“Travel writers can be so afraid to make judgments. You end up with these gauzy tributes to the ‘magic’ of some far-off spot. But honestly, not every spot is magical for everyone. Sometimes you get somewhere, look around, and think, ‘Hey, this place is a squalid rat hole. I’d really rather be in the Netherlands.’ And that’s OK.” My friend Seth Stevenson tries to make his peace with India, backpacker culture, and extreme poverty. Sounds like the beaches are helping.
Category: Asia
The other Japanese Occupation.
Some food for thought for my Asia-Pacific sections today (by way of Prof. Armstrong): Historian John Dower compares the Iraq imbroglio to Japanese expansion in Manchuria. Before rejecting his argument outright, at least consider the source. Dower knows a great deal about America’s experiences in postwar Japan — more, I’d wager, than anybody working in the Dubya administration.
Coalition of the Disgusted.
Aside from the Philippines, Nigeria, and Poland, the world wants John Kerry by a landslide. Undecided voters out there, you know how you can “Ask the Audience” on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire when you’re stumped? Consider it like that.
New School.
Another semester begins here at Columbia today, although the class I’m teaching this term — “The Asia-Pacific Wars 1931-1975” with Prof. Charles Armstrong — doesn’t meet until tomorrow. (I had been slated originally for Anders Stephanson‘s “US Foreign Policy” class, but have moved over to this Pacific-Specific class due to the usual overbooking and underbooking issues…so, while I’m missing out on a few books on progressive internationalism that had caught my fancy, the reading list for this new class seems intriguing in its own right.)
Culture Shock.
With the movie situation for the next few months looking somewhat grim, I went to see Zhang Yimou’s Hero yesterday with high hopes. But, like a maddening Zen parable, Hero left me of divided mind. Well worth seeing for its colorful meditations on swordplay, music, calligraphy, and story-telling, the film fumbles the sword something fierce when it starts dabbling in political economy…so much so that it basically completely took me out of the movie. Alas, what had started as a very worthy successor to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ended as an almost laughable exercise in knee-jerk ultra-nationalism. As such, it’s hard not to discuss Hero without resorting to massive spoilers, so here goes.
For much of its running time, Hero is a strikingly kinetic and poetic piece of work that lulls you in with its languid rhythm and sensual colors. As you may or may not know from the ads, a nameless warrior (Jet Li) comes before the rightly paranoid Emperor Qin (a very good Chen Daoming) to tell him of how he managed to eliminate the province’s three most dangerous assassins (an all-star line-up of Donnie Yen, Maggie Cheung, and Tony Leung, with the lovely Zhang Ziyi thrown in to boot.) But, faster than you can say Swift Boat, the Emperor tells Nameless he’s full of it, and offers his own explanation for recent acts of heroism, which are further revised as the film goes forth.
As I said, these various retellings move slowly — even despite the fighting — but with purpose, and are made distinct from one another through color shifts that are at once exquisite and bewitching. But, eventually we come to the end of the story, and therein the problem lies. For, as it turns out, the moral that undergirds our recent contemplations is a pretty reprehensible one (and one you’d think might have been re-evaluated in light of the last century): Namely, that brutal, despicable tyrants must be allowed their cruelties and massacres for the sake of the State.
When this Machiavellian might-makes-right proposition was first uttered by the characters, I thought perhaps I was misreading what was going on. But, no, they go through with it, and almost all of the major characters we’ve been following take a dive in varying fits of nationalistic self-sacrifice, so that the Emperor Qin can gloriously maim, loot, and murder his way into uniting the Middle Kingdom. And, thus the film concludes with the glaring contradiction (pointed out by my friend Jeremy) of mooning over lovers to-be-reunited in “a place without borders” while extolling The Great Wall, still probably the most impressive border every built by humankind.
In sum, Hero is a sumptuous visual feast that’s operating several levels above most schlocky American action pics (including the recent Kill Bills of its US “presenter.”) But the underlying moral sensibility of the final moments is so repellent that it seriously detracts from the film. Call me an incurable Western individualist, but if excusing the crimes of one’s leader for the sake of the (Mother, Father, etc.)Land is heroism, then I’m with Tina Turner. Take it elsewhere, Raggedy Man.
Dubya Distilled.
Well, with talk of deregulation, privatizing Social Security, tax code “simplification”, anti-gay and pro-life rhetoric, “Hollywood value” and “activist judge” hectoring…all punctuated by that off-putting and consistently out-of-place chimp smirk, you can’t say Dubya didn’t warn us about his plans for a ultra-conservative second term last night. (And for a man who was heroic enough to stop circling Nebraska and venture down to Ground Zero three long days after 9/11, he seemed amazingly ready to bolt-and-run at the sign of one measly protestor.)
Not much was said about Dubya’s first four years in office, of course, aside from 9/11 (9/11, 9/11) and the usual conflation of Al Qaeda and Saddam. But, really, what can he say? Deficits through the roof, the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover, 1000 men and women dead in a needless diversion of a war…His administration has been an embarrassment of historic proportions. And it is time for him to go. (Dubya video via I’m Just Sayin’.)
Busted.
“[O]n close examination, the accounts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth prove to be riddled with inconsistencies. In many cases, material offered as proof by these veterans is undercut by official Navy records and the men’s own statements. Several of those now declaring Mr. Kerry ‘unfit’ had lavished praise on him, some as recently as last year.” The Times ably dissects the Swift Veterans smear-job, complete with a spiffy graphic linking its moneymen to Dubya. “Records show that the group received the bulk of its initial financing from two men with ties to the president and his family – one a longtime political associate of Mr. Rove’s, the other a trustee of the foundation for Mr. Bush’s father’s presidential library.“
Deserter, meet Shredder.
Hmm. So the military records that would theoretically prove that Dubya was not AWOL and hiding from a drug test in 1973 have been “inadvertently destroyed” by the Pentagon. Funny, that. (Via Princess Diana/Medley.)
Turning up the heat.
Well, I’m a bit behind on this one, but I finally got out of the apartment to catch Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 yesterday afternoon. And the verdict? Well, it’s undoubtedly an extremely powerful piece of cinema. And, judging from the reactions of the afternoon crowd, it looks as if it might do some real good in crystallizing popular discontent with the Bush administration outside of the blog-world echo chamber. Still, even though I know Moore is playing by the rules set by right-wing freak shows like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, I found myself wishing at times that he had played F911 a little straighter. Simply put, Dubya and his cronies are guilty of so much blatant incompetence and documentable malfeasance that it’s disappointing that Moore feels he has to rely on cheapshots and push-button emotions some of the time.
If you’ve been keeping up with pretty much any lefty blog since 2000 (including this one), the central and most powerful allegations made here — that Dubya and the Neocons played bait-and-switch on the American people in Iraq and used 9/11 as a pretext for all kinds of terrible legislation, while doing pathetically little to minimize the actual threat of terrorism — will not come as a surprise. Still, when the data is laid out before you here like ducks in a row, from the Florida fiasco in 2000 through to the recent stonewalling of the 9/11 commission a few weeks ago, the continued pattern of incompetence and mendacity that has characterized this administration becomes unmistakably clear. As the story unfolds, Moore offers plenty of intriguing footage — Bush’s 7 minutes of Pet Goat superfluousness may perhaps be overemphasized by now, but it’s still out-and-out eerie. Equally damning is footage of Dubya at the ranch a month prior to 9/11, in which he has absolutely no clue what his agenda is for the day and, whatsmore, doesn’t seem to much care (particularly when contrasted with his obvious enthusiasm for armadillos exhibited a few scenes later.)
But while there are plenty of blows landed, I ultimately thought that Fahrenheit 9/11 would have been much more impressive if it had focused more closely on the facts and avoided the more obvious attempts at sentiment. For example, instead of examining in detail the clear civil liberties transgressions occurring at the Gitmo Gulag and elsewhere under the Patriot Act, or noting the discrepancies in its enforcement (no gun checks?) under Attorney General-cum-balladeer John Ashcroft, Moore spends too much time interviewing an aging weightlifter and various Fresno peace activists — all of whom have run afoul of goofy anti-terrorist inquiries — for laughs. Similarly, instead of talking about Dubya’s spiking of the Nunn-Lugar act or his continued cutting of First Responder funding, the film dinks around Western Oregon with two underfunded deputies – as a result, I thought the larger point about Bush’s failure to protect the homeland was lost.
As the film moves overseas, the problems with F911 become more evident. Regarding the war in Afghanistan, Moore talks about a proposed UNOCAL pipeline to the exclusion of virtually anything else, which I think invites charges of shrillness (Exhibit A: The Bonanza riff) and blurs one of the most serious charges against this administration – that it gave up a chance to catch Osama Bin Laden in order to play regime change in Iraq. Speaking of Baghdad, I think Moore would have done better to talk more about missing WMD and lies to the UN and spent less time with Lila Lipscomb, the mother of a deceased US soldier. This last section of the film is undeniably powerful, but it also feels extremely manipulative, particularly as it’s hard to envision very many situations where a mother’s grief wouldn’t be harrowing to behold. (The same goes for the grisly scenes of charred bodies and horrifically wounded Iraqi children.)
Still, what do I know? Perhaps Fahrenheit 9/11 needs these human touches to get its point across to a larger audience, a goal which it so far seems to be accomplishing with great aplomb. The fact is, Michael Moore can undoubtedly be a blowhard with grating populist pretensions, but if we had any semblance of a functioning national media these days, Fahrenheit 9/11 would have been a non-event. In the absence of anything like an independently critical television press, and given the existence of such a well-oiled, well-funded right-wing propaganda machine these days, perhaps somebody out there had to co-opt conservative talk-radio techniques to get the message out. I’m more of a “destroy the ring” than a “use the ring” kinda guy, but, as I said, what do I know? I could write in this space a hundred times over and still never reach an infinitesimal fraction of the people who will see this film and be newly angered by the idiotic and unethical behavior of this administration.
In short, if a picture is worth a 1000 words, this film is worth 10,000 blogs – by stringing so many of the Bush-bashing beads together in such entertaining and moving fashion, Fahrenheit 9/11 should bring the heart of the anti-Dubya critique right to the Heartland. I just wish it had covered its flank a little better by sticking to the cold, hard facts about the national embarrassment of historic proportions that is George W. Bush, rather than indulging every so often in cheap laughs and reflexive sentiment.
And yet outmaneuvered.
Unfortunately, the diplomatic savvy on display in this surreptitious Iraq transfer hasn’t extended to other world hotspots, as Kaplan notes with North Korea. “By his own careless arrogance,” writes Kaplan, Dubya “has stunningly mishandled this confrontation. He has allowed North Korea—the most rickety spoke on his “axis of evil,” a dangerous regime by any measure — to reach the crest of becoming a nuclear power. He has dismissed numerous opportunities to nip this disaster in the bud. And now he comes up with an old formula that evades the recent shift in the balance.” (The disarmament deal proffered by the Bushies now is insubstantially different from the one suggested by President Clinton a decade ago, the one pooh-poohed by Dubya upon his arrival into the Oval Office.)