Recently in WWII Category
"The free men of the world are marching together to victory. I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory. Good luck, and let us all beseech the blessings of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking." -- Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, June 6, 1944. And, while remembering fallen heroes, today is also the 64th anniversary of D-Day.
A busy day traffic-wise here at GitM: In a speech before the Knesset today, Dubya compared Obama to Sen. William Borah of Idaho (and not in complimentary fashion, although that case could be made too.) Here's GWB: "Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is –- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."
Now, as it turns out, Sen. Borah was the subject of my undergraduate thesis and features prominently in my dissertation. So, notwithstanding the self-serving idiocy and sad invoking of Godwin's Law in Dubya's words, I do want to take a moment to defend Sen. Borah, before -- just as Philip Roth Cheneyed up Burton Wheeler -- he disappears down the memory hole and is reinvented as simply a kneejerk reactionary. (I know Dubya brought him up to bash as a weak-kneed surrender-monkey, but I've also read several left-leaning comments out and about today that make note that Borah was a Republican, and thus belongs in Dubya's camp. He really doesn't.)
However wrong he was about Hitler in his final years, and obviously he was very, very wrong (although not perhaps as wrong as George Prescott Bush), Sen. Borah is neither the apostle of appeasement nor the GOP stooge that Dubya and folks pushing back would respectively make him out to be today. With La Follette and Johnson, Borah was one of the leading progressives in the Senate for decades, and one of its strongest civil liberties advocates in the years after World War I. In fact, if Dubya wants to ponder aloud the words of Borah, may I suggest the following?
The men who are destroying American institutions and who are a menace to American principles are not the ‘reds,’ nor the anarchistic...but rather the men who, professing like Augustus the Great, to preserve our Constitution, are subtly and with sinister and selfish purposes, undermining them.
" -- Borah to Frank Morrison, 1921.But, civil liberties aside, what should we take from Sen. Borah's unfortunate remarks about Hitler (which he made at the age of 75, less than a year before his death?) Well, to me, it might suggest that age can cloud the judgement of all of us, even long-standing Senate mavericks much-beloved by the media. It's just a good thing that ancient, venerable lion of the Senate didn't win the election of 1936, eh?
"Cheering and screaming! Every Sunday I would cheer and scream for what?! How can they do this! 13-3 and home field advantage and they lost to the f**king New York Giants!...ELI SUCKS!" How did William Shirer miss this? As seen at TNR: From deep within his bunker, Adolf Hitler laments the Dallas Cowboys' season. Perhaps in poor taste, as jokes making light of the Nazis often are, but still, I found this pretty doggone funny. (And it brought back fond memories of Mr. Bimmler.)
So, sorry to regale y'all with another long-winded, bloviating political post only two entries after the last one. But Ted of The Late Adopter asked an important follow-up to my comments on David Greenberg's Obama piece and public-interest progressivism, namely: "If FDR, Stevenson, the Kennedys all spoke with the rhetoric of citizenship, when did the Democrats stop? With Johnson? Carter? During the 80s while trying to oppose Reagan?" And, while trying to respond in the comment section, I apparently blathered on so long that I broke the site. ("Access Denied with Code 406....severity [EMERGENCY]") So, I'm posting my response as an entry instead (and there's precedent for this anyway, as when Scully and I discussed the space program a few years ago.) So, if you find this all ponderous and insufferable, feel free to skip down to the previous entry, where I raved on at equal length about Todd Haynes' I'm Not There (10/10!) And I promise to get back to more concise entries again soon...
| "Hmm, good question, Ted. Let me take a crack at it in the long-winded, digression-filled, multiple-answer manner we've been trained into. :) First, while I don't think he's entirely comfortable with the Sandelian argument I'm making here, our mutual advisor posits one answer to this question in The End of Reform: This all began in earnest during WWII, when two things occurred. [1] The financial and productive power of Big Business became absolutely integral to the success of the war effort (thus there was less of a rationale for opposing corporate power in political life), and [2] Politicians and economists discovered in boom times and Keynesianiam that they could "grow the pie," economically speaking, rather than be forced to choose a best way to carve it up. So, the civic-minded questions of political economy that dominated the early New Deal fell by the wayside. Obviously, Adlai and the brothers Kennedy come after WWII, so that in itself is not a complete answer. So I'd add the following trends: * 1968. Like 1919-1920, when the strike wave, the race riots, the Red Scare, the failure at Versailles, and various other traumatic events -- the tail-end of the influenza wave, the death of TR, the Black Sox scandal, the widespread exposure to Freudianism, Einstein's theory of relativity, and literary/artistic modernism, the recent Bolshevik revolution, and the Great War itself -- all conspired to create great anxiety and help overturn the existing order, I would argue that the events of 1968 irrevocably rent the social fabric of the nation. It became especially hard for anyone after '68 to talk about a civic project or a common public interest when America was divided so badly between left and right, black and white -- rifts that Republicans like Nixon and Reagan would exploit to their advantage with the Southern strategy and veiled rhetoric about "law and order" -- particularly when those leaders who did it best were gunned down in their prime. (This "culture war" is one of the same obstacles the progressives face in the '20s, with the Red Scare, Scopes, Prohibition, the KKK, etc.) It also became problematic to speak in the language of citizenship when it was now well beyond clear that [a] women, African-Americans, and other minorities had been and were being treated in the civic culture as second-class citizens, and [b] the main civic project which the government was then asking its citizens to become engaged in was the war in Vietnam, which didn't make a whole lot of sense. * GENERATIONS. While both the early New Left (see the Port Huron Statement) and the early civil rights movement (see King, in the original entry) have strong civic, and even Emersonian, components, both Sixties protest groups and the general mood of politics eventually swung over into the rhetoric of individualistic, rights-based liberalism. Meanwhile, the New Right, in its opposition to the New Deal and Great Society, also abandoned to a large extent the language of citizenship and virtue and made an appeal based on individual freedom as opposed to a corrupt, socialistic central government. (For an excellent civic-conservative reaction to this shift, see George Will's 1983 book Statecraft as Soulcraft, the best thing he's ever written.) Stevenson and the Kennedys were of the WWII generation, and -- while I loathe the term "greatest generation," unless you find something inherently great about training fire hoses on small children -- they were more comfortable with the civic, "we're all in it together" appeal of an earlier time. The appeal held less water with the much more skeptical Boomer generation, and, as the political culture embraced the individualistic liberalism/liberation of the late sixties and early seventies, with the nation at large. (You could argue Carter tried to make a civic argument on the energy question, and he was basically laughed out of the room.) Boomer politicians of either party -- the Clintons, the Bushes -- just aren't as comfortable making civic-minded, public-interest arguments as their forbears. It's not how they see the game is played. This is also due to: * WATERGATE, GATEGATE. From Vietnam to (particularly) Watergate to bureaucratic bloat to Iran-Contra to the fiascos of today, Americans have experienced a severe diminuition in what we believe government is and should be capable of. This open-eyed skepticism about centralized power should be a good thing, but not if we throw out the baby with the bathwater. You know how Richard said "a withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy?" Irony isn't only the shackles of youth, it's the shackles of our politics as well. There's other things going on too. Not to get all Caro up in here, but LBJ, I think, was inherently uncomfortable making civic arguments as well (unless he was appropriating them, a la "We shall overcome.") His view, shaped as it was by the exigencies of local Texas politics and his days running the Senate, was that everything ultimately boiled down to self-interest. (This partly explains how he could screw up Vietnam so badly. Eventually he thinks about buying off Ho Chi Minh with a TVA-style system of dams for the Mekong Delta, not realizing that Ho -- and North Vietnam -- are persevering in part because they've committed to an ideal more important to them then self-interest: national independence, a cause they felt they'd been fighting for for thousands of years.) But, perhaps most important to note, I think it's fair to say that one reason the rhetoric of citizenship went out of style was because: * THE PATTERN WAS FLAWED, for all the reasons I said above. If I was a guy growing up in Chicago, Mississippi, or anywhere else, and I was being treated as a second-class citizen by the white power structure, either by being denied the right to vote or being snubbed out of quality jobs or housing, and then I was told my civic duty was to go die in Southeast Asia for lousy reasons (while the Dick Cheneys of the world piled up deferments), I might turn against the civic project too. If I was a woman who was told my civic duty basically amounted to finding a good man, keeping his stomach full and his house clean, and punching out healthy, patriotic American children, I'd rebel against this flawed social order as well. In short, the post-WWII, Cold War-obsessed civic culture of the 1950s and early 1960s was stifling and half-baked. It basically told citizens that their civic obligation was to buy as much as possible, to not consort with Reds, and, most importantly, to not cause any trouble. It needed to be broken up and reconfigured. (The progressives of the 1920s come to this conclusion as well, when they see how easily Wilsonian public-interest rhetoric enables the Red Scare (thus letting people on the Right brand every possible progressive program as "Bolshevik.") This is why some of the most civic-minded Progressives -- Jane Addams, for example -- play a major part in the creation of the ACLU.) Here we get to the inherent problems with arguments that rely on civic-mindedness and appeals to citizenship. For one, a public interest that treats certain citizens as second-class is inherently and fatally flawed. Look at the early New Left -- for all its progressive inclinations and civic-mindedness on paper and even in practice, it still basically treated women like the help. (See SNCC and Stokely Carmichael: "The only position for women in SNCC is prone.") Plus, as a general rule of human nature, groups of people working together tend to desire conformity and despise independence, no matter what their political inclinations. This is as much a failing of the Left as it is the Right. (See Animal Farm, Dylan plugging in at Newport, etc.) Also, here the coercion problem in civic strands of political thought rears its head -- Rousseau's social compact forcing people to be free, and all that. An argument made on the basis of citizenship presumes coercion -- citizens are expected to do this (vote, serve in the military, be informed about public matters) and not do that (drink, hang with Communists, etc.) Coercion isn't necessarily a problem in and of itself -- I think everyone agrees citizens should not kill, own slaves, etc. -- but [1] telling people they have to do anything goes against the view of absolute individual freedom enthroned today, and [2] coercion invariably leads to conformity. which is ultimately the avowed enemy of republican government, which both relies on and should promote individual excellence. How do we get around this Gordian knot? My answer (which, not surprisingly, was also the answer of many of the Progressives) rests with Emerson. As I just said, an argument based on citizenship presupposes inculcating a certain virtue into citizens. But what if that virtue was individuality (not the same as individualism) and independence? The ability to think for oneself, the freedom to grow and innovate, and then the inclination to come back to the circle of citizens, share what you've learned, and deliberate about the public good? Emerson argues that we express our consent to government by expressing our dissent with government. If republican government is going to reach its full potential, it needs a community of independent-minded nonconformists. This is the type of citizenship a progressive candidate could and should get behind. And the Progressives did promote it -- People always read Herbert Croly as an apologist for strong, centralized government, but this isn't quite right. Decades before he got into poltics, Croly was an architecture critic -- he was deeply concerned about art and aesthetics, and was trying to fashion a political architecture that would help individuals to thrive. At the end of The Promise of American Life (p. 414), Croly talks about what's he's been aspiring to create: "A national structure which encourages individuality as opposed to mere particularity is one which creates innumerable special niches, adapted to all degrees and kinds of individual development." For him the "Jeffersonian ends" of individuality and improvement were as important as the "Hamiltonian means" of a strong central government. Ok, to step away from Planet Theory and get back to our real world: How would progressive-minded candidates of today work towards this new civic fabric? Well, first and most importantly, they would have to reconceive today's liberal arguments in civic, progressive terms, to stop using the language of consumer choice and individual freedom -- which plays so easily into the hands of corporate power and the small-government Right -- like a crutch and bring back the language of citizenship and a shared narrative/vision/history that brings people together. The civic idea is so desiccated at the moment, for all the reasons mentioned in the original post, that just hearkening to its continued existence would be an immense step in the right direction (as well as a huge political boon for the Left regardless.) From there, progressives, like their counterparts a century ago, would have to work to fix a broken system. This means campaign finance and lobbying reform, doing what we can to ensure that unwashed money doesn't corrupt the system as horribly as it does now, and that dollars don't speak louder than people. As important here is voting reform. The voting system in our nation is absolutely abysmal. I refuse to believe that a country that can give almost every supermarket or store an ATM and almost every person a cellphone and iPod must be reduced to semi-functioning punchcard booths or electronic voting that can't create a paper trail. And the long lines we see on every election day are patently shameful. Election Day should be a holiday (why not?), we should move to weekend voting, we should establish a Marshall plan to get every county in America an operating voting system, or something. Also, I doubt mandatory voting would ever work in this country, but what about tax incentives, or more likely public-private partnerships to encourage turnout? (Thanks for voting -- here's your free sundae at McDonalds and 20% off your next purchase at Borders.) The people who say this would be tantamount to bribing folks to vote are usually the people who don't want voters showing up at the polls. Today's progressives should also look to education. The (Bill) Clinton model of adult, lifelong education is a step in the right direction, but what's missing is the civic component. Civics is deader than dead in our high schools and colleges, so on the most basic level that needs to be emphasized. But, equally importantly, we need to reemphasize the skills key to republican government: critical thinking, deliberation, etc. (Dare I say it, reading.) From an early age we all need to learn how to sift through information to reach a critically informed opinion, to ask the right questions about the information being presented to us, and -- perhaps most importantly -- to learn how to engage with people who disagree with us in a constructive fashion. And, a civic-minded progressive would continually look to our shared past and our shared future to bring Americans together. This would mean not only basking in but owning up to our collective past -- say, adding a National Museum of Slavery to the Mall. It would also mean engaging in great civic projects which would bind the nation in common purpose (one of the many reasons I believe in the necessity of the space program.) Some might argue that I'm on crack for thinking that campaign finance reform, civics classes, a slavery museum, and/or a trillion-dollar space program is going to change what's wrong with America. And, no, these aren't sufficient. But, as I said in the original post, the story is everything. If our leaders help us reconceive our view of the government -- to remind us that the government is an expression of our shared values and ambitions as citizens -- then we can begin to look at other problems differently. If we're all in it together, the continued existence of child poverty, or the woeful lack of health insurance for many, here in the richest nation on Earth becomes that much more unacceptable. I'm not naive enough to believe that embracing civic progressivism or adopting the rhetoric of citizenship is going to change the country immediately, that money is suddenly going to disappear from our political process thanks to one new law, or that the next iteration of American's civic fabric will be bereft of the types of discrimination in evidence in the 1860s, 1920s, 1960s and beyond. But, to borrow from Cornel West, "To understand your country, you must love it. To love it, you must, in a sense, accept it. To accept it as how it is, however is to betray it. To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that in it which shows what it might become. America - this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of the no into the yes, needs citizens who love it enough to reimagine and remake it." To put the same argument another way, there's a scene in The Princess Bride where our hero Westley (Cary Elwes) and the princess Buttercup (Robin Wright Penn) are on the run and looking for safety in the dastardly and invariably fatal Fire Swamp. "We'll never survive," bemoans Buttercup, to which Westley responds: "You're only saying that because no one ever has." That pretty much sums up how I feel about a lot of things, including progressivism in politics. Does true love exist? I dunno. Lord knows it hasn't seemed like it, and I've been kicked in the teeth often enough at this point to think not. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't live my life as if it could happen. Same with this view of civic progressivism. David Greenberg may be right that civic-minded candidates have done pretty poorly in recent history, but that doesn't mean the principle is flawed, or that we should stop trying. And, besides, to jump over to another fantasy classic, you don't wear the ring -- you destroy the ring. So I'd rather stake my claim with the public interest progressives, even if that doesn't play as well as all the blatant appeals to self-interest, than get all Boromir up in here and start acting like Republican-lite, which all too many of our party frontrunners have been doing these past few years. |
As Claus von Stauffenberg, Col. Tom Cruise (sporting a funky, funky eyepatch, man) plots to kill Adolf Hitler in the new trailer for Bryan Singer's Valkryie, also starring Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Terence Stamp, and Eddie Izzard. Hmmm, maybe.
Pilot of the Enola Gay, Paul Tibbets, 1915-2007. "He never apologized for unleashing the devastating explosive force and insidious nuclear radiation that leveled more than two-thirds of the buildings in Hiroshima and killed at least 80,000 people, and perhaps as many as 127,000...'I never lost a night's sleep over it,' Tibbets said...He said he wasn't proud of all the death and destruction and Hiroshima, but he was proud that he did his job well. 'I didn't start the war,' he said. 'I didn't do anything except what I was told to do; what I had sworn to do, years before, which is "Fight for the defense of this country."'"
"'Inhumane deeds should be fully acknowledged,' said Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee...'The world awaits a full reckoning of history from the Japanese government.'" The House passes a resolution calling for Japan to apologize for its WWII "comfort women" program. [Text.] "Lawmakers want an apology similar to the one the U.S. government gave to Japanese-Americans forced into internment camps during World War II. That apology was approved by Congress and signed into law by President Reagan in 1988." Well, I'm all for offically recognizing historical sins in the past -- *cough* slavery *cough* -- but, unfortunately, no mention was made in this bill of our own possible complicity in Imperial Japan's ugly system of forced prostitution. The resolution might carry more rhetorical force if it did.
"'As expected, after it opened it was elbow to elbow,' the history says. 'The comfort women...had some resistance to selling themselves to men who just yesterday were the enemy, and because of differences in language and race, there were a great deal of apprehensions at first. But they were paid highly, and they gradually came to accept their work peacefully.'" The continuing furor in Asia over Japan's ignominious use of "comfort women" (re: forced prostitution) during WWII reaches America, as it comes to light that occupation Japan created a similar "comfort system" for American GI's in the year after the war (until MacArthur shut it down in the spring of 1946.) "An Associated Press review of historical documents and records shows American authorities permitted the official brothel system to operate despite internal reports that women were being coerced into prostitution. The Americans also had full knowledge by then of Japan's atrocious treatment of women in countries across Asia that it conquered during the war...Although there are suspicions, there is not clear evidence non-Japanese comfort women were imported to Japan as part of the program."
Ollie, you should've stayed at home yesterday. Conservative radio host and Iran-Contra embarrassment Oliver North gets in a tussle with the Smithsonian over his attempt to film a segment on the Enola Gay for a forthcoming Fox News show, "From the Manhattan Project to Tehran." (The Smithsonian has secured what admittedly sounds like a rather shady exclusive deal, for a public institution, with Showtime Networks.) "We were surprised to read the column because we consider the request to be pending," [Smithsonian spokesman] Brown said."
To his credit, Steven Soderbergh is relentlesssly experimental. When he's at the top of his game (Out of Sight, Traffic, The Limey), few directors are better at telling stories that move with purpose and imagination, and even some of his resolutely mainstream projects (Erin Brockovich, Ocean's 11, Ocean's 12) --which might have been staid and forgettable in someone else's hands -- have verve and originality to spare. But, even for a guy as talented as Soderbergh, you keep taking swings, and eventually you're going to whiff a few. (Full Frontal and Kafka come to mind -- I haven't seen Schizopolis or Bubble, but have heard they might be in this category too.) Alas, Stephen Soderbergh's period noir, The Good German, is in this latter camp. Written with a 21st century sophistication about sex and language but filmed in the manner of a 1940s war flick -- back projections, ancient credits, garish score, and all -- German basically comes across as a two-hour gimmick, one that sadly outlasts its welcome by the second reel. George Clooney and Cate Blanchett do what they can (and both look great in B&W), but, surprisingly, the film just never engages -- it feels flat and uninvolving from start to finish. In sum, as with the Solaris remake, Soderbergh and Clooney's errant stab at big-think sci-fi, The Good German feels fundamentally misconceived.
Berlin, 1945. The war in Europe is over, and, divided into four sectors by the victorious Allies, Germany's capital is now a sordid morass of blackened buildings and anything-goes. Venturing into the urban decay is former resident Jake Geismer (Clooney), now a TNR correspondent sent to cover the Potsdam Conference (which in its own way feels as improbable as Ocean buddy Matt Damon playing a 45-year-old in The Good Shepherd.) But, not ten minutes back in town, Geismer's wallet is stolen by his too-friendly-by-half army driver (Tobey Maguire, laughably miscast), who, as it so happens, is a well-connected black marketeer, a despicable lout, and the current boyfriend and pimp of Geismer's old flame, Lena Brandt (Blanchett). After a body shows up at Potsdam, and after that old flame is rekindled, Geismer finds himself tracking down a story that may or may not involve hidden war crimes, atomic secrets, Russian n'er do wells, German scientists, his old prosecutor buddy (Leland Orser), and of course, Lena, a girl who -- like so many residents in her fallen city -- has faced unspeakable horrors and kept them under wraps.
All well and good...who doesn't enjoy a seamy noir? But, The Good German is curiously inert, and never gets off the tarmac. The plot ends up being byzantine in its mechanics, as a decent detective story should be, but German never arouses enough interest to makes the many twists and turns feel earned. Tobey Maguire doesn't help -- A decent actor with the right material (say, as Peter Parker), he's so woefully bad here that it kills the movie from the start. (Also, a random quibble: Maguire also beats up Clooney at one point, as Clooney's Geisberg is of the Tom Reagan school of noir heroes: he gets his ass kicked a lot. But, unless this is Golden Age Spiderman or something, it makes very little sense here.) But equally jarring is the disparity between the script and the look in The Good German: The period recreation, however clever at times, ends up distracting from rather than enhancing the tale being told. In all honesty, it just doesn't work.
If The Good German does offer any distinct pleasures, they're mostly in the margins. Deadwood's Robin Weigert (a.k.a. Calamity Jane) plays pretty far from type -- the blunt-spokenness notwithstanding -- as Lena's brash, hooker roommate. And, even despite the general failure here, Soderbergh still has a great eye, and the black-and-white cinematography does pay occasional dividends (despite many of the outdoor scenes having a grainy, washed-out look to them.) Speaking of which, I'd be remiss if I didn't note that the highlight of The Good German for me was Soderbergh's framing of Cate Blanchett as a classic screen siren. True, her femme fatale accent occasionally lapses into something more like Natasha from Rocky and Bullwinkle than Garbo or Dietrich. But, a beautiful woman under any circumstances, Blanchett often looks breathtaking here, what with all the period accoutrements and chiaroscuro lighting at her service. Careful, Jake, it's Berlintown...and she's going to play you for a fool, yes it's true.
While I thought most critics lavished too much praise on Pan's Labyrinth, the very similar swells of appreciation for Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima are, surprisingly, much closer to the mark. Eastwood's first crack at Iwo Jima in 2006, Flags of our Fathers, was to my mind a well-meaning dog, one made particularly lousy by the heavy-handed fingerprints of Paul Haggis all over the film. But (perhaps due to the different screenwriter, Iris Yamashita), Letters is really something quite remarkable. A mournful, occasionally shocking testament to the inhumanity and absurdities attending war, and a elegiac dirge for those caught in its grip, even on the other side of the conflict, Letters from Iwo Jima is an impressive -- even at times breathtaking -- siege movie. And strangely enough, elements that seemed trite or intrusive in Flags -- the desaturated landscape, the minimalist piano score -- are truly haunting and evocative here. In fact, Letters from Iwo Jima is so good it even makes Flags of our Fathers seem like a better movie just by association, which, trust me, is no small feat.
As you probably know by now, Letters from Iwo Jima follows the famous World War II battle, ostensibly depicted in Flags, from the Japanese side. Here, nobody cares about artfully raised flags or the Ballad of Ira Hayes -- the emphasis instead is on honor and survival. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe, as captivating here as he was in The Last Samurai) has been ordered to lead the defense of the island against the Americans. To this task, he fully devotes himself, despite fond memories of his earlier days on US soil. But it only takes a few walks around Mt. Suribachi for Kuribayashi to figure out it's pretty much a no-win scenario -- the Americans are too many, too productive, and too strong. And once word leaks out that the Japanese fleet has been broken at Leyte Gulf, Kuribayashi and his men -- most notably friendly grunt Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), and former Kempetai Shimizu (Ryo Kase) -- must slowly come to grips with the fact that they're not digging cavern defenses so much as their own tomb...a tomb in which many Japanese officers, and not least the headquarters on the homeland, will expect them to die with honor.
What's particularly surprising here is how unafraid Eastwood is to invert the usual sympathies of a World War II film. It's not just that the Japanese are the "good guys" here -- True, Letters dramatizes the soldiers' plight by portraying them, particularly Saigo, as just like our fun-loving GI's at heart. But it also doesn't shy away from examining a cultural emphasis on dying well that seems completely foreign to the American mind. And, although a wounded American serviceman shows up later in the film, for the most part the US forces are -- surprisingly -- portrayed here like something out of The Empire Strikes Back, all gleaming, remorseless battleships and Fiery Death from Above. (Some have argued that Eastwood elides over Japanese atrocities in this film, but I'm not sure that's really fair, unless I somehow just missed the Dresden firebombing subplot in Saving Private Ryan. This is not to say that all war crimes are equivalent or that both sides are equally guilty (although Lord knows it got ugly) -- that gets into a moral calculus well outside the bounds of this review -- only that Letters seems more interested in portraying war itself as an atrocity, and that enough reference is made to ugly tactics (aiming at medics, for example) that the film doesn't feel to me like a whitewash.)
The sobering truth at the heart of the grim, moving Letters from Iwo Jima is captured in its penultimate image. (Alas, like too many WWII films, Eastwood opts for an unnecessary contemporary bookend, but it's not as distracting as the Greatest Generation stuff in Flags. In fact, you might argue that it plays very well off those scenes, in depicting what little survives the war on the Japanese side.) I won't give it away here...suffice to say that Letters makes clear that War is a demon that rips lives apart and rends men asunder, no matter what side you're on or for what reasons. Regardless of race, creed, nationality, or ideology, all who invoke its wrath will eventually come to taste tragedy.
Like Million Dollar Baby (and screenwriter Paul Haggis' (sigh) Academy-Award-winning Crash), Clint Eastwood's Flags of our Fathers is, alas, an egregious schmaltzfest, padded to the brim with shallow, one-note characters and ridiculous sentimentalizing. I said of Crash that it "mighta been the most daring movie of 1991," and Flags has that same sense about it. At best, its attempt to demythologize WWII by making the Battle of Iwo Jima a bleak, desaturated deathscape feels like a retread of Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, and various other, better films. At worst, Flags of our Fathers subverts its own enterprise by trafficking in blatantly over-the-top symbolism, making the battle close to incomprehensible, and wallowing in "Greatest Generation" kitsch like it's going out of style (which, pretty clearly, it isn't.)
As its conceit, the film follows the six soldiers pictured in the famous photograph of the Iwo Jima flag-raising, of which only three made it out alive: John "Doc" Bradley (Ryan Phillipe, better than usual), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach, also very good). As it turns out, surviving hell on earth was only the first of their trials: Once the federal agitprop powers-that-be figure out what a spectacular image they've stumbled upon, these three soldiers -- who in fact were putting up the second flag of the day -- are forced into a whirlwind publicity tour across the United States to drum up support for war bonds. For Gagnon (and his ridiculously golddiggerish fiancee), this is an unexpected stroke of luck. For Bradley, this is grist for several artfully timed flashbacks of the actual battle. And for Hayes, a Pima Indian forced to confront not only the twin demons of racism and alcoholism but also his own feelings of guilt and inadequacy on the road, the war bond schmooze train seems like it might just be worse than the battlefield... (There's also a framing device involving Bradley's son (the author of the book) interviewing the participants in the story, but it's basically Greatest Generation filler.)
Between the battle itself and the opportunity for trenchant social criticism offered by the war bond tour, this may sound like it has all the makings for a quality film. And, to their credit, the players all acquit themselves decently, with lots of good character actors (say, Robert Patrick, Harve Presnell, and look for Luther of The Warriors (David Patrick Kelly) in a cameo as Harry Truman) around to leaven the likes of grunts Paul Walker and Jamie Bell. That being said, virtually every character in Flags comes across as shallow and inert: From start to finish, Bradley's a polite, well-meaning cipher, Gagnon a boyish opportunist, and Hayes a weepy drunk, and they're the well-rounded ones. Moreover, as Ed Gonzalez of The House Next Door aptly put it, "the stink of Crash hovers over Flags of Our Fathers." Cheap, reflexive sentiment is the order of the day here, and even scenes that should be powerful -- say, Hayes being refused service at a white-only bar, or America learning of the death of FDR over the radio -- are ruined by Haggis's usual brand of in-your-face hokum, baldly sentimentalized and applied as a paste. By the time we're forced to sit through some deathbed histrionics about daddys and heroes -- a scene which would seem to undermine the film's earlier emphasis on not valorizing war simply for its own sake -- I'd pretty much completely checked out of the film. In short, Flags of our Fathers means well, I suppose...but it's far too saccharine here to do its subject justice, and is basically a long-winded, ill-conceived bore.
"The Nuremberg trials presupposed something about the human conscience: that moral choice doesn't take its cues solely from narrow legalisms and technicalities. The new detainee bill takes precisely the opposite stance: Technicality now triumphs over conscience, and even over common sense. The bill introduces the possibility for a new cottage industry: the jurisprudence of pain." Also at Slate, David J. Luban argues that Dubya's recent torture bill spells the end of the Nuremberg era, a period when the US worked hard at "codifying genuinely international humanitarian law," to say nothing of the Great Writ.
Two recent history-minded links courtesy of the NYT: National Review's Richard Brookhiser evaluates the marginalia of John Adams, and Sheryl Gay Stolberg examines the recent revival of Munich among the Bushies (as does the WP's Eugene Robinson.)
A trailer for Clint Eastwood's forthcoming Iwo Jima double-feature, Flags of our Fathers and Red Sun, Black Sand, is now online.
"The CIA based its decisions about using former SS men or unreconstructed Nazis solely on operational considerations...Hiring these tainted individuals brought little other than operational problems and moral confusion to our government's intelligence community." New documents unearthed by UVa historian Timothy Naftali make clear the Cold War-era CIA had no qualms about using former Nazi assets, and even neglected to flush out infamous war criminal Adolf Eichmann from his hiding place in Argentina after being tipped off about his location. For shame.
A quick book bash: I wasn't going to write about Philip Roth's The Plot against America, which I read a few weeks ago, until seeing C.S.A tonight crystallized my problems with it. I should say up front that I run hot and cold on Roth -- I quite liked Portnoy and American Pastoral, but kinda loathed Goodbye, Columbus. And, while The Plot Against America is getting good reviews all around, I had a strongly adverse reaction to it. For those of you who haven't heard anything about it, Plot describes an alternate USA in which famed aviator and rabid isolationist Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in 1940, makes peace with Hitler, and begins a pogrom of sorts against Jewish-Americans, forcibly enrolling Jewish children (including the narrator's brother) in Americanization programs and, eventually, attempting to relocate Jewish families to the Midwest. As per Roth's usual m.o., the tale is told from the perspective of a Newark family trying to find their way -- not very successfully -- amid the deteriorating events.
As alternate histories go, it's a great idea for a book, and I was really looking forward to seeing what Roth did with it. But, unlike CSA, which clearly showed an attentiveness to both what happened and what might have happened, Roth here has written an alternate history without seeming to give a whit about the history. In short, I found the book stunningly, almost narcissisticly, myopic. One gets the sense from reading Plot that the rift beween Jews and Gentiles in America was not only the most significant but the only ethnic or cultural schism in FDR's America. This is not to say anti-semitism wasn't rampant and widespread at the time -- Of course it was, as attested by Father Coughlin, Breckinridge Long, and Lindbergh himself, who -- in a speech that tarnished his reputation much more than Roth lets on -- blamed support for the war on the "large ownership and influence [of Jews] in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our Government." But, in The Plot Against America, no one else seems to even exist besides Jews and (White) Gentiles -- To take the two most notable examples, there's no mention of the fact that Africans-Americans were being lynched in staggering numbers in this period (the only lynching mentioned is that of Leo Frank), or that we actually did intern Japanese-Americans during the war. (As a point of contrast, C.S.A.'s central thesis is about slavery, but it moves beyond white-black relations to explore, or at least reference, the place of Asians, Latinos, and gay Americans in the new Confederate system.)
This isn't about tokenism -- it's about doing justice to the people and the history of the period you're writing about. And, frankly, the history in The Plot Against America strains credulity time and time again. I'll skip over the final twist so as not to give it away, and because it's so ridiculously implausible that Roth couldn't have intended for us to take it seriously. But, even despite that, Lindbergh's popularity -- and the public's taste for isolationism -- by 1940 seem significantly overstated throughout. (To take one example, there is no way that the Solid Democratic South would up and vote GOP that year -- With the Civil War only recently out of living memory, the Dems could've run a wet paper bag in the South, so long as it wasn't of the party of Lincoln and didn't threaten to upset the Jim Crow racial order. That didn't even begin to change until Strom in '48.) And, while Walter Winchell plays a large role here in calling out the Nazi-American pact and resulting Jewish pogrom, he seems to be the only public figure in America doing so. Where's everyone else? It doesn't make sense.
Finally (and I'll admit, this really ticked me off), Plot basically commits a character assassination of progressive/isolationist Burton Wheeler of Montana, who here appears as Lindbergh's Vice-President (or, more to the point, his Cheney -- I'm assuming that's what Roth was getting at.) At a certain point in Plot, we're supposed to believe that Wheeler -- a guy who refused to prosecute alleged dissenters as Montana Attorney General during the hysteria of WWI, helped lead the investigation into the government corruption of Teapot Dome, and turned on FDR because he thought court-packing was an unconstitutional powergrab -- is going to, out-of-the-blue, declare martial law and start rounding people up? That makes zero sense, and is, in effect, a slander on a real historical figure. Roth is obviously one of America's most gifted writers -- but, lordy, I thought The Plot Against America needed more research, more attention to historical nuance, and more sense that injustice and suffering in this country has often run along more than one axis of discrimination.
