Saturday, January 22, 2005

Idealistic Hot Air

Here's David Brooks in the NY Times, talking about Bush's inauguration speech. It's a strange article. I quote, at length:

The people who detest America take a look at this odd conjunction and assume the materialistic America is the real America; the ideals are a sham. The real America, they insist, is the money-grubbing, resource-wasting, TV-drenched, unreflective bimbo of the earth. The high-toned language, the anti-Americans say, is just a cover for the quest for oil, or the desire for riches, dominion and war.

But of course they've got it exactly backward. It's the ideals that are real.

Two years from now, no one will remember the spending or the ostrich-skin cowboy boots. But Bush's speech, which is being derided for its vagueness and its supposed detachment from the concrete realities, will still be practical and present in the world, yielding consequences every day.

With that speech, President Bush's foreign policy doctrine transcended the war on terror. He laid down a standard against which everything he and his successors do will be judged.

When he goes to China, he will not be able to ignore the political prisoners there, because he called them the future leaders of their free nation. When he meets with dictators around the world, as in this flawed world he must, he will not be able to have warm relations with them, because he said no relations with tyrants can be successful.

His words will be thrown back at him and at future presidents. American diplomats have been sent a strong message. Political reform will always be on the table. Liberation and democratization will be the ghost present at every international meeting. Vladimir Putin will never again be the possessor of that fine soul; he will be the menace to democracy and rule of law.

Because of that speech, it will be harder for the U.S. government to do what we did to Latin Americans for so many decades - support strongmen to rule over them because they happened to be our strongmen. It will be harder to frustrate the dreams of a captive people, the way in the early 1990's we tried to frustrate the independence dreams of Ukraine.

It will be harder for future diplomats to sit on couches flattering dictators, the way we used to flatter Hafez al-Assad of Syria decade after decade. From now on, the borders established by any peace process will be less important than the character of the regimes in that process.

The speech does not command us to go off on a global crusade, instantaneously pushing democracy on one and all. The president vowed merely to "encourage reform." He insisted that people must choose freedom for themselves. The pace of progress will vary from nation to nation.

The speech does not mean that Bush will always live up to his standard. But the bias in American foreign policy will shift away from stability and toward reform. It will be harder to cozy up to Arab dictators because they can supposedly help us in the war on terror. It will be clearer that those dictators are not the antidotes to terror; they're the disease.

Does he believe this? (So asks Belle Waring at Crooked Timber, where I found the link.) Has Bush, in any way, done anything that might indicate this kind of a shift? He still supports strongmen if they're our strongmen - he hasn't done anythign to challenge Putin. He hasn't done much to challenge any dictators we don't like, if they have the means to defend himself. Is anything going to change?

Bush's speech is, in fact, just more of the same - repeating the words - freedom, freedom, freedom - as if they meant anything. But mostly, just making people feel good about their country so they won't think too much about what their country is actually doing. To imagine Bush suddenly adopting Jimmy Carter's foreign policy, even its underlying rhetoric (in anything approaching an honest manner) is fantastic.

And finally - the proof is in the pudding. And Bush's first term definitely supports the idea that "The real America . . . is the money-grubbing, resource-wasting, TV-drenched, unreflective bimbo of the earth. The high-toned language, the anti-Americans say, is just a cover for the quest for oil, or the desire for riches, dominion and war." One thing Brooks has right - or would have right if anyone anywhere took one word Bush says at face value - is that Bush's speeches should hold us to ahigher standard. But - unless we meet that higher standard - people will take his words as the blather they are. And - unless something very drastic has changed - there is almost no possibility at all that the policy Brooks talks about will be followed, not by this administration....

Friday, January 14, 2005

Fun with iMusic Shuffle

A fun little game - open up iTunes/iPod/whateveryouhave, turn on shuffle - list the first 10 (next 10, whatever it is) songs to come up. Well?

Things - Fannypack
One Million Kisses - Half Japanese
Hello Good Child - Acid Mothers Temple
Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for me and My Monkey - The Feelies
Treatment Bound - The Replacements
A Drop in Time - Mercury Rev
Good Fortune - PJ Harvey
Planet Claire - B-52s
The Neighborhood - Tom Waits
Run Run Run - Velvet Underground

An interesting stretch I guess.

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Movies, 80s, Best

In the blogosphere, I find posts about 80s Movies. That is right up my alley, so I am going to post, and - if time permits - comment. Meanwhile, getting into the spirit of movie talk, Jim Snowden offers worst films even by great directors and best films by one-hit wonder directors. Those are interesting lists and topics themselves, and perhaps the spirit will move us to emulate.... not this post, though.

1 City of Sadness - dir. Hou Hsiao Hsien: follows a family in Taiwan from the end of WWII (it opens with Hirohito's radio speech, announcing Japan's surrender) to the arrival and takeover of Taiwan by the Guomindang. A beautiful film, with masterful articulation of space and depth of field, sophisticated use of time, flashbacks, ellipses and shifts of perspective, with a narrative and political sense that holds it together - the confusion of tongues, the ethnic and racial and political divisions, the wonderful accident of a star who couldn't speak Taiwanese, so played a deaf man, a perfect symbol for the impossibility of communication.... a film of political bitterness, and oppressive sadness.

2 Blue Velvet - David Lynch: Intense Freudian nightmare, with satiric overtones about middle America, TV, the Hardy Boy... brilliant in every possible way - gorgeous looking (the rich colors, the widescreen, wide angle cinematography, the distorted spaces, the lighting), gorgeous sounding - a funny, creepy, disturbing, moving masterpiece.

3 The Elephant Man - David Lynch: having seen this on video back in the 80s, I could like it, respect it - but until I'd seen it in a theater, in all its widescreen magnificence... when I did, I understood. The effect of the rich black and white, the odd portentious compositions, full of Lynchian spaces, with a kind of chorus of sights and sounds of machines. Men as monsters. Merrick on show, then, at the end, turned, made the looker as much as the lookee. The mirror. Dreams. Outstanding.

4 Fitzcarraldo - Werner Herzog: Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog sail a steamship up the Amazon, drag it over a mountain, and send it crashing through rapids. The story - Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, failed businessman, opera lover, hauling that steamship around - collapses into the performance of this man by Herzog and Kinski, but that doesn't matter either. Autobiographical, allegorical (isn't making any film a bit like hauling a steamship over a mountain? isn't life a bit like that? if it isn't - shouldn't it be?), absurd and wonderful all the way down.

5 Do the Right Thing - Spike Lee: A day in the life of Bed Stuy. A bad day. But Lee, here, is fair, giving everyone their reasons, and making it all make sense.

6 Peking Opera Blues - Tsui Hark: featuring an iconic performance by Bridget Lin, who is one of the great Movie Stars of all time. A thrilling, overpacked adventure involving an opera company, revolutionaries, warlords, gangsters, soldiers, petty thieves, and a good chunk of the burden of Chinese history. And the usual array of cross-dressing, derring do and bravura film-making one expects from Tsui Hark. Still a bit trapped by sound stages - lacks the production values of his Once Upon a Time in China films, but probably compensates with a tighter focus on the story and, well, Bridget Lin.

7 Black Rain - Shohei Imamura: adaptation of a book about a family living in the aftermath of Hiroshima. Imamura is an odd case - he has won the Palme D'Or twice at Cannes - for fairly unremarkable films. This one and Eijenaika are way better than Ballad of Narayama, his 80s winner. Somewhat unusual for Imamura - very restrained and dignified - the Ozu influence can be seen quite clearly.

8 Come and See - Elem Klimov: horrific story of a teenager fighting Germans in Bylorussia, 1943.

9 Full Metal Jacket - Stanley Kubrick: "I AM in a world of shit." Another of Kubrick's many fine war pictures, with the proof of the equation sex=death=shit worked out in some detail, in boot camp and Vietnam.

10 Brazil - Terry Gilliam: One of the best SF films ever. An everyman gets caught in a mistaken identity when his upstairs neighbor is mistaken for a revolutionary and taken away. He tries to help, and is himself destroyed. Brilliant evocation of a shabby future - cyberpunk almost before the word, with its low tech, grungy look and feel - a beautiful and genuinely haunting film.

Morning Despair

Fresh Horrors at Guantanamo - just great. James Woolcott comments. It's getting harder to snark. The unsettling fact that his "suggestion" that Fox hire Charles Graner is probably closer to a prediction - oh, maybe not Graner, but somebody smeared in the shit of this scandal is all too likely to turn up on TV alongside Ollie and G. Gordon Liddy (what a piker he is! all he ever tortured was himself!), probably pissing and moaning about the wickedness of Randy Moss or whichever Hilton sister is peddling smut this week.

Fucking hell.

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

How Low Can you go?

I know this has been discussed for a while now, but I have to say something - The Salvador Option?

Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.

The fact that it is being discussed at all - is surprising, how? We've already more or less adopted torture as a policy; we've got an AG nominee who (along with the torture) thinks the president is not subject to the constitution...

You get what you vote for I guess. Unfortunately, I get what they voted for too - crap.

How Low Can you go?

I know this has been discussed for a while now, but I have to say something - The Salvador Option?

Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.

The fact that it is being discussed at all - is surprising, how? We've already more or less adopted torture as a policy; we've got an AG nominee who (along with the torture) thinks the president is not subject to the constitution...

You get what you vote for I guess. Unfortunately, I get what they voted for too - crap.

Thursday, January 06, 2005

Some Metablogging

So here I am this Thursday night thinking about... as we move into this new year... hopes dreams plans... expectations, goals! Right! Let us ask ourselves: how can we make this blog worth reading? more frequent posts might be a start, and posts that actually say something.... it is a cruel circle, yes? why, if it were more interesting here, I would post more!

No, no, let's be serious. A new year upon us and all that. Let us imagine an influx of energy, and some focus for that energy. Let us imagine, then, the arts. Let us imagine, movie reviews, comments on books, or music, on art - the arts. The presidential elections are behind us, now maybe we can turn from politics, all the time, though it's hard with Alberto Gonzalez up for Attorney General. That's the sort of thing that will put you off your feed. Or get you reading - say, Human Rights First, which is blogging the hearings; Pandagon is also posting frequent comments; Uggabugga reminds us what the scum bags think, and James Wolcott states the matter plainly.

What the hell is wrong with us, as a country? That someone who justified the use of torture, and who claimed the president had the power to set aside the law, is being considered for the post of Attorney General? How did we get to this place? One terrorist attack? Is it possible?

You see the difficulty.... When I started playing with blogs, back - oh god - last spring (of 03!), I actually did post more about arts than politics - a bunch of stuff on comics, I remember.... well, I mentioned comics, somewhere in the post. That lasted about 2 posts, then it was monthly links to something stupid from Bush... But it is a new year! hopes, dreams, expectations abound!

So anyway, as a token of my, um, resolution to move forward in 2005, or back, or whichever direction it is, how about I offer up a list of movies? How about, Top Ten Movies Released (in my town) in 2004?

Since you asked real nice:

1) Goodbye, Dragon Inn
2) House of Flying Daggers
3) Crimson Gold
4) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
5) Millenium Mambo
6) Moolaade
7) Napoleon Dynamite
8) Zatoichi
9) I heart huckabies
10) Gozu

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Evil

Did Tom Delay really say this? Did he really read from Matthew 7 - the parable of the wise and foolish builders - at a prayer breakfast this week? I guess he did. It was on C-Span.

There are two possible explanations for this. One is that Tom Delay doesn't understand the passage - "it's about a flood, and there was a big flood, so, that will be real nice, I think" went the workings of his tiny brain, if this is the case. Alas, I have known too many bible readers who have pulled pieces out of context, or quoted things they simply didn't understand, to dismiss this explanation out of hand. He very well could be simply a moron.

The other explanation is that he meant it, literally (which, of course, is more than you can say of Jesus) - that a wise man builds his house on a rock (or lives in Texas) and a foolish man builds his house on sand (or lives in southern Asia). Or even meant it figuratively - we are good and god loves us, they are bad and god hates them, and has killed 150,000 of them because they had the temerity to live in SOuthern Asia...

In which case he is an evil moron.

However you explain it, the mere fact of it will bring you up short. Delay has really gone as low as one can go. MIsapplying scriptures like this - or worse - applying that scripture to this situation - is unimaginable.

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

Will Eisner

I just saw this - Will Eisner is dead. (I saw the news at Abu Aardvark's site, where I was reading his Comic Book Politics blog (linked to by Matthew Yglesias - this is getting confusing - how many parentheses in am I again?) Two?)

He was a great artist. He made some of the most completely satisfying comic art - from the Spirit on, to Fagin the Jew, which I believe is the last of his works I have, innovative and graceful and beautiful, and always intelligent and humane. He will be missed.

Happy New Year!

Well, this has taken longer than I thought - here I embarked on the new year full of enthusiasm and determination to blog regularly and... here it's the 4th already. Oh well.

On the other hand, this post can stand as a public sign that I have Fulfilled one of my New Year's Resoutions! For I type these words froom the basement of the local starbyucks, courtesy of a new wifi account - yay! This, I tell myself, will inspire me to all sorts of heights of blogging creativity! for now, I can post from Anywhere!

if I have the laptop.

Anyway, this is also almost completely contentless - nothing better, on a Tuesday - what is it? afternoon already? Wow.

We can only hope for more to follow, of a more edifying sort. For now -

Welcome, baby new year!