Who Are You? What Do You Want? Where Are You Going? Whom Do You Serve – And Whom Do You Trust?!
Yawn…What, the chick from VH1? She’s still around? I thought she went the way of Tickle Me Elmo. Does she dance? Ellen dances…and gives cool stuff to her audience…and underwear to her guests…and she dances…and she rewards heroic behaviour. Does Rosie do that? Huh?
Didn’t think so.
I bet she doesn’t even know all the words to the “Shoop-Shoop” song by Salt’n’Peppah.
Ellen’s cooler.
Nonnie-nonnie-boo-boo.
With the resurgeance of the Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman stories this week, I thought it would be a good time to let you, fair readers, in on a very deep, dark, military secret. A secret so shocking that many of you will walk away not believing what I’m about to tell you.
Now, just a bit about me for anyone new: I’m a retiring Air Force Master Sergeant. I’ll have 23 years of active duty under my belt at the end of July. I’ve held a Top Secret security clearance for the past nine years.
I have something to say about and to the conspiracy theorists and the “truthers.” It’s a secret, but I’m going to tell you anyway. I may face charges for this, but I think it’s THAT important. Ready?
We’re just not that good at keeping dirty secrets to ourselves in the military. Seriously. The problem with the idea that there’s any sort of dirty laundry that we, as an institution, are keeping to ourselves is dependent on the idea that X many people can all be corrupt at the same time.
This kind of thinking can only occur in people who have no knowledge of the military.
Because while some of us were motivated to join by the idea of killing bad guys and blowing shit up, and we guide the more enthusiastic members of that crowd to the proper special forces offices, there’s a large majority of us who simply want to serve and defend our country. There’s an honor amoung many of us. Actually, there’s an even stronger honor amoung the kill bad guys and blow shit up crowd, but I’m not going to explain that in this post.
In the Air Force we get the concept of Integrity First driven into us almost from the first step off the bus at Lackland. I know from serving Joint duty that the other branches take integrity just as seriously. You want a fast way out of the military? Lie. Most commands will have you out of their ranks in a couple of weeks. It’s because we absolutely MUST trust one another in the military. The mission depends on it.
Did you properly set the fuse on the 2000 pound bomb we just put on that aircraft?
You have to trust the answer to that. Lives depend on it.
Basically, we in the military SUCK when it comes to lying. Sure we have recruiters and public affairs reps and psy-ops people who’s job it is to sell one point over another. But when it comes to every day living in uniform, we have a large majority of folks who are going to do the right thing no matter what it costs them personally.
And of course we have our share of folks who think their whole job is about covering their’s or their boss’ asses. We’re no different than any other organization. Dirtbags somehow get through the screening but we normally weed them out before they get anywhere they can do real damage.
But because we have so many people who would cry bullshit when the bovine has so apparently defecated on the floor, those folks are outnumbered by the folks with a true sense of integrity.
That’s why conspiracy theories involving the military make me laugh. There may have been a couple of folks who messed up and tried to tell the story before they had all the facts, but the truth always, always, always comes out one way or the other.
It wasn’t luck that we found out the truth about Jessica Lynch or Pat Tillman or Abu Ghraib. It was integrity on the part of someone in uniform who had the guts to say, “Wait a minute, that’s not right!”
And here’s another one for you to stew over. I believe the same thing about most people in government also. Yeah, Republicans and Democrats both.
Told you you wouldn’t believe it.
There are a good few reasons besides sheer contrariness that I am standing off to the side, pointing and snickering at the antics of the “global warming” warming crowd. One of them is that I have been to the “omigod-it-could-be-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it” rodeo before. Several times, actually; when I was in junior high school the panic-du-jour was about overpopulation. Eventually we would all wind up, standing shoulder to shoulder, running out of food and clean water. When I got to high school, it was global cooling; great honking ice sheets were going to advance across the earth, the sun would grow dim and we would all freeze to death. If we didn’t starve, first.
Before and during that was the oldie but goodie of global thermonuclear war; we were all going to be annihilated by the Russkies or a melting power plant. Or die of starvation afterwards. For a while in college we were supposed to be all freaked out by the scourge of “future shock” wherein things changed so fast and so suddenly that our poor little minds just couldn’t cope, and we would… oh, I forget what was supposed to happen to us with “future-shock”. Curl up in the fetal position, suck our thumbs and turn up the electric blanket up to high, I suppose.
So, I am a little resistant to someone jumping up and down and screaming “oooga-booga!” and demanding that I panic along with the rest of the lemmings about the latest panic-du-jour. Deal with it.
See, I know the climate of the world has changed, is changing and will go on changing. There were glaciers over the upper Mid-West, once. In Roman times, it was warm enough in England to grow grapes. Until about the 14th century (give or take) it was warm enough in southern Greenland for subsistence farming. A volcano eruption on the other side of the world resulted in a year without a summer early in the 19th century in the northern hemisphere. So it went. So it goes. How much global warming in the last umpty-ump years-decades-whatever is due to human activity? I don’t know, but I am not going to rush into taking a position on the say-so of the same sort of people who were banging on about global cooling, overpopulation, nuclear annihilation, future-shock or whatever in the days of yore.
Sorry. I’ll make jokes about them, though.
Which brings me down to the one over-hyped panic-du-jour that followed upon all the others listed, the one that commanded tabloid-style headlines all during the mid 1980s. That would be the “ritual-satanic-abuse-of-children-in-daycare-centers” scare. While it is not the same kind of issue, it seems to be meriting some of the same kind of popular press. Standing off to one side and looking on, I keep seeing the same sort of shrieking hysteria, the same light-speed jumping to conclusions, the same degree of absolute conviction, the same kind of ‘piling on’, and the same shouting-down of all the people who said “now just wait a darned minute”.
The global-warming trend might very be as real an issue, as much as the day-care ritual abuse wasn’t, but the degree of shrieking hysteria on display when the issue comes up doesn’t do it any favors. Or win me over as a convert, because I am pretty sure that in ten years, the usual suspects will be banging on about something else.
To: Various
From: Sgt Mom
Re: The Smell of Hypocrisy in the Morning
1. My mind boggles actually, that someone who was around long enough to have a comedy disc in the AFRTS library (from the late 60s, if memory serves) with a piece called “2,000 Hamburgers to go” was actually trying to sound hip, trendy and with-it four decades later. Mmmm, ‘kay. Well everyone has hobbies. Mine is gardening… mercifully, I have come to that stage in life where I do not have to even pretend to be trendy. Nothing looks more ridiculous than extreme trendiness a couple of decades past its “best if used by” date.
2. It is kind of amusing, watching some of the very people who lined up to be on Imus’ show, line up to throw him under the bus. Please check out the definition of “shock jock”. One of the things they do is… er, shock. Also offend, belittle and berate. Or so I have been told. I’m more a classical music fan, myself. NPR’s “Performance Today” is about as cutting edge as I feel like getting these days.
3. So the ladies of the Rutgers women’s basketball team were shocked, hurt, insulted, etc. by his crude remark about them. They have a perfect right to be shocked, hurt, insulted; ladies should be offended when men say vile, demeaning and misogynist things about them. I hope that they have been kept in blissful ignorance about the lyrics of most rap and hip-hop hits, thought. That sort of language might very well prompt them to curl up in the fetal position with the heating blanket turned all the way up. Oh, but that’s different….
4. Right on schedule, here come the race-hustlers; Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton grown as fat as ticks by playing the race card, carefully inflaming old grievances and playing their version of a protection racket. “Give us what we want, or you’re a racist!”. MLK must be so proud. He’s probably revolving in his grave like a Makita drill.
5. Oh, and as regards ‘Affaire Duque La Cross’ ? If there are any communities in these United States who would instantly recognize such a thing as a lynch mob, virtual or otherwise, I’d expect it would be the academic community… and the African American one. That certain members of it were so quick to join in is only sad proof of the axiom that those to whom injustice has been done are just as quick off the mark in dealing it out to others. And the sainted “judged not by the color of skin but the content of character” MLK had such hopes that it would be otherwise.
6. And our lords of the Mainstream and Legacy Media were right there, with the pitchforks and torches. Thanks, guys… you covered yourself with glory, as usual. Now take a gallon of bleach and the garden hose, go around in back and try and scour some of it off.
Sincerely
Sgt. Mom
…has written yet another essay.
As usual, the whole thing is so very good, but here’s a taste:
You know who I blame for this pathetic state of affairs? I blame Leonard Nimoy. I remember watching In Search Of… as a teen and always being just a little disappointed that there was so little – you know, proof — in any one of those episodes. In Search of Atlantis, In Search of Ghosts, In Search of Ancient Astronauts, In Search of the Bermuda Triangle, In Search of UFO’s…, In Search of, in other words, every conceivable hoax and superstition on the face of the planet. And I watched it in spite of the lack of actual proof and I believed it all because it presented one thin string of opinion and falsehood cloaked as “evidence” and no one rebutted a word of it.
“We’re just asking questions” was the official, voice-over disclaimer. You hear that too from the 9/11 Truth crowd when confronted with the lunacy of their claims. We’re just asking questions…
Well, in that vein I’d like to ask some questions myself. Is Michael Moore a serial pedophile? I’m just asking, and I’m sure a lot of my readers would just like to have some questions answered. I heard that Rosie O’Donell ate a baby at a Satanic Ritual once – is that true? Can you please provide the evidence that this did not in fact happen? Thanks. Who has murdered more hookers: Bill Maher or Charlie Sheen? Come on, you can’t tell me there’s no smoke there. I just want a possible explanation…
So that’s what it has come to now. We deserve better.
God damn it, we do.
That’s just a very small part of it, you must go read the whole thing. Bring a soda, it’s a long one, but don’t skip the setup.
I’m hereby boycotting you until you stop marring my Sunday Nights on Sci Fi with that stupid giggling woman who wants more meat. Her voice is annoying enough, but that bordering on insanity giggle? Look, she’s creepier than the Burger King.
I do prefer your sammiches to Subway’s, but I’m serious, lose the bimbo.
I am not one of those given to assume that just because a lot of people like something, then it must be good; after all, Debbie Boone’s warbling of “You Light Up My Life” was on top of American Top Forty for what seemed like most of the decade in the late 70s, although that damned song sucked with sufficient force to draw in small planets. Everyone that I knew ran gagging and heaving when it came on the radio, but obviously a lot of people somewhere liked it enough to keep it there, week after week after week. A lot of people read “The DaVinci Code”, deriving amusement and satisfaction thereby, and some take pleasure in Adam Sandler movies or Barbara Cartland romances… no, popularity of something does not guarantee quality, and I often have the feeling that the tastemakers of popular culture are often quite miffed — contemptuous, even — when they pronounce an unfavorable judgment upon an item of mass entertainment which turns out to be wildly, wildly popular anyway.
“300” looks to be one of those wildly popular things, for which the intellectual great and good have no explanation. This amuses me very much, because I think I do. As I wrote last week “the story of the Spartans at Thermopylae is one of those stories which has kept a grip on us in the West for nearly three thousand years… Courage, honor, duty, clear-eyed self-sacrifice in a cause, for the lives of those you hold dear, for your city or your country… those are values that hold, that define who we are and what we stand for.”
It’s all about stories, and our human need for stories; stories about other people, stories that explain, that make things clear for us, that inspire us to great deeds, to set an example or spell out a warning. We need stories nearly as much as we need oxygen. And we will have them, bright and sparkling and new, or worn to paper thinness in the re-telling. We will have stories that have grown, and been embellished by many narrators, with heroes and minor heroes and splendid set-piece scenes, and side-narratives, like one of those sea-creatures that collects ornaments to stick onto its’ shell any which way, or a bower-bird collecting many brilliant scraps and laying them out in intricate patterns. A longing to hear such stories must be as innate in us, as it is to those creatures, for our earliest epic, that of Gilgamesh may be traced back to the beginnings of agriculture, and towns, and the taming of animals, and the making of a written language. It may go back even farther yet, but there is really no way to know for sure what those stories were, although I am sure the anthropologists are giving it the good old college try.
Our values are transmitted in the stories that we go back to, over and over. A long time ago, I read this book, which recommended, rather in the manner of the old Victorians, that children be given improving books to read, that their minds be exercised by good examples. I was initially rather amused… and then I went over the reading list in the back. I realized just then how many of those books the author cited I had read myself… and how many quiet demonstrations of honesty, courage, ethical behavior, loyalty to family, friends and community, of doing the hard right as opposed to the easy wrong had been tidily incorporated into such books as the Little House books, or Caddie Woodlawn, or “All of a Kind Family”, or Johnny Tremain. We imbibe all these values from stories… and lest we think that these sorts of moral lessons are obscure and tangled things, best suited for a long theoretical discussion of the life-boat dilemma in some touchy-feely ethics seminar, the author (or someone that he quoted – it’s been a long time since I re-read the book) brought up the old black and white movie “A Night to Remember”… the movie account of the sinking of the Titanic. The whole story of the unsinkable ship is laid out, based on research, and with the aid (at the time it was filmed) with many still-living survivors; running full-tilt into an ice-field, hitting an iceberg…loading the relatively few lifeboats while the band plays, and the ships engineers keep the lights and power going, of husbands putting their wives and children into the boats and stepping back to leave more room, knowing that the ship is doomed… of steerage passengers taking matters into their own hands and finding their way up to the boat deck, and deck-hands trying to launch the very last boat as the seawater rises to their knees. Twice a hundred stories, and at the end of it one has a pretty good idea of who has behaved well and honorably… and who has not.
Stories. We need them, and we’ll keep coming back to them. And to the best ones, we will come back again and again.
To all men living on this Earth, death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better than by facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the Temples of his Gods?”
— Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome
So Blondie and I were intrigued by several different premises – intrigued enough to actually go and see the movie 300 on opening weekend; she because it starred Gerard Butler and several acres of well-oiled, well-built male hunkiness, and me because – well, it sounded interestingly unlike the usual Hollywood bucket o’krep poured out for the plebeians. For a start, no car chases, or machine gun fire, and most definitely not a remake of a TV show which wasn’t that good to start with, or a movie which should have been left alone. Neither one of us had ever read the wildly popular “graphic novel” it was based on. (Do I have to call them graphic novels? I always slip and call them comic books, it’s the same way I call “mobile home developments” “trailer parks” and it’s a movie, dammit, not a film.) Blondie hated the movie version of Sin City BTW, and I would like to serve notice right here and now that I would usually avoid movies which incorporate buckets of splattered gore, and collections of human grotesqueries – but the story of the Spartans at Thermopylae is one of those stories which has kept a grip on us in the West for nearly three thousand years. Every forlorn last stand, against overwhelming odds has harked back to the King of Sparta and his picked band, standing in a narrow pass. And that many of those so choosing would have known of it— like Travis at the Alamo— testifies to the enduring power of their story.
Through the rise and fall of Greece itself, and the Romes that followed it, into the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and into this century, the story of Leonidas and his stalwart few resonates – as much as the righteous and politically correct would have it not so. (like this reviewer. Note to Mr. Smith; Bite me. Sincerely, Sgt. Mom). Courage, honor, duty, clear-eyed self-sacrifice in a cause, for the lives of those you hold dear, for your city or your country – those are values that hold, that define who we are and what we stand for. To have them set out unapologetically in a movie like this is as jolting as a triple-latte with a shot of brandy, after a diet of nothing but mineral water. Some years ago, I lamented that Hollywood just couldn’t bring themselves to make a movie about the war we are in. (here) Perhaps this may be the closest that they can bring themselves to do it, without running the risk of having the gentlemen from CAIR parked in the outer office.
This is not one of those movies where you go for authenticity about Greece, Sparta and the Persian empire. I can just imagine scholars of the classical world hyperventilating and gibbering incoherently for the next decade on that topic. Ancient Sparta was not anything like a democracy as we know it, Spartan women probably wore a few more clothes and took no part in public life, Greek warriors in battle wore little more than a leather Speedo and a flowing cloak, I very much doubt that anyone has ever been able to use a rhinoceros as a war-beast – and Xerxes probably wasn’t a 7-foot tall mulatto with a lot of body piercings. Some of the dialog clunks a bit, though. I can tell, because I was mentally re-writing it. All that is beside the point.
Because it is not just the story by itself; there was the look of it, the whole visual spectacle. The word that kept coming up in my mind, over and over was “painterly”. That the story of 300 was created by some who is an artist was obvious in the very first frame. Every scene was set up as if it were a painting or a classical frieze, a vase-painting; all of it harking back to something that an artistically literate person would recognize. The flow of a cloak, the jut of a bearded chin, the fall of golden sunset on a craggy mountain pass, the way a man holds a spear and shield – all of it evocative and visually rich in a way that doesn’t happen much in movies. Without having read the book, I can’t say if the movie version was true to Frank Miller vision , but it definitely made for an arresting look. We did notice some little grace notes that seem to be quotes from other movies; the fields of wheat from Gladiator, Xerxes’ monumental throne looked the one from the Elizabeth Taylor vehicle in Cleopatra and the assorted war-beasts from Lord of the Rings. (Also Blondie was bugged throughout the movie as to where she had seen the actor who played Dilius – he was in Lord of the Rings, also. She could have asked me, of course!)
All in all… ticket price and time well-spent, especially for Frank Miller fan. There are also some bonuses for the straight women and gay male demographic as well. It seems to be going over very well in flyover country, too.
You would think that the absolute cluelessness of the American Media, and many bloggers I might add, would fail to shock me. You’d be wrong.
Anyone who thinks this is going to do more than cause some hospitals to paint a wall or two, raise your hands.
For almost 23 years I’ve mostly been given Vitamin M (Motrin) and/or Flexoril for just about every ache and pain that I’ve ever had. I’ve been to a physical therapist twice even though I’m supposed to see one every other week…he’s usually so overbooked here he actually says, “When it hurts bad enough, come in, I’ll crack it again.” After 20 years of rather constant “shin splints” they finally figured out I had compressed compartments. The only reason they decided to operate was that they’d become chronic and were “getting ready to blow.”
And most of my crap is just muscles and nerves not doing what they should. I can’t imagine being in need of any real treatment.
So we whiled away an overcast Friday afternoon by going to the movies. There were three reasons for this: I feel I am duty bound to boost the first-weekend attendance of any intelligent and interesting-looking bit of historical film going, Blondie will watch Ioan Gruffudd in anything; double points and drooling slightly especially if he is costumed in tight trousers, tall boots and a shirt romantically opened halfway down the front -Â and where was I? Oh, third reason. No car crashes, explosions and machine gun fire.
Be warned though: when it comes out on DVD, it will make an excellent drinking game. Every time you see a British actor you recognize from Masterpiece Theater, knock back a shot for every presentation he or she was in. I guarantee everyone at the party will be paralytic by the end of the first half-hour, forty-five minutes max. It does have the distinct vibe of those lush and lovingly produced British television epics of a certain sort: all it lacks is the genteel host, sitting in a leather armchair, turning the pages of a book and setting the scene in orotund tones. The settings and costumes, and period details were as immaculate as they always are in these efforts. Rooms didn’t look like sets; they looked like rooms; many of them crowded and cluttered, and sometimes rather dim.
The first few minutes seemed a little awkward, rather jarring in setting up the characters and premise, and I mentally rewrote some of the dialogue. Bad habit of mine, having been intensely steeped in period literature, but either I adjusted or the writing got better. I think the latter, for a lot of the later dialogue was on-point.
The story was of that of William Wilberforce; a name not terribly familiar to Americans, and his long and discouraging struggle to outlaw slavery in the British Isles and in the British Empire as it was at the end of the 18th Century. The accounts of the abolitionist movement taught in our schools is pretty much focused on the American abolitionists at a later date, many of them inspired and even encouraged by Wilberforce himself, so this story is not a terribly over-familiar one to most Americans. William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown, to give a couple of examples – them we have heard of. Often and at length.
The structure of the story might be a little hard to follow, initially: it hops back and forth, telling the story of Wilberforce, as a fairly well-born and well-connected young Member of Parliament, a forceful orator, able politician, and a good friend of William Pitt the Younger. He is young and dashing, beloved by his friends; even his household staff is fond of him, and accustomed to his eccentricities, among which is a fondness for all kinds of animals not normally considered as pets. He is also extremely and unashamedly devout, and in an effort by his good friend Pitt to find him a cause by which he might serve both God and Mammon (in the form of Pitt’s government)Â he becomes devoted to the cause of abolishing chattel slavery, to the endangerment of his health and sanity.
Among Wilberforces’ first political allies in this effort who are not related to him by blood are the amazingly twisty Lord Charles Fox (Michael Gambon), political genius extraordinaire, and Thomas Clarkson (Rufus Sewell), a scholar with a bent for research and a passion for abolition. They are both given memorably amusing lines of dialogue: really, if I hadn’t seen Cold Comfort Farm, I wouldn’t have thought Rufus Sewell had it in him to be a comic, and sometimes rather touching foil. (He usually gets the rather grim and earnest roles.)
Other noted moments: Ciaran Hinds, as one of the principal opponents to abolishing the slave trade, Lord Tarleton. Recently come from battling those rebellious Americans, he is the representative for Liverpool, and shows off his damaged sword-hand, as a war wound. Most Americans would have dearly loved a very much larger piece out of Banastre Tarleton than that, so he makes a very suitable villain.
And there it is: the movie makes clear what a long and dedicated effort it took to bring this about. For it meant a lot of work; writing, and preaching and persuading, not just of the high and the mighty, but of the ordinary people. Of this are solid, and very real grass-roots movements made, or at least, those of them that last, one person at a time being convinced against their economic self-interests. It does not happen overnight: it takes a while, and if anyone should be seeing this as some sort of politically correct fable, expecting the righteous cause to effortlessly sweep all before it -Â well, this should give pause. People grow old, grow weary and blind, loose their health and their illusions, and die before the cause is won. But when victory comes, it is sweet and just – and one which all can take comfort in, having been brought around by reason and persuasion. And the occasional political sly maneuver.
Money and time well-spent, overall. Not quite as literary as Shakespeare in Love, but not as drearily PC as Amistad. (Blondie says that the male leads are majorly studly and straight, which knocks out a certain theory about actors who can swish about in cloaks and swords and all that.)
So according to this story which has been linked and commented on here and there across the blogosphere may indicate that our dearly beloved theatrical-release movie industry may be making a tight circle around the drain, at least as far as the domestic audience is concerned. They’ve been circling it slowly for years, but this time dare we hope that the end is nigh?
Meh. Maybe, maybe not and cry me a river in any case. I fall squarely into the demographic of that 30% that dislikes the movie selection. Yes, I am well aware of the axiom that 90% of any variety of popular culture sucks, yes I am at that cranky age where I have probably seen or heard a lot of it before. (And that little of it that I haven’t, I don’t want to. Thanks) I know that the movie-audience demographic segments most prized by Hollywood these days are A: Sub-literate, non-English speaking audiences who want to see lots of car-chases, explosions and machine-gun fire, B: pimply-faced American post-adolescent males given to communicating mostly in grunts, who also favor the above-listed cinematic elements and C: Politically correct and heavy-handed wank-fests mostly aimed at each other and a small circle of the self-consciously superior bi-coastal cognoscenti.
Hollywood gets by these days by throwing out multi-million dollar chunks of bloody chum to a large audience who gobble it up by the bucket, meanwhile salvaging their artistic pretensions by cobbling together some precious bit of art-house fluff which is ooh-ed and ahhh-ed over by the critics and all their friends, while the paying domestic audience avoids as if it were made of plutonium. This has the added benefit of allowing them to say scornfully “Really, the domestic audience just can’t handle difficult and challenging film-making! Smithers, fetch me another megabucket of chum for the masses!” (Epic Movie, anyone?)
Yeah, they turned out a regular smorgasbord of the craptacular back in any year you could name, but they also managed to churn out stuff that wasn’t half bad at all: movies with coherent and clever plots, snappy dialogue, fairly adequate performances, and the occasional happy ending… that also weren’t a remake of an older movie, part 8-whatever in some series that stopped being any fun at around part 3, or ripped from the pages of a comic book. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but for chrissake people, I am a grown-up! I stopped reading comic books at about the time my lips stopped moving when I read to myself! Please don’t start telling me about graphic novels. I have a copy of Maus and no, I don’t want to see a movie made out of it. Seriously.
If it weren’t for the lonely 1-2% of stuff produced which doesn’t suck with the force of a factory full of Hoovers, and a fairly agreeable collection of movies produced for cable and broadcast TV— at a mere fraction of the cost and the pretensions involved in theatrical productions — I swear there’d be nothing worth renting on DVD.
Might someone in the heart of dark heart of the Hollywierd beast be paying attention, and worrying about why people are staying away from the megaplex in droves? Possibly… but gloom and doom about falling movie attendance has been lurking around for about twenty years, ever since Michael Medved first began banging on about it in this book, and I haven’t seen any turn-around yet. Count me as one who is not holding my breath waiting for the whole edifice to collapse like a house of cards; not as long as they can go on unloading the buckets of spectacular and sub-literate chum on the overseas market.
In the meantime, I have a nice little second-hand copy of Cold Comfort Farm, with Eileen Atkins, Kate Beckinsale and Stephen Fry and a whole lot of people who can… you know, like act? And it’s got clever dialogue and an amusing plot… and there are no car chases at all. Oh, but the bull gets out and they have to chase after it, but that’s about it.
(Also cross-posted at Blogger News Network)
To: Wm. Arkin, “Military Expert”*
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Stop Digging
1. I take pen in hand, metaphorically speaking after reading your latest apologetic non-apology, to offer some kindly advice: Put down the shovel, step away from the hole and for the love of mike, stop digging. Possibly your editor or kindly-intentioned friends have already told you this. I encourage you to listen to them, as they presumably have your better interests at heart.
2. It is not clear in my mind why you pull down a substantial paycheck and are bylined as a “military expert” *. A single term of enlistment in the early 1970ies is pretty thin qualification, unless there is something more substantial to account for this miracle, since to put it kindly, nothing you have written ever since would lead anyone to confuse you with Ernie Pyle. Or Austin Bay. Or David Hackworth.
3. Try and wrap your mind around this basic contradiction: ever since the war in Afghanistan and Iraq began, those who have generally thought it a good idea and said so have been slammed with the chicken-hawk argument by those who do not see it as a good idea. That is to say “You have no right to support the war unless you are wearing a uniform and/or stationed in the war zone”. So a couple of young troops who are unmistakably wearing a uniform and verifiably serving in Iraq speak up and support the war effort there and you are (as teenagers say) all about saying “Shut up! We pay your salary so we own you, and you don’t have any rights to speak out about the war!” The contradiction is, to say the least, rather amusing, since it suggests that you don’t wish to hear their opinions unless they happen to agree with yours. This can be somewhat of a handicap for a reporter, actually.
4. I am also amused by the air of hurt astonishment which you display upon being confronted by the anger and outrage of those who have taken offense at your deeply insulting terms used to disparage the serving military. A so-called “military expert”* should expect a certain amount of flack in response to using such words as “mercenary”, and telling members of the service that they are lucky they to not treated like war criminals by the public at large. Do you recollect the phrase “Suck it up, hard charger” from your time of service? Apparently not. How about the one about people who can dish it out, but can’t take it?
5. Finally, I think you should take up another by-line, other than “military expert”. You remind me at this point of a veterinarian who despises animals and can’t quite figure out why they keep chomping great chunks of flesh out of him.
6. As always, the * denotes viciously skeptical quote marks.
Sincerely
Sgt Mom
PS – Can I byline myself as a military expert? I’ve been retired for a bit, but at least I can write about the military without pissing them off, and I’ll work for less, also. Think about it. Have your people call my people, or something.
(Cross-posted at Blogger News Network)
While practically everyone in the mil-blogosphere, and the blogosphere in general is lining up and taking turns to thwack the “Piniata o’ The Month”, one William Arkin who is represented to be (admittedly on very thin grounds) the “military expert” for a couple of legacy media outlets who should have known better….
Oh, one of them was the L.A. Times. Never mind. Anyway, I thought the Washington Post might have known better. It’s just that it looks like this doofus’s claim to be a military expert is based on a four-year Army enlistment in the 70ies. According to Hugh Hewitt in this article ‘many of his bylines from the past two decades described him as a “military intelligence analyst” ‘
“Military Intelligence” — Wasn’t that one of those things which was always being sarcastically desribed as a contradiction in terms? Honestly, sometimes these things just write themselves.
More piniata-whacking here, if you have the strength.
I think one of the sadder things about the recent death of columnist Molly Ivins was that the cancer that killed her this week seems to have also killed every scrap of humor in her writing long ago – it’s as if chemo killed the funny bone, too and replaced it with an advanced case of Bush Derangement Syndrome.
Nothing I read after 9/11 had the same panache, the same sort of hilarity and affection for even those she disagreed with politically. It was painful to read, and so I stopped reading her columns, possibly because I dropped a lot of the publications they were printed in. In the shadow of falling towers, magazines like Harpers, or Mother Jones and the local Current (the oh-so preciously politically correct weekly funded by ad revenue from titty bars and kinky personals) just seemed … well, frivolous. They hyperventilated over the same old obsessions and concerns as if nothing had happened at all, and if they so much as acknowledged 9/11 happening at all, well it was just one of those unfortunate things that was really our own fault for one reason or another. An air of antiquation hung over them, as if they were knights in tatty and hand-me-down armor, going through the rote motions of chivalry, holding jousts in the age of cannon. Besides, I got hooked on the internet and began blogging, exchanging one addiction for another.
More »
To: Various
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Response to Various Recent Events:
1. To: Major Legacy Media – Cease pussyfooting around and anoint the Chosen One… that is, the favored Democratic presidential nominee. Try to give the blogosphere a more substantial chew-toy than last time.
2. To Major Legacy Media – additional note. Keep in mind that anyone who has been in politics for longer than the last five minutes has “form”; that is, an established record of votes, speeches, interview, op-eds and appearances on the Sunday morning wank-fests. Contradictions, misstatements and mis-handled jokes will be noted by the blogosphere with every evidence of keen enjoyment. Take notes, try and keep up.
3. To Reuters and the AP news services: I already turn the page, as soon as I see that credit line at the top of the story. I am beginning to think a lot of other people are doing the same.
4. To President Ahmedinajad of Iran; So, punk, how lucky do you really feel?
5. To: Jewish residents of Western Europe, and those few Christian residents left in the Middle East; one word. Emigration
6. To: Those who feel moved by anti-war passions to expend bodily fluids in the general direction of uniformed military personnel; word to the wise. Our toleration of that s**t ran out approximately thirty years ago. The same goes also for businesses whose employees get snippy with military customers for the same reason.
7. To: The Council on Islamic American Relations; We have not noted Hollywood churning out vast quantities of anti-Islamic propaganda, in order to whip up the feelings of us ignorant proles. In fact, quite the reverse. But we have noted that whenever there is an uptick in car-bombs, beheadings, riots, mob violence, hostage-taking and assorted other anti-social activities in the news, the odds are very good that that a guy named Mohammed has been involved one way or another. Good luck with trying to erase this association in our minds.
8. To Ms. Jane Fonda – Please, if you are so damned keen to reprise the glory days of the 1960ies, confine yourself to doing a remake of Barbarella. Please.
Sincerely,
Sgt Mom
If the personal stuff is anything to go by, then 2006 was the year of living dangerously. It’s the year when both my daughter and I cheerfully said “the hell” to what we had been doing for a while, and resolved to pursue what we really wanted. Blondie plunged into college (funded by the GI Bill, and a small VA disability payment), and I exited full-time employment in the pink-collar ghetto with a cheerful face and almost indecent haste. No, really, I think I was given a healthy shove just as I was nerving myself up to jump. Life is too short to spend it looking at the clock and wishing for the work day to end so you can get to the stuff you really want to be doing.
But I look ahead to 2007 with a vague yet unshakeable feeling of dread. I have the feeling that things are happening faster and faster; and that they are well beyond anyone’s ability to control. There have been… is the word “portents” too heavy? Baleful, maybe; like one of those Technicolor Texas sunrises; all purple clouds edged with gold and the sun rising blood-red in smear of pink sky. One thinks of that kind of sunrise as a herald, a red sky as a warning of storms.
The execution of Saddam Hussein is just the most recent of these events; did it not seem to happen very suddenly? The various trials looked to be one of those continuing circuses that would drag on for decades. Saddam would grow fat and old, and his lawyers would quibble, delay and appeal for stays, and he would eventually die of something prosaic like a heart attack, long after anyone ceased to care, except for the last few toothless protest ‘tards waving signs in front of the last few McDonalds’ in Europe. Instead… short walk and a swift drop, thank you very much.
Iran with nukes, and a charismatic leader with apocalyptic visions… and a hard-on for Jew-killing. Not a reassuring combination, all things considered. Consider also that this doesn’t seem to bother the usual UN and Euro protest ‘tards who have a conniption every time an American administration sneezes. The possibility of a mushroom cloud blossoming over Tel Aviv, or Marsailles, or Rome doesn’t seem to keep much more than a handful of us awake at night… Eh, it won’t be a US nuke, so what? They’re the only ones that really matter, apparently.
Even more dispiriting than the possibility of Iran using nuclear materiel for un-peaceful purposes, (which admittedly is only a possibility) is the challenge which has already been conceded, yielded up and surrendered by our mainstream press and so-called intellectual elites. Contemplate how easily and how consistently the flow of AP and Reuters news releases, video and still photography from Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority were slanted by partisan interests. Now there is a dagger in the heart of any pretense at impartiality. Rathergate and See-BS 60 Minutes might have been a one-off, and I’ve been able to avoid watching TV news magazines for years, but AP and Reuters releases are at the heart of local newspapers everywhere, especially those who can’t afford to send a reporter much beyond city limits.
The affair of the Danish Mohammad Cartoons depresses me even more, every time I think on it. For me it is a toss-up which of these qualities is more essential, more central to western society: intellectual openness to discussion and freewheeling criticism of any particular orthodoxy, the separation of civil and religious authority, and the presence of a robust and independent press. The cravenness of most of our legacy media in not publishing or broadcasting the Dread Cartoons o’ Doom still takes my breath away.
They have preened themselves for years on how brave they are, courageous in smiting the dread McCarthy Beast, ending the Horrid Vietnam Quagmire and bringing down the Loathsome Nixon… but a dozen relatively tame cartoons. Oh, dear… we must be sensitive to the delicate religious sensibilities of Moslems. Never mind about all that bold and fearless smiting with the pen, and upholding the right of the people to know, we mustn’t hurt the feelings of people who might blow up the Press Club*. The alacrity with which basic principals were given up by the legacy press in the face of quite real threats does not inspire me with confidence that other institutions will be any more stalwart.
Interesting times, interesting times… as that Chinese curse has it. It would make a great book, though… assuming that we survive it all. A then-obscure poem quoted in a New Years Day broadcast, sixty-eight years ago has a an odd resonance for me this year:
“I said to a man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown,’ and he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than a light and safer than a known way.”
(M.L. Harkins, 1875-1957, quoted by King George VI, 1 January 1940)
(BTW, The new book is shaping up nicely, with practically operatic levels of drama, murder, vengeance, betrayal and stolen children. The proposal for the novel about the Stephens Party is going to be presented by a writer friend of mine to his publisher, so keep fingers crossed on that one!)
* Meaning the MSM, legacy media, lamestream media… which as a national institution seems to be imploding of its’ own weight
We get it. Saddam’s gonna hang. Move along.
Jeez, the talking heads on Fox News are practically salivating.
I have no problem with him being executed, I’m kind of surprised, but I don’t have a problem with it.
I’m kind of creeped out by the whole Death Watch thing.
This is all over the place in one form or another:
The latest U.S. deaths brought the number of members of the U.S. military killed since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003 to at least 2,978 — five more than the number killed in the Sept. 11 attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
Emphasis mine.
Mohammed on a moped, are we really going to start seeing this on a daily basis now? “X amount more than were killed on 9/11?” This is how we’re measuring things?
You know what pisses me off? I know Viet Nam made the reporting of enemy casualties oh so uncouth, and that when it was tried back in 2003 the DoD took huge hits from the media for it. So how come it’s okay for the media to report daily, almost hourly, on OUR dead? What makes that okay? How come their dead are sacred and ours are fodder?
I’ve been following the AP-Captain Jamail Hussein-Sock-Puppet imbroglio with somewhat less than my usual vicious interest in the follies of the MSM for two reasons: one, I’m distracted by the entrancements of the 19th century, and two, I’ve been pounding on this over the last two or three years, and I’m really, really tired of repeating myself.
It’s become pretty damned clear to us news junkies that depending on local stringers in certain areas of conflict, unrest or just generally feelings of bad karma was a shaky construction for a news entity who still wished to maintain some pretension of impartiality. The list of news-producing areas— those places which generate an inordinate number of headlines and passionate concern — where the crystalline flow of pure information has been tainted by the sewage of partisan interest has always been long. In my youth it included practically every news organization behind the Iron or Bamboo curtain; of course, the news bureau of a Communist state was slanting, censoring, bending folding and mutilating the news, and you were an idiot or a college professor of the Marxist bent if you didn’t know it and apply salt to taste.
Add to that now any coverage of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, southern Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, and hefty chunks of the Middle East by entities like Reuters, AP, CNN, France 2, the BBC, 60 Minutes…. Well, you get the idea. There isn’t a chunk of salt big enough to take away the taste of krep when partisan journalism masquerades as impartial newsgathering.
And what is the reaction of formerly trustworthy purveyors of news, upon having been repeatedly busted for falsifying pictures, for use of incompetently faked documents, staged footage and outright lies, pissing away decades or more of accumulated credibility? Oddly enough, it appears to follow a progression rather like the five stages of grief: denial, followed by anger, followed by bargaining, depression and finally acceptance.
AP, as an aggregate news distributor has the most to lose when busted for credibility. It is not just one channel, or one reporter, like CNN or the egregious Dan Rather, but it feeds stories to newspapers world wide. It’s an authoritative higher power, kind of like the Pope. To have thousands of readers across the US open their various daily papers, see a story from Whereverthehellistan credited to the AP, and to realize that all of them are thinking, derisively “Whotta load!” and turning the page must be a bitter pill indeed for AP’s management. Hence the denial and the anger directed at those pesky bloggers who raised questions about the AP’s Baghdad Sock-puppet o’the Month, Captain Jamail Hussein. After all, we might start wondering about how many other sock-puppet sources feature other AP stories… or how many featured in the past.
Anyone else see AP’s credibility and profitability , flaming up and collapsing in ruin like a journalistic Hindenburg, if readers begin putting the AP brand on par with those supermarket tabs that always have stories about alien abductions, monkey-human babies and antique airplanes on the moon?
Give Reuters credit, at least their management zipped through the cycle to acceptance, in pulling suspect pictures from their archives. They can see the writing on the wall clear enough, and what they will loose by no longer being credible. But Dan Rather is still stuck in the bargaining phase, and it looks like AP is mining rich veins of denial.
I love the smell of desperation in the morning…. It smells like victory. Or maybe it’s just those weird pine-scented aromatherapy candles my daughter insists on burning.
…I would assume that Fox set up the entire Fox Entertainment vs Fox News battle over the OJ thing on purpose just to show how brave and principled they are. ‘Cuz seriously, everyone from Cavuto to Hannity are breaking their freaking arms patting themselves on the back for that thing being cancelled.
So I am tired in the wake of the midterm election, and have problems of my own… partially employed being one of them, and waiting to hear from the semi-interested agent if the latest book has a chance to rest in a publisher’s in-box rather than the unnoticed slush-pile being one of the others, and we can’t afford to go to Mom and Dad’s for Christmas this year, Spike the shih-tzu still isn’t housebroken and everything in my house that hasn’t been shredded by a cat has been pissed on by a dog. On top of this I have had to endure a week of non-stop, full-bore balls to the wall gloating by the so very, very superior and knowledgeable intellects at NPR …. Really, it’s enough to make one think seriously about being a hermit and canceling every subscription to every slightly to the left of center publication I have ever had… except that a lot of them were left to lapse after 9/11. Or they went out of business. Hello, Brills’ Content! Hello, Spy! … Where are you, now that we really need you!!!??? Harpers”? Ugh, there was Mom’s old quandary about Harpers’ or Atlantic— one or the other and couldn’t decide, so took both— 9/11 decided for us; up yours with a garden hose, Lewis Lapham, you nasty and arrogant old snob. Goodbye to Mother Jones, to Utne Reader, to the local edition of Current— a publication dedicated to progressive and politically correct -thinking, but apparently supported by the ad revenue generated from tittie bars and dubious personals. Ce la guerre.
Time and Newsweek may fall of themselves soon… news that is a week old by the time it is printed seems like two weeks old to someone accustomed to scouting the internet. There may be a reason for them to exist these days, but damned if I can think of it. I can give them both up, as easily as the paladins of our free press surrendered the right of the people to know when it came to the Danish Mohammed cartoons. Man, they folded on that one faster than the French Army folded to the Germans in 1940. Even the French put up a bit of a fight way back then, but not so our fearless news media, with one or two honorable exceptions. If anything, the last couple of years have proved that fearless, unbiased and principled dedication to reporting all the news that is fit to print is as optional for our legacy media as underwear is to Paris Hilton. The same old media slime-balls— reporters and sources —- keep popping up, again and again like unsavory and un-flushable bits of sewage.
No matter how many times they are caught out, debunked, corrected, displayed before the public as complete idiots, they’re back like Freddy the Slasher. Dan Rather just won’t go the hell away, neither will Sy Hersh, we’ll never hear the end of the famous plastic turkey, Daniel Schorr, the Eyore of NPR is tiresomely still afflicting a newsroom… someone still pays Robert Fisk, although god knows why. No, it’s all enough to make me extremely tired, to know that all these and more are eagerly planning to cover naked truth with another expedient print petticoat.
And then to look away, and pretend they didn’t see a thing.
“”I am hurt, but I am not slain;
I’ll lay me down and bleed a while,
And then I’ll rise and fight again.”
To: New Yorker Magazine
From: Sgt. Mom
Re: Seymour Hersh’s Lecture Circuit
1. For nearly as long as I have been paying attention to news in general, Mr. Hersh has been represented to the public at large as a fearless and principled investigative reporter, with connections and sources in the corridors of power that lesser mortals can only dream of, and gnash their teeth in helpless envy to contemplate. After all, he won ( insert portentous drum-roll here) a Pulitzer Prize for breaking the story of the My Lai Massacre – never mind that a veteran and minor journalist named Ron Ridenhour had already done much of the legwork, tracking down the source of ugly rumors that he had heard as a GI, locating and interviewing many key witnesses.
2. Mr. Hersh has since gone on from strength to strength in his journalistic endeavors, culminating in his employment at your hallowed establishment. Funny thing, though: none of his more current journalistic scoops are usually cited when he is introduced, perhaps because of the suspicion that his “sources” over the years are feeding him questionable data for their own purposes. Or that his journalistic crystal ball sees but murkily these last few decades; he has proposed for example that the US was deeply involved in the Soviet shoot-down of KAL Flight 007, and that the war in Afghanistan was toppling into the deep abyss of failure-quagmire-gloom-despair-and-misery. This last magisterial judgment had the ill-luck to be published just before Taliban rule collapsed like a wet paper bag, inspiring at least one wit to comment that Mr. Hersh was an invaluable source for knowing what was really going on— in that in hindsight, he was invariably wrong.
3. Over the last five years, Mr. Hersh has chosen to spread the blessings of his special insights to a wider and more uncritical audience on the lecture circuit. Like some unsavory chunk of solid waste, he has popped to the surface of the slightly-less-than-mainstream-media-sewer in the same week that John Kerry clumsily maligned the education and intelligence of those currently serving in Iraq and by extension in today’s military. Senator Kerry has been savagely mocked for appearing to forget that there is no draft any more and the military today is for damn sure not the military that he condescended to grace with his presence forty years ago. Mr. Hersh, who appears to also be stuck in a similar meme and time, is currently improving the idle hour by lecturing receptive audiences on the endless series of ghastly atrocities being perpetrated by American forces in Iraq, describing in loving detail, assorted crimes of massacre, rape, sodomy and torture .
4. Strangely, for a hard-charging investigative journalist, he is a little short on the actual specific details of these incidents, or any of those described in other lectures – say, a specific time, place, unit or other disinterested witnesses. Corroborative information is a little thin on the ground; a curious omission, considering the numbers of personnel who have rotated in and out of country and the military, NGO busy-bodies, other media outlets and other investigative reporters desirous of winning a Pulitzer. But Mr. Hersh insists that he has listened to tapes, taken phone calls, seen the documents – but of course, he can’t share these with the audience, for some reason, can’t publish the specifics and most certainly has not shared what he knows with those who would be rightfully charged with investigating such crimes. How very convenient – and recalls Senator Joe McCarthy, with his so-called incriminating and ever-changing little list which he kept in his pocket and waved around when he needed to intimidate the doubters.
5. This particular story quoted him indirectly saying that if Americans knew the full extent of U.S. criminal conduct, they would receive returning Iraqi veterans as they did Vietnam veterans. Well since so many of the so-called Vietnam atrocity stories turned out to be fraudulent and related by equally fake veterans, I wish Mr. Hersh and the rest of the legacy media the best of luck getting that to happen. In these days of google searches, internet access, e-mail and mil-blogs, we can fact-check all kinds of fakes now: fake veterans, fake atrocities – even fake investigative reporters, in a way that we couldn’t forty years ago. Jesse McBeth, anyone?
6. Seriously, have you ever considered suggesting a career change to Mr. Hersh, since the actual investigative reporting thing may be played out? Walmart greeter, perhaps? Just a thought.
Sincerely
Sgt Mom
(Previous Memo regarding Mr. Hersh here)
To: CNN News Director
From: Sgt. Mom
Re: Jihadi Sniper Video Broadcast
1. I am resisting the impulse to install viciously skeptical quote marks around the “Broadcast Standards” portion of the title to this post, mostly as it screws up the formatting and ability to post comments. So, consider them installed, as an indicator of my own viciously skeptical attitude towards your “broadcast standards” in airing selected portions of the snuff video provided to your news department through undeniably murky channels.
2. And good job on bringing jihadi death porn to a greater audience. Carrying the bag for propagandists is in the finest journalistic tradition of a Walter Duranty, and exactly what we have come to expect of an organization that kept quiet about Saddam Hussein’s regime rather than lose the CNN bureau in Baghdad.
3. Congratulations also on continuing in the fine “journalistic” tradition established by Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace in that long-ago broadcast of “Ethics in America” where in the immortal words of James Fallows: “Wallace seemed unembarrassed about feeling no connection to the soldiers in his country’s army or considering their deaths before his eyes “simply a story.”
4. Enlighten us: Is it more, less, or equally scummy to imbed one of your own reporters with the enemy and video American soldiers being ambushed and gunned down… or just to buy the video from the Al-Quaeda camera jockeys?
5. Realizing that CNN is engaged with the wider world audience, as opposed to merely and only us hopelessly tacky and déclassé Americans, I can only suppose whoever authorized airing the jihadi sniper video spent a whole three or four seconds considering the feelings of the families of those service personnel, and their comrades who are shown being targeted. That delicacy on your part is much appreciated. However, the next CNN crew to visit an US military base in pursuit of a story may receive a somewhat frosty reception.
Sincerely
Sgt Mom
I know that I am leaping into this very late – after all, it was so like whatever – last weeks’ tempest du blog, the kerfuffle as regards the two journalists kidnapped at gunpoint in Gaza, and forced to win their release by being videoed avowing their conversion to the Islamic faith – at gunpoint. But I have been spending this week, buried in the 19th Century, in a snow camp in the Sierras, writing about imminent starvation, and perils that – well, to me this week, were a little more present in my mind. I’m focused on the next book, ‘kay? Being that I grew up in a world that was more than half convinced that Omigawd! the dirty Commies would rain down nuclear annihilation on us all , and now residing in one where even less-well-adjusted parties are freely brandishing a nuclear threat – well being stuck in the Sierra Nevada with dwindling food supplies and no rescue in sight seemed to have the charm of the unusual, as well as being – well, somewhat more manageable. In the 19th Century, one seems mostly to have had a little more time to consider the news cycle, as it were, and to proceed thoughtfully and deliberately down whatever paths of thought were presented to one. I am still buried in a mind-set which took a written letter a whole year to move from Monterey or Los Angeles, to the Middle West. I assure you, the 19th Century has certain discreet charms, once you adjust to a slower pace.
The resulting kerfuffle with representative opposing parties sounding forth, here (David Warren) and here (Captain Ed) seems to devolve around not so much the actual conversion, but the reluctance of the parties involved, to make clear they had been under duress, and/or denounce their treatment. Depending on whom you take sides with, it was either an understandable ruse to gain their freedom and lives – or the most horrible of capitulations, with serious of ramifications imaginable in the much-storied Seething Moslem Street – and then there are people like me, in the middle of the road, like the storied yellow stripes and dead armadillos, saying “But yes, to save their lives – but on the other hand, doesn’t that send some sort of signal – do you think? And what happens, next time – and what about -? –
Because, you see, it’s all about what you’ll give up, when someone points a gun at you. And as to what you’ll do in that circumstance, the truth of it is no one really knows what they would do. All we know is that other people have done, in some analogous situation. And some of those people have been most amazingly brave, have exhibited a degree of heroism and moral clarity that approaches – well something beyond what we have come to think of as merely human. And some people have been craven, and most of the rest of us have muddled through, and the great unifying principal of this kind of moral score-keeping is that one really never knows for sure, until one has actually faced the experience.
A story, from the Warsaw Ghetto, c1942-43: a party of German soldiers, SS or Gestapo, or whatever, amuse themselves by going into the Ghetto and make sport with the Jewish prisoners in it (and they were prisoners by the time of this story) by going to a coffee-shop next to a synagogue, rounding up the patrons and holding them at gun-point, while they ransack the synagogue and bring out the Torah. One by one and at gunpoint, they order each of the coffee-shop patrons to desecrate the Torah. One by one, each of them does: old-fashioned devout Jew, or modern and secular intellectual, young or old, each of the coffee-shop patrons does what they are bidden to do by the men who are holding guns at their heads, who have given every indication that they will shoot any Jew who refuses. Shamed, unthinking, embarrassed or otherwise, the coffee shop patrons do as they are bidden by the men who hold guns at their heads. Until they get to the one man, who is neither devout, nor intellectual – but he is modern, in that he is a notorious gangster, and has been for most of his life. A bad hat, a criminal, a dissolute menace, a frequent and enthusiastic violator of the laws of man and God – and when in his turn he is ordered to desecrate the Torah, he looks at them calmly and says, “I’ve done many things in my life – but I won’t do that.” He is immediately executed, at point-blank range. Alone of all the cafe patrons, he had an idea of what he wouldn’t do – and something innate led him to refuse, absolutely.
So, what would any of us give up at the point of a gun? Wallet, or handbag – absolutely. PIN? For sure. We’ve been told over and over, those are only things. You notify the bank and put a stop on the cards, get a replacement drivers’ license. All that stuff, sure, they can be replaced. Car keys? Jewelry ? Yeah, those too. That’s what insurance is for.
Slightly tougher question: They point a gun at you and say – “Give us the kid.” Or maybe “I’m taking the woman.” Or maybe, if you are a women, the person with the gun ties your hands and says “Don’t make a fuss.” Do you give them the kid, or the woman, or come along without making a fuss?
Now, the big question: what intangibles would you give up, under threat of violence, civil, nuclear or whatever?
We’ve already seen how swiftly most of our legacy media, newspapers and television stations quickly redefined intellectual freedom, in the wake of the Affair of the Danish Cartoons. The swiftness with which they capitulated to threats of violence if the cartoons were published , after decades of posing as fearless champions of the public’s right to know at any price was revealing. And cause for some dismay, for we are left to wonder what other concessions might be extorted in future by a nuclear threat – and that some of our most cherished traditions, principals, laws and allies would be yielded up with dispiriting speed by those whom we had expected to show a little more spine.
So, was there any particular reason to watch Katie Couric’s anchor debut on See-BS News?
I didn’t have one, but if you did, share with the class. Be informative, amusing and vicious…all three, if possible.
I guess it’s spreading but I got it from SondraK’s.
Memo: To Big Mainstream Media
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Can you hear me now?
In order of no special importance, I offer the following observations, with no special expectation of having them acted upon whatsoever, but more as a memo for the record, should any of you begin wondering at your crashing readership and/or media share.
1. A glamour-shot of a six-year old child, decked out in a teensy evening gown, sultry eye make-up and glistening lipstick is disturbing on a lot of mostly icky levels. Halloween is the only day of the year that a pre-pubertal person ought to be caught dead in lipstick. That such pictures of the late J. Ramsey are now plastered all over more than the supermarket tabs, and an insane amount of attention being paid to a ten year old murder case and a bizarre false confession indicates that a lot of media people share Mr. Karr’s unhealthy fascination with same. Ick, people, really. Ick.
2. Have any of your editors and bureau chiefs realized that practically every word and picture coming from local stringers and photogs in so-called Palestine, and Hezbollah-Land is either a lie— including “and” and “the”— or badly photoshopped? Or, what is even scarier for your credibility—- expertly photoshopped?
3. Are any of your reporters, dispatched at great expense and personal inconvenience to those areas aware of a subspecies of news event called a “dog and pony show”, and are they willing to entertain the suspicion that other bodies than the Bush administration may, in fact, be producing them? That thing in the corner, over there, with the spikes in the blunt end? It’s called a clue bat. Please thwack yourselves on the head with it a couple of times. Thank you.
4. Well, after having covered yourselves with glory over Hurricane Katrina, by repeating the most horrible of unverified and unverifiable rumors, over and over and over again, allowing the most ignorant and unsubstantiated statements to go unchallenged, and allowing a lot of absolutely heroic efforts and stories to pass practically unremarked… the reason we should continue paying attention to you at all would be? BTW, my own parents were burned out of their house in the Valley Center fire. Exactly one year later, they had managed to get the concrete pad cleaned off, and new exterior conblock walls put up. They were fully insured, and had lots of help, but it’s going on three years now, and even though they are moved in and the house is complete, there is still a lot of work left to do. Please keep this in mind, when you lament the slow pace of rebuilding in New Orleans and in the Gulf Coast. Just because they can rebuild a house in a week on one of those home renovation shows, doesn’t mean it happens that way in the real world. And blaming the federal government for everything about the damned hurricane starting to wear really, really thin.
5. So it was Dick Armitage who blew Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA employee to wossname, Novak! Well, (Gomer Pyle voice here) sur-prise, sur-prise, surprise! I’ve always thought it was an open secret on inside-the-beltway cocktail party gossip anyway, but thanks for sharing it with us peons outside Washington. I do want back every day of those three years of my life that I had to hear about Plamegate, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Yellowcake and Niger (pronounced Knee-gere, of course) Fitzmas, and the whole pack of nothing, though.
6. Dan Rather’s TANG memos, Katie Courics’ hips… a connection, you think?
Sincerely
Sgt. Mom