Nobody Tells Us What to Say

More proof of the superiority of the western media: apparently Chinese journalists need rules like these written down for them.

One Line Review: The Dark Knight

I admire a movie clever enough to disguise its absurdities as grotesqueries.

Come Together

Thousands turn out as Obama urges world to 'stand as one'

That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another. The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.

...

My country must stand with yours and with Europe in sending a direct message to Iran that it must abandon its nuclear ambitions.

Hey, d'you remember that Duckman episode where in the future a mom tells her young son a bedside story about the war between the sexes and how everything ends happily and then the son says, "So now we have love and respect for everyone?!" and the mom replies, "Yes, son, everyone except the Irish."

God, I miss Duckman.

Oh, wait! See - this is what happens when you keep hope alive!

Edit: Fact-checking my own jokes again.

How's that working out for you? Being clever?

That poor dead puppy.

Spoiler

From "Remembering Thomas Disch":

"Let's be honest, the real interest in this kind of story is to see some devastating cataclysm wipe mankind out ... My point was simply to write a book where you don't spoil that beauty and pleasure at the end."

More Bits

Being the trivial fellow I am, the parts of Greg Grandin's recent article on the Monroe Doctrine to which I choose to draw attention are as follows:

...National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger quipped that Latin America is a "dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica." But Kissinger also made that same joke about Chile, Argentina, and New Zealand...

I remember when Mort Sahl toured Australia in the 80s he joked that Reagan saw New Zealand "as a dagger pointing at Antarctica" but I didn't realise he'd been ripping off the man whose receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize marked the death of satire*. New Zealand was rather in America's bad books at the time as the new government of David Lange had made good on Labor's promise to ban nuclear warships from NZ ports. As Lange said at the Oxford Union debate: "What's happened is that a government has done exactly what it said it would do if it was elected - and of course this is terribly destabilising."

Douglas Feith, former Pentagon undersecretary, suggested that, after 9/11, the U.S. hold off invading Afghanistan and instead bomb Paraguay, which has a large Shi'ite community, just to "surprise" the Sunni al-Qaeda.

Mr Grandin oversells the stupidity of that just a tad. According to the Newsweek link the supposed justification for hitting Paraguay was the idea that Hezbollah had a training camp there. Coz Shi'ite/Sunni, Hezbollah/Al Qaeda - wot's the diff, right? If only there was a sobriquet that did justice to Mr Feith's extraordinary intellectual gifts.**■ ■ ■This intriguingly Orwellian aspect of Benedict Anderson's excellent survey of the history and legacy of "Haji Mohammed" Suharto caught my eye:

[T]he introduction of a new spelling system for the national language, [was] inaugurated in 1972–73. Officially, this policy was justified as a way to open up a common print market with Malaysia. But the real motive behind it was to mark a decisive break between what was written under the dictatorship and everything written before it. One had only to read the title of a book or pamphlet to know whether it was splendidly modern, or a derisory residue of Sukarnoism, constitutionalism, the revolution, or the colonial period. Any interest in old-orthography materials was automatically suspicious. The change was sufficiently great that youngsters could easily be persuaded that ‘old’ printed materials were too hard to decipher, and so not to be bothered with.

The effective result was a sort of historical erasure, such that the younger generation’s knowledge of their country’s history came largely from the regime’s own publications, especially textbooks. Needless to say, the decades of anti-colonial activity against the Dutch largely disappeared. The revolution was renamed the War of Independence, in which only soldiers played significant roles. The post-revolutionary period of constitutional democracy was abruptly dismissed as the creation of civilian politicians, aping Western rather than Indonesian ways. All this had some comical aspects. For example, the brave but hopeless Communist rebellion against the Dutch colonial regime in 1926–27 was described as the first of a series of treasonable Communist conspiracies culminating in October 1, 1965.

In the decade after Suharto’s fall, some tentative rewriting of textbooks has occurred, but in general inertia prevails. Many once-banned books have been republished (anachronistically, in the Suharto spelling), but the market for these books is basically limited to students and intellectuals. The general ignorance of the past is probably greater than at any time in the last century.

■ ■ ■From The Av Club's two-part interview with Harlan Ellison:

What is it W.S. Merwin said? "The story of each stone leads back to a mountain." Which is a great quote, and it's as true for the film as it is for anything. If you take me, he said humbly, as the mountain, and you take it all the way back, the stone is Jack Wheeldon and his buddies beating the crap out of me on the playground at Lathrop grade school in Painesville. On the other hand, I went out on the road, and I hung out with people who society would have called desperate characters, or bums, or lost causes. These were men—and very, very occasionally women, but mostly men—who could have taken terrible advantage of me! I was a little kid, and green as grass, and they could have done that. But everybody was kind to me. Everybody was helpful to me. Everybody gave me their wisdom. You're riding in a boxcar, and a guy says, "Hey kid, don't dangle your legs out. When it hits the grade, that door's gonna slam shut and take your legs off at the knee." Well, Jesus Christ, who the hell ever thought of that? And I saw guys on the road with stumps, and I thought about that. If anything would damp the anger, it would be good grace visited on me by total strangers like that.

■ ■ ■Here's an article about the prospects in Iraq for those who prefer their analysis to come with a non-threatening Establishment gloss. Everyone else can continue reading Patrick Cockburn and Nir Rosen. I like how the history in this extract shows a similar morphology to other accounts of the causes for the swamp we find ourselves in now - in order to frustrate third world nationalism and democracy, colonial regimes succoured those elements that are now the problem - although in Iraq it is the tribes more than the Islamic Religious Right.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, ruling powers in the Middle East have slowly and haltingly labored to bring tribal populations into the fold, with mixed success. Where tribes and tribalism have remained powerful, the state has remained weak. The Ottomans attempted forced sedentarization of the tribes, weakening tribal authorities by disrupting settlement patterns and replacing tribal sheiks with smaller cadres of favored leaders who became conduits for patronage. The colonial powers after World War I faced a different problem: the threat of nationalist urban elites opposed to foreign rule. In an effort to counter defiant urban leaders, they empowered rural tribes on the periphery. In Iraq, the British armed the tribes so that the sheiks could maintain order in the countryside and balance the capabilities of the nominal local governments operating under League of Nations mandates. Thus, the tribal system that Ottoman rule sought to dismantle was revitalized by British imperial policy, and the power of the nominal Iraqi government was systematically vitiated. In 1933, Iraq's King Faisal lamented, "In this kingdom, there are more than 100,000 rifles, whereas the government has only 15,000."

Despite my sneering, it's a very good overview of the problems that may arise from the occupation's recent policy of arming Sunni tribal militias subsequent to their falling out with regional AQ clones, although Mr Simon's suggestions to improve the situation may require a major rethink now that Iraqis are reacting to the US government's heavy-handed methods of coercing a new Status of Forces Agreement from Maliki, one likely to severely undermine Iraqi sovereignity for the long term.

* Sahl steals from Kissinger; I steal from Tom Lehrer.
** EDIT: Wow, my memory is just terrible.

Then I'll Begin...

Still working through the pile. Some highlights...

Gotz Aly again, writing on the Historians' Dispute, the 1986 debate about how to place the Holocaust in the context of European history:

Twenty years after the Historikerstreit, more than 16 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the time is ripe for a comprehensive new understanding of the age of violent nationalism, of the twentieth century's politics of ethnic segregation, expropriation and extermination. But contrary to Nolte's obsession, such attempts should not begin with the October Revolution in Russia, because that only leads to the historically optimistic illusion that the repugnant aspects of the twentieth century can be reduced to the major totalitarian dictatorships and that they can be cleanly distinguished from all that we now view as progress and success.

For example, it was in fact Republican France that invented the selection criteria later used as the basis for the so-called "Deutsche Volksliste" (German ethnic list) in the areas of Poland annexed by Germany. In 1919, the population of the reclaimed Alsace region were sorted into four groups: full, three-quarter and half French, and Germans. On this basis, Alsatians were accorded full, limited or zero civil rights. In the case of those belonging to Group IV (the Germans), the French authorities ordered expulsion over the Rhine bridge. This was followed in 1923 by the Treaty of Lausanne, negotiated under the leadership of France and England, as the first major case of ethnic homogenization anchored in international law. It ended the Greco-Turkish War with the forced exchange of sections of the population.

The post-war order established by the Potsdam Conference of 1945 was merely an updating of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 along national lines, tacitly including the results of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. In 1946, Chancellor Willy Brandt commented on the victorious powers' expulsion policy under the headline "Hitler's Spirit Lives On". In 1947/48, it was the ceding British colonial power in India which set in motion the process of population transfer based on religious criteria between the Indian Union and what was to become Pakistan. In south-eastern Europe, too, twelve million people were uprooted by a resettlement project devised by British strategists and codenamed "Operation Balkans". And the parallels continue. Without additional details, no one could say where and under which circumstances the following twentieth-century story told by a survivor took place: "The man in uniform ordered us to follow him to the station. My elderly father died on the way there, one of my five children froze to death during the journey." (It was in 1940 during the Sovietization of eastern Poland.)

A lot of what's left in the pile is from the New Left Review, but I did finish Tariq Ali's overview of the situation in Afghanistan (this one's actually recent):

Karzai was duly installed in December 2001, but intimacy with US intelligence networks failed to translate into authority or legitimacy at home. Karzai harboured no illusions about his popularity in the country. He knew his biological and political life was heavily dependent on the occupation and demanded a bodyguard of US Marines or American mercenaries, rather than a security detail from his own ethnic Pashtun base. There were at least three coup attempts against him in 2002–03 by his Northern Alliance allies; these were fought off by the ISAF, which was largely tied down in assuring Karzai’s security — while also providing a vivid illustration of where his support lay. A quick-fix presidential contest organized at great expense by Western PR firms in October 2004 — just in time for the US elections — failed to bolster support for the puppet president inside the country. Karzai’s habit of parachuting his relatives and protégés into provincial governor or police chief jobs has driven many local communities into alliance with the Taliban, as the main anti-government force. In Zabul, Helmand and elsewhere, all the insurgents had to do was 'approach the victims of the pro-Karzai strongmen and promise them protection and support. Attempts by local elders to seek protection in Kabul routinely ended nowhere, as the wrongdoers enjoyed either direct us support or Karzai’s sympathy.'

Nor is it any secret that Karzai’s younger brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai, has now become one of the richest drug barons in the country. At a meeting with Pakistan’s president in 2005, when Karzai was bleating about Pakistan’s inability to stop cross-border smuggling, Musharraf suggested that perhaps Karzai should set an example by bringing his sibling under control...

[N]ever have such gaping inequalities featured on this scale before. Little of the supposed $19 billion 'aid and reconstruction' money has reached the majority of Afghans. The mains electricity supply is worse now than five years ago, and while the rich can use private generators to power their air conditioners, hot-water heaters, computers and satellite TVs, average Kabulis 'suffered a summer without fans and face a winter without heaters.' As a result, hundreds of shelterless Afghans are literally freezing to death each winter.

Then there are the NGOs who descended on the country like locusts after the occupation. As one observer reports:

A reputed 10,000 NGO staff have turned Kabul into the Klondike during the gold rush, building office blocks, driving up rents, cruising about in armoured jeeps and spending stupefying sums of other people’s money, essentially on themselves. They take orders only from some distant agency, but then the same goes for the American army, NATO, the UN, the EU and the supposedly sovereign Afghan government.

Even supporters of the occupation have lost patience with these bodies, and some of the most successful candidates in the 2005 National Assembly elections made an attack on them a centre-piece of their campaigns. Worse, according to one us specialist, 'their well-funded activities highlighted the poverty and ineffectiveness of the civil administration and discredited its local representatives in the eyes of the local populace.' Unsurprisingly, NGO employees began to be targeted by the insurgents, including in the north, and had to hire mercenary protection.

See also his recentish pieces on Pakistan from the London Review of Books, October and December 2007.

Also from the LRB, here's something if you feel like getting angry - Gareth Peirce's "Was It Like This for the Irish?":

Several years ago Tony Blair attempted to deport an Egyptian human rights lawyer who had been the victim of truly terrible torture in his own country: Blair argued that an assurance from Egypt of the man’s safety would suffice. Unusually, during a court challenge to the legality of his detention, private memoranda between Blair and the Home Office were made public. Across a note from the Home Office expressing concern that even hard assurances given by Egypt were unlikely to provide real protection against torture and execution, Blair had scribbled: ‘Get them back.’ Beside the passage about the assurances he wrote: ‘This is a bit much. Why do we need all these things?’ The man succeeded in his court challenge, but today, on the basis of secret information provided by Egypt, he is the subject of a UN Assets Freezing Order managed by the Treasury. He has no assets, no income and no work, and can be given neither money nor ‘benefit’ without a licence. ‘Benefit’ includes eating the meals his wife cooks. She requires a licence to cook them, and is obliged to account for every penny spent by the household. She speaks little English and is disabled, so is compelled to pass the obligation onto their children, who have to submit monthly accounts to the Treasury of every apple bought from the market, every bus fare to school. Failure to do so constitutes a criminal and imprisonable offence. A few weeks ago in the House of Lords, Lord Hoffman expressed horror at ‘the meanness and squalor’ of a regime ‘that monitored who had what for breakfast’. The number of such cases now multiplies daily. They have nothing at all to do with national security, they only succeed, as they are intended to, in sapping morale; they have everything to do with reinforcing the growing belief of the suspect community that it is expected to eradicate its opinions, its identity and many of the core precepts of its religion.

Tony Blair has recently founded the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, "to promote faith as a force for good, improve awareness between religions and tackle poverty and war". Isn't that yummy!

Nothing if not topical I now link to this article from 2006, brought to my attention by a commenter* at alicublog, about the US media's bizarre pundit industry:

Mr. Kedrosky, 40, has learned to take clear positions. Many of his fellow B-listers have "too many hands," he says. "They're always saying, 'On the one hand, on the other hand.'" As he sees it, punditry is "like pounding a volleyball back and forth. You just have to remember which side of the net you're on. If you all stand on the same side, you don't have a game."...

Many minor leaguers take a methodical approach to getting recognized. They don't just stand on the patio of the "Today" show, shouting pithy remarks at Al Roker, hoping to be discovered. Instead, they invest in promoting themselves and honing their skills.

This year, more than 1,000 people paid between $760 and $1,995 to buy ads in the Washington-based "Yearbook of Experts," which TV bookers turn to for guests. In New York, the Learning Annex, an adult-education program, hired a former producer from CNN and a BET Radio Network producer to teach would-be pundits such skills as "how to design an irresistible hook" and "how to build up your profile."

In Racine, Wis., Don Crowther runs 101PublicRelations.com, a company that sells audio CD seminars priced from $39.95 to $79.95. Mr. Crowther says tens of thousands of people have bought his pundit-related products, with titles such as "How to Get Booked on 'The View.'"

He advises wannabe pundits to get face time and experience on local newscasts first, and to woo station decision-makers. One tip: "Send three-dozen doughnuts to the newsroom with a card that says, 'Thanks for considering me for your upcoming shows.'" Do such blatant ploys work on jaded news professionals? "They tend to roll their eyes," Mr. Crowther says. "But they eat it and they remember you."

Others suggest befriending A-listers, so they will recommend you to bookers if they're unable to make an appearance.

It's stuff like this that makes me wonder if our media systems are not so much crying out for reform as lying splayed, twisted and broken in front of us, their liquid, puppy-dog eyes pleading for a coup de grace.

And another from Overland - Malcolm Knox's lecture about the state of the Australian novel. I found a lot of this to be wrong-headed - it's interesting to compare it with the Myers piece, particularly when Knox upbraids the "middle-brow reader" for thinking "if a book is challenging her concentration then that's the author's fault", advocates judging authors on the quality of their sentences, and praises Cormac McCarthy. The stuff about book marketing is very interesting, however, if a tad depressing:

The idea of segmentation, of internal competition, is perfectly suited to an environment where this quarter’s, this year’s returns are paramount. But even corporations that are more developed along these lines, more mature in the ruthless arts, know that you still need your sales division to cross-subsidise your research and development. Like many late adopters, it seems that publishers are falling over themselves to throw out babies with the bathwater, in the race for a better return to feed the giant maw of their global parent this quarter, this half, this year. I would liken a literary novelist’s first three or four books to the R & D phase. Publishers disagree.

Newspapers – and this is the point I am trying to reach – are no different. Where I work, at John Fairfax, the idea used to be that the classifieds would cross-subsidise the opinion page. The big-selling Saturday paper, with its car and house ads, would cross-subsidise the lower-selling Friday and Monday papers. The purpose of a new lifestyle section, a magnet for advertisers even if its content was light in substance, was to keep afloat the parts of the paper that people actually read, such as news and, yes, book reviews.

But this has changed. Now, every day and every section must fend for itself. This is fine for the Saturday motoring section. Not so good for the books pages. HarperCollins and Readings Bookshop aren’t as big advertisers as Ford and Toyota, believe it or not. And if you’re part of the advertising sales staff who really run the newspaper, what would you rather sell? A $10,000 glossy ad to Holden, which you can do in five minutes, or a $250 ad to a second-hand bookstore, which might take you a week in cajolery and coercion, if not outright begging?

It used to be understood that the Holden ad in the magazine would pay for the book review pages – but no more. And this is why we at the Sydney Morning Herald now have our book reviews wrapped inside a section promoting new theatre shows, new movies, new restaurants, new homewares. Because the advertisers rule, and books must seek homewares display ads for shelter and succour.

More fun - and shorter - is Jeff Sparrow's review of Jenny Hocking's biography of Frank Hardy:

[She] delights in the incongruities of his later years, such as his spectacularly unlikely affair with the Greek singer Nana Mouskouri or his 1986 arrest during a reading in a pub for unpaid parking fines. On that occasion, a group of drinkers rescued him from the divvy van, with Doc Neeson from the oz-rock band The Angels opening the door and saying, ‘Step out, comrade!’ While the Tactical Response Group tried to quell the developing riot, two working-class legends enjoyed a quiet beer in the back bar.

* Ah, apparently it was atrios, here.

Jeez, Talk About Yer Generation Gap...

Sez New Scientist

Circumcision and other forms of male genital mutilation have always been a puzzle. The ritual mutilations can leave the man vulnerable to infection and even death. So why do some societies insist on such a risky ritual for their men?

There may be an evolutionary explanation, according to Christopher Wilson, of Cornell University in New York, US. It could function to reduce a young man's potential to father a child with an older man's wife, he says...

In some forms of mutilation, the handicap to sperm competition is obvious. There is subincision, for example, where cuts are made to the base of the penis. This causes sperm to be ejaculated from the base rather than the end, and is performed in several Aboriginal Australian societies, says Wilson.

In some African and Micronesian cultures, young men have one of their testicles crushed.

Are we sitting comfortably?

Protection

The Age manages to find some good arguments for Australian troops to remain in Iraq:

A flag-lowering ceremony overnight at the Tallil air base, 300 kilometres south of Baghdad, marked the moment Australia handed over its operational role to the Americans...

Not everyone is pleased the Australian troops are leaving.

"We are against … American forces in the area because they are using weapons while the Australians didn't do anything harmful against the people all the time they were in the province," said teacher Hassan Mohsin, 32.

"I think the return of the Americans to the city will cause many problems. They will make many arrests," said shopkeeper Abdullah Muzhir.

Feel free to forward them to your favourite neo-con.

Can't Post... Reading

(And not what I should be reading, neither.)

So -

Democracy and deference*, by Mark Slouka, in Harper's:

In general, the Brits act as though the government is their business and they have every right to meddle in it. Americans, by and large, display no such self-assurance. To the contrary, we seem to believe, deep in our hearts, that the business of government is beyond our provenance. What accounts for the difference? My wife, whose family hails in part from England, has a theory: unlike us, the Brits don’t confuse their royalty with their civil servants, because they have both, clearly labeled. Acknowledging the universal desire to defer, they channel that desire, wisely, into the place where it can do the least harm, a kind of political sump.

The only sensible argument for monarchy I have ever read.

[* Not sure if that link works. Harper's appears to be down but it might be temporary.]

(Only recently noticed) A Reader's Manifesto, by B. R. Myers, in the Atlantic Monthly:

The flat, laborious wordiness signals that this is avant-garde stuff, to miss the point of which would put us on the level of the morons who booed Le Sacre du Printemps. But what is the point? Is the passage meant to be banal, in order to trap philistines into complaining about it, thereby leaving the cognoscenti to relish the irony on some postmodern level? Or is there really some hidden significance to all this time-zone business? The point, as Auster's fans will tell you, is that there can be no clear answers to such questions; fiction like City of Glass urges us to embrace the intriguing ambiguities that fall outside the framework of the conventional novel. All interpretations of the above passage are allowed, even encouraged—except, of course, for the most obvious one: that Auster is simply wasting our time.

What Else is New?, by Steven Shapin, in The New Yorker, a review of, among others, The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton:

The tendency to exaggerate the impact of technological innovation follows from an artifact of historical consciousness. When we cannot conceive what life would be like without e-mail, say, we correctly note the pervasiveness of the new technology, but we may incorrectly assume that the things we now do through e-mail could not have been done in other ways...

In 1897, to move mail around the city, Manhattan started to equip itself with an island-wide system of underground pneumatic tubes, which soon extended from 125th Street as far as the Brooklyn General Post Office. Through the nineteenth century, the pneumatic tube had developed roughly in step with the telegraph and then the telephone. For a long time, indeed, pneumatic tubes seemed promising—perhaps they could shunt people around as well as mail—although, ultimately, it was the telegraph and the telephone that flourished, becoming the ancestors of the electronic communication systems we use today. Yet, had there been a century of continuous improvement, who knows what benefits a dense and speedy system of message tubes might have brought? A man working on Eighty-sixth Street could send a scribbled note, chocolates, and a pair of earrings to his girlfriend on Wall Street. To have left your wallet at home could be a mistake remedied in seconds. It’s a safe guess, anyway, that, while aware of a distant past containing such figures as postmen and delivery boys, we would be unable to imagine life without the pneumatic tube.

The Library in the New Age, by Robert Darnton, in The New York Review of Books:

A study of news during the American Revolution by a graduate student of mine, Will Slauter, provides an example. Will followed accounts of Washington's defeat at the Battle of Brandywine as it was refracted in the American and European press. In the eighteenth century, news normally took the form of isolated paragraphs rather than "stories" as we know them now, and newspapers lifted most of their paragraphs from each other, adding new material picked up from gossips in coffeehouses or ship captains returning from voyages. A loyalist New York newspaper printed the first news of Brandywine with a letter from Washington informing Congress that he had been forced to retreat before the British forces under General William Howe...

Londoners had learned to mistrust their newspapers, which frequently distorted the news as they lifted paragraphs from each other. That the original paragraph came from a loyalist American paper made it suspect to the reading public. Its roundabout route made it look even more doubtful, for why would Washington announce his own defeat, while Howe had not yet claimed victory in a dispatch sent directly from Philadelphia, near the scene of the action?...

Le Courrier de l'Europe, a French newspaper produced in London, printed a translated digest of the English reports with a note warning that they probably were false. This version of the event passed through a dozen French papers produced in the Low Countries, the Rhineland, Switzerland, and France itself. By the time it arrived in Versailles, the news of Washington's defeat had been completely discounted. The comte de Vergennes, France's foreign minister, therefore continued to favor military intervention on the side of the Americans.

Rehabilitating Rachel Carson, by John Quiggin and Tim Lambert, in Prospect Magazine (my extract probably comes from the longer version):

In the 1990s, however the situation changed radically, first for tobacco and then for DDT. The tobacco industry was faced with the prospect of bans on smoking in public places driven primarily by concerns about the health effects of passive smoking. Realising that such restrictions would prompt large numbers of smokers to quit, the industry sought, once again, to cast doubt on the scientific research. Given its bad, and well-deserved reputation, it was evident that a campaign focused on tobacco alone was doomed to failure. So the industry tried a different tack, an across-the-board attack on what it called “junk science” about environmental and health hazards. Its primary vehicle was The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), a body set up by PR firm APCO in the early 1990s and secretly funded by Philip Morris...

TASSC had an advisory board ... but the real work was done by an activist named Steven Milloy... TASSC and its website junkscience.com attacked the environmental movement across the board, on everything from food safety to the risks of asbestos. The result was that advocacy pieces dismissing the scientific evidence on the health dangers of passive smoking, for which Phillip Morris was paying, appeared to be just part of the general campaign against “junk science”.

One of the issues Milloy took up with a good deal of vigor was DDT, where he teamed up with J. Gordon Edwards... Edwards' attacks on Rachel Carson moved from the LaRouchite fringes of the political spectrum to become part of the orthodoxy of mainstream Republicanism. By the late 1990s, the tobacco industry's fight against restrictions on passive smoking was clearly headed for failure. Milloy switched his primary focus to climate change. He collected money from Exxon and other fossil fuel companies. This switch only made DDT more useful as a rhetorical stick with which to beat environmentalists.

Killing by the numbers, by Mark Benjamin & Chris Weaver, in Salon:

At worst, the rules explicitly allowed the killing of unarmed Iraqis under certain circumstances, a particularly dicey concept given an enemy that does not wear a uniform and hides among civilians. Specifically, the snipers were allowed to shoot unarmed people running away from explosions or firefights. The chain of command was particularly frustrated by insurgents fleeing after attacks from roadside bombs, called improvised explosive devices. The notes from Army agents who later investigated the shootings said the battalion leaders, Balcavage and Knight, worried that the snipers had "let a lot of guys go after IED explosions." The snipers called these fleeing, sometimes unarmed Iraqis "squirters." Of course, it's not unusual for innocent people to run from explosions.

Selling the War with Iran, by Nir Rosen, in The Washington Note:

The truth is, most allegations about Iran's role in Iraq and the region are unfounded or dishonest. Iran was responsible for ending the recent fighting in Basra and calming the situation after Iraqi parliamentarians who backed Prime Minister Maliki approached it. The Iranians, never close to Muqtada or his family, were so annoyed with Muqtada and his presence that they reportedly ordered him out of Iran where he had been living in virtual house arrest anyway since arriving six months earlier. Iranian officials and the state media clearly supported Prime Minister Maliki and the Iraqi government against what they described as "illegal armed groups" in the recent conflict in Basra, which is not surprising given that their main proxy in Iraq, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council dominates the Iraqi state and is Maliki's main backer.

In the Guardian, With friends like these - David Edgar on professional turncoatery:

Hard enough to be fooled by the party; even harder to accept that you deluded yourself into believing that the poor are, by virtue of their poverty, uniquely saintly or strong. No surprise that this realisation turns into a sense of personal betrayal, which turns outwards into blame. One obvious result of this is the tendency of ex-radicals to become very conservative indeed, a tendency satirised by Edmund Wilson in his quip about John Dos Passos: "On account of Soviet knavery / He favours restoring slavery". Dos Passos was not the only American Marxist to pole-vault the cold-war liberal centre and land in the arms of William F Buckley's high conservative National Review. Initially claiming that he still believed in the end of working-class emancipation, former Trotskyite Max Eastman quickly turned on "mush-headed liberals" who "bellyache" about civil rights; for former beat critic and latter neoconservative Podhoretz, homosexuality was a death wish and feminism a plague.

Above all, the reality that neocons felt mugged by was the moral inadequacy of the poor. Kristol's manifesto On the Democratic Idea in America blamed the free market for encouraging unreasonable appetites in the working class; as Robert Nesbit put it, "to allay every fresh discontent, to assuage every social pain, and to gratify every fresh expectation".

See also this glorious beatdown on Mamet from Michael J. Smith at the usual suspects:

But mad as he is at the Times, and NPR, Mamet is mostly mad at the Jews. All around him, his landsmen, being intelligent people, are marrying the girls and guys they like, without regard to race or religion. And more and more often, they are declining to buy literal or figurative Israel bonds. They are coming to be Jews in much the same way their neighbors are Unitarians or yogis or yachtsmen. That is to say, their Jewishness belongs to the personal sphere. It is not a sign of radical demarcation from the world around them. They have for the most part no interest in being Hebrew-speaking Amish. And this drives Mamet crazy.

The Jews Mamet depicts in his book are downright anti-Semites, full of self-hate and slavishly eager to please Gentiles. But unless Mamet knows a very different class of Jews from those I know, this is sheer fantasy. Why is Mamet indulging in it?

If David Mamet were an institution, it would be easier to understand. Shtetl institutions wouldn't exist without the shtetl, and so those institutions, and the people who staff them, have an interest in keeping the shtetl walls high and strong.

Storming Heaven - Tariq Ali on 1968:

France finally exploded in May-June of that year, making it an uncommonly memorable and beautiful summer. We were preparing the first issue of The Black Dwarf as Paris erupted on 10 May. Jean-Jaques Lebel, our tear-gassed Paris correspondent was ringing in reports every few hours. He told us:

'A well-known French football commentator is sent to the Latin Quarter to cover the nights events and reported: "Now the CRS [riot police] are charging, they're storming the barricade - oh my God! There's a battle raging. The students are counter-attacking, you can hear the noise - the CRS are retreating. Now they're regrouping, getting ready to charge again. The inhabitants are throwing things from their windows at the CRS - oh! The police are retaliating, shooting grenades into the windows of apartments…" The producer interrupts: "This can't be true, the CRS don't do things like that!"

"I'm telling you what I'm seeing.." his voice goes dead. They have cut him off.'

The police fail to take back the Latin Quarter now renamed the Heroic Vietnam Quarter. Three days later a million people occupied the streets of Paris demanding an end to rottenness and plastering the walls with slogans: Defend the Collective Imagination, Beneath the Cobblestones the Beach, When the finger points at the moon the IDIOT looks at the finger, Commodities are the Opium of the People, Revolution is the Ecstasy of History.

The BBC also has a nice story on official paranoia surrounding the October 1968 demonstration in London. Papers on the March demonstration are, forty years later, too sensitive to release, ho ho.

The Dark Knight - The Rise of the "Real" Barack Obama, by Wajahat Ali (one piece amongst the ream of stuff I've waded through about "Bittergate" and the Reverend Wright press-fiasco. Are white people fucked in the head or what?*):

When Obama refused to passionately and angrily distance himself from Wright, CNN commentators labeled him soft, passive, and unassertive. During the Pennsylvania primaries, when Obama took the offensive and ignited the critical, and many say "negative," campaigning against Clinton, he was accused of losing his "Cool Hand Luke" aura and Zen calm and was instead "lashing out" under the strain of critical inquiry after failing to deliver the decisive "knockout blow" during the crucial final stretch. When Obama talked about "transcendence" and "moving forward" as a means of bridging the racial divide, his authentic Blackness came under review by doubting spectators because he sounded too conciliatory. However, as of this week, due to Wright's most recent comments, Obama was urged to abandon reconciliation, and instead "passionately denounce" his former Pastor as to not appear both too soft or too radical.

Chalmers Johnson reviews Soldiers of Reason - The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire by Alex Abella:

In 1951, there were a total of 32 SAC bases in Europe and Asia, all located close to the borders of the Soviet Union. Wohlstetter's team discovered that they were, for all intents and purposes, undefended - the bombers parked out in the open, without fortified hangars - and that SAC's radar defenses could easily be circumvented by low-flying Soviet bombers. RAND calculated that the USSR would need "only" 120 tactical nuclear bombs of 40 kilotons each to destroy up to 85% of SAC's European-based fleet. LeMay, who had long favored a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union, claimed he did not care. He reasoned that the loss of his bombers would only mean that - even in the wake of a devastating nuclear attack - they could be replaced with newer, more modern aircraft. He also believed that the appropriate retaliatory strategy for the United States involved what he called a "Sunday punch," massive retaliation using all available American nuclear weapons. According to Abella, SAC planners proposed annihilating three-quarters of the population in each of 188 Russian cities. Total casualties would be in excess of 77 million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe alone.

Woohoo! Thomas Frank got a regular gig! [Don't you love the way the WSJ's online site is apparently designed to crash Firefox? It's the product placement of the future!]:

But suppose we read on, and we find the news item about the hedge fund managers who made $2 billion and $3 billion last year, or the story about the vaporizing of our home equity. Suppose we become a little . . . bitter about this. What do our pundits and politicians tell us then?

That there is no place for such sentiment in the Party of the People. That "bitterness" is an ugly and inadmissible emotion. That "divisiveness" is a thing to be shunned at all costs.

Conservatism, on the other hand, has no problem with bitterness; as the champion strategist Howard Phillips said almost three decades ago, the movement's job is to "organize discontent." And organize they have. They have welcomed it, they have flattered it, they have invited it in with millions of treason-screaming direct-mail letters, they have given it a nice warm home on angry radio shows situated up and down the AM dial. There is not only bitterness out there; there is a bitterness industry.

Cf Joe Bageant and Dave Lindorff.

Various historical pieces: Gertrude Bell and the Birth of Iraq by Chris Calder; Churchill for Dummies by Michael Lind; The origins of shock and awe by Preethi Sirimanne von den Driesch; an article on The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, see positive reviews and negative; Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen on the bombing of Cambodia; Richard J. Evans reviews Gotz Aly's Hitler's Beneficiaries; and Gustav Seibt's obituary for Raul Hilberg:

Hilberg understood that murdering a swathe of the population consisting of several millions of people scattered over an entire continent required not a group of demoniacal sadists but an army of bureaucrats on the staff of administrative bodies, registrars to control identification, police for segregation, railway officials for transport and paramilitary organisations to whom groups of victims would eventually be assigned for the actual business of extermination. And so to begin with, Hilberg did not study the memoirs of the few survivors, but turned his attentions to the copious amounts of material on the perpetrators. Hilberg famously interpretated a piece of writing which is familiar to everyone: the train timetable. Here the word Jew never once appears, only an ominous 'L' which signalised that the transport carriages that were so tightly packed on the outward journey would be 'leer' or empty on returning. This 'L' contains the precise amount of explicitness allowed - and guaranteed - by the bureaucratic form of expression.

I was in Dymocks flipping through Andrew Roberts' A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 recently, disturbing other browsers with my dark laughter, so I might as well link to Johann Hari's savaging of that other neo-imperialist unhistorian Niall Ferguson, Britain's answer to Keith Windschuttle**, which I read, possible reread, a few weeks ago, though it goes back a few years.

Or look at how Ferguson describes the British Empire's conscious policy of mass starvation of Indians in the 1870s and 1890s. In reality, severe natural climate disruption hit India, and there was massive crop failure. The British viceroy - Lord Lytton, appointed because he was Queen Victoria's favourite poet - declared that grain shipments to London must continue, by force if necessary. The institutions that Ferguson presents as Britain's glorious gift to India - the railways and telegraph lines - were in fact used more efficiently to steal and ship out India's food, so Londoners could enjoy them over breakfast. Some gift.

And even this was not enough. Lytton went further and declared all relief efforts illegal. The result? One journalist noted that the train lines of India were strewn with "bony remnants of human beings" begging for grain. "Their very eyeballs were gone ... Their fleshless jaws and skulls were supported on necks like those of plucked chickens. Their bodies - they had none; only the framework was left." Some 29 million innocent people died, a crime worthy of Stalin and Mao.

But where does this figure on Ferguson's balance sheet? He dedicates a few dry lines to it. To give some sense of perspective, he gives almost as much space to describing a statue of the Prince of Wales that was made out of butter. He then minimises the crime, chiding anybody who compares it to Nazism ("the intention was not murderous") and demanding to know "would Indians have been better off under the Moghuls?" (Yes, actually.)

And the follow-ups from Hari and Andrew Murray.

Etc, etc, and reams of stuff on Iran, Iraq, the sub-prime crisis and the rest of the ongoing fiasco we call current events. This winds me back to the last occasion I attempted to write an actual post, a deconstructing of Obama's ludicrously overpraised "race" speech, which I abandoned under the usual delusion that the zeitgeist would have moved on to more sensible things before I finished. Ha bloody ha.

Edit: Dang. I completely forgot this extraordinary piece from 2001 by Chris Hedges, "A Gaza Diary", also originally from Harper's.

Before we leave, we visit the office of Dr. Mahmoud al-Madhoun, the hospital's director. He hands us plastic bags filled with bullet fragments he has taken out of his patients. All have the dates, the types of wounds, and the names of the victims printed neatly on the outside. Of the 1,206 killed and wounded, he says, 655 were under the age of eighteen. He cannot understand why soldiers would fire at children.

"In thirty years of practice," he says, "I have never treated a patient who died after being hit by a rock."

I like his old stuff better than his new stuff.

* I myself am not so much white as glow-in-the-dark.

** Australia's answer to David Irving

Boy Do I Hate Being Right All the Time

From The Times of London:

Fifteen British sailors and Marines were seized by Iran in internationally disputed waters and not in Iraq’s maritime territory as Parliament was told...

Newly released Ministry of Defence documents state that:

— The arrests took place in waters that are not internationally agreed as Iraqi;

— The coalition unilaterally designated a dividing line between Iraqi and Iranian waters in the Gulf without telling Iran where it was;

— The Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ coastal protection vessels were crossing this invisible line at a rate of three times a week; It was the British who apparently raised their weapons first before the Iranian gunboats came alongside...

Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, repeatedly told the Commons that the personnel were seized in Iraqi waters.

The MoD, in a televised briefing by Vice-Admiral Charles Style, the Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, produced a map showing a line in the sea called “Iraq/Iran Territorial Water Boundary”. A location was given for the capture of the Britons inside what the chart said were “Iraq territorial waters”. But the newly released top-level internal briefing accepts that no such border exists.

The report, addressed to Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the Chief of the Defence Staff, blames the incident on the absence of an agreed boundary and a failure to coordinate between Iraq, Iran and the coalition.

Under the heading “Why the incident occurred”, the report examines the history of a border that has been disputed since a treaty between the Persian and Ottoman empires in 1639.

Professor Robert Springborg, of the School of Oriental and African Studies, said yesterday that it was negligent to fail to clarify with the Iranians where the notional boundary was.

Via Jon Schwarz.

And, yes, that's the same Robert Springborg that enraged Bob Hawke during the Gulf War. Background for those unfamiliar. This presumably presents an opportunity for Gerard Henderson to complain about the London Times' left-wing bias.

I've Been Banging My Head Against a Number of Increasingly Irrelevant and Relentlessly Tedious Posts for Two Whole Weeks But None of That Matters Now

FAFBLOG!

(Incidentally, that title is exactly one character short of as long as they're allowed to be. Isn't that uninteresting?)

Science News

Interesting juxtaposition in the New Scientist e-mail:

Bugs provoke the immune system into fighting cancer
Deliberately infecting people with the bacterium that causes listeria could increase their ability to fight cancer

Corn-based film foils food poisoning bugs
A novel packaging film made from renewable materials such as corn residues, could help stamp out Listeria and other food-borne bugs

Revolved Door

Very belatedly I notice from Crikey! that Tom Switzer, former opinion editor at the Australian, culture warrior, chum of Quadrant and the IPA, author of such brilliant columns as (re Cronulla) "Beach violence not a symptom of rampant racism", and the man who smeared Manning Clark as a Soviet agent, has become Brendan Nelson's chief of staff*.

Further comment seems unnecessary.

*Or some other thing in his office.

Front from the News

Putting me in mind of an Editor & Publisher article I mentioned at the time on the old blog, E&P editor, and author of So Wrong for So Long*, Greg Mitchell lists "eighteen things you've already forgotten about media coverage of the Iraq war" at Mother Jones. Over at E&P itself you can read Joe Galloway's preface to Mr Mitchell's book. Meanwhile, Louis Proyect reviews the film of the book War Made Easy by Norman Solomon, pursuing similar themes.

* Subtitle: How the Press, the Pundits - and the President - Failed on Iraq. NB.

Get Your Own Translations

Sterne relates the history of the name of Melbourne's Festival for No Apparent Reason:

[T]the festival owes its name to a brazen piece of political subversion that has since transcended its context to become one the most durable practical jokes in Australian history:

One of the federation jubilee events of 1951 was an Aboriginal theatre production called An Aboriginal Moomba: Out of the Dark...

When a name was needed for Melbourne’s new festival, Bill Onus, president of the Australian Aborigines League and a performer in the earlier jubilee event, suggested ‘Moomba’ to the Melbourne City Council. The name had been successful for the theatre production and the council believed it to mean ‘let’s get together and have fun’.

The official history relates that the good citizens of Melbourne proceeded to moomba their brains out by the Yarra each March and - a clear indication of how self-assured white middle-class society was in the mid-20C - it wasn't until the late sixties that anybody bothered to consult further on the etymology of "moomba" and it was discovered that the whole thing was a big prank. It turns out that in certain local Aboriginal languages "moom" means "buttocks" or "anus" and "ba" can mean either "at", "in" or "on". "Moomba" can therefore be translated into the vernacular as "up your bum".

I think I knew this and subsequently forgot it, so I'm glad to be reminded. It puts me in mind of Mungo MacCallum's story about how the Canberra water-police, whose duties at the time largely consisted of fishing corpses out of Lake Burley Griffin on those occasions local flooding washed bits of Queanbeyan cemetery into the river, ran a competition to name their new launch. A local academic suggested Platypus explaining it was appropriate because platypuses are aquatic, uniquely Australian, docile but capable of defending themselves, etc. The police duly chose this as the name for their new boat, at which point the academic explained his real reason for suggesting the name was that it was Greek for flatfoot.

Which is precisely the kind of joke you'd expect a Canberran academic to make.

Occupation

As an exciting alternative to boring old history, Philip Chester, in the Australian, offers this:

In the anti-colonialist era following World War II, European masters began the process of returning lands to their original inhabitants.

What distinguished the Jews from other such people was that they had been expelled and forced to live in exile while the land they had lived in for 1500 years endured occupation for two millenniums. Their lives dependent on the whims of their rulers for countless years, they had shed tears in little European or North African villages when concluding the Passover service with the phrase "Next year in Jerusalem". But no longer: they were finally able to return and so did many Holocaust survivors and other persecuted immigrants.

Yes, the Jewish people's return to their ancestral homeland was an unprecedented event.

I don't think I've seen the bizarre delusions of Zionism better expressed than here, where the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people from their homes to make way for an invasion of Europeans is presented as a triumph of anti-colonialism. One wonders how seriously Chester takes the utterly batty notion that Palestine remained Jewish land despite two thousand years of being inhabited by other people, but styling that millennia [sic] long habitation as an "occupation" is a distortion as hilarious as it is vile, what with the sneering implication that the territories now cleansed of Palestinians have really been freed of an occupation rather than subjected to one. I suppose the pledges of Israel's giant invisible friend are sufficient to make it so, or perhaps Chester seeks to find another bond of commonality between Australia and Israel: the fantasy of terra nullius. (OK, to be fair to Chester, that's probably more of an American thing.)

Apropos of which, it is unfortunate that, only a month after our sparkling new government had drawn a curtain over a sorry chapter of denialism regarding our own history by offering truth and contrition (but not compensation!) to the Stolen Generation, this anniversary of the Nakba did not strike our leaders as an opportunity to commemorate that tragedy rather than to unequivocally congratulate the nation founded on it.

Laurels

Former U.S. Under-Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith has written a book. Hope he's got his blurbs ready.

"...without question, one of the most brilliant individuals in government." - Donald Rumsfeld

"The fucking stupidest guy on the face of the Earth." - Gen. Tommy Franks

Obviously, these are not mutually exclusive.

Mobilisation

Via Larvatus Prodeo, "Election 2007: Did the union campaign succeed?" at the Australian Review of Public Affairs. Using a seat-by-seat analysis, the authors argue that reaction to WorkChoices and the union movement's Your Rights At Work campaign were the significant factors in the swing against the Howard government.

We are not claiming Labor would not have won the election had it not been for the ACTU campaign. Had the ACTU relied on a Labor-led campaign against WorkChoices, and not independently campaigned in marginal seats, it is more than likely Labor’s appeal to working families and the ACTU’s media campaign would have produced a broadly similar result. What we do claim, on the basis of this modelling, is that seats targeted by the ACTU produced significantly larger swings, and their campaign appears to have added to Labor’s margin of victory.

I don't imagine this will stop the punditocracy from putting the whole thing down to Howard-fatigue or some other such substanceless notion that feeds into their unshakeable belief that voters are idiots swayed by trivialities, but there it is.

I found the authors' concluding paragraphs interesting:

In America, politics in recent years have been shaped by greater mobilisation of the union vote for the Democrats under a reformist AFL-CIO leadership that won office in 1996 (and their new rivals in the ‘Change to Win’ coalition). Union mobilisation of the vote is an offshoot of political unionism that has tried to respond to the declining capacity of industrial unionism (because of low union density and limited union impact on wages) and to the recognition that genuine political allies and legal change are increasingly necessary for organised labour’s revival. As Margaret Levi (2003) has made clear, the union movement depends not only on a strong shopfloor presence but on a favourable legal and political environment as well. Better laws are critical to the labour movement’s long-term hopes, both in the United States and in post-WorkChoices Australia...

Australia’s compulsory voting system means there is relatively little research on mobilisation campaigns. Moreover, if voters are obliged to vote, there is little need to develop vast grass roots networks to mobilise them. Yet the YRAW campaign appears to be an example of the success of such a strategy. The decline in union density means, almost automatically, a weakening in political influence—both in a diminished voter bloc and perceptions of weakness that embolden opposition. Like the American labour movement, the ACTU has offset its declining natural constituency by more strongly mobilising its remaining membership, renewing it in the process. And so the tactics the ACTU employed during the 2007 election were much closer to those of a grass roots mobilisation than to the simple increase in resources, or targeted promises, that accompany other marginal seat campaigns. This is important both in highlighting the continuing power and importance of the union movement in Australia, and in opening up the possibility of the broader significance of electoral mobilisation by social movements. Perhaps the era of activist electoral politics is not yet dead, but waiting to be remobilised.

Given the historical role the rise of unions in the industrial sphere played in the development of modern democracy, with the extension of the franchise and the creation of parties representing the working majority, it's odd to think that the greater involvement in the political sphere currently necessitated by declined influence in the workplace itself might now serve to revitalise the unions in the industrial arena.

Parsing

In other news:

Tom Gross, a media affairs columnist for the National Review Online, said there was a major difference between a shoah and the Shoah.

In which case one hopes Matan Vilnai didn't make his remark in Hebrew given it has no capital letters.

Too Many Books

Fun With Google Docs Beta

In my defence, a few of these are home-made chap-books of internet printouts. Don't ask me how many of them I haven't read yet or I'll start to whimper.

I shall now toy with the idea of sharing my third-rate CD collection with the world.

Another Oscar Travesty

For a second time the Academy has seen fit to rob venerable film editor Roderick Jaynes of his just reward. Nominated for his editing work on No Country for Old Men, a film which, as Mr William Crystal might have said, apparently edited itself, Mr Jaynes was again denied an opportunity to be recognised, however orthogonally, for his contribution to the cinematic arts and to share with an industry audience some part of his accumulated understanding of their craft, perhaps helping to arrest, if only temporarily, its continuing decline.

In this spirit I extract in its entirety Mr Jaynes' introduction to the published screenplays of Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink in which he recounts how he came to work with the brothers, and explains in some detail his filmic philosophy. It will hopefully be illuminating.

When Joel and Ethan Coen first approached me in the autumn of 1983 to cut Blood Simple, it had been almost thirty years since I had last worked in film. That was on a largely forgettable entertainment called The Mad Weekend with Alistair Sim and Basil Radford and directed by Geoffrey Milestone. Geoff was a small man both in stature and talent and was known, rather uncharitably, both at Ealing and at Rank, as "the wee McKendrick." Still, he seemed pleased enough with my work and introduced me to a friend of his, the American director George Marshall, who was about to begin shooting Beyond Mombassa.

At George's suggestion I moved to New York, took an apartment, and worked for less than a week on the picture before Marshall decided that my cutting was "too damned Prussian" and replaced me with Jack Tuttle. Due to a union rule my name remained on the film while Jack went on to make a mess of things; he was a dear man but no editor, and this brings me back to the Coens. They were huge fans of Beyond Mombassa and wanted me to cut their first picture. I explained my involvement in the Marshall film and didn't hear from them again for several weeks, when Ethan called to inform me that Jack Tuttle had passed away in 1962 whilst cutting another Coen favorite, Operation Fort Petticoat. The boys glumly reiterated their offer.

I decided to accept, with mixed feelings due to the circumstances, and under two conditions: that I be left alone in the cutting room, and that I not be asked to read the script before starting in cutting. Since, throughout my career, this second condition has been the subject of some contention, I shall try to explain it here.

I've never thought much of the motion picture scenario. It has its uses, I suppose, as a rough sort of guide to the actual shooting of a movie - and of course the thesps need a vade mecum from which to memorize their lines. But beyond this, the utility or interest of a motion picture script seems nil. It is not a literary artifact, not having been written for publication and therefore never attracting the grade of author who would merit it. Scenarists are inevitably amateurs, boobies, and hacks. Their scripts are invariably shoddily bound and shot right through with errors of spelling and punctuation - not to speak of the lapses of taste. At best the scriptwriter is a student of writing rather than a writer per se; he is like a child scraping away at his scales on the violin. No sensible person would listen to this grating chatter by election, and I am far too old to feign enthusiam for such recitals. As for whatever information is required for film editing, the script contains no more than the footage itself - less, in fact. The footage will sort itself out for the discerning editor, and those of us who understand the art of the image juxtaposed need not concern ourselves with the original intent of the chap - frequently a nephew of the producer - whose scribblings give us, at many times remove, our raw material. No, it is the organization of moving images that is the very art of cinema, and true authorship resides in the hand that wields not the pen, but the razor.

Given a free hand on Blood Simple, I was rather proud of my first cut, but when I screened it for the lads they responded to the action scenes with silence and to the dramatic scenes with their alarming asthmatic laughter. They took the picture away and, along with a friend of theirs named Don Wiegmann, made rather a mess of things I'm afraid, but due to union rules my name remains on the picture.

I didn't hear from them after the screening and had to see the finished film two years later at the local cine in Hove, so I was surprised to get the call to cut their second effort, Raising Arizona. It was from Joel this time, who went to great - one might say sickening - lengths to assure me that they had got on with me personally and respected me professionally, but this time their offer was conditional on my reading their script before commencing work. The script might give me, Joel said, a fix on which characters were central and which peripheral, and a firmer grasp of the order of the individual scenes. Michael Balcon had given me much the same speech before booting me off The Bells of Rhymney's and it had sounded no more persuasive then. So once again an opportunity foundered upon this point which I still considered a matter of principle; I turned down the lads' offer and also their next, for Miller's Crossing, which bore the same condition. No regrets.

I must say, however, that in watching that picture I was struck that the lads had matured somewhat. There was less of the bellowing and rum carryings-on that had so branded Raising Arizona the work of amateurs; the actors had been issued proper suits, the settings had been designed with a measure of restraint, and the characters spoke in a normal tone of voice and were sensibly covered in medium shots instead of the leering close-ups I had been given on Blood Simple. There were even frequent over-the-shoulder shots. I like an over-the-shoulder; it lets you know that the other fellow is still in the room and hasn't wandered off to do God knows what. Yes, all told the lads' third picture seemed a step up, if from an abysm.

I'm not sure why the Coens called me on their fourth picture, Barton Fink; our last conversation had ended with sharp words on both sides. At any rate, they were still asking me to work on condition of reading the script, which was still an impossibility; at this juncture, however, I made the concession of allowing them to tell me the story of the picture before I started work. This left them satisfied if not pleased, and they proceeded to narrate a tale which, to my mind, seemed crushingly tedious. I kept my impressions to myself though, as I attach little importance to scenario, and agreed to do the job, the more since I learned that their cinematographer would be Roger Deakins. Deakins I knew to be an able chap of good family in Chiswick (I had the good fortune to be acquainted with his gran) and I assumed that under his steadying hand the Coens would carry on with restraint.

T'would not be so. The footage I was given marked a return to the Borstal sensibility of the boys' earlier efforts - entire scenes covered without a proper camera angle, tattiness of setting and wardrobe, and actors once again encouraged to bellow and banshee. I made what sense I could of the footage, of which more later, but the strange sequel to my relationship with the Coens was that they asked me to write this introduction to the published scripts of Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink. I accepted only when they agreed not to review my remarks prior to their publication here. This I demanded on suspicion that they were soliciting my thoughts merely because they found it amusing to have their scenarios introduced by someone who had never read them, and if such were the case, I intended to disappoint them. For I then judged it a matter of principle to read the scripts, it being absurd to comment upon them otherwise, however banal I might precognosce them to be. Upon dancing through the two scenarios, though, I was surprised to discover something of interest.

Certainly neither manuscript caused me to revise my low opinion of the scriptwriting form. However, what is odd and even unique in the case of the Coens' scripts is that, inept though they may be, in my judgment they prove superior to the films based upon them. The malformed thoughts contained in the scripts that follow are at least here intercepted prior to their being mucked about by the silliness of the Coens' camera work. The Miller's Crossing scenario, whilst unable to propose concrete solutions to the problems of mobsterism and the bootlegging of alcohol in the 1920s, at least raises those challenging issues. And Barton Fink contains clever insights on certain artistical and Semitic themes. Pity that these somewhat promising beginnings should be so brutally strangled by their own parents. And by, I might add, the palsied hand of the film editor.

But I did not complete my account of my work on Barton Fink. At the outset the Coens were once again as good as their word, leaving me alone to impose what order I could on their unruly footage. But when I showed them my first cut, the screening ended in silence, and finally all they could find to say was that they'd been hoping for an editing style more along the lines of Beyond Mombassa. I gritted my teeth and explained to them - again - the nature of my involvement in that film. Perhaps my irritation showed; I am a film editor, after all, and not a diplomat or nuncio. At any rate, after the picture was taken away the Coens fiddled it with a friend of theirs, Michael Berenbaum. Perhaps the lads just wanted a bit more of the Hebrew point of view. I myself don't care for what they've done, and don't recognize much of my own in the picture now, save for my name in the credits - the good old rules and regs.

Roderick Jaynes
Hayward's Heath, Sussex
April, 1991

As the book in which this essay appears is now, unsurprisingly, out of print, I would hope Mr Jaynes has no objection to my reprinting it here. Second-hand copies of the scripts are available from most reputable on-line book traders should you wish to own Mr Jaynes' thoughts in a more concrete form - or to peruse the screenplays themselves, the full versions of which are often a useful indication of the efforts film-makers go to in constructing scenes on the page, and often on film, before realising they needn't have bothered.

If you also wish to read Mr Jaynes' recounting of his attempts to assist the Coens during their difficulties in determining a title for The Man Who Wasn't There, you may access it here, courtesy of The Grauniad. I suspect this is the introduction for the published script of that film, and a hard copy should be easily available to those of you who enjoy whiling away an hour or two rummaging through remaindered bins.

The Dream

I'm one of the tiresome individuals who only heard of Chez Pazienza's blog after he got sacked from CNN for writing it. But if you never visited before I recommend this story from his time with KCBS in Los Angeles about organising tie-in news items for a mini-series on the Titanic, for the benefit of those who have what he calls "The Dream", the belief "that those coming into my living room each day and night and relaying to me the important events of the day ... had to at least be somewhat smarter than the average bear."

Any Questions?

While attempting to find out what Thomas Frank's been up to lately, I discovered an interview I'd not seen before. It's three years old and doesn't cover much new ground, but there's a nice story about a university job interview:

By the time he landed it, Frank had a contract from the University of Chicago Press to publish a book based on his dissertation. His interviewers seemed amazed by this, he recalls, and the main question they had for him was: How did he do it?

This annoyed him. ("I was, like, 'Well, it's a quality book, that's how.' ") So did the fact that, having flown in at his own expense, he was given to understand that he had no real chance at the job. At the end, the interviewers asked if he had questions for them.

"Yeah," he said. "Let's go around the room and each of you tell me: If you had to be a vegetable, what kind of vegetable would you be, and why?"

The Commie Line

Belle Waring turns up a malignant gem at National Review Online. Others have been taken by the author's bizarre speculations about Barack Obama's parents, but I particularly liked this bit:

It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution. To be sure, there was much to be discontented about, for black Americans, prior to the civil-rights revolution. To their credit, of course, most black Americans didn't buy the commie line — and showed more faith in the possibilities of democratic change than in radical politics, and the results on display in Moscow.

It takes a peculiarly interesting kind of cleverness to notice that for a long period it was the communists who took the lead in the fight against Jim Crow laws, lynching and the like, and turn it into proof of commie subversion. Or cleverness in a particularly peculiar kind of mind. One might assume that this NRO pundit regards the lack of interest other political stripes took in fighting the oppression of U.S. blacks as evidence of their staunch anti-communism.

Two Interviews on Pakistan

With election results a-pending in Pakistan, here's two relevant interviews recently conducted by Wajahat Ali, over at the usual suspects (yes, I will keep referring to it like that):

From a few days ago, with Steve Coll, author of Ghost wars.

And from today, with Imran Khan, leader of the Pakistan's Movement for Justice Political Party, and former et cetera.

Oh, Great, Another State

As a result of discovering, in the Grubacic and Vodovnik piece I read over at the usual suspects a couple of weeks ago, that Kosovo PM Hashim Thaçi's nom de guerre while in the KLA was The Snake, I've been unable to read about his recent unilateral declaration of independence without hearing Hank Azaria mellifluently intoning "Alllright - time for a crime spree!"

Which would be funnier if it wasn't so freakin' apt.

The US and various other countries have quickly recognised the new "independent" Kosovo. We are told this doesn't encourage secessionist movements elsewhere, because only Kosovo deserves recognition as it is, apparently, a unique case, and not only in the sense they all are. (Hard cheese, Somaliland!*) This recognition will probably encourage a lot of Trutheresque discussion of Caspian Sea oil pipelines and Camp Bondsteel from the sort of people who make the elementary error of imagining that the motivations of governments, however nefarious, are at base always rational. If I thought the US and allies had such concrete reasons for welcoming this latest part of the ongoing Balkans debacle, I'd be less worried.

* [Edit - I hate it when I'm seized with a compulsion to fact-check my own jokes.]

Book Alert III: William Polk - Violent Politics

Over at the usual suspects, Uri Avnery discusses William Polk's short history of insurgencies:

For me, the main lesson is this: from the time the general public embraces the rebels, the victory of the rebellion is assured.

That is an iron rule: an insurgency supported by the public is bound to win, irrespective of the tactics adopted by the occupation regime. The occupier can kill indiscriminately or adopt more humane methods, torture captured freedom fighters to death or treat them as prisoners of war - nothing makes a difference in the long run. The last of the occupiers can board a ship in a solemn ceremony, like the British High Commissioner in Haifa, or fight for a place in the last helicopter, like the last American soldiers on the roof of the American embassy in Saigon - defeat was certain from the moment the insurgency had reached a certain point.

As you can see, I'm working through a backlog of 'net reading, so apologies for old news.

Book Alert II: Sudhir Venkatesh - Gang Leader for a Day

Over at Counterpunch, Vijay Prasad reviews Gang Leader for a Day by his old college roommate Sudhir Venkatesh. The paper Steven Levitt co-authored with Mr Venkatesh on the finances of crack-dealing gangs features in Mr Levitt's and Stephen Dubner's diverting tome Freakonomics (although I've just noticed you can read the original paper here as a pdf file) and Mr Venkatesh's new book sounds just as fascinating.

Ensconced in the world of the Robert Taylor homes, Sudhir comes to see a major gap between the lived reality of the people and the scholarly-media images of them. Sociological categories such as anomie (even anarchy) and the culture of poverty do not capture the rule-based lives of these cast out Americans. Capital fled the ghetto,­ industrial investment dried up with globalization (and the factories remain as abandoned mausoleums), and retail investment rushed to the suburbs leaving space for small family shops (bodegas) whose economic survival is premised upon the sale of liquor, the lottery and the prevention of petty theft. Humans abhor a social vacuum, and into this wasteland came not only the drug-profit fueled gangs but also "off the books" entrepreneurs and community leaders. They provided a measure of order: the policing is done by the gang soldiers and the women who emerge as building leaders. These gangs became the "de facto administration" of the buildings, and even as the leader "may have been a lawbreaker, he was very much a lawmaker as well." Drug sales funnel jobs into the neighborhood, and to earn the trust of the residents, the drug kingpins become the main social welfare agency (they are assisted by women like Ms. Bailey who, in a patron-client way, distribute goods that they leverage out of local businesses). There are some startling revelations here, when Sudhir reports how families pool their resources to survive: if on one floor, an apartment has a fridge and another has a shower, if one has an air conditioner and another has a working toilet, the families simply use each others' utilities and treat the floor like one big house, with their families as one large joint family. The elements of social solidarity are all over these spaces, and Sudhir is keen to show us this. The vision of social devastation has to be altered or else a sense of futility sets in when policy makers turn their eyes to the ghetto.

Schwarz on Kristol

At TomDispatch, Jon Schwarz uses a particularly foolish performance from William Kristol shortly before the Iraq War as a template for recounting the sorry history of the United States' relations with Saddam Hussein, and the debacle of the subsequent war. I particularly liked this next bit, but it's all good.

Back in 2003, Kristol was also quite certain, almost touchingly so, that the Bush administration would be well served by relying on Iraqi exiles:

"KRISTOL: We have tens of thousands of Shia exiles [who] have come back to help contribute to the liberation of Iraq.

"ELLSBERG: I'm afraid the people who propose this war have failed one lesson of intelligence history, which is not to rely too much on the knowledge of people who have left the country... The people who've come to this country may very well underestimate the desire of those people not to be governed by foreigners."

This lesson of history goes back a long way. Book II, Chapter XXXI of Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy is titled "How Dangerous It Is to Believe Exiles":

"It ought to be considered, therefore, how vain are the faith and promises of those who find themselves deprived of their country... such is the extreme desire in them to return home, that they naturally believe many things that are false and add many others by art, so that between those they believe and those they say they believe, they fill you with hope, so that relying on them you will incur expenses in vain, or you undertake an enterprise in which you ruin yourself... A Prince, therefore, ought to go slowly in undertaking an enterprise upon the representations of an exile, for most of the times he will be left either with shame or very grave injury."

The Weekly Standard's archives show Kristol has published quite a few articles on how political correctness in elite U.S. universities is strangling the teaching of the Western canon. And you can understand where he's coming from: While Kristol himself received a PhD in government from Harvard, it obviously was during a period when radical multiculturalists had completely expunged Machiavelli from the curriculum. When will the PC brigade ever learn? Teaching Toni Morrison starts wars.

Strange Bedfellows

Over at Margo Kingston's WebDiary, Ian MacDougall provides a comprehensive refutation of Keating's panegyric for late Indonesian dictator Soeharto. (You can tell it's Margo Kingston's site by the bizarre swerve the comments thread takes into discussing cruelty to animals.) Mr MacDougall introduces his rebuttal with an historical tidbit I was unaware of, quoting Andrew Fraser and Tony Koch:

As national president of the Australian Labor Party[, Tom Burns] ... played a key role, with Gough Whitlam, in reforming and modernising the party in the early 70s, to the extent that it took office federally in 1972.

Part of this effort was the skilful crafting of a report into alleged branch-stacking when Paul Keating was seeking pre-selection for the Sydney seat of Blaxland in 1968. Burns claimed that some of the so-called voters rested beneath tombstones in Bankstown Cemetery and that "it should never happen again", but allowed Keating to keep his pre-selection and launch his political career.

I guess Keating owing this first step in fulfilling his ambitions to the votes of dead people might partly explain his abiding affection for a mass killer.

The Old Grey Mare

Further searches failed to turn up any discussion of Mitt Romney's racist dog-whistling at CPAC other than occasional reprints of Chris Floyd's article in the alternative press (Mr Floyd's site appears, at the moment, to be under siege from Turko-Germanic hackers) and a column in the Wisconsin State Journal. (Kudos, Mr Wineke!) But during the search I stumbled across this glorious demonstration of what it takes to be a newspaper of record (my emphasis):

It was a speech that had an audience ... interrupting him with sustained applause ... as he decried “the culture of dependency” fostered by government social programs, the looming “demographic disaster” of unchecked entitlement programs, the looming threat of Asian economic supremacy, the perilous threat of “Islamic jihadism,” and the urgent need to unleash the American entrepreneurial genius by “taking a weed-whacker to government regulations.”

Riiight. Because clearly threats to the European welfare system is a major issue in the American elections, and you'd expect a pro-lifer like Romney to complain about too many people having babies, even if it wasn't well-known that European birthrates are in fact declining. "Unchecked entitlement programs". Gotcha.

Good old New York Times. They could sugarcoat a whale corpse.

You're OK, It's Your Friends I Can't Stand

In the news:

Beijing was defiant yesterday in the face of its most embarrassing Olympic crisis so far, sparked by the US director Steven Spielberg's announcement that he is quitting as an artistic adviser to the 2008 Olympic Games because of China's continued support for its oil-rich trading partner Sudan.

My emphasis. My laughter.

Dumbing Up

Jon Schwarz draws our attention to this Washington Post article describing the results of a psychological experiment conducted by the Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management that demonstrates that people who feel powerful are less adept at empathy and comprehending alternative viewpoints.

Across four experiments we found that power was associated with a reduced tendency to comprehend how others see the world, how others think about the world, and how others feel about the world. Priming power led participants to be less likely to spontaneously adopt another’s visual perspective, less likely to take into account that another person did not possess their privileged knowledge, and less accurate in detecting the emotional states of others.

In other news, fish don't live in trees.

While the WashPo article oversells the results just a tad (as usual with psychological studies, it involves a laughably small sample size, with participants entirely chosen from the student body) and Mr Schwarz broadens the interpretation to cover all cognitive abilities rather than just social skills, it is interesting to see some research suggesting that placing people in postions of power diminishes their ability to make sensible decisions. It would be nice to see experiments designed to test the effect of the power mindset on more general intellectual skills such as risk assessment, factual analysis and basic reasoning, although I won't hold my breath waiting to see such research conducted by a business management school. Like Mr Schwarz, I think this question of whether power makes people stupid has been comprehensively answered by world events, but a barrage of psychological test results might help enlighten those unfortunate enough to prefer social science to history, a matter of some importance while almost all governments on Earth are, at best, elected monarchies or oligarchies laughably described as democracies.

I can understand why those who believe that the powerful are intellectually superior to the rest of us would favour systems of hierarchical authority^†, but I've never been able to comprehend why anti-elitists who nevertheless hold that the mass of humanity are incapable of governing themselves ("Chaos!") think the situation could be improved by picking a section of humanity to govern everyone else. Scientific proof (well, OK, social-scientific proof) that power makes you stupider might be the key to persuading these people that systems of devolved egalitarian political authority might be better. Unless their problem is they just can't be arsed to be runnin' t'ings. It's pretty much mine, after all.

† Simmias: The senate is furious over your ideas for a Utopian state.
  Allen: I guess I should never have suggested having a philosopher-king.
  Simmias: Especially when you kept pointing to yourself and clearing your throat.

Bat Country

Over at Sadly, No!, Mr Leonard Pierce dons his Raoul Duke disguise and infiltrates CPAC.

Here’s a description of Hell they never give you: a huge room full of all the people you hate most, and they’re all having a wonderful time.

Yes, it’s all smiles and sunshine here at CPAC: lively young ladies with skillfully applied layers of makeup are here to greet you at every turn and correct your every confusion. Hopelessly earnest collegiate nerds hand out Mitt Romney stickers and hope against hope that John McCain has some sort of campaign trail meltdown: perhaps it will occur to him that the last 30 years have all been a fever-dream brought on by bad fish paste, that he is still in some VC labor camp wearing a tin can around his head, and he will savagely turn on his campaign manager with a broken bottle while at a Kiwanis breakfast. High school kids with bad moustaches pal around in hopes that toadying up to the rich kids will be their ticket to an easy future. On the walls are banners for the dregs of conservative thinksmanship: Town Hall, the ACU, Human Events, the YAF. (The National Review is conspicuous in their absence; they probably think CPAC takes much-needed revenue away from their Cruise the Caribbean with Rich Lowry promotion.) And up front, where no one can touch them – their natural state, as the Market intended, are the big men. Up there, in the first few rows, are the bosses, the people for whom America is shitbox and change drawer, the living embodiments of The Man.

On the way in, bracing the driveway entries to the Omni but kept far from the entrance by irritated-looking cops, were the abortion protesters. Their color posters of mangled fetuses were held up proud and loud in fear that the throngs of right-wingers inside might be paying a little too much attention to lining their pockets and not enough to their pet topic, the atomic holocaust of tomorrow’s Christians. My cab driver, a scarred-up vet who confesses solidarity with the protesters on the abortion issue but is also a lifelong democrat, shrugs in an almost embarrassed way – as if his earlier self-identification as a pro-lifer places him humiliatingly in the company of these fanatics. Once I check in, the atmosphere of gregarious paranoia only increases: there are cops and security people everywhere you look, and long lines through metal detectors and pat-downs by mean young cops and men with earpieces, who all seem to have only recently graduated from high school. I have another moment of panic as they paw through my briefcase, turning all my electronics on and off and opening all the containers: I do, after all, have a lot of pills in there. But God bless the lobbyists for the pharma industry: every goddamn one of them is at least putatively legal, and who’s to say I don’t actually have prescriptions? Other than me, of course, and I’m not talking. At least not after my next round loosens all the muscles in my tongue.

Lovely stuff.