In retrospect, I should have had my musings the September 11, 2001 attacks on Tuesday, but I didn't think that I had anything to contribute. However, I have reconsidered even if we should also commemorate Augusto Pinochet's bloody, and US supported, coup, which also happened on September 11, but in 1973.
When I first heard about them, I thought the first collision was a pure accident like when that B-25 bomber crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945. However, the clear weather of that day and the second plane hit the other World Trade Center tower made horrifically clear that this was no accident.
When that revelation sank in, I had only thought, "Please, let these attacker be another Timothy McVeigh." That is, I was hoping that a native white American militia organization was responsible for this horror like they were in the Oklahoma City Bombing, because if it isn't, then President George W. Bush would able be exploit this for anything he wants to do. Unfortunately, it turns out that Osama Bin Laden was responsible, and Bush and his cronies got to pursue anything they wanted.
I was actually hoping that this incident could have led to Bush and company reexamining US foreign policy to realize what provoked this. Yes that was a naive hope, but it was all I had to cling to. Instead, we were subjected to deceptive blandishments like "They hate our freedom" and stupid appeals to shop
That has led to among other things, the glorified gulag of the Guantanamo detention camp, making a volume of lies and exaggerations for the 2003 Iraq invasion and the draining chaos that followed including the sickening abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. You know, there was a time when the US was famous for their comfy POW camps that were better quarters for many enemy soldiers than their own side's barracks. Furthermore, that policy paid off in World War II with encouraging surrenders, minimizing inmate trouble and getting them to blab any secrets they had. It's just like Bush and company ignore American history and simple common sense from that to do something right in a war.
Finally, whatever the other causes of our economy's turmoil, the trillion dollar public expense has got to have been a contributing factor to our biggest trading partner's troubles.
After all, only a ideological idiot like Bush and his gang would cut taxes during a war; however, I would just love to see what they could have done if they had the chutzpah to do a war bond drive like they did in World War II like this cartoon. This may be violating Godwin's Law but a big reason why Nazi Germany never went for war bonds was that they didn't wanted the German public to have a safe means of criticizing their policies by boycotting them. Regardless, Bush and co. were in no mood to listen to basic sanity anyway.
So, that's at least part of the legacy of 9/11, an attack we are all still paying for in all the miserable ways.
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Prohibition, A TV documentary review
When it comes to American history, few American documentary filmmaker on TV can match Ken Burns.His film have a powerfully engaging effect that seems to work best with his own voice when he has the least amount of material work with. For example, for events that occurred before the advent of film, such as The Civil War, he is able to create evocative scenes with paintings and landscape shots that seem make motion almost superfluous. That is further enhanced with great actors reading the writings of great historical figures like Sam Waterston as Abraham Lincoln, Morgan Freeman as Frederick Douglass and Julie Harris as Mary Chestnut.
Last night, I had a binge of sorts watching Burns' documentary of last year, Prohibition. As usual, it was an insightful look at one of the United States' most disastrous constitutional mistakes when it tried to ban the sale of alcohol. Starting from a well meaning activist urge to control the social problems arising from America's obsession alcohol, it blew up into a national imposition arising from a toxic mix of nativist prejudice and ethnic anxiety, dosed with a jigger of self-righteousness fueled with political savvy as the 18th amendment of the US Constitution..
From that supreme act, you will find a intriguing story of how good intentions created some of most serious blowback as organized crime instantly took advantage a ready market created by the draconian in definition Volstead Act that was enforced by underfunded and undermanned Prohibition Bureau under an underenthusiastic political leadership.
Against this, you have colorful tales of bootleggers, rumrunners and gangsters of which Al Capone was simply the most self-grandizing of the bunch. Opposing them, you will understand how that side was hardly much better, especially when the head of the bureau, who was willing to encourage the trampling civil liberties in her methods as part of regular business, was willing to directly interfere with the 1928 Presidential election by spewing religious hate, a sentiment in principle shared by that other supporting group, The Ku Klux Klan.
Furthermore, you will see how this conflict infected much of American society as alcohol became the ultimate forbidden fruit, leading to a widespread attitude of secret defiance that became fashionable to a self-destructive degree. In fact, the social activism dedicated to ending prohibition is a real eye-opener like the well to do society lady, Pauline Sabin and the mayor of New York City, Fiorella La Guarida.
The only major disappointments is that I wish Burns could have focused a bit more on some of the well meaning and famous heroes of the era like Izzy and Moe and Eliot Ness and his Untouchables. However, the tragic story of that rural enforcer in the mountains who did his duty and pay for it with his life goes a long way about the era's costs.
Furthermore, I wish Burns could have drawn the obvious parallels with the current narcotics prohibition which is proving not much less self-defeating and ineffectual itself. As much as I am a teetotaler, this series becomes a intelligent fable on the perils of social reform overreaching itself and making things worse in the long run.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Following a Powerful Historical Story in Sound.
It's funny how Germany's history in the first half of the 20th century is so fascinating a morbid sense to see a nation so steeped in militaristic nationalism that they help plunge the world in such destructive agony in the first World War and then go collectively insane in World War II.
For myself, I found listening to a whole list of history audiobooks from Audible.com cover much of that history with such enthralling narratives and there are still holes to fill with more to listen to.
It all started with the classic book, The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman where you will follow how Europe's nationalistic rivalries exploded into an war led largely by arrogant idiots like Joseph Joffre who kept with stupid doctrines long after they have proved self-destructively useless until it was almost too late and weaklings like General Moltke who nervously fiddled with vital military plans and senselessly stuck with them even when the tragedy could have been avoided. However, it followed through and reading about Belgium and the price it paid for its independence is powerful listening as the conflict that drowned it become something much worse in scope. Meanwhile in my reflexive interest in Britain's role in this rolling disaster, I never thought I would be rooting for General Douglas "Butcher" Haig and Lord Kitchener, but reading the moronic blundering of John French screwing up the British Expeditionary Force to the point of utter destruction you are drawn to the competent no matter their subsequent history.
After that, I couldn't resist listening to all of Richard J. Evans' The Third Reich Trilogy (The Coming of the Third Reich , The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War) to listen to an comprehensive survey of Nazi Germany as a kind of grand historical horror story. It starts with the trials of the doomed Wiemar Republic and how it provided the fatal precedents that Hitler exploited to the hilt. Still, listening to the final book is almost impossible to get through entirely, the depravities inflicted in Eastern Europe, especially in the Soviet Union, beggars the imagination even when you know about the death camps that came later.
After that, The End by Ian Kershaw is the natural followup to learn why did Nazi Germany fight to the absolute bitter end. In that book, there is a perverse fascination to learn of a nation being ground into oblivion with such hopeless fanaticism for a future Hitler refused to contemplate and his people feared more than anything else.
Finally, I'm listening to Exorcising Hitler by Frederick Taylor to learn what happened to Germany afterward to answer that necessary question: what happened to a country that paid such a crushing price for following a leader's grandiose dreams in the face of all conscience and reason. The answer I got is an intriguing mix where a punitive moral idealism and a pragmatic appreciation for the greater good for a nation that eventually came to a real moral reckoning on its own by its next generation.
All in all, it's been an intriguing trip and The Berlin Wall by Frederick Taylor will likely be next.
As modern history goes, it's well trodden ground, but it's a journey that is still powerful to follow myself.
For myself, I found listening to a whole list of history audiobooks from Audible.com cover much of that history with such enthralling narratives and there are still holes to fill with more to listen to.
It all started with the classic book, The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman where you will follow how Europe's nationalistic rivalries exploded into an war led largely by arrogant idiots like Joseph Joffre who kept with stupid doctrines long after they have proved self-destructively useless until it was almost too late and weaklings like General Moltke who nervously fiddled with vital military plans and senselessly stuck with them even when the tragedy could have been avoided. However, it followed through and reading about Belgium and the price it paid for its independence is powerful listening as the conflict that drowned it become something much worse in scope. Meanwhile in my reflexive interest in Britain's role in this rolling disaster, I never thought I would be rooting for General Douglas "Butcher" Haig and Lord Kitchener, but reading the moronic blundering of John French screwing up the British Expeditionary Force to the point of utter destruction you are drawn to the competent no matter their subsequent history.
After that, I couldn't resist listening to all of Richard J. Evans' The Third Reich Trilogy (The Coming of the Third Reich , The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War) to listen to an comprehensive survey of Nazi Germany as a kind of grand historical horror story. It starts with the trials of the doomed Wiemar Republic and how it provided the fatal precedents that Hitler exploited to the hilt. Still, listening to the final book is almost impossible to get through entirely, the depravities inflicted in Eastern Europe, especially in the Soviet Union, beggars the imagination even when you know about the death camps that came later.
After that, The End by Ian Kershaw is the natural followup to learn why did Nazi Germany fight to the absolute bitter end. In that book, there is a perverse fascination to learn of a nation being ground into oblivion with such hopeless fanaticism for a future Hitler refused to contemplate and his people feared more than anything else.
Finally, I'm listening to Exorcising Hitler by Frederick Taylor to learn what happened to Germany afterward to answer that necessary question: what happened to a country that paid such a crushing price for following a leader's grandiose dreams in the face of all conscience and reason. The answer I got is an intriguing mix where a punitive moral idealism and a pragmatic appreciation for the greater good for a nation that eventually came to a real moral reckoning on its own by its next generation.
All in all, it's been an intriguing trip and The Berlin Wall by Frederick Taylor will likely be next.
As modern history goes, it's well trodden ground, but it's a journey that is still powerful to follow myself.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Pictures at a Revolution: a personal book review
This book is an endlessly fascinating history about one of the most tumultuous periods of Hollywood in the mid 1960s. In that time, the American film industry underwent a dramatic transition as the old guard of Hollywood found its hegemony challenged by a new generation of filmmakers with a new sensibility to the art even as the veterans tried and true ways proved to be neither anymore. In that time, the 1967 Picture Oscar Nominees proved to be a microcosm of this conflict like the roguish French influenced Bonnie and Clyde, the youth oriented iconoclastic satire of The Graduate faced off against the stogy Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and the mainstream artistic and box office fiasco Doctor Dolittle while the searing detective drama, In the Heat of the Night found itself as much in the middle of this divide as its Black star, Sidney Poitier.
Along the way, you will enjoy bracing sidestories like the fall of Hollywood's production code as its censors found themselves out of touch and out of time in a world and how television finally changed from a simple threat to the film medium into a valuable tool that helped make new cinematic visions possible. On a larger scale, there is the competing influences of film as the French New Wave influenced the young turks like Warren Beatty, Arthur Penn and Mike Nichols to take a more personal and less inhibited approach to film. Meanwhile, the mainstream studio establishment misread the brief fad for big budget musicals like My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins to set themselves up for a disastrous box office reckoning that would break the back of their power even while United Artists showed the way forward with a new looser business model that made the new media mainstays like the James Bond series possible.
Finally, there are the lives of the actors of this time they had to ride this storm with their own ways in enthralling stories. There is Rex Harrison, a veteran actor who tried to take advantage of his mainstream break-out and squandered it as a drunken hateful prima donna on Doctor Dolittle, a film whose botched creation is more comically entertaining than the movie itself.. Against that, you have the struggles of Dustin Hoffman, a Jewish actor of the highest artistic ideals who found himself hitting the big time in the way he least expected, and opened up what was possible for actors of various ethnicities. However, you will also see the slightly sad story of Sidney Poitier, a breakthrough Black film star who paid the price of too many of his employer's prejudices and the strictures of his own ideals and frustrations as the burden of being both a pioneer and a token began to sink his career.
Finally, this book is a enticing callback to an entirely different time of being a film fan decades before home video when filmgoing could be a enriching social occasion of ideas for the discriminating fan while seeing vintage stuff was a rare treat that required connections and the determination to make that possible.
In short, this film will give you a new appreciation of mainstream film in a time when Hollywood began to realize its old ways were self-destructing, but saw a future where newcomers could make it so much more.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)