Just very briefly:
- U.S. Boosts Pressure on BP Over Spill (WSJ) — Gummint’s saying the oil company should lead the clean-up effort.
- Korean Crisis May Lead To Greater U.S. Military Role (NPR) — This is getting ominouser and ominouser.
- US troops in Afghanistan outnumber those in Iraq (BBC) — One of those important take-note-of moments in the sweep of history.
- Haley denies affair with blogger (thestate.com) — Having put this on my front — because I believe it could affect the election outcome (and it’s unfortunately drawing more bemused national attention down on our state) — I will now go take a shower. Or two. Delousing might also be in order.
- White House a tough fit for ex-military officers (WashPost) — There’s an interesting trend I had not noted, but the Post has…
- Calling it a day on Fox’s ’24’ (WashPost) — Just a little pop-culture fix for the mix. So what did in Jack Bauer? Was it that, like the former military officers, he just wasn’t a good fit for the Obama administration’s approach to the world?
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I watched the first two seasons of 24, but the relentless torture, not to mention the fascism of Jack Bauer, our supposed hero, made me wonder why this was supposed to be “entertainment.” Made me sick and weary.
He’s an antihero. I heard the head writer of the show talking about it on NPR tonight, and he was essentially saying that the moral ambivalence of the character was a reflection of the writers’ view of him. They didn’t know what to think of him either.
In any case, I did the same thing you did — watched the first two seasons via Netflix, then wrote the series off. I was tired of being jerked around.
I wonder — would a realistic 24 work, one that involved ACTUAL action that could possibly take place in 24 hours, rather than a couple of years’ worth of plot development being artificially squeezed into that time period? It would be interesting to see someone try.
But the thing that really turned me off was the gratuitous manipulation of the audience. Persuade the audience that this character is to be totally trusted one hour, then have him turn out to be working with the bad guys the next hour, then find out that’s a ruse in the next hour… or spend an entire 24-hour season keeping the viewer in suspense over the safety of a certain character, and then, in the last hour, when most of the conflict is resolved, arbitrarily kill him or her off, as a malicious afterthought.
It’s like they had a bet going: How much can we jerk viewers around without their tuning us out?
Re: Nikki Haley. Time to bleach your mind with Clorox. Works wonders.
No comments on the end of “Lost”? I really quite liked the ending, but many hate hate hated it. But then the show was always an interpretive allegory that demanded engagement from the viewer, while most shows switch your brains off.
Funny how the media reacts to events. Early in the oil spill disaster the MSM seemed to treat it as a rather medium sized story on par with the mining disaster. It was mostly about the men who died as a direct result of the explosion. Even after the thing started to leak the reports seemed rather tepid.
Now we have the Korean incident. this seems to have really big potential.
I would be interested in seeing how the June 28, 1914 assasination of the Austrian Archduke was covered in the days after it occurred. That story is my choice for top news story of the 20th century. But it took months, even decades to fully realize it’s implications. Could the events in Korea have comparable implications? Time will tell.
Yeah, that started as an explosion story, rather than a spill story. And since I didn’t do a Virtual Front that day, I missed it for a couple of days.
On Korea, I tuned into it as soon as the report came back pointing the finger at the Dear Leader’s regime. And yeah, it’s ominous.
I tend to think the archduke’s assassination made a splash, but I don’t know: To what extent did the big papers in this country understand the way that would make the dominoes tumble in Europe? I’m inclined to think they understood it better than they would today, because back then they would have had correspondents in the major European capitals. Not so much today, though.
I wonder how much you can find about the assassination from contemporaneous reports available online. My niece took a history course several years ago and did tons of original research on plantation life using online resources. It’s amazing how much has been scanned in!
When the archduke was assassinated, it made headlines but given the time period, international politics were not as much interest as it is today. Newspapers were much more influential and from what I understand, they did not spend much time connecting the dots and how his death would potentially affect Europe. Without the newspapers providing the backdrop for a potential world war, Americans went about their lives uninterested in European affairs.
I have studied that era, but I don’t recall why we finally got into the war. I know we were very very late. Bart?
Pearl Harbor got us into WWII. Before that, we were pretty isolationist.
Burl, I thought the “Lost” ending was as close to perfect as possible.
I seem to recall a scene in the Gary Cooper movie Sgt. York where a group of men were sitting around in an old grocery store discussing the events of the day. One of the men said that he thought it would rain tomorrow. Another said something about a baseball game.
Then the camera focused on one of the men reading a newspaper with the headline “Germans Smash at Verdun”. Americans were little interested in European affairs until the nation was pulled in to the conflict. I found that scene a very powerful indictment of just how complacent people are about very important events.
Tsk-tsk, Kathryn. You neglected to obey the slogan. You failed to Remember the Lusitania.
And no, that didn’t pull us into the war in the same sense that Pearl Harbor did the next one, but it helped.
Maybe you should “blame” Woodrow Wilson, the internationalist.
The president said, famously, that “The world must be made safe for democracy.”
Allowing for differences of time and place and party, his reasons were not dissimilar to those of W. in going into Iraq — if you’ll recall all those speeches about folks in that part of the world being entitled to the blessings of liberal democracy as well as Americans.
In fact, if you go back and read The New Republic’s editorial supporting the invasion of Iraq, if I recall correctly, they cited Wilsonian principles.
I know this stuff because that’s what I was concentrating on at the time, when apparently everybody else was thinking about WMDs. Which is why my memory of what happened and why is so different from many people’s.
I tried reading John Keegan’s history of that war, but drifted away and started reading something else after a couple of chapters.
The world it describes, the culture, the alignments, the motives, make so little sense to my post-WWII mind. I can understand and identify better with the period of our early republic (up to the disaster of Andrew Jackson’s election) or the Napoleonic Wars or ancient Rome better than I can the world that had bled over from the 19th into the early 20th century.
And everything about WWII makes sense to me. I’ve just read and absorbed so much about it that everything adds up. I get it. (And am nostalgic for it, even though I didn’t live through that time.)
But the previous generation? Totally alien.
I’m reading “George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I” by Miranda Carter right now, which I’m enjoying, but I agree — it all seems so alien to how we think of things. It’s amazing to me how differently we think than many of our western relatives did only a hundred years ago.
Dunno, Brad–SC is pretty nationalistic in its views–pre-WWI, dontcha think? I get frustrated a lot by the vestiges–nay more than mere vestiges, of 19th century politics around here.
When the Great War broke out, nobody thought that it would degenerate into stalemate and begin to bankrupt the countries involved. After a couple of years, it began affect the rest of the world, including America.
I read a review of the Miranda Carter book that suggested that while it was interesting, she conveniently ignored evidence that didn’t fit with her premise….
And Kathryn, you mean “nationalistic” in the sense of South Carolina being the nation?
That, the Confederacy, perhaps as well, and the “build a fence” people. Not a lot of internationalism around these parts….we aren’t the world.
I think its fun just to look at the changing world map over the years. The world map of 1914, especially the map of Europe, shows very few nations compared to what existed either 100 years earlier or later. Apparently there was a great deal of consolidation into just a handful of empires: Russia, Britain, France, Germany, Austria and the Ottomans. Beginning with WW I and the various treaties that came out of that conflict a whole host of now nations emerged: Poland, Ireland, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Checkoslovakia and others. Following WW II that continued and with the demise of the Soviet Union the dismemberment of Empire continued. The one exception is the US. We have maintained what we had in 1914.
I know that didn’t add anything profound to the discussion but it is very, very interesting from a visual perspective.
Bud– one thing that happened was the creation of “Germany” and “Italy” –ringing any bells?–there was a movement in the 19th century to unify “nations” of “peoples” based on ethnicity, language and culture instead of historic political boundaries.(The first verse of Deutschland Ueber Alles delineates a region for “Germany” that encompasses any arguably Germanic peoples–and a whole lot more than Germany actually occupied other than during WW II–http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschlandlied)
A lot of the eugenics and other physical anthropology got their start there–innocently enough at the time. Europeans were classified as Nordic, Celtic, Alpinic, Dinaric (the central European type–tall, pale and dark-haired, with closer set eyes, strong but straight-ish noses, brachycephalic, etc.–I look like a classic dinarid.So did Hitler)) and others. Nordic was determined to be best, followed by Dinaric. Celts had some virtues, but the Alpinic (shorter, stockier and baby-faced) and Mediterranean types were clearly inferior. Non-Europeans–pfft.
See, that’s why all this “my people came over x years ago” can be so dangerous, in my experience. Us and them–polarizing. We are all Americans.
But Burl, the second war was about ideas, and about intolerable totalitarian systems. They provided something worth fighting against. When I read about the Great War, I think, beyond these mutual-assistance treaties we have, what’s my motivation for fighting again? Perhaps it’s just my own ignorance.
By the way, if you want to talk economics, read my latest post.
Oh, and Kathryn — my people still came over before your people. So there.
That would have been followed by a smiley face if I did such things.
@Brad, do you remember where you saw the review? I’d like to read it.
All about economics. A standard model during the 1800s was the notion of empire, with raw materials and manufacturing under the hegemony of the ruling nation. In many ways, the last two empires under the old systems were Japan and the United States, and both countries were about 300 years too late.
And so, the Great War was mostly about hegemony, plus a real sense of identification with the state, whether it’s Britain or Germany or France — and the war broke down all those psychological walls. I’m far more interested in WWI than WWII, because of the vast changes in national perspective engendered by that conflict.
Since you are going to talk about who is a real blueblood, wasn’t one of the reconstructive ideas about Japan was that they had to destroy their geneological history?
I’m 100% with Burl on this one. WW I is very much an under rated conflict. I would even go so far as to say WW II is just a continuation of WW I. The American perspective on WW II is a bit over simplified in that it views the world in isolation from the events of what came before.