And it would intrigue me. And confuse me. 1). Wasn't this movie from the 70s, not the 40s? And 2), isn't Chinatown a bit of an odd place for a hard-boiled detective story? And 3), wouldn't Jack Nicholson for the lead in the a hard boiled detective movie?

As it turns out, the answers to these questions are:
1) Although the movie was filmed in 1974, it is filmed in a bit of a retro style that seeks to evoke the old hard-boiled film classics of the 30s and 40s. (Or at least there are elements of this movie that are meant to evoke older movies, such as the opening and closing credits being obvious examples.)
Of course by now, the 1970s filming style is every bit as dated as the 1940s film style, so it is a bit strange to see one type of old movie trying to evoke images of another type of old movie. It's like retro-kitsch piled on retro-kitsch.

2). It turns out that the film actually has nothing to do with Chinatown -- aside from some throw away lines, and using Chinatown as a backdrop for the last scene.
The reason the name Chinatown was used as the title I actually never really understood until I watched the DVD featurettes, where the symbolism behind the name was explained much more clearly than it ever was in the film.
The title refers to a conversation the screenwriter had with a policeman who used to work in Chinatown. The policeman said that when he worked in Chinatown, they deliberately tried to do as little as possible, because they didn't understand the language or the culture, and they had no idea if they were helping a situation or making it worse by getting involved.
In this respect, "Chinatown" refers to a state of moral ambiguity where you don't know if your interference is helping or not. Which is why the film has almost nothing to do with Chinatown the place.

It's an interesting concept, but if the screenwriter hadn't spelled this all out very clearly in the DVD featurette, I'd still be scratching my head as to why in the world the movie had this name. This either means I'm a bit dense, or that the title was never fully explained in the film itself. (And, if as I suspect the latter, this raises the question of whether the film and it's meaning should be self-contained, or if it's fair to include bits that require further explanation.)

And 3): Jack Nicholson does an excellent job as a the laconical sarcastic detective. This comes of right from the opening scene, when a client of his realizes his wife has been cheating on him, and in despair clutches at the Venetian blinds. "You can't eat the blinds, I just had them installed," Nicholson says in his usual drawl.

It's also interesting to see Jack Nicholson in his prime. Not that this is my first early Jack Nicholson movie by any means. (I've seen at least 3 Nicholson films that predate this one: "Hell's Angels," "Easy Rider," and "Five Easy Pieces".) But these days you get so used to the older Jack Nicholson being on the screen you forget what he looked like when he was young.

And speaking of Hollywood superstars past their prime, "Chinatown" was directed by the Roman Polanski.
Now I never heard of Polanski until there was that big arrest controversy a few years ago. So it was interesting for me to finally match a film to this now infamous director. (Actually, wikipeding Roman Polanski, it turns out I've also seen another film of his: "The Pianist.")

(Uh-oh, I just realized I'm several paragraphs into this review, and I haven't even started yet. I've just been making stupid comments about who's in it, and what the title means. I better get started.)

The screenplay for this film is actually pretty intelligent. It works on two levels: on one level it's a murder mystery with a few surprises thrown in along the way. On the other hand it works as a history of some of the issues that surrounded the development of Los Angeles in the 1930s, specifically disputes over water issues.

I'm not sure everything resolved itself....

[Maybe I just missed something, but I still don't understand why the water company was dumping water in the middle of the night. The only explanation given, that they were helping the Orange tree farmers, I thought was disproved by Nicholson's character. If there was another explanation that came up I missed it.]

...but it was still a good story.

The only thing was: you know when you're in the video store, and you are deciding whether or not to rent a classic film, and you think to yourself, "You know, because this is an older film it's probably going to be really long and slow paced, and is going to be hard to sit through"?
Well guess what.

Yeah, this is an older film that moves at a bit slower pace, and is a bit harder to sit through. I guess our generation is just so spoiled by fast past action extravaganzas, with lost of explosions, and a really upbeat rocking sound track, that it's just hard to go back to these older films. (Sad how quickly things get outdated these days. Makes you wonder what people will be saying about the films of today in 35 years.)

But, if you're in the mood for an old classic that moves at a slower pace, and if you want to see some of Jack Nicholson in his prime, go ahead and check this movie out.

Link of the Day
Chomsky on the Internet

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

2011-04-13T13:16:00.002-04:00

(Movie Review)

I know this movie had gotten somewhat mixed reviews, but I wanted to see it anyway. I had enjoyed the two previous installments in "The Chronicles of Narnia" series (see my review of "Prince Caspian" here).

And, like everyone else in the Western World, I had a childhood nostalgia for the original books by C.S. Lewis.
("The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and "Prince Caspian" had both been read to me. Twice. Once by parents and then again by my first grade school teacher. "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" was the first book in this series I actually read on my own. I was curious to see what became of the Narnia characters, and so I asked the parents to buy me the book when we were on vacation in 3rd grade. I think I actually read this book twice, once in 3rd grade, and then once again in 6th grade. But I haven't read it since then, and so aside from one or two things sticking in my memory, I can't claim to remember it very well.)

And I also saw the BBC TV miniseries version of "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" (W) back around the same time, which I don't remember other than thinking it was pretty hokey.

I'm therefore very pleased that this new movie series has come along and is trying to give the Narnia series the big screen treatment it deserves.

It is a pity that this is likely to be the last installment in the series. (Based on what I've been reading, at least. After the disappointing box office performance of "Prince Caspian",this movie only just barely made in the first place. And then because this movie didn't do exceptionally well in the theaters, I'm not expecting the next installment in the series to get any funding. But I'd like to be proved wrong.) But I suppose this series was not the first attempt to film "The Chronicles of Narnia" and it will likely not be the last. Hopefully in another 20 years someone else will take another crack at it.

One of the things that separate the Narnia series from some other book/movie fantasy movie franchises out there is that every story in the Narnia series is quite different from the one that came before it. Unlike, say the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, or "Harry Potter", where each movie has a very similar plot to the one that came before it, the Narnia stories have very different plots for each different book.

"The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe" was more or less a straight up fantasy story. There was a lot of wonder about seeing a new world filled with fantastic creatures, and a standard good versus evil epic battle scene at the end.
"Prince Caspian" added in an element of legends and myths. The events of the first story are so far removed in the past that they are only vaguely remembered in the second story, and are treated much like far away mythical subjects.

"The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" is yet again much different in tone than the first two movies. It's a sea voyage type story. It almost reads like a fantasy version of Captain Cook's diaries: you go to an exotic land, you encounter strange new people, you go off to the next exotic land.

It is tough material to make a coherent movie out of, to be sure. And because of this, it does require that you be a little bit more forgiving when you watch it. But for those of us who remember the books fondly it is fun just to see the film makers take make an attempt at transferring the story to the big screen.

Despite the fact that this film reportedly was made on a much reduced budget than the previous two films, I did think they did a good job working with the money they had. The various oceans and landscapes that pop up in the film look beautiful, and it is visually very impressive.

I would have preferred to see a few more fantastic creatures. I understand this is partly just because the script didn't call for as many new fantasy creatures, but in the two previous movies, there were lots of exotic creatures just hanging out in the background. Their reduced presence in this movie might have been due to the budget.

The character of Eustace Scrubb is very annoying, but then he was supposed to be written as annoying, so I guess you can't complain about that.
He is also supposed to serve as a lot of the comedy, and this really falls flat in my opinion. He is able to be "plain-annoying" just fine, but he never really rises to the level of "comically-annoying." In my opinion a lot of the attempts at humor in this movie were just embarrassing.

On the other hand, kudos to this movie for working in a cameo for the two older Pevensie children Peter and Susan, despite the fact that the book didn't include them. It was a nice little touch to continuity. As was the return of the White Witch from the first movie.
I'm disappointed that my favorite comedian, Eddie Izzard, did not return as the voice of Reepicheep, but since the character was animated anyway it's not so noticeable when they switch voice actors.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky--the current crisis in the middle east

Fantastic Mr. Fox

2011-04-11T12:22:00.001-04:00

(Movie Reviews)

I saw this movie based off of my friend Brett's recommendation.
Brett had apparently gone into this movie with his younger nieces and nephews expecting your standard animated children's film, and had been pleasantly surprised to discover it was full of Wes Anderson's quirky sense of humor.

Like Brett, I too consider myself a Wes Anderson fan. I haven't seen everything the man has done, but I have enjoyed "Rushmore", "The Royal Tenebaums," and "The Life Aquatic."

(Although I did write in my review of "The Life Aquatic":

Like all Wes Anderson films, however, this has a tendency to go on for a little bit too long, and get bogged down in the middle. I had the same criticism of “Rushmore” and “Royal Tenebaums.”

This wasn't as true with "Fantastic Mr. Fox." Perhaps because at 87 minutes it's shorter than any of the other Wes Anderson movies I've seen so far. And perhaps because, as a children's movie, the plot and pacing is kept a little tighter. But there were a few moments when I was squirming in my seat slightly. That last scene at the end, for example, seemed to go on for just a few beats too long.

And yet, as with the other Wes Anderson films I've seen, I always walk away chuckling. Sure they may have some slow moments, but I always walk away remembering the funny parts.
And the Wes Anderson humor grows on me. There are bits that the more I think about it, the funny they seem to be, so that I usually find the movie much funnier two days afterwards than I did when I was actually watching it. (I don't know if everyone reacts that way to Wes Anderson films, or if it's just me.) Like for example, the newspaper column Mr. Fox writes, and which he complains that his friends don't read. Or Mr. Fox making a recording of his chicken stealing plans for his records. Or pretty much any of Bill Murray's lines.

(Incidentally, Bill Murray became one of my favorite actors after I started seeing him in Wes Anderson films. Before Wes Anderson, I had been largely indifferent to Bill Murray, but Wes Anderson really knows how to make full use of Murray's dry humor. I hope the two of them continue to have many more collaborations in the future.)

Aside from the story about animals, and aside from the animation, there seems to be very little to mark this as a children's movie. Wes Anderson's unique brand of humor doesn't seem to be made any easier for the children to grasp. You would think that the studio would have inserted a lot more obvious punchlines or slapstick humor or something to make this movie more marketable for children, but, astonishingly, they resisted that temptation.

Actually the one concession that Wes Anderson seems to have made for the children's market is that all the cuss words are replaced by the word "cuss." As in "He's a cuss of a lot bigger?" or "What the cuss are you talking about?", et cetera.
This becomes a bit of humor in and off itself with the word "cuss" popping up in all sorts of situations.
It's the usual Wes Anderson ironic humor, of course, but if you like that thing it's on full display here.
(It's also a brilliant satire on the American tendency to assign moral values to phonemic utterances. When you substitute one semantically meaningless word for another semantically meaningless word, does that make it less morally bad? It obviously confused the MPAA ratings board. They ended up settling on giving this film a PG rating for what they called "slang humor.")

My only big complaint is that I wish they would have gotten younger voice actors to play the parts of the adolscents in this film. Their voices I think come off as sounding way too adult, and it takes me out of the film a bit. Other than that, a brilliantly done film.

Link of the Day
NOAM CHOMSKY - DOES ACTIVISM MATTER?...

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

2011-04-04T08:43:00.001-04:00

(Book Review)

Put this in the category of "books-I-really-should-have-read-a-long-time-ago-and-am-somewhat-embarrassed-to-admit-I'm-just-getting-around-to-now." It's been on my reading list forever, and but I've only now actually sat down and read it.

And, like most books in this category, once I finally did start reading it, I wondered why in the world I had waited so long. It's an extremely readable little book, and moreover one that really gripped me. Once I started reading it, I had a hard time putting it down, and I finished off the entire book in a few days. (Which, for me anyways, is a bit of a feat. I'm one of those people who usually takes about 6 weeks to finish a book.)

But before I get into how great this book is, let me start at the beginning and explain why it had been on my reading list.

For starters, I'm a big George Orwell fan. I have not, to my shame, read a lot of his books (I'll have to work on remedying that), but what I have read has made an impression on me.
"Keep the Aspidistra Flying" I read during my college years, when I was trying to reconcile my idealism with my middle class lifestyle and the book did a lot to shape my evolving world view.
The first time I read "1984" (again back in college)I went in expecting a political book, but was instead amazed at how beautifully it was written. For this reason "1984" was one of the only audio-books I brought with me to Japan (in an effort to keep up my English literary skills despite being surrounded by a foreign language environment.) And it's one of the few books that I've listened to so many times I've practically got it memorized. ("Animal Farm" was also included as a bonus on the same audio book.)

As for this book, Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" may not be well known to the general public, but it is often read and often quoted in the crazy leftist circles I hang out in. It is practically required reading for anarchists, and as a nominal anarchist myself it's high time I finally got around to it.

Noam Chomsky himself is a huge fan of this book, and often talks about it in articles and interviews.
Chomsky talks about the importance of the contents of the book (although not completely uncritical of the anarchist movement in Spain, Orwell does portray them as the true voice of workers' control and workers' democracy, in contrast to the totalitarian methods used by the Communist party.) But Chomsky also thinks it's important to talk bout the publishing history of the book. It was suppressed when it was first published in 1938. Only a few copies were sold in England, and the book wasn't even published in the United States. According to Chomsky, the reason has as much to do with the institutional left as it does with the right. In the 1930s communism was very fashionable among intellectuals, and it was unpopular to criticize the established Communist party. In the 1940s, the Soviet Union was our ally against Hitler. It was not until the 50s that this book was finally published in the United States, and then it was only because of the red scare, and this book was presented as cold war anti-communist propaganda. "Orwell, who had died already, would have hated it" said Chomsky (link here).

[Incidentally, while on the subject, another one of Chomsky's favorite Orwell stories is that Orwell had originally written an introduction to "Animal Farm" (W), in which he said that press censorship is not only a problem in totalitarian governments, but a form of it exists in England as well. It's just that in England, people are a lot more subtle about censorship. As if to prove Orwell's point, this introduction was suppressed.]

Anyway, all these are reasons why I should have read the book long before now. As to the actual book itself:

The book is a memoirs of Orwell's time in the Spanish - Civil - War. It describes how he arrived in Spain full of enthusiasm for the Republican Government, and then gets disillusioned by the totalitarian tactics of the Communist Party (although he remains an ardent anti-fascist till the end.)

Politics are the main thrust of this book, and yet to focus too much on politics would be to do an injustice to Orwell's writing. The real joy in this book is that it's just so well-written.
In this regard, the book truly is an overlooked gem. Not only do we have a first hand account of the historic Spanish Civil War (something invaluable in and of itself) but it's written by a writer who is worth reading--someone who knows how to use just the right words to create just the right images, and does so in a way that makes the book really flow.
Right from the beginning of the book you know you're in good hands.

In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers' table.

He was a tough-looking youth of twenty-five or six, with reddish-yellow hair and powerful shoulders. His peaked leather cap was pulled fiercely over one eye. He was standing in profile to me, his chin on his breast, gazing with a puzzled frown at a map which one of the officers had open on the table. Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend--the kind of a face you would expect in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist. There were both candour and ferocity in it; also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors. Obviously he could not make head or tail of the map; obviously he regarded map-reading as a stupendous intellectual feat. I hardly know why, but I have seldom seen anyone--any man, I mean--to whom I have taken such an immediate liking. While they were talking round the table some remark brought it out that I was a foreigner. The Italian raised his head and said quickly:

'Italiano?'

I answered in my bad Spanish: 'No, Ingles. Y tu?'

'Italiano.'

As we went out he stepped across the room and gripped my hand very hard.
Queer, the affection you can feel for a stranger! It was as though his spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy. I hoped he liked me as well as I liked him. But I also knew that to retain my first impression of him I must not see him again; and needless to say I never did see him again. One was always making contacts of that kind in Spain.

These wonderful descriptive passages continue on all through the book. In fact, if I had to choose to quote another passage to illustrate how well-written this book is, I'd be somewhat spoiled for choice. There's a very interesting passage in which Orwell gives a very detailed account of what it's like to be shot in a war and to think you're about to die (which someone else has excerpted for their website here) and there's vivid descriptions of the street fighting in Barcelona, and of the scene in which Orwell's wife warns him that the Communist Police are looking for him.

But I'll limit myself to one more long quotation, and the quoted passage below will just have to serve as an example of the pleasure that is found reading this book:

There seemed no hope of any real fighting. When we left Monte Pocero I had counted my cartridges and found that in nearly three weeks I had fired just three shots at the enemy. They say it takes a thousand bullets to kill a man, and at this rate it would be twenty years before I killed my first Fascist. At Monte Oscuro the lines were closer and one fired oftener, but I am reasonably certain that I never hit anyone. As a matter of fact, on this front and at this period of the war the real weapon was not the rifle but the megaphone. Being unable to kill your enemy you shouted at him instead. This method of warfare is so extraordinary that it needs explaining.

Wherever the lines were within hailing distance of one another there was always a good deal of shouting from trench to trench. From ourselves: 'Fascistas --maricones!' From the Fascists: ''Viva Espana! Viva Franco!'--or, when they knew that there were English opposite them: 'Go home, you English! We don't want foreigners here!' On the Government side, in the party militias, the shouting of propaganda to undermine the enemy morale had been developed into a regular technique. In every suitable position men, usually machine-gunners, were told off for shouting-duty and provided with megaphones. Generally they shouted a set-piece, full of revolutionary sentiments which explained to the Fascist soldiers that they were merely the hirelings of international capitalism, that they were fighting against their own class, etc., etc., and urged them to come over to our side. This was repeated over and over by relays of men; sometimes it continued almost the whole night. There is very little doubt that it had its effect; everyone agreed that the trickle of Fascist deserters was partly caused by it. If one comes to think of it, when some poor devil of a sentry--very likely a Socialist or Anarchist trade union member who has been conscripted against his will--is freezing at his post, the slogan 'Don't fight against your own class!' ringing again and again through the darkness is bound to make an impression on him. It might make just the difference between deserting and not deserting. Of course such a proceeding does not fit in with the English conception of war. I admit I was amazed and scandalized when I first saw it done. The idea of trying to convert your enemy instead of shooting him! I now think that from any point of view it was a legitimate manoeuvre. In ordinary trench warfare, when there is no artillery, it is extremely difficult to inflict casualties on the enemy without receiving an equal number yourself. If you can immobilize a certain number of men by making them desert, so much the better; deserters are actually more useful to you than corpses, because they can give information. But at the beginning it dismayed all of us; it made us feel that the Spaniards were not taking this war of theirs sufficiently seriously. The man who did the shouting at the P.S.U.C. post down on our right was an artist at the job. Sometimes, instead of shouting revolutionary slogans he simply told the Fascists how much better we were fed than they were. His account of the Government rations was apt to be a little imaginative.' Buttered toast!'--you could hear his voice echoing across the lonely valley--'We're just sitting down to buttered toast over here! Lovely slices of buttered toast!' I do not doubt that, like the rest of us, he had not seen butter for weeks or months past, but in the icy night the news of buttered toast probably set many a Fascist mouth watering. It even made mine water, though I knew he was lying.

You'll notice, if you read the above quote, the humor that sneaks into it. And this is also typical of the way the whole book is written. While reading this book the corners of my mouth were constantly twitching upwards in little half smiles at the subtle humor Orwell infused throughout his writing.

Actually, although the book is most famous for its politics, the majority of the chapters are just about describing the every day nature of the war. In fact Orwell is almost apologetic when politics intrude into his narrative:

"If you're not interested in the horrors of party politics, please skip [this chapter]; I am trying to keep the political parts of this narrative in separate chapters for precisely that purpose. At the same time it would be quite impossible to write about the Spanish war from a purely military angle. It was above all things a political war."

Orwell first arrives in Barcelona to see that the anarchists are in complete control of the city. He describes the kind of revolutionary society the anarchist have created:

The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. ... It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Senior' or 'Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' and 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias'. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.

Orwell enlists in the anti-fascist republican cause, but he soon discovers there are deep divisions with in the anti-fascist side. On one hand there are the anarchists, who see the war as a working people's revolution. On the other side are the middle-class republican capitalists, who see the war as a way to re-establish bourgeois capitalism, and want to roll back the gains that the working class had made during the early days of the war.

So far so simple. But here is what Orwell claimed very few people outside of Spain actually understood: the Communist Party was actually against the working class revolution, and it was the Communist Party more than anyone else that wanted to restore bourgeois capitalism. The official Communist Party at this point was completely controlled by the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union didn't want to upset its various international alliances by having a revolution in Spain. And so it was the Spanish Communist Party which was responsible for crushing the worker's revolution, destroying worker's control of factories, and throwing all the revolutionaries in jail.

Orwell was in Barcelona when street fighting between the anarchists and the Communist controlled police broke out, and he describes what he saw.
Orwell himself had joined the militia as a member of a Trotskyist organization, and so in the end had to flee from Spain for his life after he saw many of his friends rounded up and jailed.

The Communist Party, of course, placed all the blame for the violence on the anarchists and Trotskyists. The Communist newspapers in Britain repeated the official line, and even the capitalist newspapers attacked the anarchists. As Orwell writes:

The reason why a one-sided version has been accepted is simply that the Spanish revolutionary parties have no footing in the foreign press. In the English press, in particular, you would have to search for a long time before finding any favourable reference, at any period of the war, to the Spanish Anarchists. They have been systematically denigrated, and, as I know by my own experience, it is almost impossible to get anyone to print anything in their defence.

.

Orwell dedicates a whole chapter to examining the lies and misrepresentations of the English press.

Although Orwell apologizes for the political chapters in his book, in my opinion they are the most interesting. It's a pity this book was so little circulated when it was first released, because the journalists he named in this chapter really deserved the public shaming he tried to give him. In particularly Orwell goes after the Communist controlled press.

Orwell showed that the journalists write so many logical absurdities and self-contradictions that, even though they were hundreds of miles away from the actual events, they must have known they were lying.
It's a beautiful thing to see a brilliant mind like Orwell's simply rip apart all of these articles. (It's also not hard to see why this is one of Noam Chomsky's favorite books. Orwell's media critiques are very similar to Chomsky's own style.)

And finally, one can see in these chapters Orwell's frustrations with political manipulation of the truth, a theme of course that he would develop further ten years later in "1984."

A fascinating little book. At only 232 pages, it's well worth the short time it will take you to read it.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky on Mumia Abu-Jamal & George Orwell (Recommend skipping to the 5 minute mark to skip the introduction.)

Flashman and the Redskins by George MacDonald Fraser

2011-03-29T20:12:00.001-04:00

(Book Review)

And here I am with the 7th book in the Flashman series. (After having read Flashman, Royal Flash, Flash for Freedom, Flashman at the Charge, and Flashman and the Great Game, Flashman's Lady and the original source material Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes.)

One of the reasons I enjoy the Flashman series is that it takes me to so many exotic places. I've so far followed Flashman to the British occupation of Afghanistan, pirate fighting in Borneo, criminal gangs in Singapore, slave traders on the coast of Africa, the Sepoy rebellion in India, the charge of the light brigade in Crimea, peasant rebellions in Russia, insane dictators in Madagascar, et cetera.

This book, from beginning to end, takes place entirely within the boundaries of the United States. Having been born and raised in America, this doesn't strike me as quite so interesting as some of Flashman's previous adventures. But perhaps the American West is regarded as a little bit more exotic in England, where this book was originally published. (Or for that matter in Australia, where I purchased this book.)

However, once I got into the book, I did find it interesting enough.

The story is divided into two parts. The first part takes place in 1849-50, right after the events described in the 3rd book "Flash for Freedom". (Although the first 5 books in this series were chronological, they're starting to jump around all over now.)

Flashman ends up taking part in the great migration of wagon trains across the American West caused by the 1849 gold rush. But it's not your standard "wagon train across the plains story. There's a bit of a twist. Through the usual series of convoluted events, Flashman ends up in charge of a wagon train of prostitutes, who are going out to set up a new brothel in Santa Fe.

These books can be pretty ludicrous, to be sure. They're also occasionally a bit trashy. But they're great guilty pleasures. Knowing what we know about Flashman's character, we know he's not going to be able to resist temptation, and it's obvious he's going to get himself into plenty of trouble before this trip is over. The pleasure is in waiting to see exactly how Flashman will manage to screw everything up this time.

However, as usual, mixed in with the guilty pleasure are a lot of historical tidbits. This book is even more heavily footnoted than the previous volumes (81 end notes total) meaning that just about every couple of pages you have to break from the story and flip to the back of the book to find out that so-and-so was actually a real historical person, or that such-and-such was a real place, or that this or that event really happened. As always these books are so thoroughly researched it makes a great way to justify reading these otherwise trashy stories.

The second half of the book takes place in 1875-76, and is focused on Custer's Last Stand, and the events leading up to it. Flashman, again through the usual series of convoluted events, ends up being present at Custer's last stand, despite doing just about everything he can to avoid it.

Custer's Last Stand is one of those famous events that everyone has heard about, but no one really knows anything about it.
Or maybe I'm just speaking for myself. Anyway I certainly didn't know what the issues had been leading up to this conflict, nor what exact military blunders Custer had made.

This book does a pretty good job of walking you through the major historical points. Flashman is at the meeting with the Native Americans when the negotiations break down. (Flashman is of the opinion that the negotiations were intended to break down so that the government would have an excuse to go to war.)
Flashman also spends a lot of time with Custer in the months leading up to the conflict. The picture painted of Custer may boarder on being a little bit cliche and one-dimensional. (He's portrayed as being an emotionally fragile, glory seeking basket case.) But again, much of it is backed up with historical footnotes.

And finally, at the actual battle itself, Flashman sees exactly how Custer allowed himself to blunder into a much bigger Native American force.

I have a few more thoughts on this book, which I am presenting below in no particular order:

* Flashman in all of these books is always portrayed as an anti-hero. You root for him to survive everything because he's the only protagonist you've got. At the same time, you're also kind of hoping for him to get his just desserts, and usually most of his evil deeds do come back to bite him in the butt in one way or another.

In the past books, Flashman has done some truly despicable things. And he continues to push the boundaries in this book. For example he sells colored girl into slavery to pocket the money. He also participates in the massacre of a Native American tribe. (Not willingly, albeit. He is in a position where he either has to participate or be killed himself. But he doesn't hesitate to kill the Indians if it will save himself.)

This put me off of the book a little bit. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. When writing about an anti-hero, there is a fine line. On the one hand the whole point of this series of books is that its protagonist is a bully and a coward. (And, based on the portrayal of Flashman from the original source material, "Tom Brown's Schooldays", it would be inconsistent for him to ever do anything that wasn't mean or spiteful.) Still, you don't want to push your audience too far away.

Then again, I suppose the fact that these books give you a protagonist that makes you feel uncomfortable is what's interesting about them. Although it would make me hesitant to recommend them.

* The book perhaps overuses the deus ex machina plot device to deliver Flashman from various tight spots. More than once in this book Flashman will appear to be doomed, and then a stranger will suddenly appear out of nowhere to save him.

* Although this story is about the American West, having it written by a British author does bring a unique perspective to some of the historical details.
For example, more than once the Custer's military blunders are compared with the Charge of the Light Brigade in Crimea. The bungled diplomatic negotiations with the Sioux at Black Hills, and the arrogance of the American government, are compared with William McNaghten in Afghanistan (both incidents described in previous Flashman books).
The relationship between the Native Americans and the British government is touched on (Sitting Bull apparently had a badge of King George III.)
I also learned that President Ulysses S. Grant was a big fan of "Tom Brown's Schooldays" (the original source material for the Flashman character, and there's an interesting joke about this in the book) and that before Texas had officially joined the United States, Britain had once entered into negotiations with the object of persuading Texas to join the British Empire. (Flashman claims this was a bit of a sore point among the Americans of the time.)

* I'm not entirely sure why this book has such a politically incorrect title. To keep with the pulpy feel of the story, perhaps?

Actually speaking of political incorrectness, large parts of this book do seem aimed at upsetting liberal views of history. The author, George MacDonald Fraser, seems to be of the opinion that modern history has completely white-washed the Native Americans, and made them into passive victims of Western Imperialism while ignoring the fact that the Indians committed a lot of atrocities themselves.

Some of this viewpoint comes out through the character of Flashman himself, and admittedly Flashman is not intended to be a reliable narrator in all things. But it also comes through in the historical footnotes, where the author complains about "Indian apologists."

What the actual historical record is, I'm no expert on. It's more than possible that there were plenty of atrocities committed on both sides. However I'm a little uneasy that Fraser seems to think that the Native Americans have gotten off too easily. I seem to remember them being portrayed as bad guys more often than not in many of the films I watched as a child. (Some of these films were a bit older, but dated or not they are still part of the collective media environment.)
Also, in his book "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong" (A), James Loewen makes the case that, contrary to popular belief, most history textbooks actually downplay the atrocities committed against Native Americans.

However to Fraser's credit, he certainly shows that the atrocities were not one all way. And he gives a sympathetic viewpoint of the Native American position regarding the Black Hills conflict. (As mentioned above, he places the blame for the negotiations breaking down on the United States government, not on the Indians.)

In conclusion: although I feel conflicted about some of the things inside this book, I certainly can't complain that it was a boring read. It did an excellent job of holding my attention. I enjoyed reading it, and I like to think I learned a few things from it.

Link of the Day
John Pilger Interviews Noam Chomsky 25 Nov 1992

Also: Obama’s War on Schools
The No Child Left Behind Act has been deadly to public education. So why has the president embraced it?

Thoughts on the Red Dawn Remake

2011-03-26T09:25:00.003-04:00

In the fall of 2000 I was finishing up my education degree at Calvin College. In one of our evening seminars, we were talking about the pros and cons of a nation-wide standardized test that was required for all school children to take.

I don't remember the exact name of the test. (This was 10 plus years ago now). But there is something that does stick in my memory.

The professor was reading through a list of the objectives that the test was supposed to promote: reading skills, writing skills, math skills, and patriotism.

"That patriotism part disturbs me a little bit," the professor said. And to illustrate his point, he showed us an example math question.

The question had a bar graph showing how much each nation spent on it's military. North Korea spent by far the highest, then China, and then the United States. The question read something like, "If for example North Korea spends $10 billion on its military, and China spends $9 billion, and the United States spends $7 billion, what percentage of the Chinese and North Korean military budget does the United States spend?"

"Now," the professor said as he changed slides, "here are the actual figures."
The next chart he showed made my bar drop. The United States military spending was just off the chart. It spent far more than any other country. It spent more than the next 10 countries combined. To get some sort of visual sense of this, click on this link here to see a comparative military chart from 2002 (link here).

This was one of those life changing moments, when I realized just how insidious the nature of propaganda is. It wasn't technically a lie, because the test never claimed these figures were accurate. They were just example numbers for some made-up math problem. But it was a subtle way of influencing how school children thought about the world. North Korea and China are obsessive war mongering countries that spend much more on their military than peace loving countries like the USA.

And this kind of subtle propaganda was everywhere. It was in the movies we watched, the newspapers we read, and now I learned children are even propagandized in the questions on mandatory standardized tests.

All this is, of course, a digression, but I couldn't help but remember this when I heard that the new "Red Dawn" remake was going to feature North Koreans as the bad guys.

For anyone unfamiliar with the "Red Dawn" movie, it is a 1980s movie in which the Soviet Union invades and takes over the United States. All the adults are rounded up and put in re-education camps, but a group of teenagers hide out in the mountains and wage a guerrilla warfare against the Soviet Army.

In the re-make, now, it is the North Korean army that is going to take over the United States.

The website Bleeding Cool has, to their credit, already done a couple of articles illustrating just how blatantly ridiculous and boarder-line racist this is. (Links here and here.)

And perhaps the premise is so absurd on it's face that any thinking adult would just laugh it off, and doesn't need my help pointing out how utterly stupid this plot is.

I mean, you would have to believe that a nation with 24 million people would be able to take over 310 million people.
You would have to believe that a nation that has just barely begun it's nuclear weapons program, and does not yet have long range missiles, would be able to take over a nation that has 20,000 hydrogen bombs stockpiled.
...That a nation with a military budget of $10 billion dollars could take over a nation with a budget of $741 billion dollars.
...That a nation completely isolated from the world would be able to take over a nation with obligatory mutual defense treaties with several nations.
...That a nation which has for the last 60 years not been able to take over its own peninsula is now capable of world domination. And that instead of exerting their military influence in their own region they would fly across to the United States.

The really ironic thing is that historically Korea, as a small kingdom surrounded by greater Asian powers, has a history that is very consistent. They are always the ones being invaded, (first by the Chinese, then by the Japanese, then by the Americans). They are never the invaders. And there is no indication that they want to be.

To illustrate the stupidity of this film, you would have to imagine the Roman Empire, at the height of it's powers, making movies about them being overrun by the Celts in Britannia. You would have to imagine Nazi Germany making films about being taken over by Belgium, or Russia making a film about being overrun by Afghanistan.

So, yeah, clearly this is ridiculous on it's face, and you don't need my help pointing out all the real world flaws in this plot. But once the movie gets released and becomes part of our culture, it will be yet another way in which children are surrounded by propaganda (a world view that is reinforced in the movies as well as standardized test questions).

Perhaps I've given this movie, which might not even be that successful, more time and thought than it deserves. I just wanted to get this off my chest so it would stop bugging me in the back of my mind.

And of course, I should remember the golden rule of movie reviewing: never review movies you haven't seen. Once this movie comes out and I see how they actual execute the concept, it's possible it might be better than it looks. (According to Wikipedia (W), it looks like the North Koreans are going to get some backing from the Chinese. Which makes it only slightly less ridiculous.)

Final thoughts go to Noam Chomsky, who's got spoken eloquently on this subject many times before (a 1993 speech, but still applicable today, taken from this website here):

...There is a very characteristic development going on in the U.S. now. It's not the first country in the world that's done this. There are growing domestic social and economic problems, in fact, maybe catastrophes. Nobody in power has any intention of doing anything about them. If you look at the domestic programs of the administrations of the last ten years -- I include here the Democratic opposition -- there's really no serious proposal about what to do about the severe problems of health, education, homelessness, joblessness, crime, soaring criminal population, jails, deterioration in the inner cities -- the whole raft of problems. You all know about them and they're all getting worse... In such circumstances you've got to divert the bewildered herd, because if they start noticing this they may not like it, since they're the ones suffering from it. Just having them watch the Superbowl and the sitcoms may not be enough. You have to whip them up into fear of enemies. In the 1930s Hitler whipped them into fear of the Jews and Gypsies. You had to crush them to defend yourselves. We have our ways, too. Over the last ten years, every year or two, some major monster is constructed that we have to defend ourselves against. There used to be one that was always available: the Russians. But they're losing their attractiveness as an enemy, and it's getting harder and harder to use that one, so some new ones have to be conjured up... So it was international terrorists and narco-traffickers and crazed Arabs and Saddam Hussein, the new Hitler, is going to conquer the world. They've got to keep coming up, one after another. You frighten the population, terrorize them, intimidate them so that they're too afraid to travel and cower in fear. Then you have a magnificent victory over Grenada, Panama, or some other defenseless Third World army that you can pulverize before you ever bother to look at them -- which is just what happened. That gives relief. We were saved at the last minute. That's one of the ways in which you can keep the bewildered herd from paying attention to what's really going on around them, keep them diverted and controlled....

and

...The fact of the matter is, this [Iraq] was a Third World country with a peasant army. It is now being conceded that there was a ton of disinformation about the fortifications, the chemical weapons, etc. But did you find anybody who pointed it out? Virtually nobody. That's typical. Notice that this was done one year after exactly the same thing was done with Manuel Noriega. Manuel Noriega is a minor thug by comparison with George Bush's friend Saddam Hussein or George Bush's other friends in Beijing, or George Bush himself, for that matter. In comparison with them, Manuel Noriega is a pretty minor thug. Bad, but not a world class thug of the kind we like. He was turned into a creature larger than life. He was going to destroy us, leading the narco-traffickers. We had to quickly move in and smash him, killing a couple hundred or maybe thousand people, restoring to power the tiny, maybe eight percent white oligarchy, and putting U.S. military officers in control at every level of the political system. We had to do all those things because, after all, we had to save ourselves or we were going to be destroyed by this monster. One year later the same thing was done by Saddam Hussein. Did anybody point it out? Did anybody point out what had happened or why? You'll have to look pretty far for that.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky Responsibility and integrity: the dilemmas we face

and Alarmed by the so-called crisis in Japan? The invisible hand of the free market explains nuclear safety

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

2011-03-24T10:27:00.002-04:00

(Movie Review)

A few weeks back I was having coffee with a friend, and for reasons I don't quite remember we got to talking about Heavenly Creatures.

I had seen this movie purely by chance. I was a Freshman at Calvin, and the Calvin film committee had been showing weekly movies every Saturday night. Sometimes when I couldn't get myself invited out to a party somewhere I would kill my solitary Saturday nights by wandering over and watching whatever movie they were showing. One week they showed Heavenly Creatures.

I had known absolutely nothing about the movie before it started--never even heard of it before. The abrupt tonal shift at the end of the movie took me completely off-guard. Up until the end I had thought I was watching a movie about a friendship between two girls with elements of a children's fairy tale fantasy. The horrifying ending really shocked me. And yet, because it had shocked me so much, the movie has stayed vivid in my mind years 15 years later (unlike countless other movies in the intervening years which I've watched and promptly forgotten.)

I must have been getting a little bit too animated in trying to convey all this, because my friend just laughed and told me to calm down a bit. I apologized, and then said "but isn't it true that the movies that really chill you are the ones that stick with you?"

She thought about this for a minute, and then said she agreed. And said the last movie that had really chilled her, and stuck in her mind for this reason, was "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo."
Up until this time, I had no interest in watching "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." As a literary snob, I'm always wary of bestselling books. And the movie had seemed a little bit too art-house trendy for me. But after this conversation, I decided I wanted to check it out.

So the next time my brother-in-law and I were in the video store looking for something to rent, I suggested this movie.

It is, of course, always an exercise in futility to go into one movie expecting it to make you feel the same way as another movie. A problem to this genre in particular is that there are only so many times in this life that we can be genuinely shocked before we start to become immune to it. When I was 18 I was, at least as far as my movie going experience is concerned, probably a lot more innocent and naive than I am now.

And so, not surprisingly, this movie failed to make as much of an impression on me as Heavenly Creatures did.

In fact I found it entirely forgettable.

This is your average mystery/ suspense thriller movie, of which there are a dime a dozen, and I didn't find it particularly better than any of the other various mystery suspense movies I've seen over the years.
It wasn't any worse, mind you, but at the end of it I was left wondering what all the hype had been about. (The video rental box had bragged that this was the biggest money making film in Europe in 2009, and the highest grossing Swedish film in history.)

My brother-in-law had the same reaction. "If this hadn't been a foreign language subtitled film," he said, "I would just have considered it a bad movie."

I wonder about that myself. If this film had been released as just a normal English language film, and if it had been released without any of the hype, would people have even noticed it?
(Yes, the sexual assault scenes were disturbing to watch, but they in me produced revulsion rather than a really chilling horror. Plus the far-fetched plot made it hard for me to forget at any time that I was watching a movie, and that these were fictional characters and not real life situations.)

However, I won't go as far as to say the film bored me. It had my attention all the way through.
The film starts off as a mildly intriguing murder mystery. I was watching to see what would develop. There were also a couple different plots going on at once, and I was curious to see how they would come together. "The girl with the dragon tattoo" herself seemed at the beginning to be a minor character in her own movie, and I was curious to see how the plot was going to come around to her.

As they work to solve the crime there are a couple surprises and a couple red-herrings along the way, but that's pretty standard in these type of movies. And the bad guy, when he is ultimately confronted, turns out to be a pretty sick and twisted individual, but if you've seen "Silence of the Lambs" (or any equivalent suspense movie) there's really nothing new in here.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky: Gaza - One Year Later

and: The Fustercluck Doctrine

A Brief Summary of the Conservative Arguments Against NPR

2011-03-22T13:14:00.003-04:00

(Partly inspired by this latest Cal Thomas editorial (link here), but applicable to a wide range of Conservative whining around the issue the past few weeks.)

1). NPR has a well-known liberal bias. Tax payers shouldn't have to pay for NPR because it has a liberal bias. We should cut public funding, and if liberals like NPR so much, why not just let them make up the difference out of their own pocket?

And...
2). Aha!! Liberals are contributing to NPR. And worse yet, NPR is accepting money from liberal donors. That just proves it has a liberal bias. Therefore we should cut its budget.

And return to point number one. And round and round the circular logic goes.

I actually enjoy NPR. More because I think they do quality programing than because of any ideological slant.

Of course you should always have your eyes wide open, and know about the ideological constraints of any media you listen to. Chomsky has some very interesting stories about his own experience with NPR (link here).
[And I know I link to a lot of Chomsky stuff, but this clip is seriously worth the 5 minutes it takes to watch, especially if you listen to a lot of NPR.]

As a nominal anarchist, I should have problems with state funded media. And indeed I do have some misgivings. Government funded radio is necessarily going to reflect a certain point of view that would be different from, say radio controlled by the workers.
I think this is a reason to be skeptical of it. I don't think this is a reason for doing away with it completely, because I tend to believe the world is a richer place for having more opinions available.

From an anarchist perspective there is of course a legitimate question about whether citizens should be forced to fund government radio, and in theory this is a reasonable objection to NPR. But in practice, the commercial networks have been doing such a poor job of keeping us informed that I shudder to think how the political dialogue would suffer if we were only left with cable news and talk radio. So until we reach the anarchist utopia of citizen controlled radio, I'd just assume prop NPR up as a counterweight to the corporate controlled media.

Also, call me crazy, but I don't think NPR is all that liberal. Of course if you go through their archives with a fine enough tooth comb you can prove any point you want to (as Cal Thomas does in his column), but even then his examples are pretty weak. If these are the best examples of liberal bias he can come up with over several years, then that's saying something in and of itself.

But the intended result of this is entirely predictable. After being beat-up so much for having a "liberal bias", the head executives at NPR are going to be very careful in the future about including any information or view points that Republicans might possible disagree with. At best NPR will become totally toothless and afraind of covering any contraversial issue, and at worst they will start to shift to the right. And this I believe is the true objective of the Republican campaign against NPR.

Link of the Day
Chomsky: is Iran a threat?

Free-Born John by Pauline Gregg

2011-03-17T09:44:00.000-04:00

Subtitle: A biography of John Lilburne

(Book Review)

Before I get into the actual book itself, let me start with the subject matter and how I became interested in it.

I first became interested in “The Levellers” when reading “A People’s History of the World” by Chris Harman.
Now, I know I had a number of negative things to say about that book, but in spite of all its flaws there are one or two things Chris Harman does a pretty good job on.
One theme that Chris Harman does a good job of emphasizing is that in any era of history, the bottom rungs of society have never really accepted that their lot is simply to be poor and miserable.

This is notable, because it is in contrast to another view of history: that before the enlightenment philosophers and French Revolution got the mobs all riled up, the idea of political and economic equality never really occurred to people. I had one Latin Professor at college who I remember once espoused this view to us at length, and was at great pains to emphasize to us that we could not try and understand the ancient world by using our modern ideas of equality. Sure, there had occasionally been peasant rebellions and slave revolts, but this did not mean that people like Spartacus believed in equality as a philosophical principle. Spartacus and his like were simply rebelling to improve their own lives. No one back then could, not even the lower classes, could comprehend the idea that everyone should be equal.

Harman, I think, does a fairly good job of demolishing this point of view by showing that throughout history the lower classes have not only fought for equality, but (in the instances where their writings have survived) spoken and written in favor of equality. (This is also in accordance with Chomsky’s view that human beings have a natural desire for freedom and equality, and they don’t have to be taught about these things by philosophers.)

To support this view Harman covers numerous rebellions and movements, but one of the more interesting movements that Harman touches on briefly is the Leveller Movement, which occurred in England during the 1640s—something that had been left out of my history education completely, but which I found fascinating. At the time, there was a civil war going on between the Royalists and the Parliamentarians. The Parliamentarians wanted to establish a republican system of government, but one in which only wealth land-owners could vote.
However within the ranks of the common people and soldiery, there emerged several more radical egalitarian movements, such as the Leveller Movement, which believed in universal suffrage and the removal of all social distinctions. Although ultimately unsuccessful, the Leveller’s had great influence in the Parliamentarian army, and for a while were a real threat to Oliver Cromwell and the Grandees (as Parliaments leaders were known). Cromwell and Ireton were even forced to debate the Leveller’s at the Putney debates.

I was curious to find out more about the Levellers after this, but living in Japan at the time I did not have access to a decent English library. And so I did the standard geek thing and wasted a lot of time reading about them on the Internet.
Wikipedia alerted me to the fact that the Leveller Movement had recently been the subject of a British television mini-series “The Devil’s Whore (W).”
At the time, there were several copies of “The Devil’s Whore” up on YouTube (and they might still be up for all I know, if you want to try and watch them yourself) so I tracked down the various parts and sat through all 4 hours of it.
“The Devil’s Whore” retells Leveller history as a sappy romance saga (fellows should be warned ahead of time) and it does get pretty sappy at points. But it also did do a great job of introducing me to Leveller figures such as Edward Sexby, William Rainsborough, and John Lilburne, and for this reason alone I give it a cautious recommendation if you can track down a copy.

Now that I’m back in an English speaking country, and have access to the University library, I decided to try and seek out some actual books on the Levellers.

Once I actually got deep into the library, it turns out that there are quite a number of books dealing with the Leveller movement—about 3 or 4 rows worth. Some of these books are a bit older, and some of them are published by University presses, but they are out there if you bother to track them down.

Many any of them are written in a dry and stuffy academic tone. And a lot of them are analytical history, intent on analyzing the Leveller movement and its causes rather than telling a story.
When I’m reading history for pleasure, I always prefer a book that reads like a story. I also tried to find the most readable book on the subject. After flipping through several books, it looked like “Free-Born John” by Pauline Gregg was the most readable of the bunch.

For the amateur historian, this is a good armchair history. It’s not the best written book I’ve ever come across (parts of it are a bit dry) but for the most part it’s a very smooth read and, like any good armchair history book, reads like a story.

While reading this book, I was a little bit surprised at just how much information existed about John Lilburne’s life. Considering, for example, we know next to nothing about Shakespeare’s life (Lilburne’s near contemporary) I had assumed that historical records for the common people were just lacking for this period. But not so for everyone obviously. Partly because Lilburne (a shameless self-promoter) wrote so much about himself in his published pamphlets, the author is able to reconstruct a pretty detailed history of his life.

But that’s not to say there aren’t a few gaps from time to time, and occasionally the author has to resort to sentences like “It is easy to imagine John Lilburne might have also been with the crowds on that day.” In fact, the first 100 pages or so are filled with speculation about what John Lilburne probably did, almost certainly did, and could not have failed to do.
Also during the first 100 pages the author will fill in some of the gaps in the narrative by writing about the intellectual climate at the time, or even long boring descriptions of what London was like during this period.

Another problem, again not wholly the author’s fault, is the somewhat repetitive nature of John Lilburne’s tale. Much of the book is simply recounting the cat and mouse game between the Leveller’s printing press and the authorities. The Levellers will publish an illegal pamphlet, the authorities will try suppress it and find out who is responsible, the Leveller’s will publish another pamphlet, and the cycle will repeat again. It’s interesting to a point, but some of this might have been better off summarized. (Although reading a book like this does make you appreciate the importance of living in a time and country where freedom of speech is protected.)

Also like any martyr to a cause, John Lilburne spends a lot of his life locked away in jail. And it’s hard to write an interesting biography of someone lingering in jail for years. The author I think does the best that can be expected under the circumstances, and writes about the pamphlets Lilburne smuggled out of the jail, the various friends and enemies he made in the jail, and his ability to sometimes influence outside events from within the jail.
Often, given the turmoil of the period, what is happening outside of the jail is much more interesting than what is happening inside, and the author will jump back and forth between the greater Leveller Movement and Lilburne.

However there are plenty of parts of Lilburne’s life that are fascinating.
The book is also filled with plenty of scenes of court room drama, and because every time Lilburne was up before a court he wrote long pamphlets about his experiences, the entire proceedings are usually documented in surprising detail, and the author has plenty to draw on here for details.

The ever changing relationship between Cromwell and Lilburne is well documented in this book as well. As a member of Parliament, Cromwell actually starts out as an admirer of Lilburne, and is instrumental in freeing him from his imprisonment. As Cromwell becomes more powerful, however, he becomes obsessed with suppressing Lilburne and the Levellers. However, as the book shows, Lilburne and Cromwell still retain some fondness for each other even as enemies. When he perceives Lilburne is no longer a threat, Cromwell is even capable of acts of kindness towards Lilburne and his wife, for which Lilburne writes Cromwell letters gushing with thankfulness.

Throughout the book, John Lilburne comes out as someone who is remarkably dedicated to his cause, and can also be remarkably stubborn in pursuit of his ideals, refusing to be bought out or to compromise. However the author does not gloss over his faults either. She shows him as occasionally egotistical and a self promoter. Also, although Lilburne made his name standing up for the poor and dispossessed, there is one unfortunate incident when he appears to have acted harshly as a landlord towards his tenants, and Pauline Gregg dutifully records this.

And although largely sympathetic to the aims of the greater Leveller Movement, the author also points out some of their ideological shortcomings and inconsistencies. For example, the program which the Levellers introduced and petitioned the government for is hard to classify in terms of ideology. They wanted more government interference in cases where the poor would benefit from government involvement, and less government interference otherwise. They appealed to ancient Anglo-Saxon law in cases where it supported their cause, and appealed to the will of the people in all other cases. Basically their platform was designed to help the poorest members of society, but that was the only consistent thing about it.

(Although this is probably not unique to the Leveller Movement. Probably most political parties have a platform that was designed first to benefit its supporting members, and then try and backfit an ideology onto it afterwards. The same could probably be said about today’s modern Democratic and Republican parties. For example you could really do your head in trying to figure out if Republicans support more or less government interference.)

[An interesting side note here on another of my interests—the history of anarchism. According to this BBC radio show “In Our Time: The history of Anarchism" (link here)--which is totally worth listening to if you’ve got a free minute—the origins of the modern anarchist movement date back to the Levellers. Not that the Levellers actually were anarchists, but they were accused of anarchism by Cromwell and the Grandees because of their constant appeals to the will of the people. This had the effect of putting the word into the idea of anarchism into the political discourse so that later on, in the 19th century, theorists like Proudhon and Bakunin would take what had previously been a derogatory word and use it as a label for their own political philosophy. Or at least so the BBC claims (this may be a slightly Anglo-centric way of viewing what was primarily a Continental movement. I’m not sure the French Proudhon or the Russian Bakunin really read a lot about the English Civil Wars). But for what it’s worth, Pauline Gregg does record the accusations of anarchism used against the Leveller movement.]

Pauline Gregg also takes care to emphasize that the Leveller movement was not socialist, but held private property as a sacred right even while emphasizing political equality. Gregg contrasts the Leveller movement with other groups at the time such as the Diggers (who were actually early Agrarian Communists) and wonders whether the Levellers would have had more success if they had managed to form an alliance with the Diggers.

[Although I should note that apparently not everyone is clear on this point. I've recently had discussions with members of the Socialist Party who have apparently been reading different books than me ("Cromwell and Communism" (A)) and they believe that the Levellers were actually early communists. But my own readings on the internet have confirmed what Pauline Gregg asserts.]

Reading about John Lilburne and the Leveller Movement, a few thoughts did strike while reading this book. I'll just jot some of them down briefly.

1). It was interesting how Christianity was used by all sides on the English Civil War, both those fighting for repressive government and those fighting for people's rights both clearly believe that they had God on their side. I suspect this was probably partly because in the pre-enlightenment era, people couldn't conceive of a world without religion, and so religious terminology was all they knew. I suspect a lot of these progressive movements would use more secular language if the same battles were being re-fought today. But there's no denying that John Lilburne and the other Leveller leaders were just as deeply religious as the Royalists and Grandees they were fighting against.

2). The success of the Leveller Movement was that it so thoroughly infiltrated the rank and file of the army. Because most of the common soldiers were attracted to the ideals of the Levellers, the movement had power.
In fact, if you think about it, just about every successful revolution is successful because it wins over the army. (French Revolution, Paris 1848, Paris Commune, Russia 1917, Germany 1919, et cetera).
The lessons of history are clear that any revolutionary movement which hopes to succeed must involve itself in campaigns for soldiers' rights. This is something that the left has perhaps been neglecting in recent decades, and indeed it is a difficult balancing act to be against the imperialist nature of the modern army, but still trying to recruit its soldiers. But I think it's an issue that deserves more thought than it has been given in recent years.

3). However, despite having support from the rank and file of the army, as well as the London citizens, the Leveller Movement was ultimately defeated. As I was reading this book, I was constantly wondering how they allowed themselves to be defeated despite having so much support, but, as Pauline Gregg tells it, in the end most of the soldiers proved reluctant to mutiny against their established leaders, and the few mutinies that broke out were easily dealt with.
This is probably another all too common theme in revolutionary history. People are so used to submitting to authority figures, that often the movements don't realize how powerful they really are.

One last note:
This book is a bit older—it was published in 1961. I’m sure the history remains the same, but I’m told that interest in Britain interest in the Leveller movement and the Leveller martyrs revived during the 1970s, and so perhaps a more recent book might have more to say about the Leveller legacy.

Link of the Day
The Fifth Freedom

Bonus Link: On the subject of Cromwell, if you like mixing your history lessons with Irish folk rock, here's the Pogues "Young Ned of the Hill" (A curse upon you Oliver Cromwell)

Megamind

2011-03-14T09:35:00.002-04:00

(Movie Review)

This movie may not be Citizen Kane, but it sure is a lot of fun. It's got a really good premise: what is life like from the supervillian's point of view? And, if the supervillian ever happened to win against the hero, what would he do next? Since supervillians often purely exist just to antagonize the hero, would a supervillian still be able to find purpose in his life without having a hero to fight?

What's more, unlike so many movies that start out with a great idea but then drop the ball, this movie actually lives up to the comic potential of its premise.

The movie takes a standard comic book superhero story.
Actually it's a thinly veiled parody of Superman. The superhero has all the same powers as Superman, the same origin story, a reporter girlfriend just like Superman and there's even a parody of Marlon Brando (who played Superman's Dad in the Christopher Reeve series)as spacedad. In fact given how litigious DC comics can sometimes be about protecting Superman's copyright (they sued Captain Marvel for copyright infringement back in the 1950s (w)) I'm almost a little surprised they got away with this.
But then, given how interconnected media conglomerates are these days, there's probably some mutual parent company.

What's interesting about this movie is that it tells the story from the bad guy's perspective.

Of course, by now it's nothing new to try and deconstruct superheroes or parody superhero movies.
Some of this movie was vaguely reminiscent of The Incredibles. Other parts of the movie, which tried to show the more mundane side of supervillian life, reminded me of the Dr. Evil segments from Austin Powers.

But when it's done well it can still be a lot of fun. And this film is fun. You can't help but laugh at the frustration of Megamind, who has spent his whole life living in comic book superhero cliches, and then becomes frustrated when the world suddenly no longer lives up to those cliches. You can see his frustration when one superhero forgets to show up to fight him, or fails to give him witty banter while they are fighting, or when another superhero retires to pursue his music career.

In addition to sending up comic book cliches, the movie also makes you think just a little bit about the true nature of evil, or (to put it in Calvinist terms) the problem of free will. It doesn't really get into any in depth discussions, but then you can't really expect a 90 minute movie to do that. In depth discussions are for books, the best a movie can do is just raise the question and then throw it out to the audience to ponder.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky on U.S. Foreign Policy

and The non-acquiescers of Planet Glox.

Superbad

2011-03-12T05:45:00.000-05:00

(Movie Review)

I guess this film is a bit of a cult classic. I missed out on it because I was in Japan. (The big budget Hollywood action flicks usually do pretty well in Japan, but humor doesn't always translate, and especially films with kind of quirky humor like this do not get big releases in Japan, and they can easily fly under my radar.)

But a friend loaned me this movie the other day, and I enjoyed it. I mentioned the movie to a couple people, and they immediately responded, "Ah, Mclovin!"

Even people who hadn't even seen the movie seemed to know about Mclovin. One friend told me, "a couple years ago that scene was always on TV back in the US."

It's amazing how much mileage this movie gets out of that one joke--the fact that a nerdy high school kid picked a ridiculous name for his fake ID. As the police officers repeatedly shout out his name, this gag alone probably accounts for about half the movie's humor right there.
And yet, it had me chuckling. [Mclovin! (Chortle) ahh, Mclovin. You crazy kids.]

This is the kind of film where the humor sort of grows on you. At least for me. I wasn't laughing very hard while I was actually watching it, but there were a number of things that stuck in my mind, and had me quietly laughing to myself the next couple days. (For example Jonah Hill being so upset that he didn't have a partner in Home Ec, or Michael Cera singing "These Eyes.")

Judged in an absolute sense, this may not be the best movie ever. But film review is always comparative. And as high school comedies go, I think this is near the top of my list.
I was talking with a friend who complained, "When I was in high school, we had 'American Pie.' What a terrible movie that was! I would have loved to have had 'Superbad' back then instead."

He was a couple years younger than me. I was in college when 'American Pie' came out. But his general point was well taken. There's a real quirky humor to this film that is a lot of fun. Also it manages to capture the awkwardness of high school without veering into sentimentality, so it gets another point.

I wasn't sure the police officers entirely fit into this film. There completely moronic banter was so different from the conversation of Jonah Hill and Michael Cera that they seemed to have been lifted out of another film entirely. At first I was worried they were going to ruin the whole film, but by they grew on me as well. By the end of the film I thought they had justified their existence.

Also a great soundtrack.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky: “This is the Most Remarkable Regional Uprising that I Can Remember”

Also--more music on youtube. possibly the best version of "Masters of War" that I've heard yet.

Some Thoughts on Wisconsin

2011-03-06T10:45:00.007-05:00

Just some brief thoughts that I'll jot down in no particular order.

1). I'm no constitutional lawyer, but if what is happening in Wisconsin and Ohio isn't already illegal, then it should be.
Because our forefathers will worried about legislative assemblies voting away certain basic human right, they added the The Bill of Rights to our constitution. It doesn't matter how many votes you have in the senate, you can't legally vote away someones right to freedom of religion, or freedom of speech.

If the right to collective bargaining isn't already guaranteed by our constitution, then it should be. State legislatures should not be able to legally strip unions of their rights. I'd like to see federal law makers in Washington introduce a new constitutional amendment to prevent this from happening in the future.

2). In recent years Fox News, Glenn Beck, and Jonas Goldberg have made a career out of comparing liberals to fascists. (And if you don't believe me see "Glenn Beck's Nazi Tourette's", 24-Hour Nazi Party People, Bill O'Reilly Defends His Nazi Analogies, and Liberal Fascism by Jonas Goldberg (A).

In general I try and stay away from fascist analogies, but...If we are going to go down that road...

Anyone with any historical knowledge whatsoever knows that Franco and Mussolini rose to power by first trying to demonize the labor unions and then proceeded to crush the labour unions once they got into power. Fascism as it developed at least in Spain and Italy can be said to be a right wing reaction against trade unionism.

Now of course I'm not saying that the labour unions have to win all the time, or that reasonable people can never disagree with union demands. But when you support legislative efforts to strip unions of their collective bargaining rights--well, I'm just saying people who live in glass houses should be careful about throwing around Nazi analogies.

3). Short digression here, but speaking of Glenn Beck: I can usually disagree with someone without thinking that their insane. But I just don't know about Glenn Beck. Watch this video here from his show(in which he ties together the Libyan protests with the Madison Wisconsin protests, and then talks about the end of the world order as we know it) and make up your own mind about whether this man still has a firm grip on reality.
This wouldn't bug me so much if the man were a marginal figure, but he's not. He's got a very highly rated program, on the highest rated cable news network in the country. I was just in airport bookstores recently, and he has authored not one, but several books being displayed prominently on the shelves. His name is even being used as an endorsement to sell other people's books.

I cringe often when I imagine what future historians are going to write about the political dialogue from our time.

4). The Daily Show has been doing a great job recently satirizing the right wing hostility towards public school teachers. Highly recommended viewing (see here, here, here, and here.)

Nor, by the way, is the right-wing attack on teachers anything new. See this "This Modern World" cartoon from back in 1997.

It's worth remembering at this point the high turn over rate of teachers (Washington Post Article here), especially first year teachers.

Anecdotally, I can't begin to tell you about the number of disillusioned former teachers I have talked to over the years. As an education major in college myself, I know several former classmates who taught for one year, and then decided the level of stress involved in teaching at the public schools just wasn't worth it, and then quickly switched over to easier and better paid jobs.
As an English teacher in Japan, I also encountered several former public school teachers who had decided teaching in public schools in America wasn't worth the stress, and decided to escape by becoming English teachers abroad instead.
I also know several people who started out as Education majors, and then were warned that the stresses of the job were rapidly beginning to outweigh the rewards. I could probably write a book about all the things former teachers have told me over the years.

Now, with public school teachers becoming villainized and their pay attacked, I can't imagine anyone with any talent that would be remotely attracted to this job. So remember this the next time you hear a pundit complaining yet again about how American education is falling behind, or how talented people never seem to want to go into teaching.

Which brings me to point 5

5). Remember this e-mail from some anonymous wall street stock trader that was circulating a few months back? Full text here, brief quotation below.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you're only going to hurt yourselves. What's going to happen when we can't find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We're going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We're used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don't take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don't demand a union. We don't retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that.

For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We're going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I'll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

This was making the rounds on facebook a few months back, and most people were responding with the predictable "hey buddy, if you think it's so easy to handle 40 unruly inner-city middle school students, I'd like to see you try."
And no doubt there's some serious misrepresentation going on here. (Contrary to popular belief, teachers can't just abandon the classroom to take bathroom breaks whenever they feel like it. Nor do they retire at 50. And summer break is down to 2.5 months).

But all this is to miss the point. For the sake of argument, let's just assume everything this guy asserts is true. Let's assume that he and his Wall Street buddies are super talented, and the rest of us really suck, and that they could just swoop down and take our jobs whenever they feel like it.

Assume all that's true, and perhaps you begin to see the absurdity in his threat. I would absolutely love it if the most talented people in society would choose to become teachers. Instead, it appears all the talented people are sucked up by Wall Street, where they produce absolutely nothing of value.

And this ties in with the whole problem of capitalism. In a capitalist economy all the profits go to the people who create none of the wealth. The workers who actually manufacture the goods and services that power the economy get paid only a small portion of the value of their labour. However the stockholders, bankers, and Wall Street traders, who do not do any of the work of production, get all of the profits which result from the workers' labour.

And when the economy crashes because of poor choices made by banks and Wall Street, you better believe that they are not going to be the ones who have to pay the price. When sacrifices have to be made, it's the teachers' unions that have to be broken.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky on Wisconsin protests (From Democracy Now!)

Jackass Number Two

2011-02-28T05:45:00.001-05:00

(Movie Review)

So I was hanging out with a couple friends on a Friday night, and someone put this movie in.

I have never seen any of the other Jackass movies, haven’t watched the TV show (I think I might have seen a bit of it once when flipping channels, or something, but it didn’t pull me in) and I’m not interested in it. But sometimes when you’re with a group of friends, you end up watching things you normally would not.

It’s a bit hard to review a movie like this because it’s just a series of pranks and stunts. There’s no real plot or anything, so there’s no scripting or character development or acting to critique. You just watch the various stunts, and if you laugh, great, and if not, there’s not much else to say.

For most of the movie I was more disgusted than anything else, and the laughs from me were few and far between. If I had been at home watching this alone, I think I would have turned it off within the first half hour. But because I was with a group of guys, I stuck it out and watched the whole thing with them. Even though my predominant reaction throughout most of the movie was “Why in the world am I watching this?”

The creativity from sketch to sketch varied widely. Eating the piece of excrement bit, and drinking the horse semen part both seemed to me like they were scrapping the bottom of the creativity barrel. (I can understand that the pressures of filling up a weekly TV show make you include all sorts of filler, but I was expecting more creativity from a movie.)

On the other hand, parts like the bees in the limo, while admittedly a bit cruel, at least was thinking outside the box. I also liked the rodeo see-saw part.
The taxi driver sketch at the end was an interesting premise, but I had trouble believing the intended prank victim was really dumb enough to not realize what was going on, and so the whole thing seemed a bit fake to me.

Much of the movie seemed to me like a Rorshach test. What was happening on screen was only half the show. The audience reaction was where the interesting part was happening. Will you find it funny, disgusting, amusing or revolting? Will you complain that our culture has finally hit rock bottom, or will you admire the comedic genius of these guys? How hard will you laugh and which parts in particular will hit your comedy level?
As such, it probably goes without saying that this movie needs to be watched with a group of friends so that you can see each other’s reactions. It’s no fun being grossed out all alone.

As for me—well I guess I’ve been a prude all my life. Even back in elementary school I remember being disgusted by the fart jokes and the scatological humor that some of my classmates found so hilarious. To me, most of this movie was based on either just being gross, or self-inflicted injuries, or self-mutilation. In most of these sketches I kept waiting for the greater punch line to arrive until I realized this was it—this was what I was supposed to be laughing at.

So I wasn't impressed. But, somewhat to my surprise, according to rottentomatoes.com, this movie did well with the critics who gave it overall positive reviews. So I guess maybe I'm the one whose out of step with society.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky - Controlling the Public Mind

and The Wit and Wisdom of “Fox & Friends” Anchors

True Grit

2011-02-21T01:57:00.004-05:00

(Movie Review)

I was excited to see this movie, mostly because everyone else was really excited to see this movie. (Yep, I got caught up in the hype. Just call me trendy.)

I haven’t seen the original John Wayne version. (Although since I consider myself a bit of a classic film buff, I suppose I ought to get around to it someday.)

However I was impressed by all the positive reviews this film received. Furthermore I always like Coen - Brother's movies. (I’m not always sure what to make of them afterwards, but I always enjoy sitting through them.)

And I enjoyed sitting through this movie as well. Most of it, anyways. (This is one of those movies where the end unfortunately drags out for a bit too long after the main climax finishes. But aside from the last 10 minutes or so, I was completely sucked in by the movie.)

As with any Coen Brothers film, I suppose characters and atmosphere take priority over plot. There were any number of scenes in this movie which I think contributed nothing to the plot, but which are simply there to add to the atmosphere or to emphasize character eccentricities. I think as long as you go into this movie with a relaxed attitude, and are not impatient for the story to get rolling, you’ll have a great time.

As I was leaving the movie theater, I overheard a number of people say to each other, “Well, that wasn’t a great film, but it was entertaining enough.” And I suppose that more or less reflects my attitudes to it as well. Despite all the rave reviews this film has been getting from the critics, I didn’t think it was a new classic. But it was good enough.

Jeff Bridges does a great job in this movie. Much of the movie is just a showcase for him to act like an old, grizzled, brutal Western lawman, and he makes a character worthy of that showcase.
And, somewhat to my surprise, Matt Damon also really does a good job with his role as an arrogant Texas Ranger. (I’m not generally a huge Matt Damon fan, but I think his performance in this movie should easily silence all those critics who think he can’t really act.)

Josh Brolin, although he has a relatively small part in this movie, is as always fantastic. Hollywood is filled with actors who have a very limited range, and seem to be playing the same character in every film (I’m not going to name names, but you know which actors I’m talking about.) Josh Brolin by contrast shows up as a completely different character in just about every movie he’s in, and always does so convincingly. I think he’s one of the few Hollywood stars who’s also a great character actor.

Link of the Day
What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream

Bonus link--Megan Washington: "The Hardest Part" when I was living in Australia this song was on the radio a lot. Apparently it's by an Australian artist, so it may not have made it big back home (I'm not sure) but it's a real bouncy fun song and deserves a larger audience.

The Informant!

2011-02-14T22:51:00.002-05:00

(Movie Review)

This film had gotten a number of good reviews, and I was curious to check it out.

It took me a bit to get into it. The first hour or so I was largely indifferent to the story it was telling, partly I suppose because I didn’t find any of the characters very sympathetic. (I know that’s the whole point of the movie, but it still kept me slightly at arm’s length.) And then as the story unfolded, by the last hour or so I was really hooked.

The film is a true story about a whistle blower who, it turns out, has plenty of problems of his own.

The film doesn’t really hide his problems. You sense that something’s a bit off right from the start. But the film doesn’t completely show you everything straight off either, and so as the film progresses more and more is revealed.

Although much of the film is played for comedy, it does contain at its heart an important question: how much protection should whistle blower’s have? Matt Damon’s character, the real life Mark Whitacre, ended up serving a prison sentence 3 times as long as the people he blew the whistle on. Yes, he embezzled 9 million dollars, but the movie hints that this would never have come to light if he hadn’t alerted the FBI to the price fixing scam. If only uncorrupt people are allowed to become whistle blowers, than does this mean most of the corruption is never going to be uncovered?

As I said though, a lot of this is actually played for comedy in the film. And some of it works pretty well. I got a couple laughs out of some scenes.
However film’s main gag is that it gives us access into the head of Mark Whitacre (the main character). The film will show one scene, and then there will be a voice over giving us insight into what Mark Whitacre is actually thinking at the time. Often it’s something completely unrelated, like how polar bear’s hide their black noses to blend in with the snow.
I’m not quite sure what the point of this is. It might be a way of mocking Mark Whitacre, or hinting that he’s not altogether normal. And as the film progresses, it’s obvious Mark Whitacre has mental illness problems, but this seems to be completely unrelated to the little mental thought balloons we get glimpses of throughout the film. And in fact, having constantly having random thoughts about things unrelated to the subject at hand is something we all do. Like a lot of common human eccentricities, it seems a bit ridiculous when you focus in on it with just one character, but it’s a common enough human trait. You could do that with any character in any movie.

I suspect what happened is that someone was worried the movie couldn’t really stand on its own without throwing in some running gag to spice it up a little. But frankly, I found these constant asides mostly annoying.

Link of the Day
Philosophers and Public Philosophy

The Men Who Stare at Goats

2011-02-12T22:23:00.001-05:00

(Movie Review)

This is a fascinating little movie about the army’s investigation into psychic activities. It is one of those films that immediately sends you running to the internet to try and figure how much of this is true, and how much of this is fiction.

It’s also one of those movies that is interesting in direct proportion to how much of it is true. If it is all true, then it is absolutely amazing. If it is mostly a Hollywood story, then it’s alright, I guess, but I’ve seen better.
The movie opens with the tantalizing line that it is mostly true. Or in their words, “more of this is true than you would believe.”
The rest of the movie often assumes a tone that almost leads you to believe you’re watching a semi-documentary. It’s told through the voice of a reporter, who appears to be documenting everything as he is going, and is mixed in with facts and historical tidbits (for example, citing Reagan’s support of the program).

While watching the movie, I was under the impression that this was more or less a true story (with maybe a couple composite characters and events.)

However after watching the film, my small bit of internet research (I looked at the Wikipedia page) leads me to believe it’s loosely based on a documentary, but mostly made up. I’m not sure.

At any rate, the movie has a rather interesting premise.
About halfway through the movie, a conversation between two generals outlines the reasons for the Army’s investigation into psychic and paranormal activities.

“When did the Soviets begin this type of [psychic] research?”
“Well sir, it looks like they found out about our attempts to telepathically communicate with one of our subs—The Nautilus, while it was under the polar ice cap”
“What attempt?”
“There was no attempt. Seems the story was a French hoax. But the Russians think the story about the story being a French hoax is just a story sir.”
“So they’ve started doing psychic research because they thought we were doing psychic research when in fact we weren’t doing psychic research?”
“Yes sir. But now that they are doing psychic research, we might have to do psychic research, sir. We can’t afford to have the Russians leading the field in the paranormal.”

Absolutely straight out of “Dr. Strangelove.” I was just waiting for them to say something like “we can not afford to have a paranormal gap” and make the allusion complete.

Given that the military designs contingency plans for absolutely everything, and given what a huge amount of pork barrel spending the military is responsible for, I am not surprised at all they were actively researching psychic and paranormal abilities on the off chance it might someday prove useful for military purposes.

What I am surprised at is that, as this film alleges, instead of turning the project over to real researchers to run controlled scientific tests, they gave free reign to new age shamans, hippies, and failed science fiction writers to completely control the project. The result seems to be prove the old motto “the truth is always stranger than fiction.” (Again, assuming this is an accurate representation.)

The story is told in two parts. One is flashbacks to the 1980s when the whole program began. A fascinating little piece of history, although a bit dated now.

The other part of the story, the frame part for all the flashbacks, takes place during the current Iraq War, where apparently the psychic and paranormal division was still being employed, running experiments on Iraqi prisoners and torturing them by putting them in a solitary cell with strobe lights and Barney music.

I found the constant switching back between the A story and the B story a bit disorienting. (Just when you’re starting to get into one of the stories, they pull you out of it and throw you into the other.) But no doubt that the film as a whole is one amazing story.
The flashback to the 1980s show a bizarre world in which for a brief time pseudo science was given free rein in the small section of our military. The Iraqi war parts show a bizarre world in which private entrepreneurs are convinced Iraq is going to be a new gold mine of private investment, and private security contractors get into firefights with each other, trapping the hapless locals in between. (Again, the voice-overs, in which Ewan McGregor tells how many casualties resulted from the fire-fight, leads you to believe this was all based on real events. If it turns out this was mostly fiction, I’m going to feel slightly manipulated.)

There’s a pretty stellar cast in this film (Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey, George Clooney) and they all do a great job. Jeff Bridges, who has been a bit typecast as crazy hippy characters ever since “The Big Lebowski”, nevertheless does a great job as a hippy Army commander. Kevin Spacey has a couple great scenes, especially near the end when he’s explaining the new Iraq War psychic operations, and has a fit, throwing pencils at one of his subordinates who brings up an abandoned project.

The ending could have been a bit better. If it’s a true story, than I guess they were stuck with the facts. But if this was largely made up, then I think it could have used a couple re-writes.

Link of the Day
South America: Toward an Alternative Future

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

2011-02-10T21:55:00.001-05:00

(Movie Review)

I was slightly disappointed with this movie when I realized it was about Sherlock Holmes fighting the magical powers of the occult. Couldn’t they just let Sherlock Holmes be Sherlock Holmes and outsmart regular criminals without some sort of vast magical occult conspiracy to take over the world?

And then I thought, “Well but what else did I expect from Hollywood?” Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories where you get the pleasure of observing Holmes outsmart the criminal from his amazing powers of observation and putting together a series of seemingly meaningless clues, may work well as 20 page stories, but probably doesn’t give the spectacular visuals that a blockbuster Hollywood film needs to compete.

(In fact come to think of it, the last Sherlock Holmes movie I saw, “Young Sherlock Holmes”, also involved Sherlock Holmes taking on the occult. And oddly enough, these are the only two Sherlock Holmes movies anyone seems to remember or to watch. I mean I know there are tons of old Sherlock Holmes movies out there if you dig through the archives of Hollywood, and occasionally some of them are run late at night on cable, but I’ve never actually sat down and watched any of these. Have you?)

I was slightly worried the film might attempt to cop-out by invoking the super-natural as an explanation, but to the film’s credit at the end everything had a logical scientific explanation. (Actually some of the more fantastic bits might have been pseudo-science or steam-punk, but close enough.) There weren’t enough clues given to the audience to try and solve the case with Sherlock Holmes, but then the original Conan Doyle stories often worked the same way.

For the same reasons, I don’t really hold it against this film that it made Sherlock Holmes into an action franchise. Like I said, I think Hollywood had to do it to make the film more visually interesting. And I like pop-corn movie, action blockbusters as much as anyone else.

However, if this does become an action movie, it must be judged in part on the quality of its action scenes. And I don’t know, something about these Guy Ritchie action scenes didn’t really do it for me. Hard to put my finger on it exactly. The close-ups, the dizzying quick cuts between shots, the speeding up and then slowing down, all of which made me feel like I wasn’t enjoying the action scenes so much as just struggling to keep track of what was going on.

Also, in theory, I like the casting of Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law as Holmes and Watson. I think giving the parts to actors like these, instead of more stereotypical serious Holmes, is a great way to keep things fresh.

And, in theory, I think it’s good to have them bickering back and forth a little bit as comic relief.
However the way they were constantly arguing about domestic issues like an old married couple wasn’t perhaps quite as funny as it could have been. It also got a bit repetitive.

Link of the Day
On The U.S. Human Rights Record

Kick-Ass

2011-02-08T21:41:00.001-05:00

(Movie Review)

I hate writing about controversial stuff on this blog.

…Okay, that’s not completely true. If it’s an issue I already have an opinion on, and feel strongly about, I don’t mind it at all. But if it’s an issue I don’t really have a fully formed opinion on, or have strong feelings about, then I’d just assume stay out of it.

I’ve read a bit about the controversy surrounding this movie on Phil’s blog (Phil's post here--and relevant article here). And indeed, it does seem to cross a few lines.

I don’t normally like making common cause with hypocritical Christian media watchdog groups like “Focus on the Family”—(Groups that have made a living complaining about violence in the media, while supporting real life violence in the Iraq War.) And yet, I don’t know, at points watching this movie I couldn’t help but wonder if we had as a culture somehow crossed the line into their worst fears about the fetishization of violence. It was almost like I was watching a satire of what these groups were worried an ultra-violent Hollywood movie would someday look like.

But wait, that’s the point, isn’t it? The whole movie is supposed to be a satire. Does this make everything acceptable because it’s a satire? Well, your judgment call is as good as mine. Like I said, I don’t have any strong opinions.

The film opens with what I thought was a fairly interesting question: given how obsessed our culture is with superheroes, how come you don’t see more people trying to act out these fantasies in real life? Not that it would be successful, but how come you don’t at least see people attempting it?

(Having raised the question, let me give the obvious answer: people, even children, are much better at separating entertainment from reality than media watchdog groups give them credit for.)

The beginning scenes appear to promise a story exploring what would happen if people attempted to live out their super-hero fantasies in reality. But then, very quickly, the film itself becomes just another super-hero fantasy. And since these super-hero movies are a dime-a-dozen lately, I’m not entirely sure what the point of this film is. I mean if I wanted to watch just another super-hero film, I’m more than happy to stick to the standards like Batman and Spider-man.

Especially since we just had “The Watchmen” last year, another movie attempting to deconstruct super-heroes just seems kind of redundant. But I guess Hollywood does everything in packs. Maybe now that they’ve got the idea, we can expect a lot more of these movies in the coming years.

As the movie made multiple tonal shifts, I had a hard time deciding what they were going for. Were we watching a satire on action movies, or an action movie? Was this being played for comedy, or pathos? Were these people living in the real world (where the human body is fragile and can be easily injured) or in some type of comic book world?

Ah, but was it entertaining? Did it hold my interest all the way through? That’s another question, the answer to which is largely yes. Love it or hate it, I do have to admit this film kept me entertained. The film was populated by a number of weird, but interesting characters. And, perhaps in part because of the various tone shifts, you never really knew where the film was going with its premise, and that in itself kind of kept you hooked in for curiosity’s sake if nothing else.

The exception was the last half hour or so. By that time you pretty much know where the film’s climax is headed, and all that’s left to see is just the characters battle it out. At this point I guess my interest began to fade.

So, yeah, I guess in conclusion I’m not sure what to make of this film, and didn’t have any real strong opinions. But for the most part it entertained me.

Link of the Day
On the Backgrounds of the Pacific War

Hot Tub Time Machine

2011-02-06T21:21:00.000-05:00

(Movie Review)

I suppose a large part of any enjoyable movie experience is just matching your expectations to the film, and getting in the appropriate mood.

In that respect, perhaps the title of this film is one of the best things about it. With a title like that, you know right from the start you’re going to get a movie that doesn’t make a lot of sense, or have much of a story line. And having been forewarned about this, you don’t really mind when nothing really makes a lot of sense.

This is one of those stupid comedy movies that’s hard to give an intelligent review to. On the whole, I thought the script was pretty lame. But there were lots of little moments mixed throughout the film that brought a smile to my face.

The premise of the film is that 4 guys travel back in time to 1986, through a process that is never explained, for reasons that are never explained. (Somehow a hot tub is involved, and somehow a Russian energy drink Chernobly (sp?) is involved, and something about a magic squirrel as well.)

Man, you know you’re starting to get old when time travel movies start going back to time eras you actually lived through, and even sort of vaguely remember.
It used to be that these time travel movies would go back to exotic mystical times, like the 1950s in “Back to the Future”.

“Back to the Future” is of course the obvious comparison to this movie. And in fact, call me cynical, but I kind of imagine this movie started life as a Hollywood memo somewhere suggesting that the studio remake “Back to the Future” and update it for today’s audiences. The multiple similarities between the two movies are just so obvious.
(For example, kid travelling back in time to meet his young parents. Same kid beginning to fade in and out of existence once they start changing the time stream. The obvious band performance scene near the end. Returning to the present to find out that everything has changed for the better. Et cetera.)

It’s perhaps unfortunate for this film that all these similarities remind us of “Back to the Future”. It might have been a lot better for the filmmakers if they had tried to make us forget about “Back to the Future” as much as possible, because the similarities invite comparison. And man, does this film suffer by comparison.

In “Back to the Future”, there were all these brilliant little plot points subtly set up in the first third of the film (before the time travel incident), which would then begin to pay off once you got back in time, and saw how everything came together.

This film doesn’t really have any of those. There were a few things that were mentioned in the beginning of the film that I expected were going to pay off later, but they never did.
Why the writers couldn’t have bothered to follow through on some of this stuff I don’t know. It wouldn’t have cost them anything extra in special effects. Either they just got lazy or, perhaps more likely, this is one of those studio films that everyone had their hand in, and went in for several re-writes. This would perhaps explain all the bits that never really seemed to go anywhere. (Such as explaining why John Cusack’s girlfriend had moved out on him at the beginning, how Rob Cordery’s character got the nickname “violator”. What actually happened in Cincinnati. Why the town of Kodiak valley deteriorated in the last 20 years. What the connection with the squirrel was. What the “Great white Buffalo” comments meant, et cetera. What was the origin of the antagonism between Rob Corddry’s character and Clark Duke's character. I even thought the time travel bit might explain why the various characters go on the self-destructive paths they do later in life, but we see none of it.)

I was also a bit confused about just how many cans of Chernobly there actually were. Did they have one, or two? And did they use up all of the first one when they spilled it on the hot tub the first night? Apparently not I guess, but unless I missed something, none of this was really made clear in the movie.

The jokes can be a bit lame as well. Take the following, for example:

“Hey, for your information, I’ve had lots of girlfriends. Hot ones.”
“No, you’ve had lots of boyfriends. Gay ones.”

That might not have been quite so bad if this was one of those scenes where the one-liners where flying back and forth so fast you could barely keep track of them all, and immediately forgot about the lamer ones. But it wasn’t. The whole 4 or 5 line conversation between Clark Duke and Rob Corddry was leading up to this punch line, and after it was delivered the filmmakers decided to lingered on it —stop the conversation for a reaction and laughs from the rest of the car, and then onto a new topic.
What in the world made them think that joke was worth all that? It’s the kind of awkward moment that makes you wonder just how much these Hollywood screenwriters get paid anyway, and if maybe they’re getting paid way too much whatever it is.

But even though the script can be a bit comedy challenged in parts, I think the actors do a great job of selling the material anyway. All 4 of these guys are great. Rob Corddry, who I’ve enjoyed for years on “The Daily Show” can get slightly annoying at times, but on the whole does a great job of playing the jerk in the group of friends—the kind of guy who is constantly causing his friends all sorts of grief, and then gets upset when they try and call him on it.

John Cusack is, as usual, one of my favorite actors, and does a great job with all the dry humor bits. My favorite part of the film is where Cusack’s character is trying to carefully explain to Rob Corddry’s character that the piece of graffiti he had carved 20 years ago (“Adam sux cox n dix”) is no longer there, and Rob Corddry is so devastated by this (as if this was the worst part of the time travel mess.) It may not sound like much on paper, but the actors really do a great job with the delivery.

(By the way, based on the two gags just previously mentioned, you might conclude this film has a bit of homophobia running through it, and many of the jokes are based off of the assumption that the worst thing a male could have happen to him is to be accused of being gay. And you would be right. But I guess it’s no worse than any of the other frat house comedies out there these days.)

At the risk of stating the obvious, this is one of those Hollywood movies that would have been completely worthless if they hadn’t have gotten a bit of star power behind it. If John Cusack hadn’t have been in this movie, it would have been a disaster.

John Cusack’s character in the film, by the way, is apparently a narcissist and a control freak. Although we don’t really see this so much in his characterization, or in anything he does, we just have to be told it by the rest of the characters. (There was the sticker plan thing in the beginning, but since that happened off camera, and had no other ramifications in the movie, and was so blatantly existing solely just to tell the audience this guy is a control freak, I’m not really sure it counts as effective characterization.) So this is perhaps another example of lazy writing.

Still, having said all that, I must admit that this film got enough laughs out of me that I can’t hate it entirely. And may even give it a cautious recommendation, for anyone looking to kill time watching a brainless comedy.

Link of the Day
Interview with Prof. Chomsky Nov 16 2010

The King’s Speech

2011-02-04T21:00:00.004-05:00

(Movie Review)

I confess I went into this movie with some ambivalence.

Even though it had gotten good reviews (and had been recommended to me by several people) the premise of the movie just sounded really boring—a king overcoming a speech impediment didn’t strike me as the kind of story that could keep me interested for 2 hours.

Once again, however, I learn that good screenwriting and witty dialogue can make even the subtlest of stories completely engrossing.

Even though not a lot of action happens in this movie (the climax is the main character speaking into a microphone for 3 minutes) the conversations between all of the characters are all really good.
Because this film is so talky, at times I thought like I was watching a theater play transformed onto the big screen. (In fact I should look it up to see whether this movie did originally start life as a play.) But like any successful stage play, all of the talking parts have a nice flow.

This is one of those minor historical little stories that has to struggle a bit to find its place among more major stories. Potentially, what is happening in the background of this movie (the first royal abdication in British history, and the build up to the Second World War) should be more interesting than the main story (George VI struggling to master his speech impediment.) So there’s an interesting balancing act that the screenwriters have to juggle to keep their main storyline from being overwhelmed by the other plot threads.
War films we’ve had plenty of the past few years, so I didn’t mind so much that the war parts got pushed to the background.
The abdication crisis, and the soap-opera like events that lead up to it, I knew little about and would have been curious to learn more. And although the film makers did feature it as a major part of the story (in the 2nd act of the film, at least), I would have gladly sat through more.

I wonder, would this movie have been slightly improved if the abdication crisis had been given almost equal time to the speech impediment? It would have overwhelmed the main plot a bit, but then the main plot was slightly repetitive.

One of the things I hate about romance movies is that the plot sometimes seems to go in circles. The guy will win the girl’s love, then he’ll screw it up and he’ll have to win her back again, then he’ll screw it up again and have to win her back yet again, then something else will come up and they’ll temporarily break-up, and then get back together again. (Not all romance movies do this, but a lot of them do. You know which ones I’m talking about.)
This movie, although more of a bromance, did tend to follow that same pattern. There were several times when the speech therapist Lionel had to win back the King’s confidence, and by the 3rd time or so I felt a bit like we were moving in circles.

Also, some of the reviews for this film had led me to believe this film was about Lionel's "unconventional methods" to speech therapy. (Huge cliche that, but I'll let it go because it's apparently historical.) However the film was really all about the relationship between the two men, and little about Lionel's unconventional methods. There are a couple scenes, and a bit of a montage, but at the end of the film I didn't really understand what Lionel's theory of speech therapy was, and why his methods were considered so uncoventional.
In fact, from the brief bit we saw of it, it looked like the methods of the King's usual speech therapists (Demosthene's pepples)were much more unconventional.

What else to say? Well, the acting was pretty good. It’s easy to either underact or overact this type of script, but I think the actors hit it pretty pitch perfect. They say all their lines with a bit of oomph to them, but they never really get to the point where their overacting.

My only complaint is I thought the guy they got to do Churchill was almost doing a bit of a caricature of Churchill. But admittedly Churchill is one of those iconic figures (like Nixon or Elvis) that it’s hard to portray without veering into caricature. And fortunately Churchill only has a minor role in this movie.
In fact, while I'm on the subject, it almost seemed like Churchill was shoehorned unnecessarily into this movie. He could have been taken completely out of the movie, and I don't think anyone would have noticed. But it's like the studio said, "It's a movie about Britain leading into World War II. Even though Churchill wasn't yet prime minister at the time, we've got to put him in their somewhere. He's the only person the American audiences will actually recognize."

And on the subject of World War II:

Just about every major studio movie that comes out portrays World War II as a just and necessary war. (It’s necessary to maintain at least one good war in the public memory so we can justify future wars.)
Although that’s not the main theme of this film, and although the war is in the background not the foreground of the film, the underlying assumption is still that the war was a necessity.
This isn’t really the place to go through the whole historical record. I’m just going to state my objection to this interpretation, and say that I agree with writers like Chris Harman and Howard Zinn, who have done an excellent job of cutting through all the mythology surrounding that war.

Some more points:

* And one small historical nitpick.
At one point King George VI declares, “Without exception, every single monarch throughout history has succeeded another monarch who was dead, or nearly dead. I am the first monarch in history who has succeeded a king who is still very much alive.” (Or something like that, I’m quoting from memory.)

Despite this being phrased in a very categorical way, I think there are a number of exceptions to this. The example that springs to mind is William of Orange succeeding James II of England. (And I have a feeling that if I racked my brains long enough I could think of more. If anyone else can think of more examples feel free to put them in the comments section.)

This isn’t technically a historical inaccuracy, because it was something that the character said, and you could make the argument that the character simply got it wrong. But you would think that a king of England would be a little bit more versed in his own royal history.

* This movie got a fair amount of publicity over here in Australia because of the Australian connection. (Both the character Lionel Logue, and the actor who played him Geoffrey Rush, are Australian).
Watching the movie in a Melbourne movie theater, I can attest that the audience laughed appreciatively at all the jabs at Australia's expense thrown in this movie.

*************************************************************

Speaking of Melbourne, this little article in the Melbourne Age "Accusations of anti-Semitism have cast a cloud over The King's Speech" adds an interesting angle historical angle to the criticism of the film.
This is all new information to me, so I don't have any strong opinions on it. Go over and read the article and see what you think for yourself. (Rather frustratingly, the author of the article only reports that a controversy exists, and doesn't comment on the accuracy of the accusations. I guess researching it would have been too much work.)
However, if these charges are accurate, it is yet another example of what authors like Harman and Zinn have been saying all along--that much of the justification for World War II was retrofitted into history, and at the time the actual ruling classes of Britain and the United States were not very concerned about the plight of European Jews.

And on the subject of historical criticism of this movie, see also Christopher Hitchens review: "Churchill Didn't Say That"

*************************************************
One last link: This article "'The King's Speech' might get a post-Oscars nominations re-edit"

This is yet more proof that:
A)--The ratings system is completely broken.
B)--The American obsession with assigning moral values to phonemic sequences is just getting ridiculous.

Link of the Day
Chomsky on Gaza MIT Jan2009

Flashman’s Lady by George MacDonald Fraser

2011-02-02T03:03:00.003-05:00

(Book Review)

Yes, I come to yet another Flashman book. (See also: Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Flashman, Royal Flash, Flash for Freedom, Flashman at the Charge, and Flashman and the Great Game.)

So far I’m still having fun with this series, so I’m still continuing on with it.

Although I should add, by way of disclaimer, that these books are definitely guilty pleasures. There’s some of Orientalism in them (using the Far East as an exotic backdrop for Westerners to have adventures in). And there’s probably a bit of sexism in them as well. (The books are meant to parody Flashman’s misogyny, not endorse it, but there’s a fine line that perhaps occasionally gets crossed.) But as much as I’d hate to have to defend everything in these books, I certainly enjoy reading them. They’re a very fun way to learn history.

It’s common for these books to cover about two or three different topics as Flashman runs from one danger point into another. This book can be roughly divided into about 3 equal parts (each little more than a 100 pages):
1). Cricket in England during the 1840s,
2). Singapore and Malaysia in the 1840s,
3). Madagascar during the 1840s.

Not being a big sports fan, the first 3rd of the book, in which Flashman interacts with some of the great Cricket players of the 1840s, was slightly dry for me. It wasn’t terrible (there’s a gambling scandal and a personal rivalry to keep things interesting) but I felt like it went on for　too long, and I was eager to get to the more exotic parts of the story. (Despite having lived in a cricket playing nation for one year, I never did catch the fever.)
But that’s just me. If you’re a sports fan, you might enjoy it more than I did.

There’s a brief detour in the storyline for Flashman and his friends to witness a public execution. The scene described there reminded me very much of Charles Dicken’s description of a public hanging in 1849, and indeed Dicken’s account is cited as one of the sources in the footnotes.
The bloodlust of the English mob described here is used later in the story to put some perspective on the cruelties Flashman will witness in Madagascar.

The second part of the story takes place in Singapore and Malaysia.
This past year I’ve met a lot of people from Singapore and Malaysia, and through talking to them my interest in these countries has greatly increased. The history of Singapore and Malaysia seems to be a fascinating mix of Asian culture and British colonialism.

Unfortunately, George MacDonald Fraser, who can be wonderfully descriptive when he wants to be, doesn’t really get into the local culture in much detail. Nor is there much history of the British involvement in these areas. So that was slightly disappointed.

What Fraser does focus on is one of the forgotten heroes of the Victorian Empire, James Brooke, who apparently was famous for going up and down Malaysia and Indonesia battling pirates.

In one of the afterwards to the book, Fraser hints that James Brooke has been left out of the history books as part of a politically correct plot to cover up the good that the British Empire did. “Nowadays, when it is fashionable to look only on the dark side of imperialism, not much is heard of James Brooke. He was one of those Victorians who gave empire-building a good name,” (p355).

Although I don’t know anything about James Brooke myself, this kind of language makes me feel slightly uneasy. Up until now, I’ve always felt like I agreed more or less with George MacDonald Fraser’s politics, but I’m reluctant to concede that imperial military intervention has its good points. But, like I said, I don’t know anything about the subject, so I’ll just let it go at that.

Politics aside, I did get swept up in the whole adventure of the story. James Brooke was fighting pirates on the Batang Lupar River, and engaging in what was known as “river fighting.” I had never heard of river fighting before, but I guess it means taking these big ships that were designed for battle on the high seas and maneuvering them down through the rivers instead to battle other pirate ships also hiding along the river.
Needless to say, river fighting is a lot different than traditional ocean fighting, and Fraser does a good job of describing it, including the different spy boats that would run up and down the river ahead of the main boat and the ambushes when the enemy ships come out from behind the jungle foliage.

And, although Flashman himself is a fictional character, the campaign actually did take place. As usual, in his footnotes Fraser backs up most of what he says by references to diaries from the surviving members of the expedition, indicating that even some of the more unbelievable sounding episodes are straight out of history.

The last 3rd of the book takes place in Madagascar, which was ruled in the 1840s by the terrible Queen Ranavalo.
I had never heard of Ranavalo before, nor read much of anything about any of the history of Madagascar come to that. But I was happy enough to go along for the ride and learn a few new things about a different part of the world.

Once again, these Flashman books end up being a thoroughly enjoyable read.

*************************************************************

Up until now, the books have proceeded in chronological order. This book breaks chronology, and jumps back to the years 1842-1845 (after the first Flashman book, but before the second one.) I’m also given to understand that many of the later books in this series also jump around a lot in chronologically.

The author can get away with this to a certain extent, because in Flashman’s first person narration it’s been clear all along that he’s had many more adventures than he has been telling us.

But it is difficult to write a prequel that fits into continuity flawlessly. And if you want to be nitpicky about it, there are a lot of things you can point out. (As a former Trekkie, I’m trained to get anal about continuity errors.)

For example, Flashman runs into his old rival Tom Brown at the beginning of the book. And he obviously seems to remember the confrontation, because he wrote it in his memoirs. This appears to contradict the ending of the previous book, in which Flashman had to be reminded who Tom Brown was. (Also, presumably Scud East would have heard about this encounter, but the impression given in “Flashman at the Charge” is that neither Tom Brown nor Scud East have run into Flashman since their school days.)

Somewhat more serious is that Flashman and his wife go through a number of shared experiences, which you think would alter their relationship slightly, or at the very least have been referenced in the other books.

But having said all that, none of that really spoiled the fun. The point of these books is just to have some fun historical fiction, it’s not to obsess about every continuity point. (And also, these are admittedly pretty minor points.)

*******************************************

This is the 6th book in series, and to mix things up slightly, in addition to Flashman’s own first person narrative, pages from his wife’s diary are also mixed in. This is an interesting way to keep things fresh. His wife is so airheaded and clueless about everything that the portrayal might well boarder on sexist (yet another point where I would be hard pressed to defend these books) but there is added humor in reading through her version of events, and seeing how little she grasps of what is happening around her.
Her diaries are edited by her sister, who will occasionally make marginal notes into them when she loses patience with her sister’s narration.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky on 9-11 and the New War on Terrorism (2002)

King Richard III by William Shakespeare

2011-01-31T21:39:00.004-05:00

(Book Review)

Before I get into the actual review, first: A brief summary of my relationship with Shakespeare. (Because if you can’t be self-indulgent on your own blog, then where can you be self-indulgent?)

Ever since the 1950s (or before?), Shakespeare has had a reputation for boring schoolchildren.

And yet, there’s a certain type of child (bookish, introverted, un-athletic, quiet, geeky) that is fascinated by stories, and is curious about the classics from a young age, even if they lack the ability to read them for themselves.

And that was me. I wasn’t a gifted youngster in terms of reading ability, but I was always fascinated by good stories, and from a young age I was aware that there were lots of good stories locked away in classic literature, and I was eager to get at them.

As a pre-adolescent, I became especially interested in Shakespeare. I discovered we had a number of similar interests: Greek mythology, Ancient Rome, history, and, of course, blood and violence.

Why the adolescent male mind is attracted to violent stories is a question I’ll have to leave for psychiatrists. But we are.
Like many a child before me (and probably many afterwards) I discovered that there was much more blood and violence in classic literature than in the R rated movies I wasn’t allowed to watch. Hence began my fascination with books like the Iliad, and the Odyssey.

And Shakespeare fit into this scheme as well. Shakespeare wasn’t as action packed as Homer, but he could be frighteningly gruesome. For example, when I stumbled upon “Titus Andronicus” (which I had mail ordered simply because of my interest in Roman history, not being aware what kind of story it was) I was, like any boy would be, both repelled by it and fascinated by it.
It was certainly more horrific than any of the horror movies I wasn’t allowed to watch at the time. (And if you don’t believe me, go and find a detailed plot summary of this play, and then ask yourself if this isn’t much more gruesome than anything “Friday the 13th” or “Nightmare on Elmstreet” can dish up.)
I remember gleefully recounting the details of the play to my mother in the car one afternoon, knowing that she might stop me from watching horror movies, but that she couldn’t really forbid me from reading Shakespeare.

However since I was a child of limited literary abilities, all of my fascination with Shakespeare was based purely on the stories. I had no interest in or patience with his word play, similes, puns, poetry, or iambic pentameter. I just wanted to find out what the story was.
Similarly, all of the symbolism, themes, character foils, and the like usually went right over my head unless they were explicitly pointed out by someone (a teacher, or the text notes.)

As you would expect given this, I rarely had the patience to actually sit through and read a Shakespeare play from beginning to end. Instead I would specifically look for editions of Shakespeare which were rich with long introductions, explanatory notes, and with plot summaries and analyses for each scene. I would read all of these instead, and only just skim the actually play itself.
For plays I was specifically interested in, like "Trolius and Cressida" (because of my interest in the Trojan War), or Titus Andronicus, (because of my fascination with the macabre, mentioned above) I tried several times to sit down and read them from cover to cover, but always gave up within the first few pages.

The only times I ever actually found the will power to sit down and read a Shakespeare play was when I had to, because someone else was testing me on it.

With this level of external motivation, I found I could quite happily read through “Julius Caesar” (10th grade English) and not only get through the whole thing, but more or less understand it.
The same with “Macbeth” (12th grade English). And King Henry IV Part 1 (British Literature class at Calvin College), followed by King Henry IV Part 2.
And then the Shakespeare class I took at Calvin. (Hamlet, King Lear, 12th Night, Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Tempest, Othello, Measure for Measure, Much Ado about Nothing). All of these I read because a teacher or professor made me read them. And all of them I ended up enjoying.
And yet I still never went on to read any plays on my own initiative.

…But I’ve always meant to.

This past year, I’ve found a new excuse.
I’ve given myself a bit of a crash course on British History. (For most of the year, until I recently found the audio book section in my local library, I’ve spent the entire year with just “This Sceptred Isle” (A), and “Monarchy” by David Starkey as the only selections on my ipod. And I listened to them over, and over, and over again. And now I finally know who all these medieval kings of England actually are.
Since I now had the historical background which I thought would help me appreciate Shakespeare’s history plays more, it seemed the perfect time to pick up Shakespeare again.

Short Disclaimer
A Japanese friend, who never really understood the appeal of Shakespeare, once cynically quoted to me the following line (apparently from a Japanese academic talking on Japanese TV): “There are so many books written about Shakespeare, that you could spend your whole life reading books of Shakespeare criticism, and never actually get around to reading Shakespeare himself.”
The scary part is—he wasn’t lying.

This makes it a bit intimidating to try and write anything new on the subject. But, since I’ve committed myself to this book review project, I’ve got to jot down at least a few thoughts.
As always, I’ll just write down what struck me about this book going through it as an average reader, and not worry if what I have to say is new or particularly insightful.
(For this reason, I have deliberately avoided consulting the critics, and have just written up my off-the-cuff impressions on the play.)

The Actual Review
This is the final play of a 4 part series detailing the Wars of the Roses. It is preceded by Henry VI part 1, Henry VI part 2, and Henry VI part 3. It is my understanding that many of the characters in this play make their first appearances in the earlier plays. And yet this is an independent work in its own right. Which is why I started with this play instead of the earlier ones. (Although now that I’ve finished this, I find myself interested in going back and reading the earlier plays.)
If you do jump directly into this play, it probably helps to know a little bit of the historical background behind the Wars of the Roses in order to understand who everyone is. But it’s probably nothing that some text notes or a good annotated version of the play can’t fix.
Having recently acquired some British history (see above) I felt like I understood pretty well what the historical background was, and who everyone was in this play. (At least as far as the main royal family anyway. I wasn’t so familiar with the some of various nobles and side players, but Shakespeare gets you up to speed pretty quickly.)

I was also able to catch a couple points were Shakespeare takes some liberties with history. (Historically there’s no proof that Richard, and not Edward, gave the order for Clarence’s death.)
[And actually, while I’m on the subject the last time I walked into my local bookstore there were about 4 or 5 revisionist histories of Richard III, all claiming he wasn’t such a bad guy after all and probably didn’t commit a lot of the murders attributed to him. But I’ll leave that aside.]

As with any historical novel (or historical play, or historical movie), a lot of the pleasure comes from seeing history come alive. Historical characters are fleshed out, made into people you care about, and get you emotionally involved in the story.

For example, it’s one thing to know the dry fact that Clarence was killed in the tower drowned in a tub of butt of marmsey. It’s a whole different level of emotional involvement to read him pleading with his murderer’s for his life.

Since this play takes place directly after the Yorkist victory in the War of the Roses, it’s interesting the way Shakespeare sets the play up as first two different factions (the Yorkists united against the one remaining Lancastrian, Margaret) and then later explores the Yorkist faction falling out among themselves.

The play also seems to have elements of the horror genre in it. Like many horror stories about ancient curses, Margaret (the last Lancastrian) pronounces curses on all the victorious Yorkists at the beginning of the play. At first they all laugh her off, but one by one, everyone she curses meets an untimely death. The inevitability of it makes it horrific. You can try and laugh off the curse, you can try and avoid it, you can try and repent of your evil ways, you can even try and run away, but sooner or later that curse will hunt you down and kill you.
The deaths are the result of Richard, of course, but it makes you wonder if Richard is actually doing the killing, or if he is just being used as the instrument of the curse.

The character of Richard, as Shakespeare, portrays him, is extremely good at lying. He always says one thing in private, and then swears up and down in public that his intention is just the opposite. It’s impossible to read this play and not think of modern politicians, which is perhaps why this play has remained so popular over the years.
That being said, given this plays reputation I was hoping for more of a psychological exploration about what makes a tyrant. And that we don’t get. Richard is evil just for the sake of being evil. (Supposedly he’s bitter at the whole world because of his physical deformity, but that level of motivation doesn’t rise much above a typical comic-book villain.)

Perhaps because of the fact that Richard was more of a plot device than an actual character, the ending of the play and his eventual defeat left me a feeling a little bit underwhelmed. I’m not sure exactly what kind of emotional conclusion I was hoping for from the play, but whatever it was I didn’t get it.

As far as readability: I thought it was pretty interesting. It’s got a high body count (which satisfies the macabre inside all of us), but because it has a high body count there are a lot of death speeches right before a character dies, and mourning speeches after a character is killed (which slows down the pace of the play a bit.)
And at the risk of sounding like my old English teacher, the verbal sparring between the characters is pretty interesting. Theirs a lot of wit on display in the antagonistic scenes as characters trade verbal barbs back and forth.

Anyways, for whatever it’s worth, those are my two cents on the most scrutinized playwright in English history.

Link of the Day
Chomsky in Lebanon

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

2011-01-29T10:25:00.001-05:00

(Movie Review)

I can be a bit out of it. I didn’t really know anything about this movie except that it when it first came out it generated a lot of buzz at some of the geek websites I follow. (I spend more time than I care to admit checking websites that report on geek culture.)

I can be skeptical about mainstream culture, but I usually like geek chic. I am a geek, after all. So even though I knew nothing about this movie, the glowing testimony of internet geeks sold me on it. And the fact that it got generally positive reviews at mainstream sites like rotten tomatoes was a bonus.

So I walked into the theater being sure I was going to love.

And was therefore unpleasantly surprised to discover I hated it.

Much of the movie is a one note gag. The gag is that it’s a guy’s love life played out as if it were a video game. Once you get that joke in the first 10 minutes, then the last 80 minutes or so of the movie doesn’t really have a lot to offer.

It’s also a movie that’s trying way way way too hard to be cool. The quick cuts, the ironic subtitles, the dry sarcastic conversations—the whole thing just reeks of effort. And the thing about being cool is, once the effort starts to show, it’s no longer cool.
And all the characters are really overdoing the hipster dry sarcasm thing. Throughout the whole movie. Which didn’t work for me.
It’s funny in a movie when one character is dry and sarcastic, especially when they can play off other less subtle characters. (The old vaudeville rule about only having one straightman.) But when all the characters are doing it all the time, I just got sick of it fast.

And plus I just didn’t think it was all that funny. I can pick remember about 2 or 3 lines which made me chuckle, but the rest of the jokes just seemed stupid and forced.

And perhaps worst of all, I wasn’t given a reason to care about any of these characters. And I wasn’t given any reason to understand any of their motivations.

I mean, I know it’s just a silly movie and I’m not supposed to take it too seriously. But you’ve got to make me care a little bit.
Why did Scott Pilgrim fall in love with Ramona? I didn’t particularly think she was all that great, and aside from the fact he had a mysterious dream about her I was never given any reason why he would suddenly get so obsessed with her.
Throughout the movie, I couldn’t see any reason why he should pick Ramona over Knives Chau, or vice-versa. One was just as good as the other it seemed to me.
Why were all the ex-boyfriends fighting Scott? Why did Knives Chau spend the whole movie being obsessed with him, and then suddenly have a change of heart and let him go in the end? Why was she obsessed with him in the first place?
Why did Scott’s roommate want to evict him?
Why did that one girl with the glasses really hate him?

I could go on all day listing things. None of the characters were given any reasons to do any of the things they did. And therefore I was bored watching it because I couldn’t care less about what happened to anyone.

Also: Did they have to name the one Chinese character in the movie Knives Chau? And did they have to portray those Japanese twins in such a stereo-typical way with the Asian dragons? And who thought it would be a good idea to have the one Indian character doing the Bollywood song?

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky on U.S. Foreign Policy
Also: Don't shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths

The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg (Abridged)

2011-01-27T01:31:00.000-05:00

(Book Review)

As you can see in the title to this post, this is the abridged version I'm reviewing.

Ordinarily I don't like abridged versions. (I'm enough of a stickler for details that I always wonder what I'm missing.) I do make certain expectations however, particular if it's on audio book and I don't think that realistically I'll ever get around to reading the print version.

Of course you do never really know what you're missing. And my two main criticisms of this book (that it was very abrupt, and that most of it I already knew)could well be unique to the abridged version. In fact these types of criticism usually are. But I don't know. I can only review what I've listened to.

So, briefly, I'll deal with my two main criticisms. The first being the abrupt pace of the book.
This is set right from the opening sentences of the book, where without much of an introduction at all we're plunged right into the middle of the Germanic invasion of England, without any historical background at all as to what had been going on in England before the Anglos and the Saxons came, or why they came in the first place.

"So where did it begin? How did the billion tongued language of modern English first find it's voice? When and where did it begin to assume the form we know? How did it set out from such a remote and unlikely place on the map to forge it's way to spectacular success?
As far as England is concerned, the language that became English arrived in the 5th Century with Germanic warrior tribes from across the sea...."

The author than rushes from one fact to another without really letting the significance of any of it really sink it.

My second criticism, that I already knew most of it, is perhaps a bit of "know-it-all" thing to say. And to be fair, if I had come across this book a year ago much of it would have been completely new to me.
In the past year, however, I've been doing a lot of reading about linguistics (for example "The Mother Tongue" by Bill Bryson and "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker.
And I've also been brushing up a lot on my history of Britain. These two things combined manage to cover a lot of the same ground as a book about the history of the English language.

And in fact some of what Melvyn Bragg states as hard truth is challenged in these other books. Steven Pinker in his book casts doubt on the hypothesis that some prototype Indo-European language is the mother of all languages (something Melvyn Bragg states as a simple fact without qualifications.)
And at least one of these books (don't remember offhand if it was Pinker or Bryson) challenges the conventional folk linguistic story that the "beef/cow" distinction originated from the ruling Norman class never encountering farm animals until they came to their table served as meat. (Something else that Bragg states as a simple fact.)

However that's not to say I didn't learn anything at all from this book. About a quarter of the book, maybe half, was new information. For example much of the history of the English language bible was new to me.

The book is written by a British author for a British audience. (At least the version I listened to was. I know sometimes publishers re-edit books for their American release.) Some of it, the emphasis on place names in Britain, is of limited interest to Americans. But as the story of English expands it does include sections on American English. And Australian English gets some attention as well. (My own surname gets mentioned twice in the section on Australian English.)

Not anything Earth shattering in this book, but fairly interesting and pleasant enough to listen to.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky-Propaganda And Control Of The Public Mind
and
A Defense of Wikileaks

King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard

2011-01-25T01:05:00.000-05:00

(Book Review)

Because my real life has become depressingly boring lately, I’ve decided to try and seek out a little bit of excitement in my leisure reading material. And so I come to one of the classic adventure stories: “King Solomon’s Mines”.

(This is also part of my project to read through the classics of pulp fiction. See also: "Sherlock Holmes”, “The Martian Trilogy”, “The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu”, “Conan the Barbarian” and "The Scarlet Pimpernel" and "Prisoner of Zenda".)

I didn’t know much about this book before I started, and I confess that it was quite different from what I had expected.
I was expecting much more of a jungle adventure story--men hacking their way through thick green jungle foliage, boating down a jungle river, battling crocodiles and piranhas and tigers.

Instead, this is much more of an African savannah story. They cross through the great plains, there is a bit of elephant hunting, and then the real meat of the journey takes place crossing a desert. And then it becomes a desert story—men wishing for water—wishing they had water again—complaining about not having water, et cetera. (I don’t care for desert crossing stories all that much. They tend to be one note songs.)

Once they get across the desert, they find a kingdom hidden away in the mountains. And then it becomes a “hidden kingdom” story, and a “restoring the rightful king to the throne” story.

I really hate to say this about an old celebrated classic, but reading through these classic adventure stories, do you ever get the feeling that the only reason they became classics in the first place is that they were written before the publishing industry really took off? Maybe back in 1885 people were so desperate for fantasy adventure type stories they would lap up anything. In this day and age, when year after year bookstores are flooded with shelves full of fantasy books, I’m not sure this book would ever have gotten much notice.

That’s not to say this book is completely worthless. There is a bit of wonder that comes through when the characters are descending from the mountains into a completely new land. And there are a couple big epic battle scenes that show a lot of imagination in their descriptions. I just never was able to get past the rather bare bones writing style and skimpy plot.

(Admittedly part of the problem is that I waited to long to read this book. I should have read it at age 12. I would then have probably been a lot less critical of all the undeveloped characters and motivations, and just gotten swept up in all the big battle scenes.)

The publisher’s introduction to my copy warns that H. Rider Haggard presents a rather “patronizing” view of the native black Africans. And “patronizing” is about the right word for it. It’s not a negative view necessarily. The black natives are presented as having their own code of honor, and there are a lot of elements of the “noble savage” stereotype in their portrayal. But they are often presented as childlike in comparison with the white protagonists, easily impressed, easily persuaded, and never quite on the same intellectual level. They are capable of the greatest cruelties as well as the greatest bravery, depending on who gets them excited.
And, there are several little polemics against inter-racial romance in the book. “Can the sun mate with the darkness, or the white with the black?” one native girl says at one point, and the narrator later repeats it as a truism, as if one bad analogy had forever put the question to rest.
(By that logic, why stop at skin color? Why not forbid people with white hair from mating with people with dark hair?
I know, I’m preaching to the choir here. We’re all enlightened now in the 21st century. But one can imagine the effect this would have had on all those children who read this book 100 years ago.)

Well, I guess this is about what you’d expect from a 19th century book during the height of the British Empire.
The author, H. Rider Haggard, by the way, was a bit of an interesting fellow himself, and lived in Africa for a number of years. So he wasn’t simply writing this book from an armchair back in London, relying on newspaper reports and his imagination for an Africa he’d never seen (like Burroughs did with his Tarzan series.) Haggard actually had first hand contact with these people, so you would think his portrayal of them would have been a little bit more enlightened.
But then racism is a funny thing. Although we might like to think that more integration would lead to more understanding, historically this hasn’t always been true. For example the slave owners in the American South did not acquire any more enlightened views from their daily contact with their slaves.

In closing:
Well, I guess I’ve written a number of negative things about this book, but I didn’t hate it completely. (The books I really hate I usually don’t make it to the end of, so by default almost any book on this book review project is something that held my interest at least a little bit.) It’s a short little book (only 214 pages), and it reads fairly quickly. And for all its faults it was fast paced enough that I didn’t really get bored with it, and therefore was able to sit down with it for long periods of time. Not perfect, but a nice little quick read if nothing else.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky: WikiLeaks Cables Reveal 'Profound Hatred for Democracy' by U.S. Govt Officials