Hindsight as Foresight

Another Iraq war post - sorry about that. This one is something I posted in real time, on AOL, March 19, 2003. I wish I had found this the other day... this was a response to some dipshit comparing the invasion of Iraq to Normandy - I have never been one to suffer the abuse of history gladly....

Attacking Iraq is a pointless, cowardly act of bullying, a more or less willful distraction from any of the things that might in fact give our nation pause (from Al Qaeda to the economy to North Korea to Israeli-Palestine relations to the rest of the list), which comes at the end of a disgraceful season of diplomatic incompetence, that not even dirty tricks (bugging the UN?), bribery (what, 26 million for Turkey?), backstabbing (ask the Kurds), threats and insults and raw plain stupidity (all those idiots, right up to the house of representatives, renaming French Fries and french toast) could save from complete failure, leaving us alone, with one lame duck ally willing to do anything besides line up for the photo ops and payoffs...

It has been an odd week - I have been going back and forth with someone on Facebook about the war. This person is trying to justify the support for the war - how everyone thought Saddam had WMDs, both parties, how he didn't remember any arguments against the war, how all this talk about how bad it was comes from hindsight - I don't know. It wasn't hindsight - Stephen Walt points to this ad - signed by 33 international security academics - that lays out the case against the war, succinctly and absolutely accurately. Alex Pareene notes how The Washington Post and NY Times, even while pushing the war on the front pages and editorial pages, were publishing other stories - reported, in ways that didn't fall apart the way Judy Miller's did. Bill Moyers offers a collection of Iraq stories. There was enough info, in 2003, to doubt the government's case for the war. An awful lot of the information was speculation, probably on both sides - but when you found things that were based in solid reporting, they tended to point against the war. Things like the stories about Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda - those were debunked long before the war started, but were being repeated right up to the end. It made you wonder.

I mentioned how weak the arguments for the war seemed at the time - how they were built on metaphors and analogies, hand-waving, moving the goalposts around, and so on. They were narratives - stories - and that air of inevitability, the image of unanimity, was part of the narrative. As were the Serious people on TV, the Serious Liberals, too, forced to support the war - while the anti-war side wasn't suppressed exactly, but all too often was represented by hippies in the street - by movie stars and Noam Chomsky or something like that, at least as straw men. It was all so well orchestrated....

Enough. Though the fact is that it remains a haunting question - the means by which the country was taken to war, and especially the ways fairly widespread doubts about the war were submerged - not suppressed exactly - but somehow forgotten... It's a lesson of some kind. But one that even now seems to be submerged - brooding about the war seems even now to be something for lefty bloggers and repentant liberal hawks - the public and the politicians still seem quite unwilling to admit any of it happened. We shall see.

Iraq Plus 10

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War, one of the worst foreign policy disasters in American history. Not the worst - Vietnam killed 55,000 Americans and god knows how many Vietnamese, tore the USA apart, gave us Nixon in place of LBJ, corrupted almost every piece of American society, made us hated in the world - Iraq did plenty of harm, but Vietnam beat it across the board. But I will leave Iraq ahead of the Mexican-American war and the War of 1812. The former may have actually done the country more harm (being a fairly direct antecedent to the Civil War), and it was a vile act - an unprovoked act of conquest ("one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation" said Grant), all the worse for being waged in order to extend slavery - but, unlike Iraq or Vietnam or the War of 1812 (for the most part), it was a fairly spectacular victory, and wicked or not, success has to count for something. And the War of 1812, though a stupid war and a complete disaster for the USA, didn't do too much harm - the British had bigger fish to fry and dropped it, and we managed to win a battle after it was done, so I guess it isn't in the running... No - Iraq gets that second place.

But that's the best you can say about it - not quite as bad as Vietnam. A war started on false pretenses, that never really promised any benefits for the US or the world - Saddam Hussein was irrelevant in 2003, there was nothing to be gained by fighting that war. A war that weakened the much more useful endeavors in Afghanistan. That cost us support around the world for everything we did. Costs thousands of lives, trillions of dollars - of our money, never mind the harm we did to Iraq to no end. And did it all for nothing - there were no benefits to starting it, and no unexpected benefits emerged along the way. We conquered the place easily enough, but screwed things up as soon as we marched in. We were diminished by the war in every way - our actions, particularly things like Abu Ghraib (though that started before we went to Iraq); our political discourse - the cowardly reaction of the political classes, accepting the war, congress abdicating its responsibility, the press taking no responsibility, the public accepting the thing... We have not recovered from Vietnam (I'm not sure, sometimes, if we've recovered from the Mexican-American war) - we will be a long time recovering from this disgrace.

I remember the beginning of the war - walking through the Public Garden, with helicopters flying overhead, circling downtown, as if they were afraid that millions of hippies would come out of cold storage and take over the city. It was unsettling. I joke about hippies, but what were those helicopters there for? There might have been protests, though I didn't see them that day - but what difference did a bunch of helicopters make? I felt instead that this was something officials felt they had to do - we were at war - there should be helicopters circling the city, cops in riot gear, sirens. You had to act like there was a war going on....

I don't mean to turn this into a kind of media critique, though I suppose it's inevitable. It was a war for the media, and by the media. The blogs were all shivery about it, after months and months of anticipation and debate. Perfectly sensible liberals defending the build up to war, though a lot of them seemed to drop out in the last month or so before the event. Exciting footage on TV (I guess it was exciting - the news channels seemed to think so) - sensible people on TV, sensible liberals! Bill Clinton! talking about how important this was, gosh, what if Saddam has something? All of that surrounded by a steady pulse of uneasiness - elevated terror alerts at opportune moments, that kind of thing.

It was very strange. I remember arguing about it, mostly on AOL - the arguments for the war seemed so completely nonsensical. The claims about Saddam's threats were so obviously exaggerated - there was plenty of information around, from far more credible sources (like the actual UN inspectors), that he didn't have any weapons of mass destruction - and there was nothing, anywhere, to indicate that he had any connection to Al Qaeda, that he planned to cause any trouble to anyone (other than his own people) - it was maddening. And so many of the arguments, even in the public discourse, consisted of magic thinking, metaphors - anticipating Tom Friedman's Suck. On. This. moment - showing the world we meant business. So much of it was like that - all about messaging - sending a message to the terrorists that we were big and bad and were gonna kill a bunch of the bastards! Which depended so much on analogies and metaphors - the smoking gun is a mushroom cloud stuff - the people I was arguing with on AOL were particularly awful, constantly comparing Saddam Hussein to Hitler, to a naughty child, to a gangrenous limb, on and on. It was hard, in real time, in 2003, not to see the war as a piece of theater - as what Friedman said it was - going somewhere and picking someone out and beating the living shit out of them, just to show we'd do it.

In other words, terrorism. And, as is almost inevitable, terrorism never works - the people you use it on take note and get you back when the chance comes. Or, sometimes, get back at someone else... but it doesn't work. Victims of terrorism harden their hearts, at least against the users of terror.

And - I know it is bad form to say I told you so, but - Tom Friedman's still employed! So - sorry - I did tell you so, as did quite a few other people, many of them in positions where they should have been listened to. And a not insubstantial number of protestors. Who were right. So I will end with something I wrote on AOL, April 12, 2003:

We might want to hold off a bit on claiming Iraq has been "liberated" - currently they are simply conquered (though not quite pacified) - maybe we should find out who ends up in charge before getting too celebratory. Let's face it - the odds that Iraq will come out of this better off than they were under Saddam are probably about even - they are that high primarily because they may not have us for an enemy any more. Their new rulers are not likely to edify the gentle of heart.

I mean - we could see the rest of it coming. I could, and who am I? It's kind of the point I was getting at with the comments on the media, on the symbolism of the war - the pro-war side treated it as though it were a gesture. The anti-war side didn't have all that much special virtue, maybe - they just treated it as real actions in the real world involving real people. Which is a lesson we fucking well ought to learn.

Summertime Movie Viewing Report

The last couple weeks have been a good example of the kinds of films I seem to be driven to lately. Mid-level Hollywood comedies, (I've never been so desperate to pay money for something like Transformers, or the Hangover, for that matter) and amiable documentaries, that maybe belong on TV. This is not exactly a bad thing - the films are generally edifying in some way - but they do seem like a lot of filler. There aren't enough movie movies to see. When one comes along - a revival of The Leopard, say - what bliss!

Anyway - what have I seen lately? Well - start with Pianomania -a fascinating and lovely look at the backstage of concert music, through the eyes of a high end piano tuner, Stefan Knupfer. We see him working with a variety iof musicians - Lang Lang, Alfred Brendel, etc. - we see him working with Steinway to buy a new piano (for the Vienna Concert House), and overseeing the sale of another piano. Much of the film is devoted to a recording session with pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard - Aimard is recording Bach, and wants to use different kinds of sounds from his piano - tuned like a harpsichord, a clavichord, an organ, etc. - he and Knupfer work on that for a year. It's quite a fascinating film, showing the details of piano tuning, the manipulation of sound - and quite entertaining. Knupfer is a witty, amiable fellow - "I think I'll have a very sportive day" he says, in the midst of running up and down stairs between Aimard and his piano, and the room where the recording engineers are set up. What's best about it, though, is probably that it shows something I know nothing about, and teaches me something about it.

That's also true of Buck - a nice doc about Buck Brannaman, a horse trainer and trick roper and cowboy, who runs clinics on training horses - he had a hard childhood, which has somehow left him almost saintly seeming, and utterly devoted to training horses gently - and people too... It's a nice story, and Buck and his family and other associates are nice people to spend a couple hours with though there isn't much more to the film. Except, again, showing me something I don't know anything about, and leaving me knowing more about it - not a bad thing...

Page One:Inside the New York Times - In a way, I'm not sure this is all that much different from previous two - it is, as subtitled, a year inside the New York Times, specifically the media desk (editor Bruce Headlam, reporters Tim Arango, Brian Stetler, and most of all, reporter and columnist, David Carr.) It is, basically, a fly on the wall type film, put together after the fact - it's not quite pure hagiography (of the institution, let's say) - but close, and certainly, one imagines the Times was able to exercise a good deal of control over what ended up in the film. Though like the films above - it shows us the day to day workings of a big newspaper (the big newspaper, at least in the US) - and that too is inherently fascinating stuff. But as a film - maybe just a nice look at something....

But it feels like more than that. A lot of it, I have to admit, is just that there is something so exhilarating about newsroom films - I am a sucker for that stuff. Hecht and Hawks and Capra - and this is right in that tradition. I get twinges watching these guys working the phones, typing away on their laptops, pitching stories, walking the halls looking for that last paragraph, waiting for the lawyers to call back - even just the simple stuff, watching how fast and easy they type - great stuff. It's a great genre, because newspapers are a great setting, and this is a ,ore than worthy entry in the tradition. But I suppose, there is more than that - there is, after all, the Big Question, whatever that is - here, it takes the form - will the New York Times survive? - and spreads out from there. Whither journalism? Whither print? Whither the web? Etc. And how will these changes change society? the body politic? etc. etc.

I don’t know. The issues raised are, undeniably, vital questions, and they are given something of an airing here. And their importance gives the film heft - though in the end I'm left a bit unsatisfied. I don't know if that is the film's problem, or if it's broader - I am not sure I have ever been all that happy with the debates I've seen over these issues (the whole Whither Media stuff). It's hard to say why - here, a lot of my dissatisfaction seems to come from the way the discussions always seem to get sidetracked, bogged down, or how single issues come to take over for the whole range of issues. As an example here - there is a panel where Markos Moulitsas and David Carr get into a discussion about the place of the Mainstream Media - which Kos turns into a discussion of Judith Miller and Jayson Blair, and the failures of the New York Times, a position Carr routs mainly by pointing to the rest of the paper. But really - both seem to be evasions - Kos of the general value of the paper (and other papers), Carr of the fact that the authority he claims relies completely on not fucking up like that.

Now - I have opinions on the subject. In fact, I think the problem for print newspapers (and not necessarily just print) is driven by two things - 1) the big one is the advertising crisis - I mentioned this last year, days where I could not find a classified section in my local paper. (At least not in print.) That trumps everything else, since the daily paper lives on its ads. (Monthly publications, books, I think, will find ways to continue to make money through sales - I don't think daily papers can do that enough to survive.) 2) The digitization of information - and the web - which makes bits easy and cheap to exchange. ("Free" - or - free as far as the information goes - the cost revolves around the connections and servers - you get on the web and then do what you do, and it doesn't much matter what....) This changes the economy - it's one thing to charge for objects - something else to charge for information that can be reproduced for almost nothing. I can hold these opinions, and a variety of opinions based on them (that you can't control the flow of information enough to charge for it like you could for a piece of paper, things like that) - but... I hold other opinions too - that nothing on the web except web-based newspapers can do what newspapers can do. That without all the things newspapers have - the departments and bureaus, reporters and editors, people doing the legwork, the cold calling, grinding through the archives, interpreting the data - you cannot provide the real service newspapers provide. And this opinion collides with the ramifications of the first 2 - because I don't know how newspapers can survive in their current form with the current models of revenue. I don't think you can afford to put out a daily edition on the revenues you can get from ads, now - and I don't think (the Times' attempts to the contrary) you will be able to maintain much headway charging for online content. It's too easy for the information to get out of the paywall. And maybe more importantly - even if the Times and a couple others survive - having one or two or a dozen great papers in the whole country is not much better than having none. Someone will have to work something out. And - someone will work something out. That is not "optimism" it's just a fact - news and information will circulate in the future. But I don't know how, who will pay for it, what it will look like, what kinds of (valuable) things will be lost (or gained) - or who will be ruined getting to that point. We are kind of stuck in limbo for a while. There was someone in the movie, testifying before Congress, who said, we are early in the process - John Kerry took the opportunity to pontificate about the people who have lost their jobs - but she was simply right. Things have not worked themselves out in the least yet - the process is just starting....

Okay - crap - that went on longer than I expected. Well - what of the fiction?

Well - there's Bad Teacher - Cameron Diaz as a bad teacher, who plans to quit to marry a rich kid - when his mother intervenes, she's got to go back to work, and does so, with all the enthusiasm we might expect. She shows films every day in class; she smokes pot in the parking lot; she steals money from the class car wash to fund her breast enhancement surgery. She's surrounded by loons - Lucy Punch as Amy Squirrel, the probably mad do gooder neighbor; Jason Segal as a randy gym teacher; Justin Timberlake as a rich goofy christian (not stated, but the "pro-choice" joke, and a dry-humping scene make it clear enough); John Michael Higgins as a dolphin obsessed principal; Phyllis Smith as a nice old lady who's up for anything... All this rolls along amusingly enough - the jokes are good, the performers on their game, the story manages not to turn sappy - or gratuitously nasty - I mean, of course people sort of change, and things sort of get better for people, that's what stories do, they change people... to do this without lapsing into life lessons (beyond obvious stuff like don't be a[ny more of a] dick [than you have to be]) is a small triumph, and I'd say it gets there.

Larry Crowne, on the other hand - not so much. It's a likable enough film, I guess, but not a very good one. I have to blame Glenn Kenny and Sam Adams for this one - Kenny kind of liked it; Sam Adams - abetted, I think, by the Most Interesting Man in the World - played a great role the day before in making me miss an 11 AM screening of the African Queen - The Larry Crowne Affair turned out to be a bit more convenient... So what do we have? Tom Hanks is a master criminal laid off from his job at Goldman Sachs and is pursued by Faye Dunaway, or Julia Roberts, as Elizabeth Warren - no, wait, no, that's wishful thinking... Larry Crowne is laid off from UMart because he lacks a college education. He goes to community college, where he has classes with Julia Roberts (another Bad Teacher, though she already has a lousy husband, so isn't looking for another) and George Takai (being very strange). Also in the latter class is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (in the person of Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who rides a scooter (like Crowne) and so orchestrates his midlife crisis makeover. The potential for age inappropriate sex does not materialize, and Hanks and Roberts pair up in the end. He gets A's in his class, but the MPDG drops out (and Crowne doesn't repay her generosity to him by telling her to see Bridesmaids for a lesson on what happens when you start a quirky new retail store in the middle of a fucking recession. Jesus lady! get the degree, so at least in 10 years you can get temp work for an outsourcing firm!) Where was I?

The truth is - there's an interesting story lurking in the shadows here. The MPDG who revivifies poor middle aged Tom Hanks - and Tom Hanks who revivifies mopey Julia Roberts. The little side step - where someone wakes him up and he wakes up someone else - is a cool twist. And some of it is played with some wit and grace. Just not enough. Or really anything beyond the actors pouring on the charm and treating it all like a lark. There's a good idea there - but it's just an idea. Even the idea that Hanks saves Roberts - the film tells us that she saved him (that is, he says that to her), but - we've seen the film - seen her class, which is atrocious, we know she's mailing it in, but his enthusiasm, and his ability to engage his classmates, wakes her up. It would have been nice to have the filmmakers notice this - they might have gotten around to writing a decent film if they had... Instead - it plays like a very sketchy first draft.

Nina Paley on Free Content

This may be relevant to my recent newspaper post - maybe. Here is Nina Paley (director the very fine animated film, Sita Sings the Blues), laying out her ideas on copyright: Understanding Free Content. What she says seems just about right to me - content is like water; books, DVDs, etc. are containers - water is (should be) free - containers are not, and should not be. There's much more... I think something like that will have to come about, especially now that information (content) can flow, as easily as it does... The internet gets around any particular barriers - but specific containers (books, DVDs, films as films, CDs, etc.) still have value. They do to me - I still buy books, CDs, go to movies, and prefer all of those things to downloading books or music or movies from the web... A lot of these things have to be worked out - especially with more ephemeral content like newspapers - it has value that changes with time. Is valuable the day it comes out - loses value fairly quickly - then regains it over time, as a record of a time and place. How that fits with containers - I don't know...

Anyway - I just wanted to pass that article on - it is very interesting...

Newspaper Angst

I get up this morning to find this story headlining the Globe - Times Co. may shut Globe;
seeks union concessions. Ouch. There's nothing new, I guess, about stories of newspapers in trouble - but this is bringing it home in a particularly unpleasant way.

I know I am probably part of the problem: I've been reading the daily paper online for almost a decade (summer 2000, I think, is when I dropped it for good) - though I keep buying the Sunday edition most of the time... I don't know how that factors into this, though - it's ad revenues that pay for papers, and ads are there online as much as in paper. Just that I'm not sure anyone to this day has figured out how to measure the value of online ads. Circulation, I suppose, measures the value of print ads pretty well - but online? Subscriptions don't quite do it - they're too easy to circumvent...

But this is not just a question of format. I don't buy the paper, but I read it: I check the Boston Globe, every day. I read it the way I always have, more or less - check the big news stories, read the sports pages, look through the A&E section, and anything else that catches my eye. I do it online rather than the paper, but - I don't want to do without that. I want a local paper - I want the Globe, not the Herald, too - online, offline, whatever... This is terribly distressing. I am not sure how much the real problem is that the Boston Globe is owned by the New York Times - if the Globe were independent, would it have a different set of incentives to stay open? The Herald is independent - I don't know if that changes the dynamic in important ways - I suspect it does. It's all a mess.

And so - to take a bit of comfort - here's Roger Ebert celebrating the good old days in the newspaper world. As well he should! Though at some point, that is somewhat misleading - the romance of the old newspapers is fine, but some of it is dependent on the technology - the technology has changed: information increasingly circulates electronically now. That creates different ways of working, reading, all the rest. And that - while urging nostalgic regret - is not the same problem as the disappearance of independent local newspapers. Related, no doubt - indeed, probably driven by the close association of local reporting and writing with the facts of printing presses and papers and circulation figures and ad revenues and all the rest - but the two are still separable. The fact is - there will be good writing available somewhere. If not in papers, then online. But the other side of things - the local paper, the local reporters - the people who know everything in their corner of the world (that Ebert describes in that essay) - when that goes, it is harder to say that it will come back. Someone has to pay the people who know all the mobsters' nicknames - it's not obvious where that money will come from when newspapers are all online, all either completely centralized (all the big chain papers), or completely atomized into blogs and vanity sites....