This week at CCLaP, Karl Wolff reviews “The Cage” by Gordon Weiss, a former UN worker who writes about the human rights disaster of Sri Lanka in its battle with the Tamil Tigers.
As an added bonus, here is Anthony Bourdain in Sri Lanka, from his series, No Reservations. Take note that the air date for the episode is 2009. Like Bourdain’s episode to Lebanon, he’s taking a trip before the dust has finally settled:
Posted in book reviews, books, CCLAP Fridays
Tagged asia, book reviews, books, Buddhism, communism, culture, economics, human rights, non-fiction, philosophy, politics, religion, Sinhala, Tamil, Tamil Tigers, terrorism, tourism, UK
The Benefits of Hindsight
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.
Groucho Marx
Henry Kissinger wrote his final volume of memoirs, Years of Renewal, in 1999, at the cusp of the new millennium and in the final years of the Clinton Administration. Why did he wait nearly two decades to publish this volume? White House Years came out in 1979 amidst the foreign policy disasters of President Jimmy Carter. The book’s tone, coupled with its colossal size, exudes an Ivy League public intellectual’s not-so-veiled justification for his service in the Nixon Administration and its foreign policy successes. It is a classic example of using the genre of the political memoir to explain why Kissinger was on the right side of history. In the late Seventies, with the Gas Crisis, the Hostage Crisis, and an earnest, honest, utterly inept Georgia peanut farmer in the Oval Office, it seemed Kissinger made a compelling case.
The second volume, Years of Upheaval, arrived in 1981, ready for the bookshelves of Reagan Revolution apparatchiks. With the Gipper residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue playing the greatest role of his career (not counting the movie he did with the chimp), America was ready for a change, including deregulating the banking industry and a little missiles-for-hostages do-se-do. The Nixon Crew was never well liked among the Movement Republicans, with Watergate as the Five O’clock Shadow of Executive Privilege Run Amok. Richard Nixon, the Grand Poobah of Red-baiters, poor Quaker son from Whittier, California, entered the White House on a strong platform of Law and Order, ended up dragging nearly his entire administration to the slammer in a political apocalypse of criminality, corruption, and paranoia. Kissinger gives an insider view of the slow-motion train wreck of Watergate and how the Nixon White House under siege undermined its foreign policy goals. The best bits are the conversations with the various dictators, despots, and deranged authoritarians, all comforting Henry K. by saying, “In our country, Watergate would never happen.” They should know, since they have the disappearances, mass graves, and Black Marias to prove it. But hey, at least those murderous psychopaths with absolute power weren’t Communists.
The first and second volumes each topped out with at one thousand pages (White House Years is a ludicrous 1400 pages long). Years of Renewal, by contrast, has only 1079 pages (not counting the Notes and Index). Besides the short length, Kissinger spends ninety pages summarizing Nixon’s foreign policy legacy, Nixon’s personal background, and justifying the crimes of Watergate. By all accounts, Years of Renewal comes off as rather slight.
“Our long national nightmare is over.”
Kissinger’s final volume recounts his years in the Ford Administration and the array of foreign policy challenges ranging from apartheid to ethnic wars and even a little piracy. The post-Nixon White House is a chronicle of a foredoomed presidency, the end of shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, the unraveling of détente, and the rise of the neoconservatives in the Republican Party. Kissinger regales the reader with his trademark style, an admixture of academic pedantry, sly wit, and diplomatic genius.
Shuttle Diplomacy, the End of Détente, and Arab Spring
Alliance, n. In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply in each other’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.
The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce
After the smoke from Watergate dissipated, Henry Kissinger found himself the only survivor of the previous administration. The constitutional crisis created something unique within the annals of foreign policy and executive power. Kissinger became a de facto “foreign policy president,” with his dual role as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State and institutional symbol of continuity and stability during the rocky transition period. Besides negotiating the end of the Vietnam War, the other major area Kissinger lent his considerable diplomatic skill was the Middle East, still a tinderbox after the Six Day War.
While Kissinger goes into minute detail of the difficult negotiations, the geopolitical aftermath of the Six Day War provided an opportunity for the Administration. With Nixon out of the picture and Congress temporarily assuaged with his resignation, the re-stabilized domestic sphere gave Kissinger a better chance at negotiation with the various belligerents. But it wasn’t all wine and roses for the globe-trotting Secretary of State, since Congress sought to cut the purse strings on any new-fangled military adventure the Executive Branch might use as a bargaining tool. The post-Watergate Congressional elections also brought in a massive influx of anti-Nixon Democrats, or in Kissinger’s words, “McGovernite peaceniks”. This made Kissinger’s job more than a little difficult, since he the stick of American military intervention would be unavailable.
The situation became even more complicated with the Rabat Decision, when the Arab nations agreed to defend Palestine’s right for self-determination. The irony was all the knots into which the United States tied itself during the Peace Process. Kissinger, acting on behalf of the White House, engaged in personal talks with the various Middle East leaders, working tirelessly to end the belligerency in an effort to get both sides together to sit down and talk to each other. In the process of this goal, Kissinger helped forge numerous new alliances with the Middle East powers. While the despotism remained, the various leaderships switched their alliances from the Soviet Union to the United States. Unfortunately, the pro-US stance did not alleviate the anti-Israeli sentiment. Their championing the Palestinian cause added new layers of irony and difficulty. Since the Middle East isn’t really a place for compromise and sensibility, both sides asserted the right to exist alongside a theological desire to annihilate the other side.
Amidst the negotiations, the foreign policy of détente began to crumble. The changing international situation merited a reassessment of foreign policy goals, further exacerbated by the rise of Republican neoconservatism. For decades, the Cold War’s diplomacy fit under two interrelated concepts: brinksmanship and containment. The first was a matter of strong defense and the nerve of a duelist, the United States going toe to toe with its adversary, the Soviet Union. The Berlin Airlift and the Cuban Missile Crisis are examples in popular folklore of brinksmanship. (In reality, the Cuban Missile Crisis involved long-term negotiations and trading missile bases for accepted security guarantees. The book, When President’s Lie, by Eric Alterman, describes the situation in much more detail.) Containment involved the United States using diplomatic, economic, and military measures to contain the expansionist aggression of the Soviet Union. It involved sending troops to such places like South Korea, West Germany, and South Vietnam.
By the mid-Seventies, the American people and Congress were getting sick of bankrolling “containment,” least of all when it didn’t work. Détente was the Nixon White House’s brilliant idea for ending the Vietnam War. It involved Kissinger negotiating with the Soviet Union and China, the former the economic and military patron of North Vietnam. The Middle East, long a bastion of Soviet support, was the other puzzle piece. Included in détente was the associated issue of nuclear annihilation. Anti-nuke protesters and the Nixon Administration both wanted the same thing, the means to that goal involved radically different methods. Nixon and Ford wanted a strong defense, but they also wanted to avoid wiping out humanity because of some regional conflict escalating because both superpowers have enough nuclear warheads to re-create the end credits of Dr. Strangelove and no horse sense to stop it from happening. The road to warming relations between the two superpowers involved numerous handshakes with dictators and other human rights abusing monsters.
L: Augusto Pinochet, human rights violating monster, dictator, psychopath; R: Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace Prize winner.
This necessary dictatorship-coddling is something neither the Right nor the Left understood. Kissinger tried to achieve something unheard of in American foreign policy history: the institution of a foreign policy based on the concept of the balance of power. Again, to quote Eric Alterman’s When President’s Lie:
The country’s history until then [meaning, the Second World War] involved a counterproductive swing between viewing foreign policy as akin to commercially profitable missionary work and the equally implausible desire simply to withdraw from world affairs whenever the natives failed the appreciate America’s plans to improve them.
The balance of power alludes to the disappointing fact that the United States, a global military, economic, and cultural superpower, has operational limitations. In Years of Renewal, Kissinger is forced to handle numerous diplomatic crises with an eviscerated intelligence community; a hostile Congress, public, and media; and the tragic foreknowledge that, because of Watergate’s omnipresent taint, Ford will not be re-elected.
The Rabat Decision and the rise of American neoconservatism become key factors in détente’s decline. The foreign policy apparatus becomes a target for Congressional attacks and the rhetoric of the Right involves the accusation that the Ford Administration is “soft on Communism.” The self-righteous bellows from the ideologically pure clashed with the necessities of running the Department of State and the Foreign Service Corps.
The events in the Middle East mirrored the events in recent years, the culmination of which was the Arab Spring that began in December 2010. Kissinger attempted to bring order and stability to the Middle East in the aftermath of the Six Day War. Today, the United States government is trying to make heads or tails of the still ongoing revolutions, protests, and social unrest covering the Middle East. In both cases, the government was reactive to the crisis. The Arab Spring was a populist uprising against the despots coddled by détente-era Washington, useful pawns ruling petro-tyrannies organized as a geopolitical bulwark against Soviet expansionism. How the United States will answer the developments of the Arab Spring is hard to discern. It’s simply too early to tell. Most of the region remains a question mark, as the future is unwritten, unless one subscribes to the apocalyptic fictions of Tim LaHaye and Jerry P. Jenkins, hackmasters behind the anti-Semitic bestselling Left Behind series. (Just read the plot summary of Glorious Appearing and tell me the series isn’t the Protocols of the Elder of Zion rewritten as a Dispensationalist fantasy.)
Mr. Kissinger Goes to Africa
At least the South Africans aren’t Commies!
[C]oming to Rhodesia from South Africa is like moving from Wagnerian tragedy to paperback thriller.
“War, Peace, and Allegory in Rhodesia” (1977), Jan Morris
Under Ford, Kissinger finally travels to sub-Saharan Africa. In his continental tour, the most notable visits were to the countries surrounding Angola and the apartheid states of Rhodesia and South Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa represented another facet of the United States commitment to combat the spread of global Communism.
With Angola, a former Portuguese colony, a domestic civil war took on global political dimensions. The situation proved to become chaotic with three different patrons (the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba) and numerous neighboring nations harboring anti-government guerrilla groups. The situation was confusing at best, since it is easy to get lost amidst tricky alliances, countless players, and many acronyms. Kissinger asserts the need for intervention, especially in light of the Soviet Union’s lack of influence in the Middle East. The predominantly non-aligned African nations would become potential puppet states to an emboldened Soviet expansionist policy. Cuba’s participation adds another fold to the already delicate situation, since a Cuban Communist victory would be yet another trophy for Castro to wave in the face of the US intelligence community.
South Africa and Rhodesia represent the redheaded stepchildren for American foreign policy. Kissinger finds South Africa’s apartheid morally distasteful, politically counterproductive, and a public relations embarrassment. The mineral rich country of South Africa was the African equivalent of Saudi Arabia: a nation located in a pivotal location for trade run by a hyper-wealthy claque of theocratic bastards. (The Sa’ud Family running Saudi Arabia like their own personal possession and South Africa run in a quasi-dictatorship by the Afrikaner-dominated National Party. South Africa had a democracy with an executive, judiciary, and legislative branches, but all power resided in the hands of the white minority, itself split between the descendents of the Dutch and English colonials. When it became demographically possible, the Dutch regained political control from the English, declared independence from the Commonwealth, and instituted the barbarities of apartheid, the system Jan Morris aptly characterizes as “part mysticism, part economics, part confidence trick.”) In both South Africa and Saudi Arabia, mineral wealth, pivotal location for world trade, and staunchly anti-Communist political ideologies made them useful allies, although both nations have embarrassing human rights records. Then again, Kissinger sees the left’s focus on human rights as a “fetish.”
Rhodesia is South Africa’s counterpart, albeit the farce to the latter’s tragedy. Unilaterally withdrawing from the British Commonwealth in 1962, the Prime Minister Ian Smith instituted an apartheid system, only with a much tinier white population. White rule in Rhodesia seems as foredoomed as Ford’s chances at re-election.
The challenge for Kissinger was to aid South Africa and Rhodesia along into multiracial democratic states without falling to Communism. While organizations like the African National Congress were undoubtedly leftist, if not openly communist, the premise that Communism will spread to South Africa is pretty weak. The Soviet Union had military strength, but seeing South Africa as potential Soviet satellite state borders on the absurd. History has shown that the Soviet Union concerned itself with its European satellite states and its Central Asian republics. The limited Soviet range existed because the Soviet Union possessed a vast geography, small population, and limited economic means. The talk of South Africa or a Central American republic becoming a bastion of Communist aggression sounds like the ravings of a lunatic in a tinfoil hat. Robert Littell put it best with his magisterial spy epic, The Company, when he compared the Soviet Union in the Eighties to “Upper Volta with missiles.”
In the end, Kissinger’s ideals are in the right place, but he is hamstrung by his own amoral balance of power foreign policy.
Evo-Devo of the Right: Conservatives, Neoconservatives, and Tea Party Conservatives
Cut off from the mother country, they remained unaffected by the rationalistic heritage of the Enlightenment or by the democratic dispensation of the French Revolution.
Henry Kissinger on South Africa
On the domestic front, we see Kissinger’s foreign policy assailed on two separate fronts. The McGovernite peaceniks of the New Left and the self-righteous ideologues of the New Right. The mid-Seventies see the birth of the neoconservative movement, a political movement that inherited the passionate rhetoric of the Sixties protests and channeled them into a scathing critique of détente. Without the benefit of public service, the young upstarts accused the Ford Administration of being “soft on Communism.” They were technically correct, but tone deaf to the concept of the balance of power. In Years of Renewal, we meet some rising stars of neoconservatism, many whose names should sound familiar, including Richard Perle and Dick Cheney, then Ford’s Secretary of Defense. To these political fanatics, détente was tantamount to treason, since negotiating with Communist powers was morally anathema. In this way, they are similar to the New Left, although the New Left concerned itself with human rights and anti-nuclear crusades. In both cases, a self-righteous morality could not comprehend the complex realities involved in operating the State Department. The world would be a much better place if all nations were representative participatory democracies with free markets and a robust investment environment. The problem is it’s just not possible. The United States, especially after the disaster of the Vietnam War, wasn’t in the mood to bankroll any more military adventures to topple despots. The problem was this has led to a revival of American isolationism in both wings of the American political system.
The abrupt swings from the zealous missionary desire to convert the world into democracy loving capitalists and the equally strong desire to hole up in our geographically protected shell when those measures fail simply fail to work anymore. Terrorism is a global problem. The free market, despite the halleluiahs from lovers of Ron Paul and Ayn Rand, is riddled with inherent weaknesses that require prudent government regulation. Communism fell in the 1990s and the Great Recession has proven that capitalism is the last man, just not standing, at least not with any superior confidence.
While neoconservatives undermined the Ford Administration, dooming his chances for a second term, the latest variation of conservative ideology, Tea Party conservatism, comes off as a misnomer. The movement began as a grassroots reaction against Big Government and the specter of Socialism, it has mutated into a racist, nativist, anti-intellectual, anti-government party that espouses a ridiculous theocratic anarcho-capitalism. This socioeconomic ideology has one minor flaw: it makes no damn sense! But that’s a rant for another time, suffice to say economic de-regulation cannot coexist with cultural hyper-regulation, at least not for long. Within the United States we have a multicultural participatory democracy whose citizenry is composed of more than the straight white heterosexual conservative evangelicals who think they speak for the whole nation but whose knowledge of the Constitution and the Bible remain, shall we say, a tad on the slender side. Hate to break it those of the self-anointed Elect, but the United States is a nation of laws based on the Constitution, not those of Moses or the Holy See. Ironically, those politicians bolstered by the support of the Tea Party embody this Biblical quote rather accurately: “All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.” (Luke 4: 6-7) Now who said that? Jesus Christ or Satan?
Final Thoughts
Are we having fun yet?
Zippy the Pinhead
Reading 5000 pages of Kissinger’s memoirs has been a multiyear project of endurance, frustration, and illumination. While I personally disagree with Kissinger’s political ideology, I can’t help but respect the intelligence, passion, and skill he brought to the positions of National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, and his “balance of power” foreign policy makes a lot of sense, at least in the abstract. But this admiration goes hand in hand with a vengeful hatred and commitment that Kissinger should stand trial for war crimes, specifically those involving Cambodia, Laos, and Chile. (Although making a stink about this is useless unless he has specific charges filed against him, preferably by the World Court or the United Nations.)
While the hatred and admiration commingle into a curdled froth, one has to perform the duty of book reviewer with a careful unbiased eye. Draining an assessment of Republican foreign policy without any personal or political bias would be an exercise in futility (and boredom). The other realization is that Kissinger’s role, while influential and powerful, did not make him the Global Puppetmaster of every atrocity from 1968 to 1976. One has to be careful of anti-Kissinger critiques devolving into thinly veiled anti-Semitic blather. Remember how our government actually works: Kissinger, as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, acted in the name of the President and in the interests of the United States. One sees in the lunatic scribbling of the extremists Left and Right, turning Kissinger into a latter-day caricature of the All-powerful Conspiring Jew. This is not only inaccurate, but it misses the point. The United States proceeds towards multicultural enlightenment at a glacial pace, battered by the pendulum swings of ethnocentrism and moral relativism. Because Kissinger was from a Jewish family living in Germany, fled to the United States, worked in Army Intelligence, and later enjoyed a successful academic career, all these facets provide targets for anti-intellectual attacks. His intellect, Ivy League status, and foreignness deflect the justified and necessary questioning of his actions on behalf of the US government. Luckily, everyone from the National Security Archive to the late Christopher Hitchens have worked tirelessly to pry documents from the NSA, CIA, and other agencies to shine a light on Kissinger’s misdeeds.
Even after trudging through 5000 pages of whitewash, I realize that the balance of power foreign power philosophy makes sense. The United States has limited capabilities, especially in terms of nation-building. Our culture is too infatuated with military technology and power to understand that we have to fix the apple cart after he kicked it over and given the vendor a televised show trial. The United States needs to understand the limits of its capabilities in geopolitical terms. Once these limits are understood and accepted, then one can go about pressing palms and organizing alliances. The forward thinking helped Kissinger open China. This foreign policy coup would be similar to President Obama “opening” Iran. Since the Arab Spring is still a work in progress, one needs to facilitate other options, because the tide may strike the shores of Saudi Arabia with Arab youth unhappy with being thought of as Sa’ud Family property.
The world’s future is unwritten, but Kissinger’s memoirs provide a fascinating document of the inner workings of American foreign policy and the global political personalities that shaped the paranoid Seventies.
And now for some singing …
Posted in 5000 Pages of Kissinger, book reviews, books, Critical Appraisals, TV
Tagged antisemitism, arab spring, asia, book reviews, books, capitalism, communism, culture, detente, diplomacy, economics, foreign policy, gerald ford, kissinger, neoconservatism, non-fiction, politics, pop culture, South Africa, state dept, tea party, TV
One can encounter the Chinese language in a variety of unlikely places. Captain Malcolm Reynolds upbraiding a crewmember in Joss Whedon’s space western TV series Firefly; Chinese characters strewn about Ezra Pound’s controversial epic masterpiece, The Cantos; and in numerous products one sees in finer Asian markets nationwide. For many Western readers, this reviewer included, Chinese represents a completely alien language. The challenge comes from a reader trying to find a point of reference with a foreign language, at least from a technical linguistic standpoint. For speakers of European languages, this becomes increasingly difficult. A Cultural History of the Chinese Language by Sharron Gu attempts to provide a means for non-specialists to approach Chinese, not from the technical and scientific discipline of linguistics, but from the discipline of literary history.
Gu couples this literary history with the premise that, because Chinese is so much older than other living languages, it is more refined and advanced. Gu asserts that,
Chinese evolved into a language as abstract as and analytic as German, as fluid as Arabic, and as suggestive and flexible as English and Spanish. Most important of all, Chinese has become a language of all these capacities at the same time.
Unfortunately, Gu’s book does not deliver on the premise.
A Cultural History tackles a diverse array of disciplines, including archaeology, anthropology, sociology, political science, and a history of philosophy, science, painting, drama, poetry, and literature. A comprehensive history of Chinese musical instruments is followed by an equally detailed history of poetry. Her explanation of the linguistic differences between different words is fascinating. The problem is not with individual sections so much as the overarching organization. The accumulation of details and minutiae overwhelms the reader. While touting itself as a book for non-specialists, it reads suspiciously like a dissertation-turned-into-publication. The book also sets itself up for confusion by its assertion in a single Chinese language, creating a linear progressive history of language evolution. While not a book on linguistics, the relative scant attention paid to major Chinese dialects (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) and languages related to Chinese (Mongolian, Vietnamese, etc.) is jarring and confusing.
The confusion reinforces Gu’s assertion, exposing its political agenda. Despite this being “a cultural history,” she writes about “the Chinese language.” The shaky cultural arguments reflect Gu’s nationalist bias. Gu really needed to explain the political history of China, since there are references made to dynasties and the Warring States. One needs to understand from the outset that the China we recognize today does not have the same geographic borders as these older historical entities. The editors should have insisted on a readily accessible apparatus for the non-specialist reader, including lists for: Chinese dynasties, literary terms, philosophical concepts, and words associated with painting, music, and drama.
A Cultural History of the Chinese Language is less a cultural history than a hyper-detailed edifice vainly supporting a thinly-veiled nationalistic mythology.
Here’s some of the Chinese from Firefly. Shiny!
Posted in book reviews, books, food, TV
Tagged asia, book reviews, books, China, culture, ezra pound, linguistics, nationalism, non-fiction, philosophy, poetry, politics, religion, science fiction, series, the cantos, TV, whedonverse
The first part in a series dedicated to examining the science fiction and fantasy films from 1979 to 1989. The series will investigate whether these films possess certain ineffable qualities missing from today’s films of the same genres.
Kurtz: I expected someone like you. What did you expect? Are you an assassin?
Willard: I’m a soldier.
Kurtz: You’re neither. You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.
Why are we beginning a series devoted to the science fiction and fantasy films of the 1980s with Apocalypse Now? Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Vietnam War film holds the key to unlocking what made Eighties science fiction and fantasy films so great. It’s an unlikely beginning, especially since John Carpenter’s classic horror film Halloween, was released the previous year.
Apocalypse Now, while still a War Movie, has several characteristics that make it closer akin to the Fantasy genre. There is a Knight on a Quest in search of a Mythical Object guarded by a Monster. In the film, the Knight is Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), accompanied by the crew of a small patrol boat. They travel up the Nung River in search of Colonel Walter P. Kurtz, at once the Object and the Monster. In addition, Apocalypse Now is a visionary film. To be a visionary, one has to look at the same thing but in an entirely different way. While the War Movie has a long and storied history, Coppola created a unique cinematic experience, cobbled together from a script by the conservative scriptwriter John Milius and narration written by war journalist Michael Herr. What resulted was a depiction of the Vietnam War as a hallucinatory carnivalesque nightmare. The effects of the Vietnam War on the domestic side would not be covered with this extended unflinching hallucinatory nightmare until Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998).
At the time of its release, the closest antecedent to Apocalypse Now was Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967), itself an extended indictment of the ravages and excesses of industrial capitalism. In terms of science fiction and fantasy film, Apocalypse Now’s title is telling. Unlike, say, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome or The Dark Crystal, which are both post-apocalyptic films, the apocalypse is now. The soldiers in the film seem morally adrift and numbed to the world, only attuned to finding sex or the next drug fix. Chef reads a newspaper article about the Charles Manson murders, the murders mirroring the actual atrocities of My Lai. Surrounded by madmen, murderers, and mayhem, the world seems at an end. The apocalyptic setting and the horrific montages make the film much more than a faithful transcription of a Southeast Asian conflict.
The End is the Beginning is the End
Apocalypse Now came at the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s unrivalled critical and commercial success. The film also represents the terminus of the American New Wave, Coppola belonging to a membership that included Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas. Coppola’s success began in 1972 with The Godfather and continued with The Godfather: Part II (1974) and the Conversation (1974). Marlon Brando gives a landmark performance as Colonel Walter P. Kurtz, his presence a potent admixture of military and intellectual genius, Nietzschean amorality, smoldering sexuality, and tribal godhood.
The release of the film came during a revolution in the world of cinema. Gone were the days of the freewheeling director and hands-off producers. Apocalypse Now came two years after Star Wars (1977, George Lucas), a film that redefined the Hollywood blockbuster, and the Empire Strikes Back (1980, Irvin Kershner). While not a cinematic flop, the film’s cost overruns and numerous other issues would make produces much more reluctant to give a visionary like Coppola massive budgets and little creative oversight. The Eighties would see the rise of empty spectacle, family-friendly pap, and marketing juggernauts. Apocalypse Now is a self-contained epic, not a node in a massively orchestrated marketing and merchandising operation.
Apocalypse Now vs. Apocalypse Now Redux: a Defense for Both
In criticism, especially film criticism, an overarching trend exists where “the director’s cut” has more credence than a film released by the studio system. The phenomenon exists because of the Auteur Theory championed in academic circles and the larger trend of the search for Authenticity™. When discussing Apocalypse Now, fans, critics, and audience members become divisive regarding which version is better. Many see the original Apocalypse Now as the better film and Redux as a travesty. (Thankfully, Coppola’s film was about the Vietnam War and not a Jedi insurgency, thus giving the world a Director’s Cut without CGI dewbacks and Greedo shooting first.)
My opinion splits the difference. I enjoy both, but both versions are radically different films. Even at nearly three hours, the original Apocalypse Now possesses an insistent pacing and momentum. It is the more economical, pared-down film.
I enjoy Redux because it delves deeper into this nightmarish world. Characters are expanded, entire set pieces are added, and Captain Willard comes across as a different person.
The issue of pacing becomes more pronounced with Redux. Even the original is lacking in traditional battle scenes. After Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore’s (Robert Duvall) aerial assault on the Vietnamese village, the only military “action” are isolated skirmishes and the Do Long Bridge stalemate (less a battle than a siege).
The majority of the film is Captain Willard reading the Kurtz’s dossier. The normal narrative trajectory of a war film is the reverse: skirmishes leading up to a climactic battle. The film operates under a series of anti-climaxes. In the end, Willard finally reaches the Kurtz Compound to realize the Colonel is not there. When he does return, there are several conversations and finally Willard taking down Kurtz at the very end of the film.
Redux includes two extended scenes which were cut from the original: the crew meeting the Bunnies and the French Plantation Scene. In the latter, Willard tells Roxanne Sarrault (Aurore Clément) that he doesn’t intend to return to the United States following his mission. It’s a major difference and the film narrative becomes altered, since this throws into question why he should continue his mission?
The longueurs and anti-climaxes heighten the viewer’s sensitivities. The waiting, the meditation, and the visuals combine to create a cinematic experience both hypnotic and excessive. The artificiality of Carmine Coppola’s score plays off against the claustrophobic and ruthless nature of the Cambodian rainforests. The score becomes integrated into a whole by the editing, cinematography, and sound design.
The film is a non-traditional candidate for a science fiction or fantasy film, but it excels in its fantastic visuals and the meticulous worldbuilding. Standing at the crossroads of the American New Wave and Eighties Action Spectacle, Apocalypse Now prepares the way for films set after apocalypses (Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the Dark Crystal), those indicting the inhumanity of bureaucracy (Brazil), and the organized madness of modern existence (They Live, Buckaroo Banzai, Bladerunner).
Posted in 80s SFF, film, nature
Tagged 80s, apocalypse, asia, capitalism, catholic, chaos, communism, fantasy, film, hollywood, maximalism, movie reviews, politics, pop culture, religion, science fiction, series, Vietnam, war
Hav by the Welsh travel writer Jan Morris is a very Borgesian work, bringing to mind the Argentinean writer’s love for mirrors and labyrinths. There is even a character named Dr. Borge and Hav’s major cultural motif is the labyrinth. Morris achieves distinction in creating a place that goes beyond being a second-rate pastiche of Borges themes. Unfortunately, the field of science fiction is riddled with examples of good ideas soured when executed. Poor execution usually involves sloppy writing where the author received payment by the word.
New York Review Books has released a stellar volume with Jan Morris’s Hav. The book compiles her two works of science fiction, Last Letters from Hav (1985) and Hav of the Myrmidons (2006). The volume also includes an introduction by science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin and an epilogue by the author. In the introduction Le Guin notes how readers began booking trips to Hav, not knowing it was fiction. After reading Morris’s Destinations: Essays from Rolling Stone, one can understand the reader’s oversight of Hav’s non-existence. Her travel essays for Rolling Stone, written in the 1970s, envelop the reader with a keenly constructed sense of place, quirky characters, and a narrative drive, though not necessarily plot-based. This non-fiction writing is reflected in her fiction, creating a plausible locale. Hav, a tiny Mediterranean peninsula off of Anatolia, possesses a culture frozen in amber, isolated from the world at large, but also an amalgamation of Eastern and Western cultures reflective of the wars, conquests, and commerce that passed through the area.
Last Letters sees Hav as a sleepy community with an outdated bureaucracy, an ambiguous British colonial political presence, and a multicultural kaleidoscope. On the Escarpment reside the primitive Kretevs. Arabs, Greeks, and Chinese reside in their own ethnic enclaves. Hav has the westernmost settlement of Chinese, owing to the proximity of the Silk Road. The Venetian and Russian empires made their marks in art and architecture. A muezzin cries along with Missakian’s trumpet call, a remnant of the Crusader’s retreat. The back cover summary describes Hav as having “chaotic and contradictory splendor.”
One should note that this is not alternate history. Hav’s fate follows the ebb and tide of history, albeit from the perspective of a geographic asterisk. A humorous passage in Last Letters involves the local intellectual circle hating Ferdinand Braudel because he never mentioned Hav in his monumental survey The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Le Guin states in the introduction,
Probably Morris, certainly her publisher, will not thank me for saying Hav is in fact science fiction, of a perfectly recognizable type and superb quality. The “sciences” or areas of expertise involved are social – ethnology, sociology, political science, and above all, history.
Morris’s writing is what makes Hav such a treasure to read. Described as a “romantic traditionalist Welsh author,” she approaches travel at a different speed and pitch than Anthony Bourdain. Morris’s character of Jan Morris is indistinguishable from her presence in her non-fiction travel essays. She seems like a nice middle-aged lady who, despite all evidence to the contrary, sees the best in people and has the bad habit of asking awkward questions to stage-managed power brokers. Not conservative in the vulgar faux populist mutation common to the United States, but one whose conservatism cherishes the artifacts and lessons of the past and seeks to preserve them for future generations.
Morris’s “traditionalist” leaning comes to the fore in the sequel, Hav of the Myrmidons. Morris returns to Hav twenty years later to find a series of unsettling changes. Following the Intervention, Hav is now a theocracy run by the Cathars, a Christian heresy long thought extinct. The Holy Myrmidonic Republic of Hav exists both as a Catharist theocracy and as an emerging capitalist power. A new airport, highway, and resort hotel – the Lanzaretto! tower – have been carved out of the rubble. One thinks of Dubai and China’s emergent industrial hubs, whereas Old Hav bespoke of Danzig or Trieste, political “free cities” with their own syncretic cultures.
A chilling episode occurs when Jan is invited to a meeting at the ominously named Office of Ideology. She meets Hav’s political deputies. “They reminded me of the ideologues of apartheid who, long before, had greeted me with similar earnest solemnity at Stellenbosch in South Africa.” Nothing is more stultifying and possibly unintentionally comical than the long-winded prattling of a totalitarian state’s cog, all ideological purity and true believer crazy eyes. In Destinations (1980), she summarized the ideology of apartheid as “the intricate political device – part mysticism, part economics, part confidence trick – by which the white race maintains its supremacy over the blacks.” With its omnipresent icon of Achilles’s helmet, Hav expresses that same combination. The Greek community on San Spiridon, an outlying island, has become reborn, albeit with a troubling fanaticism.
This new iteration of Hav reflects the Post-911 world in its admixture of aggressive free market capitalism and political authoritarianism. One need only look at China (and the countless Chinese products we all buy without a second thought) or the political autarkies of Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin. The United States has catered to the whims of dictators, so long as the bananas were cheap and the despot made the appropriate anti-communist slogans. Morris reverses Marx’s quote by showing the old Hav as a farce and New Hav as tragedy. Hav is on the make, aspiring to rekindle its Venetian or Arabic drive to link itself again to a global marketplace. Morris wonders at the human and cultural costs of those aspirations. Is the material gain accrued from integrating with globalization really worth it, especially if all one caters to are incurious tourists blathering on about a place’s safety and comfort? Travel without risk, at least the risk of random discovery, is a pointless endeavor. Reading Hav is not.
Posted in book reviews, books
Tagged asia, book reviews, books, borges, capitalism, chaos, communism, culture, economics, europe, fiction, hav, history, mediterranean, non-fiction, nyrb, politics, pop culture, religion, science fiction, turkey
Why is Alfred Buber an important character for modern readers?
Alfred Buber’s story is a riff off several things: isolation, male loneliness, a feeling some of us may have that for others life is richer, more sensual, more rewarding than it ever will be for us. Buber is frozen by that feeling, by the sense that he is a spectator at his own life, shut out of any chance at love, at being wanted, at feeling full and satisfied.
He mistakes these feelings, I think, for desire, and I believe many men do this: conflate loneliness with desire, as if connection with a woman, finding a woman, sexually bonding with a woman, will somehow end the emptiness. As Buber puts it, in men loneliness acquires a sexual tinge.
It’s Buber’s own story, of course, how his quest unfolds, but maybe in the crooked telling of it, the double lives and inadvertent lies, Buber reveals something universal: men’s desire for women is unyielding, relentless, and as often as not a proxy for much more complex needs.
As a lawyer practicing in Burma, what are some of the cases you’ve handled?
I first went to Burma to link up with a friend who had opened a Rangoon office for his law firm just after Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest the first time. We had in mind to build a robust international practice and be prepared for what we thought would be an onslaught of foreign firms anxious to do business in an evolving, resource rich, and developing economy.
It was not to be. The government never did, really liberalize anything, despite grand sounding visions, nor take its boot off the neck of business, let alone its own people. As time passed companies left rather than came, or were forced to leave, western entrepreneurs vanished and were replaced by Chinese, Japanese and others, and it became clear that the obstacles to our building a viable practice were insurmountable.
What we did do, as American lawyers, was develop relationships with Burmese lawyers whom we trusted, and retain some very talented younger Burmese lawyers on staff, so that we would have been in a position to provide advice to international clients on the business environment, laws, and pathways to success. The firm to some extent continued to do this for a number of years, but I didn’t persevere, though I have warm feelings towards many people in Rangoon, and look back on the time I spent there with great fondness and nostalgia. (Well, I look back on just about everything with nostalgia. It’s the present I have problems with.)
In the movie Reversal of Fortune, Alan Dershowitz advises Claus von Bülow against telling his side of the story, since telling the truth would put the lawyer in an awkward position. Does Alfred Buber’s truth telling place him at greater risk?
By the time he tells his story Buber no longer cares about risk, how he is regarded, or anything else, including his own life. He makes a commitment to tell his story accurately, and to do his penance by laying out his flaws and weaknesses for all to see. But in doing so he exposes more than he thinks he does because his story doesn’t add up, eventually reveals his illusions too, and how the track on which his thoughts run is not completely coincident with reality.
Of course being too honest puts one at risk whenever there are disputed versions of a single set of facts. Lawyers know this – memory is very shaky – but good lawyers are quite adept at sizing up how a client’s story – however honest or well intentioned – may be received.
And I would never disagree with Professor Dershowitz on anything law related anyway.
Many reviewers have likened the book to the writing of Vladimir Nabokov. How do you deal with living in Nabokov’s shadow?
I love Lolita, and since there is some similarity in subject matter I’m not terribly surprised at the comparison, but I’m not a beneficiary of it. When a reviewer chooses to make the comparison between me and Nabokov, the enquiry then devolves to a single question: Am I as good as Nabokov, or am I not? How could I possible come out ahead in such a contest?
I would say, in all bluntness, that my thinking, my story, my tone even, is meant to evoke J. Alfred Prufrock rather than Humbert Humbert. Those wonderful lines in Prufrock where he obsesses about the women he encounters in sedate London parlors, about how the fine hair on their arms catches his eye, about how they may see him, about how shallow their interests seem to be and how isolated and distressed he is, these are Buber’s themes. Buber’s default into what he thinks is desire – Nabokov’s territory – is just that: a default. His mind set, his dilemma, are not Humbert’s.
Buber is, like Prufrock, a perfect English gentleman. He certainly isn’t a pederast: he thinks of berating, in fact, the owner of a Bangkok bar for allowing a too-young girl to work there.
Have you ever been to Thailand? If so, what were you impressions?
I went as a tourist many years ago, and then more recently when I had the opportunity to work in Burma I visited several times. I have also spent time in the north of the country, near the Burma border, visiting refugee camps and friends who work there, and I’m active with a group that supports Burmese refugees who live just inside the Thai border.
I came to know Bangkok quite well, and I have a great affection for many things there. There is something about the city that has overpowering charm: the Thais are as physically graceful as people get, in my view, have ways of behaving and thinking that are difficult for a casual visitor to access and are therefore endlessly interesting, and Bangkok is spotted with magnificent temples and statuary and stores filled with dusty treasures there for the finding. There is also a steamy, sensual undercurrent to it, a bluntness, a candor, that I admire.
Sex, women, desire, lust, the profane thread that suffuses everything but that is usually either denied or treated with adolescent titillation, is brazenly confronted in Bangkok. Personally, I find the image of a Bangkok bargirl trolling for fellatio customers less vulgar than Paris Hilton’s smile.
In a previous interview, you stated that the book came from a non-judgmental perspective. How does this contrast with the place of judgment in law?
In law, the matter is always binary: one side wins, the other loses. Mature lawyers are often able to anticipate what the odds are of one or the other, and to find some appropriate middle ground on which to resolve differences. I’ve become quite good at that, in all immodesty, in sizing up disputes and trying to anticipate where the midpoint is, how it should end.
In my travels, in my books, I’m talking about something quite different. I’m by no means a moral relativist – I believe in right and wrong, that there are some absolutes – but I have no patience for blue-stockings and self-righteous moralists. I don’t pass judgment on Alfred Buber, on men who behave as he does, or on Nok and women who make the choices she does, just as I have a very removed perspective on peoples’ private decisions: I care as much what color you paint your living room as I care about whom you have sex with (as long as you own the room, and the other person or people consent), and I don’t pass judgment on the kind of sex tourists who drift about in Buber, nor their licentious behavior. There are bigger problems in the world than carnal trading.
If anything I’m most acidic in the novel about the moralists who torment Buber in his own law firm, rather than about anything Buber himself may think or do.
What are your thoughts on how Americans view sexuality?
The question’s hard because it presupposes there is any one view. I’d start by saying, I suppose, that Buber is not really about sex at all but about male loneliness, personal alienation, a misguided journey by one man who seeks to find solace in sex when his desires have very little to do with sex itself. In the novel Buber makes clear that even as he sets out with fantasies of sensual escapades, no sooner does one actually present itself than he retreats into his old prissy persona, and promptly falls in love – not lust by any measure – with a young women who personifies for him the exact opposite of the raucous sexuality that surrounds him.
I think many people, perhaps the dominant culture too, trivialize sex, treat sexuality as a voyeuristic commercial oddity, reduce the sex act to a past-time, a punch line, a battle-station in some strange, unpleasant, jostling for dominance and relevance. As we retreat to our homes, our computer tables, our post-industrial, post-feminist, post information-age irrelevance, romantic love becomes tangled with isolation and computer-assisted fantasy, and a generation soaked in soulless high school hookups leads the way for sex to become as mundane as sweating.
I think we live in strange times.
Who are some of your favorite authors?
For many years I was an ardent fan of Lawrence Durrell (The Black Book; Tunc and Nunquam; The Alexander Quartet, and others) and of his friend Henry Miller. I still am. I reread and reread those books. I’m a huge Wodehouse fan, an admirer of Evelyn Waugh, Somerset Maugham, D.H. Lawrence, Nobokov …. An eclectic mix, in short. I also read an awful lot of non-fiction.
What other projects are you working on at the moment?
I have young children and a busy law practice, and those features tend to slow down my writing. It’s not a matter of time, so much, as it is mindset. I find that my best work happens when I retire from daily preoccupations and settle into my story without distraction.
I am though working on a novel I’ve tentatively called The Color of Skin. Like my first novel, Empire Settings, it’s set in South Africa, and like Empire it concerns this issue of interracial love. But the story is much more visceral: about the modern consequences of the relatively simple, unacknowledged fact that the early Victorian explorers in south eastern Africa couldn’t keep their hands off the Zulu women.
How it came about, how it may have felt, how a descendant may deal with the mixed messages that have resulted from these relations over the years, makes for wonderful reading. I think it will make for a really compelling novel.
One doesn’t have to walk far into a bookstore to get assaulted with self-help books and memoirs. Much like people with blogs, everyone thinks they have something valuable to say. In addition to memoirs by randomly generated Kardashians the upcoming election season brings with it the fatuous “campaign biography” ghostwritten by the candidate’s staffers not currently concocting an attack ad or planting a piece of journalism with a compliant member of the Fourth Estate. It is with relief that Kimberly A. Taylor’s hybrid memoir/self-help book is available. Play Fair! The Art of Relationship and Friendship presents the reader with a fusion of personal reminisces and informative sections on how to deal with others.
Play Fair! begins with Kimberly at age four chiding a fellow classmate for taking away a toy. Throughout this small book (only 84 pages), we see Kimberly’s assertiveness and confidence. Her extroverted personality eventually led her to a Fulbright scholarship in the former Yugoslavia, only a couple years after the Cold War ended. The strange culture and awkward political transition create ample opportunity for Kimberly to explain issues about interpersonal relationships. She encounters strange laws, especially those concerning removal of large amounts of currency from former Eastern Bloc nations to Austria and Germany. She also uses her privileged position as a visiting student to help others, including defusing potentially dangerous situations with oppressive officials and bureaucrats. (This tiny book is a wonderful complement to William T. Vollmann’s coverage of the former Yugoslavia in his massive Rising Up and Rising Down.)
Zagreb, Croatia
Aiding in her development is Kimberly’s acquisition of languages. Boasting fluency in at least five languages, this allows her to streamline through dangerous or exploitative situations. Several times, native residents comment on how she sounds like she was born there. The languages she mastered include challenging tongues like Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, and Russian. She also knows relatively easier languages like German and French. (Easy by terms of comparison, since learning a language is tough. This reviewer learned German and Latin, but found learning Arabic truly difficult and alien.)
Dr. Miller and her ad agency clients.
While language acquisition and intercultural encounters mean certain things within the academic realm, Kimberly eventually became a professor of psychology and applied it to international business. Season 4 of Mad Men was illustrative of this very thing. In one episode, Don Draper and his hard-drinking colleagues compete against a rival ad agency to win the Honda account. This involved an understanding of the Japanese culture and their business ethic, not to mention reining in Roger Sterling’s racist belligerence. (Sterling was a veteran of World War II and saw the Japanese, not as business partners, but as The Enemy.) The season also saw the introduction of a female business psychologist, Dr. Faye Miller. She worked with several firms in dissecting the preferences of potential customers. She also dealt with male prejudice and many seeing her job as fake or a kind of trickery. In the Sixties, many still saw the reliance of psychology as a manifestation of personal weakness.
The second half of the book elaborates on the notion of interpersonal interaction, specifically relationships with the client. How should one treat an analytical personality? Or an extroverted personality? The explanations are terse and informative. Since this is for the business class, the book is free of New Age-y half-baked psychobabble. Granted, one needs self-confidence and assertiveness in the cutthroat world of modern business, but Kimberly explains how one can thrive and survive in this environment.
Play Fair! also shows that a self-published work can be done effectively. At under 100 pages and a simple black and white cover avoids the usual opportunities for self-indulgent silliness. The Internet is full of websites mocking badly done self-published works. Play Fair! is professionally done with an eye towards brevity and high quality. If the major publishers churning out Kardashian Extruded Product would do the same, perhaps they might not be in a financial scramble.
Kontains krap.
Posted in book reviews, books, The Internet, TV
Tagged asia, book reviews, books, capitalism, culture, economics, fiction, Japan, Kardashian, Mad Men, non-fiction, pop culture, psychology, sales, self-published, the internet, TV
KUMAR(to Goldstein)Well, if you have the yellow fever tonight, there’s a rocking Asian party over at Princeton tonight.
GOLDSTEIN Man, I have the yellow plague. There’s nothing sexier than a hot Asian chick…or dude for that matter…
Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle (Danny Leiner, 2004), script by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg
A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867) by Karl Marx
A Woman of Property
David Schmahmann is another lawyer-author who joins the ranks of the Permanent Press. His second novel, The Double Life of Alfred Buber, can be seen as a Judeo-Anglo-Rhodesian-Thai riff on Vladimir Nabokov’s iconic novel Lolita (1955). Schmahmann, like Buber, is a product of international personality. The author is a native South African who practices law in Brookline, Massachusetts. Alfred Buber is the son of Jewish Communists living in Rhodesia, pariah people living in a pariah state as it were. (Rhodesia withdrew from the British Commonwealth in 1965 to establish a white-ruled sovereign state. Unrecognized and justifiably shunned by the world community, it lasted until 1979, when it became Zimbabwe in 1980.)
Alfred Buber grew up in Rhodesia but eventually settled in the United States to work at a prestigious law firm of Henshaw & Potter in Boston. After many years hard labor at the firm, Buber moves from a small boardinghouse to a white mansion, a veritable marble sarcophagus. Dissatisfied with wealth and in a rut at work, he decides to take a trip to Thailand. In a bar called The Star of Love, Buber meets Nok. With this fateful meeting, this overweight nearly hairless Westerner finds pleasure, relief, and the seeds of his own destruction.
Already one can see the contours of Lolita in the narrative. Schmahmann elevates the novel from a mere facsimile of Nabokov’s best-known work and makes it his own. In the same manner, Stevie Ray Vaughn covered the uncoverable “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” by Jimi Hendrix. The unexpected delight arises from Schmahmann’s deft handling of Buber. He begins as an overdetermined caricature and gradually transforms into a fully formed human being. Buber’s “yellow plague” becomes less a desire for the flesh than a desperate need for companionship with another person. His finely calibrated professional persona, the fortress-like mansion, and the complex dissembling finally begin to crack.
Tongue Thai’ed
Western fascination with Asian cultures is nothing new. As the quote from the pan-ethnic stoner comedy Harold and Kumar explicitly states, human desires know no ethnic boundaries. Unfortunately, Alfred Buber comes from an older generation and raised in the racially rigid society of Rhodesia, and sees his desires for an Asian woman as something hateful that must be concealed at all costs. The worst part is not that Nok is Asian as much as she works as a prostitute.
Buber’s descriptions of Thailand are impressionistic and possess the vagueness of fable. But this should be expected, since he is not a native and everything seems new and odd. One can compare Buber’s impressions with the razor-sharp descriptions of Sonchai Jitpleecheep, the hero of John Burdett’s crime novel Bangkok 8 (2003). Buber is a foreigner, a farang. Bangkok 8 plays like a great companion piece to Alfred Buber, since both are told in first person and Burdett’s crime novel goes into amazing depth about the Bangkok prostitution industry, as multilayered and economically vital as any other sector.
Alfred Buber’s love for Nok develops to the point where he wants her to be his bride. The economics of prostitution and marriage collide and commingle in a series of scenes with Buber interacting with the Nok’s family and villagers. Buber, ever the public traditionalist, negotiates with Nok’s father for her bride-price. (It is ironic how “traditional marriage” advocates fail to mention how the earliest traditional marriages were both arranged and saw woman as property. Then again, who can rationally discuss anything with someone possessed by Gay Panic?) In both cases, prostitution and marriage, women are commodified. Buber, the son of Communists, teases out the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” of the situation.
Nabokov Blues
From the plot to the quality of the writing, comparing Schmahmann to Nabokov is inevitable. In this case, it is entirely justified. Anthony Burgess wrote about Nabokov in his book-length review of literature, The Novel Now (1967). (Burgess also shares with Nabokov, at least with American readers, the notoriety of being known for only one book, despite being prolific.) Burgess writes that Nabokov is both “pedantic and cosmopolitan” who writes in “the involved, dense, witty, learned, allusive English that disappointed the smut-hound readers of Lolita.”
Buber shares the trait many Nabokovian characters share, finding “the only alternative to perversity, with its magical and terrible privileges, is banality.” One can see this in Alfred Buber, his near-reverential desires for Nok contrasted with the artifice of propriety and decency. (Side question: Why do we yearn for our financial betters to be so utterly boring? And why do we feign outrage when they aren’t? The hypocrisy cuts both ways.)
An example of Buber at his most tender is in order. Here Buber describes Nok with a tenderness and joy one usually doesn’t associate with clients of prostitutes:
Buber holds her narrow brown foot in the air as she lies on the bed under a single sheet, traces the curve of her calf with his finger. What is it, what, I obsess, about this slender curve, this smooth brown muscle, that holds me so entranced? It cannot be lust alone. I have had her, recently, cannot penetrate her again and grab any pleasure further pleasure in it, and yet this curve, this calf, holds me still, dominates me, entrances me beyond description. Or the hardness of the back of her thigh, the very fine, almost impenetrable follicles that give texture to her skin. I run a finger there and I want it too, endlessly, for myself. I have her, for a pittance, for today, for tomorrow, for a week or a month if I choose, and yet that is not enough. (Italics in original)
It goes on like this, alternating between an almost detached and clinical sexuality and a lush, overheated sensuality of a Baudelairean prose poem. The passage convinced this reviewer that the novel was no simple copy of Lolita, but a worthy book in its own right.
While Nabokov is most famous for his book about the pedophile and Burgess is most famous for his book about gangs that speak strange, both writers produced a large multifaceted oeuvre. Only reading those two books by these titans of literature does a disservice to the reader. The same goes for David Schmahmann. While he only has two novels to his name right now, one can only hope he, like Burgess and Nabokov, is capable of so much more. Nabokov wrote a novel-length poem with academic commentary (Pale Fire), satires of totalitarianism (Invitation to a Beheading), and alternate history erotica (Ada, or Ardor), among many, many other volumes. And that’s just his fiction. This reviewer hopes David Schmahmann can be as prolific and imaginative as Nabokov, but hopefully get beyond the great author’s shadow. It is still early in his career and this reviewer anticipates much from this gifted South African born lawyer.
Posted in book reviews, books, film, food, Permanent Press
Tagged asia, Bangkok, Bangkok 8, book reviews, books, Boston, capitalism, communism, culture, economics, fiction, influence, John Burdett, lawyers, Lolita, Nabokov, pop culture, prostitution, Rhodesia, sex, South Africa, Thailand, TV, UK
“I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country.”
Patton (1970), screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola.
“Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things … I would not refer to him as a dictator.”
Vice President Joe Biden (2011)
“God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.”
H. L. Mencken (1956)
Brothers in Arms: the Story of Al-Qa’ida and the Arab Jihadists by Camille Tawil is a lucid investigation of the various threads within the modern Islamist movement. While the media, especially television, is prone to turn Middle Eastern anti-government dissent into a monolith labeled “terrorist,” Tawil, an investigative journalist working for the al-Hayat Arabic daily in London, dissects the various theological and political rifts within the Islamist movement.
Borne within the crucible of the Afghan-Soviet War and unified by religious rhetoric and corrupt tyrants supported by the United States, the Islamist movement attracted both the devout and the sadistic. In the words of the poet Ezra Pound,
These fought, in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case ..Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later …some in fear, learning love of slaughter.
From Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920)
Within the context of the Arab struggle against tyranny, the Islamist movement presents itself as a constellation of paramilitary groups working within the parameters of nationalistic goals. Besides the corrupt monarchs and dictators, the Islamists also stand in opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood’s tendency towards non-violent protest and Kemal Atatürk’s secularization of Turkey following the First World War. One is left with the dismal choice between tyranny or theocracy. To use a phrase familiar with benighted, defeatist, unimaginative voters: “the lesser of two evils.” A false dichotomy ingrained into the consciousness, a Manichean rube that kills critical thought. (One should note the single unambiguous difference between the agents of Islamist terror and members of the Christian Right: the Islamists have beards.)
Throughout the book, an underlying tension occurs between two countervailing trends. Nationalist uprising (overthrowing the tyrannical status quo, etc.) and internationalist jihad (creating a global caliphate along 7th century lines, etc.) either compete for dominance or collude with each other. Erstwhile secular dictators like Saddam Hussein have flirted with jihadist rhetoric to retain hold on power. Nationalist movements have also had their secular agendas, ranging from the aforementioned Atatürk and certain factions of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (Cf. the more theocratic HAMAS, Iran’s unelected theocratic Guardian Council, and the unelected Christian Right’s relationship with the GOP). Not every Islamist movement thought joining Osama bin Laden’s World Islamic Front was in their best interests. Similarly, not every Islamist movement thought the turn towards attacking the United States was a good idea either, despite the United States supporting dictatorial regimes and absolute monarchies for decades.
Preserving freedom at home by supporting tyranny abroad.
This brings up two important questions: What does national liberation matter when the end goal is a global caliphate? Granted, Islamist groups wanted to overthrow the present dictatorial regimes and install more Sharia-friendly Islamic states, but putting things in “global” terms opens the field to all sorts of utopian lunacy. Second, given the Islamist desire to create austere theocratic regimes with the Quran as the only law, the complaints against secular dictatorships become moot. It becomes an aesthetic debate, since tyranny and repression will be fruit of both systems.
Tawil explains how a desire to create democratic systems becomes a major sticking point between Islamist groups. Some desire to batter the government into holding elections; others see democracy as another manifestation of the infidel. For all the black-and-white saber rattling associated with the War on Terror, Tawil shows the difficult choices facing Islamist groups and how different goals led to groups getting torn apart.
Brothers in Arms: the Story of Al-Qa’ida and the Arab Jihadists offers an illuminating exploration of the variegated Islamist movement. Written in 2007, the book lacks information on the more recent London and Bali bombings. The greatest irony facing the Islamist movement is its oncoming irrelevance due to the Arab Spring passing across the Middle East like the European Revolutions of 1848 and the dissolution of the Iron Curtain from 1988 to 1993. The social networked young secular activists, despite the best efforts of the United States to sit on the fence, will do what arms and terror cannot and shove extremist terror into the dustbin of history.
Posted in book reviews, books
Tagged al qaeda, arab spring, asia, book reviews, books, capitalism, culture, economics, hosni mubarak, Islamism, middle east, non-fiction, osama bin laden, philosophy, poetry, politics, pop culture, religion, terrorism, too big to fail, UK
A Second Term and a Third-rate Burglary
Now Watergate does not bother me
Does your conscience bother you?
Tell the truth.
“Sweet Home Alabama,” Lynyrd Skynyrd (1974)
Years of Upheaval, the second volume of memoirs by Henry Kissinger, continues his personal account of public service, spanning the time of Nixon’s re-election to Nixon’s resignation following the Watergate scandal. The memoirs record a short span of time although it encompasses a plethora of geopolitical, domestic, and personal events. In the words of Homer Simpson, this volume has it all, “the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles.”
Riding on the triumph of the Paris Agreement, the document that began the peace process in Vietnam, Kissinger returned home to the United States. In a few short months, he witnessed President Nixon win the 1972 Presidential Election in a record landslide victory. The afterglow of re-election victory began to fade when papers began reporting about a burglary in the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The office was in the Watergate building. The imperious tough guy edifice of Richard Nixon, personifying the dam that held back the onslaught of international Communism, had a hairline crack in it. If Nixon could re-imagine Cold War foreign policy, with the help of Kissinger, his National Security advisor, surely this third-rate burglary needn’t worry a President who opened China, ended the Vietnam War securing “peace with honor,” and defused the menace of nuclear annihilation with détente.
Years of Upheaval chronicles Kissinger’s ascension to the post of Secretary of State, negotiating with the various parties in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur, and dealing with the challenges of foreign policy while executive power eroded in the prolonged hydra of scandals called Watergate.
Inside/Outside
The State Department: Now with 30% more ominousness.
Presidents privileged enough to have a second term usually reshuffle their staff. In this case, Nixon dismissed William Rogers and nominated Henry Kissinger for Secretary of State. Following his confirmation, Kissinger assumed the dual role of Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. President Ford later terminated Kissinger’s special situation, preserving Kissinger in the Cabinet position and letting Brent Scowcroft take over the role as National Security Advisor.
The recent maelstrom of current events, from the resurrection of the Far Right to the Wikileaks fiasco, makes this an invaluable book. A major component of its value it is specific bias. One usually associates bias with a lack of worth and this makes it easy to dismiss works that may merit reconsideration. This behavior happens all too often in our hyperventilating political culture with its calls for “fair and balanced” reporting, not listening to critics, and hating everything that falls outside our tunnel vision.
After one recognizes the bias of a work like this, one should work towards divining the grain of the bias. Because Kissinger specialized in foreign policy, it afforded him a unique position to witness the spreading Watergate fiasco. It also allowed him a means of justifying a way out of getting swept up in the scandal, containing the damage to “juvenile and illegal” activities perpetrated by campaign workers and those staffers associated with domestic policy. This memoir is self-serving in an entirely different fashion than the Haldemann Diaries or Chuck Colson’s Born Again.
The perspective is also unique in that the Secretary of State receives the resignation letter of the President. While Kissinger engaged in shuttle diplomacy, the executive branch suffered from multiple disruptions. Watergate began as the Vice Presidency became threatened by Spiro Agnew’s monetary shenanigans. The verbal warhammer of the Nixon Regime, Agnew uttered some of the greatest one-liners, usually penned by that paragon of tolerance, Pat Buchanan. Raging against the nattering nabobs of negativity and the impudent snobs, Nixon’s heir apparent left amidst accusations of bribery and fraud. The Silent Majority hadn’t yet metastasized into the Moral Majority. In another unique instance in this paranoid time, the circumstances gave Nixon the opportunity to nominate his own successor.
From an institutional standpoint, Upheaval offers a firsthand look at Kissinger’s transition from National Security Advisor to Secretary of State. The former is an advisory position with no confirmation necessary and an office within the White House. The latter involves Senate confirmation and is the most prestigious Cabinet position, heading the Foreign Service, and occupying a massive bureaucracy from Foggy Bottom (the Harry S Truman Building). The prestige and responsibility of the Secretary of State is further enhanced by Kissinger’s status as a foreign-born immigrant. (During World War 2, Kissinger worked in Army Intelligence, returning to Germany a decade after fleeing in the Thirties.) At the height of the Watergate scandal and the dissolution of executive authority, Kissinger acted as a “surrogate President for foreign policy.” Once Ford became President, Kissinger fell back into a more traditional capacity.
A Shalom and a Salaam
The Americans & Russians are sending bombing planes tanks
Chinese Egyptians Syrians help me battle for my righteous
house my Soul’s dirt Spirit’s Nation’s body’s
boundaries & Self’s territory my
Zionist homeland my Palestinian inheritance
The Capitalist Communist & Third World Peoples’
Republics Dictatorships Police States Socialisms & Democracies
are all sending Deadly Weapons to our aid!
“Jaweh and Allah Battle,” Allen Ginsberg, 1974.
White House Years provided a glimpse into the negotiations leading to the Paris Agreement and the end of US involvement in the Vietnam War. It was the foreign policy showpiece of the first volume. In Years of Upheaval, the Yom Kippur War is given the same showpiece status. Southeast Asia faded into the background only to have the Middle East flare up with Egypt and Syria attacking Israel. Kissinger took the lead in the disengagement negotiations with the dual aims of bringing about a coherent peace process and locking out the Soviet Union from exacerbating radicalism in the region. Existing as a geopolitical archaeology of sorts, one witnesses how the United States came to treat the grab bag of absolute monarchies and dictatorships as our allies. Like a sequel to World War 2 with the Soviet Union and United States exploiting “our Germans” versus “their Germans,” the despots and tyrants became “our Arabs” to combat the threat of Soviet expansionism, manifest in the loaded yet vague term “Arab radicalism.”
Despite the cynicism, hatred, and despair one feels towards this region and its seemingly unending conflicts, Kissinger’s account reveals the specific context that resulted in the resulting military and diplomatic actions.
In the early Seventies, the Middle East lay dormant with Israel sitting precariously atop conquered territories wrested from Arab hands in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The Arab nations, specifically Egypt and Syria, festered with resentment and impotence. The recent assassination of Gamal Abdel Nasser created a power vacuum Anwar el-Sadat filled. The United States did not consider Sadat a real threat or a leader of promise until the Yom Kippur War. According to Kissinger, Sadat did not send Egypt into war against Israel for conquest, but to prove that Egypt was not impotent against Israeli arms.
Herein lays the paradox facing any peace process in the Middle East. Israel, surrounded by hostile neighbors, maintains occupied territories of its three neighbors, as a means of maintaining security. Egypt and Syria have portions of their territory occupied by Israel. In order to assuage “the Arab street” – a euphemism for the sociopaths and maniacs who cloak a bloodthirsty ethos in “fundamentalist Islam” – and the more established oligarchies (usually military), leaders have to walk a fine line between appeasing the base and making sensible decisions. It is a delicate dance that can have fatal consequences for all involved.
Jordan is a special case. The West Bank, prior to Israel’s occupation, belonged to Jordan. Jordan, throughout this prolonged crisis, remained a stalwart ally of the United States. It did not press as hard as Egypt or as passionately as Syria, because it had to hold off the designs of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) under the charismatic leadership of Yasser Arafat. The rocky land and the half of Jerusalem dubbed “Palestine” belonged to Jordan. Kissinger, trying to keep this precarious situation as simple as possible, worked with King Hussein to block any unwarranted influence from the PLO during the peace negotiations.
In addition to this complicated set of challenges, the Middle East is a region that has several thousand years of political history and long-simmering blood feuds. The region came into existence following the arbitrary set of lines and arbitrary set of leaders concocted at the Versailles Treaty following World War 1. One can dig deeper and find Arab occupations, Turkish occupations, Crusader occupations, and on and on. Israel occupying the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt hearkens back to the Book of Exodus and big-haired Charlton Heston movies. Now it is Anwar Sadat saying, “Let my people go!” Instead of Hebrew slaves, it is an Egyptian Army surrounded on all sides by the Israeli Army, without supplies.
Prior to negotiations, Kissinger recounts the delicate task of supplying Israel. The airlift operation comes across like a transcontinental Rube Goldberg Machine, endlessly complicated by wary European nations, Soviet saber rattling, and a nation rapidly spinning into a frenzy over Watergate.
Charting this dangerous course ends with the historic Kilometer 101 meeting. In a tent in the middle of the desert, military negotiators from both sides begin the arduous task of actually taking to each other. The faint glimmer of hope presides when leaders from the belligerent nations meet in Geneva. Drawn together by the prospect of giving the region a lasting peace, one understands the motivation since the Middle East had been in perpetual warfare since 1949. Kissinger labored extensively with Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Israel to detach political issues from disengagement. As per usual with Kissinger, it involved the creation of a bogus-sounding organization under whose auspices the disengagement would take place. Kissinger did the same thing with the North Vietnamese when they pressured the United States to create a coalition government with representatives from the Communist Party.
The challenges to begin a Middle East peace process had become further exacerbated by the unraveling of executive authority due to Watergate. Under normal circumstances, the Secretary of State could use the tried-and-true tactic of carrot and stick. With Watergate eroding Nixon’s authority, Kissinger had less authority to cajole or threaten the leaders, even those like Sadat who actively sought an American alliance.
The Middle East represents a Gordian knot of paradox, atrocity, and war. Kissinger gives a succinct analysis of the history, diplomatic challenges, and personalities involved in the region. In that case, it is useful for anyone seeking to understand a complicated situation and its history that spans millennia.
The Valley of Bones
The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones. And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord God, you know.”
Ezekiel 37: 1 – 3
The memoirs of a government official in the upper echelons make it easy to forget what a high-stakes game diplomacy can be. Buried beneath mountainous prose that describes numerous meetings between dignitaries drenched in minutiae and bonhomie, the reader can become overwhelmed or bored. Middle East leaders, Arab and Israeli, that worked towards creating a working peace occasionally found themselves in the valley of bones.
Anwar Sadat met the fate of his predecessor in 1981 following his historic meeting with Israel. This ushered in the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. King Faisal, another personality in this volume, met his end with assassination in 1975. Yitzhak Rabin, who played a role in Golda Meir’s government, died at the hands of an Israeli religious fanatic in 1995. One laments that the yearning for peace often gets destroyed by the faith-based initiative of bloodthirsty fanatics, or, in Kissinger’s witty phrase, “apostles of the ordinary.”
Sadat’s martyrdom occurred shortly before Israel withdrew from the Sinai in 1982. Israel still occupies the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip (1967 to present). The growing influence of the Palestinian cause has complicated the peace process.
Besides the deaths of Middle Eastern leaders, the United States endured the impeachment crisis shortly after Vice President Agnew resigned. Amidst the chaos and bloodshed, Kissinger remains standing.
Strange Interludes
Interviewer (Eric): From the plastic arts we turn to football. Last night in the Stadium of Light, we witnessed the resuscitation of a great footballing tradition, when Jarrow United came of age, in a European sense, with an almost Proustian display of modern existentialist football. Virtually annihilating by midfield moral argument the now surely obsolescent catennachio defensive philosophy of Signor Alberto Fanfrino. Bologna indeed were a side intellectually out argued by a Jarrow team thrusting and bursting with aggressive Kantian positivism and outstanding in the fine Jarrow team was my man of the match, the arch-thinker, free scheming, scarcely ever to be curbed, midfield cognoscento, Jimmy Buzzard.
Buzzard (John): Good evening Brian.
“The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Goes to the Bathroom” (1.11), Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “Literary Football,” airdate December 28, 1969.
The inordinate length of this book allows for the occurrence of some strange interludes. One encounters situations from the menacing to the ridiculous. Because Kissinger is an Ivy League academic and a career diplomat, his writing comes across as lapidary, overdetermined, and always polite. He finds a way to say kind words about nearly everyone he meets, friend and foe alike. His description and justification of Nixon’s anti-Semitism or King Faisal’s anti-Zionism are marvels in grammatical acrobatics.
Following the afterglow of Nixon’s re-election, Kissinger is whisked to Hanoa, capital of North Vietnam, to hammer out the remaining minutiae in the Paris Accords. It is one of the strangest trips in American diplomatic history. Hanoi comes across like a small provincial town rather than a towering fortress, the monolith acting as bulwark against colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. The battle-scarred landscape and the empty streets say more about the agonies of the Vietnam War than any writer does. The entire experience has a strange otherworldly feeling, with Kissinger negotiating with Le Duc Tho and others in a building only a few blocks from the notorious Hanoi Hilton.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, during one of Kissinger’s many trips to Israel, he had the opportunity to visit Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem is the museum and memorial to the Holocaust located in Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. In an uncharacteristic act of silence, Kissinger says nothing about the experience. Theodor Adorno famously said, “There can be no more poetry after Auschwitz.” Given the monumental scope and horror of the Holocaust, it would seem trite or futile to attempt to write about it. The silence seems out of character with Kissinger’s gregarious nature and his penchant for cheerleading for American ideals and power.
The geopolitical context further complicates this visit, since Israel’s military conquests bring to mind associations of Germany’s quest for Lebensraum (“living space”). Additionally, Kissinger’s repeated endorsements of America’s quest for freedom and liberty come across as vacant gestures when openly courting the support of the brutal regimes of Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. The United States, in decades to come, will tie itself into an incomprehensible knot of alliances with both Israel and the Middle Eastern tyrannies. During Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy”, many of the pro-Soviet Arab tyrannies eventually tilted to become pro-US Arab tyrannies. (Or in the words of our youth, “frenemies.”)
Kissinger describes King Faisal’s position thus:
The speech on Communism and Zionism, however bizarre it sounded to Western visitors, was clearly deeply felt. At the same time it reflected precisely the tactical necessities of the Kingdom. The strident anti-Communism helped reassure America and established a claim on protection against outside threats (which were all, in fact, armed by the Soviet Union). The virulent opposition to Zionism reassured radicals and the PLO and thus reduced the incentive to follow any temptation to undermine the monarchy domestically. And its thrust was vague enough to imply no precise consequences; it dictated few policy options save a general anti-Communism.
During that meeting between Kissinger and King Faisal, the King asserts that Israel was the result of a plot between Jews and Communists, “put there by Bolshevism for the principal purpose of dividing America from the Arabs.” This kind of rhetoric may sound odd to Western ears in the mid-Seventies, with the rise of the Tea Party movement and Glenn Beck’s popularity, not so much.
The travels of Kissinger become accidentally hilarious when he describes a football (i.e. soccer) game he attended in Munich. It was the final game of the World Cup. He attended with Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the new Foreign Minister for West Germany. He describes the strategies of the soccer teams in foreign policy terms. While Kissinger does pepper his memoirs with the occasional joke or two, (at least one suspects those are jokes, since they are usually devoid of any humorous content). Germany “used the methods of the Schlieffen plan, of complicated maneuver with intricately plotted designs, almost irresistible when everything worked as planned and with the psychological impetus of a friendly crowd.” “The Dutch lost, despite an even more cerebral style of soccer that was beautiful to watch but lacked the final will to prevail.” (Oh, snap!) “England, once preeminent, now relying on condition and reputation to sustain its slightly old-fashioned, somewhat pedantic style, and therefore long since eliminated from the World Cup tournament.” Has anyone contacted Kissinger to provide color commentary for World Cup tournaments? Then again, if Kissinger provided commentary in a Madden-like video game for soccer, young kids everywhere might put down their Funyuns and Mountain Dew to actually go outside.
My Country for a Horse
“Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Richard Nixon, The Nixon Interviews with David Frost, airdate May 19, 1977
“L’État, c’est moi” (“I am the State”)
King Louis XIV of France, attributed.
Watergate remains the other grand narrative in Years of Upheaval. It haunts his journeys like a grim specter. With executive authority rapidly evaporating, his power to negotiate became diminished. As per usual with political memoirs, he places a lot of blame on “professional Nixon-haters” and “McGovernite peaceniks,” while giving short shrift to the actual disturbing implications a scandal of this sort presents to the very fabric of participatory democracy. In the simplified folklore that passes for historical knowledge, Watergate remains the “Mother of All Scandals” both in terms of actual malfeasance and it is closer in living memory. Unlike the XYZ Affair and the Teapot Dome scandals, our parents and grandparents remember (or mis-remember) what happened. Watergate also put a close to a disastrous decade in foreign and domestic policy. The Vietnam War took down three presidencies, one by assassination (Kennedy), one a single-term catastrophe (Johnson), and one by impeachment (Nixon).
While it is easy to turn this is a partisan affair, Democrats gloating over Republican misbehavior and the ruthless Nixon finally being put down like a rabid dog, Watergate represents something more malevolent and disturbing than just electoral shenanigans. Despite the nature of the cause, placed under the umbrella of “national security,” Watergate destroyed the moral credibility of the Presidency. The enemy lists, the bugging, COINTELPRO, and using intelligence agencies to cover-up an investigation all reeked of political tyranny. This was behavior fitting for Pinochet, but not for a leader of a democracy. “The center will not hold,” to William Butler Yeats. Watergate was one step too far.
Unfortunately, the creeping forces of authoritarianism never quite held, since Nixon never went to trial. President Ford, in one of his first acts, preemptively pardoned Nixon. The ensuing impeachment trial would have grievously wounded an already divided nation, but the pardon created a dangerous precedent. It gave the President an aura of invincibility. Do whatever crimes and atrocities are necessary to secure your power and have your successor pardon you. Something no Jacobean dramatist could have dreamt up.
Legacies and Their Discontents
Senator Pat Geary: I despise the way you pose yourself. You and your whole fucking family.
Michael Corleone: We’re both part of the same hypocrisy, senator, but never think it applies to my family.
The Godfather: Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
Proverbs for Paranoids:
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
4. You hide, they seek.
5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
From Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon
When the Nixon administration went supernova and collapsed in on itself like a dying star, the United States preserved his legacy in its foreign policy. Despite the scandal and humiliation of resignation, the world is still cast in terms of Nixon’s radical realignment. The push towards opening China is one of the reasons the Communist regime still exists. The Middle East remains allied with the United States, the tyrannies contending with the oppressed masses and the occasional terrorist flare-up that might damage tourism and military aid shipments.
Nixon’s foreign policy legacy should be seen by the successor administrations less as a prison (what it is now) than as a strategic innovation (what it could be). A border clash between the Soviet Union and China created the impetus to play the Communist giants off each other, making it possible for the US to extricate itself from the Vietnam conflict. Can the same be done with the tyrannical monarchy of Saudi Arabia, our nominal ally, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, a faux democracy? Nixon provided the necessary strategy with détente and linkage, defusing the confrontations of the Cold War, and leading it towards the inevitable endgame. With the Cold War finished, the legacy is the free market on a truly global scale, but the practical alliances created against the Soviets has created a rogues gallery of tyrants, dictators, and absolute monarchs who pay fealty to the United States. Is it time, now that markets are free, to work towards making people just as free? Maybe the politicians, only caring about their re-election and personal enrichment, see cheap commodities as a greater priority than individual liberty?
Another legacy of the Nixon administration is in popular culture. Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s labyrinthine postmodern kaleidoscope of paranoia, perversion, and war atrocities, was published in 1973. In 1974, Francis Ford Coppola released the Godfather: Part II, a film that was both sequel and prequel to the Godfather. The second film charts the immigrant beginnings of the Corleone Family. Vito Corleone rises to power, while the film charts the Corleone Family in the Fifties and Sixties. Michael Corleone, heir of Vito, has power, wealth, and influence. Senators do his bidding and power is extended from New York to Nevada and into Cuba. Castro’s Revolution cuts short the Mafia plutocracy. Michael retreats to his eyrie in Lake Tahoe, consolidating power again in another periodic Mafia purge, whacking the disloyal. But the power corrupts him, rotting him from the inside, when he puts a hit out on his brother, Fredo. The Godfather: Part II is an American fable about immigration and the corruptions of capitalism. It also works as a metaphor of the Nixon Presidency with its paranoia, seclusion, and ruthlessness.
It’s Nixon’s world; we just live in it.
Posted in 5000 Pages of Kissinger, book reviews, books, Critical Appraisals, film
Tagged asia, book reviews, books, capitalism, coppola, culture, foreign policy, godfather part II, gravity's rainbow, kissinger, movie reviews, nixon, non-fiction, pop culture, pynchon, religion, scandal, the Seventies, watergate
