Mr. Cheney, you have my father much offended...

Darth Tyrannus, I mean, Dick Cheney, is much offended at Amnesty International over their report on rights violations at Guantanamo Bay. But couldn't he have issued a more complete denial?

"Occasionally there are allegations of mistreatment," Cheney said. "But if you trace those back, in nearly every case, it turns out to come from somebody who had been inside and released to their home country and now are peddling lies about how they were treated."

Nearly? How many torture victims in a nearly? And how many of those are ours and how many did we ship off to Uzbekistan?

Go, go, Mr. Cheney, you question with a wicked tongue.

A Little Treat For Me

Before I went to bed last night, I picked up Alfred Hitchcock's "Games Killers Play", which Dell published in 1967, to see if there was anything interesting in it. (My mother picked up the book from a library sale about fifteen years ago, and it's been sitting, unread, on my shelves for a number of years.) It contains a Donald Westlake story--"The Feel of the Trigger"--that I mean to get to in a bit, but I was astonished to find in there a story called "Room to Let" by Hal Ellson. At first I suspected that this was a pseudonym for Harlan Ellison, and I eagerly read the story on this basis. Sadly, that turns out not to be true. Hal Ellson was actually a going concern in suspense fiction when Harlan Ellison was still a youngster. There is, however, a connection (from Harlanellison.com):

"Sometime in 1949 or '50, Mr. Ellison passed a newsstand and thought he saw his name there, on one of the small paperback novels. Further inspection revealed his error: the author of that book was Hal Ellson. Intrigued by the nominal similarity, he read the book, which turned him on. Ellson was, at that time and for some years, a selling name, with such novels to his credit as DUKE and TOMBOY, and stories appearing in magazines the likes of 'Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,' 'Guilty!' and 'Manhunt.' And his subject matter was, more often than not — juvenile delinquency.

"Thus sparked, Mr. Ellison's interest was further fanned to flame by a beating at the hands of a kid gang in front of the old Paramount Theater in New York City."

The Ellison book that sprang from all this was "Memos From Purgatory", a book based on Ellison's experience posing as a street gang member.

I love finding out these little tidbits and tugging these little threads. It's just the kind of guy I am.

Smell you later.

About Schmidt

I don't have a long review about this film, but I highly recommend it. Jack Nicholson astounded me with his performance. Hollywood often asks him to do the Jack-act, based on some combination of his characters in "Easy Rider", "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", and "The Shining". To see him play a character so mousy, inarticulate, and self-effacing is a rare treat. Most movie stars would have avoided playing Schmidt simply because he's often petty and weak, but Nicholson not only took on the challenge of the role, but actually managed to carry a movie with it.

Check it out.

Unsafe at Any Speed, Time, or Weather Condition

My job forces me to spend many hours I won't get back on the freeway. Traffic has always been crummy in Seattle, and I've always been amused at the excuses traffic reporters give:

1. It's too rainy.
2. It's too sunny.
3. It's too cloudy.
4. It's too dark.

Yes. Too dark. One night a few years ago, tens of thousands of Seattle drivers, caught unawares by the arrival of Pacific standard time, forgot that their cars came equipped with lights. How they got through so many years on this planet without an awareness of the existence of night escapes me, but there it is. I can just see them turning to their spouses or carpool mates and saying, "Um, when it's dark and you want to see, what do you do?"

It's this kind of thinking that may explain why so many drivers around the Puget Sound area get into accidents. For three consecutive days now I've been stuck in freeway parking lots because someone failed to take into account the presence of OTHER CARS ON THE ROAD when he tried to cross four lanes in one maneuver or to e-mail an office-mate pictures of his own ass. The one time I took a rear-ending on the freeway, the mullet-haired stick insect who transformed my VW Rabbit into modern art came up to me and said, "Sorry, buddy. My friend and I were talking and we just didn't see you there."

I thought, but did not say, "Didn't see me there? You were so busy comparing your sisters' blowjob techniques that you couldn't see me or the thousand cars that were stopped in front of me? Did you just come from a parallel universe where I have a beard and traffic is moving fine?" I also thought about throwing that skinny redneck over the guard rail onto the express lanes below, but that's when the State Patrol showed up.

Am I telling you all this just for the thrill of a self-indulgent blogger-rant? Yes. But it's also to explain why I'm linking to this little gem from The Onion. It has always been my worst fear that some moron would inadvertently splatter me against a wall--in many ways, my antipathy towards George W. Bush is an outgrowth of this, well, let's call it stupidiphobia--and daily contact with nimrods and twits exacerbates this condition.

So there.

Ismail Merchant Dead at 68

You can read his bio here

Review: Star Wars--Revenge of the Sith

The general consensus about this movie is correct: it is a good picture, with caveats.

(I suppose I should issue a spoiler warning here, just to be fair. If you haven't seen the picture yet, go watch it and come back. The post will be waiting.)

The first thing this movie does is make clear how unnecessary the last two movies were. All the plot threads worth following, concerning Anakin's corruption and the fall of the Republic, are covered in this one. Star Wars fans may be best advised to think of the series as a tetralogy. Overall, the movie is fun, well paced, with many scenes that were striking and memorable. There's even a nifty irony concerning the death of Senator Amidala. By nifty, I mean nifty by Lucas standards. The Greeks and Shakespeare did it long ago, and much better, than Lucas does. Even so, it is a welcome move.

The opening scene, the battle to retrieve Chancellor Palpatine, has been much praised, but not entirely deservedly. It struck me as too busy, falling prey to Lucas's habit of stuffing the frame with every possible CG object his elves at ILM can design. CG is best when it isn't quite so obvious. Instead of worrying about the fate of Anakin and Obi-Wan, I was analyzing the art direction. It's a pity that in this sequence of STAR WARS movies, Lucas often forgets that leaving things out is sometimes more important than putting them in. This habit of crowding the frame occurs throughout the movie, and sometimes made it hard to concentrate on the story.

Once we got past the space flight and the slaughter of, gee, it must have been hundreds, of hapless droids, the scene moves to a saber duel among Obi-Wan, Anakin, and Francisco Scaramanga--I mean--Count Dukoo. It is here, in a well done scene (by my count, the first well-done scene in the series), that Anakin's corruption begins. Lucas was smart to bring back Ian McDirmid to play Palpatine. His silky voice and manner serve him well in his portrayal of an insidious Sith Lord and as a seducer of Anakin. The scenes between them are well-handled, and are among the best in the film.

Ewan McGregor also deserves a good deal of credit here. He's loosened up, and has a humor that makes him attractive. I wanted him to succeed and I worried about him when he was in danger, even though I know his character makes it to the next film. That isn't an easy effect to achieve, and I give him credit for having done it.

Also, unlike the other films, I counted no superfluous characters in Star Wars Episode III. Everyone, including background characters like Bail Organa, get something to do that advances the story.

All these things added up to a more involving film experience than Lucas's last two pictures combined. He didn't get everything right, but he did get some big things right. The story accomplishes something and arrives somewhere, I root for the good characters and hate the bad ones, every part of the tale and every character has a sufficient reason to be where it is, and the story sticks more or less to what's possible (in STAR WARS terms) and leaves miracles alone.

That said (there's always a that said):

The scenes between Anakin and Amidala still play badly, and created several narrative problems. The dialog between them is forced and unnatural--much weaker than the banter in other areas of the story. Did Lucas force Tom Stoppard to leave these scenes alone? Not only are they flawed, but they present the characters inconsistently. Amidala comes to Anakin with the "wonderful" news that she is pregnant, then without motivation becomes worried and asks Anakin "What are we going to do?" as if the "wonderful" news were cause for panic. Anakin claims, at the beginning of the picture, that he doesn't care who knows he's married to Amidala. The arrangement seems to bother Amidala as well, and her commitment to it appears to be inconsistent. It's unclear throughout the relationship who wants to keep the secret, or what's at stake for their relationship if the secret comes out.

Another problem: Anakin and Amidala live together on Coruscant. When Anakin first sees her after rescuing the Chancellor, he runs over and kisses her. Now the other politicians have left the frame, but we're dealing with public figures here. Have they no tabloids in the Galaxy Far, Far Away? Are there no reporters checking on who's staying with her in her home, which is presumably the property of Naboo? For a couple supposedly keeping an important secret, they don't seem to be trying too hard. And given that, why were the Jedi so obtuse about it? You didn't need the force to figure these two out.

Ironically, by driving Anakin to keep his relationship secret, the Jedi forced him into the arms of Chancellor Palpatine. If he'd felt comfortable fessing up in front of Yoda, a lot of suffering might have been avoided. Besides, it's hard to believe they'd boot the "chosen one" out of the Jedi order for such an infraction, especially with an unidentified Sith Lord out there who might take him on as a pupil. Wouldn't they more likely train him to keep his emotions in their proper perspective? I don't know, but that would seem the sensible Jedi approach. Normally, I like stories where responsibility for grand failures is shared, but in this case, a large part of the Jedis' problem seems to stem from their handling Anakin so stupidly that he can't help but fall to the dark side.

I also queston two choices Lucas made about the introduction of Vader in the black armor. The first choice was to make him walk badly when he first steps away from the table. Lucas explained that he wanted the walk to be awkward because Vader was still getting used to the equipment. This is a seemingly sensible answer but it has two problems. First, it's already been established in this universe that people get used to their prostethic limbs rapidly. Second, the scene resembles a similar scene in not only FRANKENSTEIN, but in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN. I heard a lot of giggling in the audience when Darth Vader first stepped out, and I doubt that's the reaction Lucas wanted. The second questionable choice was Lucas's insistence on having someone cry out, "NOOOOOO!" In this case it was Vader, and it felt forced. I could almost hear Lucas's pen scratching a long string of Os on the his legal pad. It threw me right out of the moment and made me chuckle.

Lucas used other lines he's used before as well. "I have a bad feeling about this" and "This is where the fun begins" among them. That move was already self-conscious and awkward two films ago, and I wish Stoppard had convinced him to cut it out. Lucas may like them, but they hurt his stories because they make them feel like stories instead of real action.

I questioned the use of Order 66 in the movie, partly because I thought such an order might give at least some Stormtroopers pause. They are, after all, being asked to fire on their own side. The gunnery captain questioned such an order, and indeed refused it, in PATHS OF GLORY. (He demanded that such an order come in writing from his General, so that he would not be held responsible for the slaughter of his own men.) Wouldn't at least some Stormtroopers have done the same? I know. I know. The cloning process is supposed to make them all reasonably pliant. Still, they did seem to have emotions. Obi-Wan even joked with one of them.

More significant than that for me is that because Palpatine's order has an official designation which the Stormtroopers understand without explanation, (unlike the B-52 pilots in DR. STRANGELOVE, these guys don't have to open sealed order packets to understand what they're being asked to do) large numbers of Stormtroopers must have known all along that it was possible they'd be ordered to kill the Jedi. How the hell was this kept secret from the Jedi for all this time? With so many Stormtroopers out there, you mean to tell me that no one ever blabbed for all the years of the war? No security is that perfect, especially not in close infantry situations. Palpatine may have been able to conceal his own dark side affiliation, but how could ordinary stormtroopers conceal such a thing from the Jedi for a sustained period of time?

Finally, the key scene where Mace Windoo and Palpatine accuse each other of treason during a saber duel in front of Skywalker struck me as weak. I thought the dialog in the scene clanged, but also I thought that, given the way Anakin slaughtered Dukoo and threatened, at one point, to kill the Chancellor for his Sith leanings, the choice he makes to attack Mace Windoo was curious. Mace Windoo said that leaving Palpatine alive was too dangerout s, the precise justification Skywalker used when he beheaded the unarmed Count Dukoo. This didn't occur to him? I couldn't understand how he worked his decision out, or why he failed to see that Palpatine was playing possum when he claimed he was defenseless. (Besides, how was he defenseless? Just because he'd lost his lightsaber? Anakin surely knows that Jedi have powers beyond that, including the lightning and choke attacks. They're always armed, even when they're not.) I had to assume that selfish motives concerning Amidala shifted the balance, but the scene should have made that more explicit than it did.

And that's lunch for me, people. I give REVENGE OF THE SITH a qualified recommendation. It's strange, but in many ways it struck me less as the work of an older, experienced artist than that of an undiciplined newcomer who has only begun to figure out how storytelling works. If I didn't know that George Lucas is, in fact, in his 60s, I'd say he's finally shown evidence of future promise.

Wait! I left One Out!

Worst depiction of romance I've seen in a movie. The award goes to:

THE LONELY LADY

I think I've been blocking it out all this time, but yeah. There is no worse depiction of romance in any movie than there is in this one. I saw this movie when I was twelve. That night, I sneaked into the living room after my parents went to bed, because TV Guide said the movie had nudity, which at twelve was all I needed to know. Fully expecting to be as turned on as a twelve-year-old could be, I flicked on the television and turned the channel to HBO.

I wouldn't have another erection for five years.

Ickiest moments: Oh, where to begin? Let's tally up the damage here. We've got Ray Liotta raping Pia Zadora with a garden hose, followed by Pia's marriage to the Liotta character's father. (Didn't she even think about what Thanksgiving would be like?) Then we've got her husband, who is sweet to her until she "improves" his screenplay by making a widow at a funeral drop to her knees and cry out "Why? Why?" When he sees that revision, instead of using some white-out, he shows her his garden hose (wouldn't he have at least bought a new one?) and says "Maybe you prefer this to me!" This sends Pia careening from one weird fucked-up relationship to the next as she suffers the price of fame in Hollywood. I mean, I knew about the casting couch, but who knew that becoming famous required you to lie on a pool table naked while some creepy eurotrash guy shoots pool balls at your crotch? This movie is the kind of thing they should show teenagers if they want to get them to keep those abstinence pledges. It is brain-meltingly horrible. It is the product of a truly depraved imagination. Your hatred of the movie will not only extend to the producers, the writers, the directors, the actors, the best-boys, and the gaffers, but to all carbon based life forms everywhere in the universe.

(Throwing myself to the ground) WHY? WHY?

Not to Quibble But...

While I've said some nasty things about "Attack of the Clones", it is also not, as Matt Yglesias suggests, the worst depiction of romance in the history of cinema. There are fates still worse, and, nice fellow that I am, I will list them for you.

1. "Eegah": How do you describe the love triangle consisting of a 30-year-old teen aged woman, a butt-ugly teen ager who thinks its charming to sing songs about other women to his girlfriend, and the gigantic man who would someday menace Roger Moore in "The Spy Who Loved Me"? Yes, it's Eegah. Richard Kiel plays the title role of the only caveman in Palm Springs. Kiel falls in love with a woman he meets after a near-collision on the highway. (A wonderous meet-cute) He later kidnaps her and her father, leaving their rescue up to the fugly Fabian wanna-be (MST3K called him a "cabbage-patch Elvis") and his dune buggy. Watch out for snakes.

Ickiest moments: Every closeup of Arch Hall Jr. in this movie qualifies, but the worst ones arrive when Eegah tries to involve the 30-year-old teenaged woman in the primitive rituals of mating (a.k.a. "Shtemlo") in front of her cowardly, ineffectual father. (Oh, and don't get me started on the shaving scene. Eeewww.)

2. "Outlaw of Gor": Bringing us funny hats and lots of butts, "Outlaw" is the story of Tarl Cabot, who occasionally likes to take a sabbatical in another dimension where large breasted women wear next-to-nothing. (How this is easier than a flight to Rio is beyond me.) Strangely, he takes with him on his journey his professional-third-wheel buddy, Watley Smith, who redefines anti-charisma on screen. The two of them get caught up in the political machinations of the King of Ko-ro-ban's trophy wife and wind up wandering around the Italian--oops--alien desert for a while until they're captured and almost executed. What saves them? One of the trophy wife's minions inexplicably changes his mind and kills her, freeing the citizenry to once again wander around saying "Cabot. Cabot. Cabot? Cabot! Cabot. Cabot! Cabot. Cabot! Cabot?"

Ickiest moments: Tarl Cabot's kissing methods make one rethink the whole idea of the French kiss, but far worse is when the trophy wife seduces an oiled-up Watley Smith. "How do they make love on your planet? Is it very different from ours?" I will say this, though. That scene does demonstrate just how badly the trophy wife wants power.

3. "Yor! The Hunter From the Future". No, I'm not. You can tell who will get together in this movie. Just watch for the primitive people with suspiciously good hair. Yor is one of those people. Kaa-laa is another. They travel together until they meet a third good-haired woman. Then we see Kaa-laa and Goodhair #3 fight over who gets Yor. Goodhair #3 is eventually killed by some hairy guys who say "Rworr" a lot, after which Kaa-laa feels bad for her. They eventually end up in a futurisitic city where they need Yor's seed for some reason. He fights against the seed harvesters and wins.

Ickiest moments: I think the villain in the piece wanted Yor to mate with his robots, or something like that. I wonder where you'd put that on a purity test. Anyway, the rest of the movie is more dippy than icky, especially the endless girl fighting over this guy with the oily chest and shiny tresses. It's so distracting to hear someone say "I love Yor!" You can't help saying back to the screen "You love my what?"

4. "Pearl Harbor" Easily the dumbest romantic triangle in the history of dumb romantic triangle. Two guys, one nurse, Michael Bay, and a plot that wraps dull couplings around a historic disaster. (When has that happened in movies before?) Three and a half hours. Evil.

Ickiest/dumbest moments: The sex scene among the parachutes was pretty stupid, as was the meet-cute during the physical exams. Worse is the whole missing-and-presumed-dead soap opera plot about Ben Affleck that leads the girl to fall into the arms of Josh "I'm going to die because my name is below the title" Hartnett. Ben Affleck is, of course, not dead. He was merely shot down over France. While Hartnett and the girl get cozy among the silk (and take Army Air Corps planes for joyrides at sunset. My father wants his taxes back for that one.), Ben escapes to England. Does Ben send a letter or a telegram to his former honey saying "AM ALIVE STOP COMING TO SEE YOU IN HAWAII STOP IF YOU'RE BOFFING MY BEST FRIEND STEVE STOP" Of course he dosn't, because we have to have lots of contrived scenes where they get into bar fights ("Not the Face!") and have boring arguments before the Japanese show up to bomb their romance. It's the movie that forces on us the awesome question: two thousand people died in Pearl Harbor, why couldn't these characters be among them?

5. "The Starfighters" One of "B-1" Bob Dornan's contributions to cinema, this Will Zens epic involves chaste romances, landing planes, taking off in planes, refueling plans, bombing lots of little white rectangles, and floating around in "poopie suits".

Ickiest/dumbest moments: Have you ever been on a date that invovled an in-depth explanation of corn detasseling? Well, now you have! You've also witnessed a double makeout party involving a married couple, and seen a man with the world's worst case of back sweat.

I could go on, but I have real work to do. Suffice it to say that, lame as the dialog in "Attack of the Clones" was, it wasn't the worst depiction of romance in cinema history. Not even close.

Let The Baby Have Their Bottle?

Farhad Manjoo of Salon seems to think we should when it comes to the issue of the Filibuster, and here's why:

"...the filibuster is no friend to Democrats, whose policies, if not politicians, appeal to a majority of the American public. They may be in the minority now, but Democrats can win again. They can take the Senate and they can take the White House, possibly both, possibly soon. When that day comes, you can be sure Republicans will use the filibuster in the same way that Democrats are using it today. Wouldn't it make sense to take that option away from the GOP now, when they're agitating for the change -- and then, in the future, to hoist them with their own petard?"

I've never been fond of too-clever-by-half strategems of government where we continue to let the opposition have what they want on the assumption that future victories will allow us to make them eat their policy. The "possibly both, possibly soon" element seems especially problematic to me. I don't see much hope that we'll pick up six senate seats in 2006, and less still that we'll get the Presidency in 2008. Given the way politics is structured in this country, we may have to put up with a very long period in opposition at the federal level. If that's the case, we'll want the filibuster, for a couple of reasons. First, because the Republicans have removed a number of other tactics that the minority used to use to stymie nominees and bills. (Anonymous holds are a prime example.) Second, because unlike Republicans of previous eras, whose theory of governance was to do as little governing as possible, these guys want to do things--terrible things, monstrous things, things that will do long-term damage to our country. Why on Earth should we take one of the few weapons at our disposal for dealing with this right-wing activisim and hand it over on the off chance that our popular policies will propel us into the majority again in the next two or three years? That's not really too-clever-by-half. That's not clever enough by three-quarters. It's that kind of thinking that helped land us here. Do you know who wins by losing? Nobody.

Dammit, Newsweek!

They retracted their story about the Quran-flushing incident. This is just the kind of juicy tidbit that news magazines have to be more careful about checking, because when they screw up like this, it allows the Bush administration to feel more secure and get away with more miserable shit. It's just like the "60 Minutes" story during the campaign about Bush's national guard service. The story turned out to be inaccurate, but the subsequent flap distracted everyone from the underlying reality--that George W. Bush did walk out on the national guard in the 1970s and was able to get away with it because of his family's connections. So sure, it's possible no one flushed the Quran during interrogations (though several other news and government organizations have found evidence that some interrogators did), but the reality of the White House's abuses of human rights (both by its own agents and by its proxy torturers in such pleasure spots as Uzbekistan and Pakistan) can't be erased no matter how badly a news weekly fucks up.

Still, Newsweek, you blew it, and the White House may be able to wriggle off a hook as a result. I used to complain that you guys were just the White House's slavish stenographers. This one's actually much better for them, because they can use it to discredit any legitimate examination of the administration's torture policy. The President and the Attorney General should invite you to the ranch for cheeseburgers and beer.

Morons.

Skeptical Inquirer on Jack the Ripper

SI's article on the subject is not really news to people who've studied the Ripper, but I mention it here because the author of the article seems more willing than most to credit Francis Tumblety as a suspect. As evidence, he points to the suspicions of an original Ripper investigator, Inspector Littlechild of Scotland Yard:

"In his letter, Inspector Littlechild writes: '. . . amongst the suspects, and to my mind a very likely one, was a Dr. T. . . . He was an American quack named Tumblety and was at one time a frequent visitor to London and on these occasions constantly brought under the notice of police, there being a large dossier concerning him at Scotland Yard. Although a 'Sycopathia Sexualis' [sic] subject he was not known as a 'Sadist' (which the murderer unquestionably was) but his feelings toward women were remarkable and bitter in the extreme, a fact on record. Tumblety was arrested at the time of the murders in connection with unnatural offenses and charged at Marlborough Street, remanded on bail, jumped his bail, and got away to Boulogne, France. He shortly left Boulogne and was never heard of afterwards. It was believed he committed suicide but it is certain that at that time, the 'Ripper' murders came to an end.'"

While this is interesting, there are a number of problems with Tumblety as a Ripper suspect. (Problems which the article notes, to its credit.) Witnesses who were the last to see the various victims alive all said that the man the women went off with was considerably younger than the 56 year-old Tumblety. Tumblety was also physically larger than the man eyewitnesses saw. The "unnatural offense" that Tumblety was charged with had to do with homosexuality, and homosexual serial killers who murder for sexual thrills tend to hunt other homosexuals. While Tumblety was certainly a misogynist, it is unlikely that women would have fulfilled his fantasies of lust and power in a way that would have provoked him to such sexually sadistic mutilations. Indeed, while he claimed a hatred of women, there is no evidence anywhere that he had ever attacked a woman physically in his life--no beatings, no rapes--which would be unusual for a man who would become one of history's most notorious sex slayers.

Further, the crimes escalated quickly in brutality, from a relatively simple throat-slashing and slight mutilation of Polly Nichols to the bloodthirsty orgy that ended Mary Kelly's life. The early killing suggests someone murdering quickly and timidly, in surroundings not entirely comfortable to him. It looks like the work of a killer early in his career, perhaps his first-ever murder. Most serial killers get started as teenagers or young adults; they don't wait until middle age. If Tumblety were the killer, he would have likely had a much longer and more stable killing career than the Ripper did.

My favorite Ripper suspect is known serial killer George Chapman, who was hanged in 1903 for poisoning two of his wives with antimony. (Antimony causes a particularly slow and painful death, characterized by exceptionally harsh stomach cramps and dysentery.) Crime library lists a likely profile of Jack the Ripper, which I'll show you here;

A white male
Average or below average height
Between 20 and 40 years of age in 1888
Did not dress as laborer or indigent poor
Had lodgings in the East End
Did have medical expertise, despite 1-2 opinions to contrary
May have been foreigner
Right-handed
Had a regular job since the murders all occurred on weekends
Was single so that he could roam streets at all hours

George Chapman was white and male, obviously. He was twenty-five years old during the Whitechapel murders. While in Poland, he apprenticed to a surgeon and later completed his medical studies. He lived in Whitechapel at the time of the murders. He was employed at the time as a barber, owning his own shop. He was single in 1888. He had a long history of violence against women, both with knives and with poison, and would later become a convicted serial murderer. You can read all about George Chapman here.

Pseudohistory and Its Discontents

M.Y. posted again today about Yalta, saying that two contrarian writers (one in the New Republic and the other in Reason) made convincing cases concerning why Bush tried to reframe Yalta as an foul bargain between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. He goes on to say this:

"Now this doesn't change the fact that the Yalta agreement was not, in fact, a great world-historical crime on the part of the Roosevelt Administration, but a little historical inaccuracy is more than forgiveable in pursuit of legitimate diplomatic objectives."

I'm not sure I'm 100% with you on your police work there, Matt. What Bush was doing in his speech was not tactfully eliding certain ugly historical truths for the sake of amity, nor was he saying, as members of the Clinton administration did in the early 1990s, that the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that the Yalta framework could now be abandoned in favor of a happier state of Eastern European affairs. Bush was falsifying history in order to improve his political standing and justify his current ideological stances. He also did it to reduce the standing of FDR in American political history and, in doing so, justify the conservative assault on his legacy at home.

That Bush's version of history is, in fact, false, is already clear by a preponderance of the historical evidence, and needn't be further argued here. What makes it even more morally questionable is that, while the lie that he's telling undoubtedly pleases those in his audience (both in Poland and the U.S.) who would prefer to believe it and may give the U.S. a temporary image boost, it also confers upon the Eastern Europeans the status of being, at least partly, the U.S.'s victim. Claims of victimhood are potent stuff in world affairs. Countries and peoples go to war over victimhood claims that go back hundreds or even thousands of years. It is, therefore, deeply dangerous to base such claims on lies. Whatever short-term advantages Bush's "admission" may confer, it is, in the long term, a bad thing for people in Eastern Europe to stick us with the blame for their repression under Russian occupation. It will lead to distortions of policy that will hurt us, and, perversely, may come to benefit the Russians, who can now claim us as a partner in their crimes. It also may mean that the next time we make an agreement with the Russians over anything--defense policy, climate change--Eastern European governments could feel justified in saying, "See, just like Yalta!" Why this should be desirable is frankly beyond me. There are times when fudging the truth is necessary in diplomacy, but the promotion of this pseudohistory will distort our relationship with Eastern Europe in ways that will take many years to undo, assuming it ever is undone.

Also, it is deeply naive to imagine that any President speaking abroad is speaking only to his foreign audience. Every Presidential speech delivered overseas is drafted and redrafted with the American public in mind. The Poles may applaud, but they don't vote here, and USAToday/Gallup doesn't call them to measure Bush's approval rating. The notion that nobody in the U.S. saw it or knew about it is absurd. I commented on the story the day I saw it, May 7th, when it was on top of my Yahoo AP headlines list. I'm a busy person, and certainly wouldn't have gone digging through the international pages in search of the item. (Most of the time, I'm beyond caring what Bush says, because so far as I've known he has never stepped up to a microphone to which he hasn't lied.) Bush knew his words would reach a domestic political audience when he spoke them, and the manner in which he framed them--which cast Roosevelt as a perpetrator of a crime against freedom and himself as a consistent, unbending liberator--was meant to benefit his standing at home and tarnish the legacy of a man whose political accomplishments, at home and overseas, Bush is committed to destroying.

What could Bush have said? He could have said, "America and the West are committed to supporting you as your build and sustain your democratic governments and institutions. We are delighted that the Yalta framework is no longer relevant to our relationship. We salute you for your resiliance under Soviet domination and for your willingness to fight for your own liberty. Please know that we will always come to your aid when called." Cynical as I am about Bush's committment to freedom anywhere, I still wouldn't have objected. Like most political rhetoric, it may not have been true, but at least it could have been true. At worst, it would have been no worse than all the other wind that blows, at various velocities, in diplomatic circles. It, or something along its lines, would have accomplished just as well any legitimate political purpose the administration might have had. No, Bush's pseudohistorical rant served an entirely different purpose: to convince the unwary, once again, that Bush is greater than those who came before him--that, while other American leaders have erred, he is perfect.

Translation Service

Scott McLellan says this:

"We will not tolerate any disrespect for the holy Quran."

Translation for the Bush Befogged:

"We will outsource the interrogations to a country that will tolerate it."

Should I Be Worried?

I just checked the tracker and I noticed that someone from the Department of Justice looked in on my Roosevelt post. I hope that's just someone using his spare time on a government computer to follow an interest. The idea of spending time at Alberto Gonzalez's health resort in Guantanamo Bay holds no appeal for me.

Busy, Busy, Busy

Again, I apologize to whoever cares over the lack of posts. I've got the screenplay up to page fifty, but I'm worried that I don't have enough material to get me into the 100-110 page range. Even though I write long in prose, there's something about the screenwriting format that discourages volubilty. So now I have to add wrinkles to a script without falling into any of a number of thriller cliches. (I'll leave it to the hairdresser who rewrites my script to put those in, along with lines like "We've got a situation here." and "I just wanted to say, 'I'm sorry.'" I'll bet screenwriters have keyboard shortcuts for inserting those lines.) It's hard and thirsty work, gang. Plus, I've got a fellowship to apply for, a novel to peddle, and a summer tutoring schedule to plan. I'm swamped.

Will the Raiders Chase Boulware?

Now that the Ravens have let their all-time sack leader go, will the Raiders go after him? Despite his age and injury history, they probably should. The linebacking corps needs leadership, and Boulware has experience in the 3-4 alignment that the Raiders will, at least sometimes, use.

That Damned Roosevelt

When I read the headline that read: "Bush: U.S. Had Hand in European Divisions", I thought that we, at long last got an admission of guilt from our President. Sadly, no. This is rather an attempt to run down FDR by ressurecting the old right-wing charge that he "gave away the store" at Yalta.

"We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations, appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability," the president said. "We have learned our lesson; no one's liberty is expendable. In the long run, our security and true stability depend on the freedom of others."

Bush singled out the 1945 Yalta agreement signed by Roosevelt in a speech opening a four-day trip focused on Monday's celebration in Moscow of the 60th anniversary of Nazi Germany's defeat.

Don't take my word for this being crap, take George Kennan's. He was actually involved in policymaking at the time, and, unlike Bush, he knew what he was talking about.

From AMERICAN DIPLOMACY:

"The most vociferous charges of wartime mistakes relate primarily to our dealings with the U.S.S.R., and particularly to the wartime conferences of Moscow, Teheran, and Yalta. As one who was very unhappy about thse conferences at the time they were taking place and very worried lest they lead to false hopes and misunderstandings, I may perhaps be permitted to say that I think their importance has recently been considerably overrated. If it cannot be said that the Western democracies gained very much from these talks with the Russians, it would also be incorrect to say that they gave very much away. The establishment of Soviet military power in eastern Europe and the entry of Soviet forces into Manchuria was not the result of these talks; it was the result of military operations during the concluding phases of the war. There was nothing the Western democracies could have done to prevent the Russians from entering these areas except to get there first, and this they were not in a position to do. The implication that Soviet forces would not have gone into Manchuria if Roosevelt had not arrived at the Yalta understanding with Stalin is surely nonsense. Nothing could have stopped the Russians from participating in the final phases of the Pacific war, in order to be in at the kill and to profit by an opportunity to gain objectives they had been seeking for half a century."

To win the Second World War, the Western Democracies needed the cooperation of the Soviet Union. Without Russian efforts in the East, Hitler might have been able to consolidate his gains in the west by devoting a larger portion of his forces to the occupation of France and the defeat of England, and we might have had to deal with Gaulieters for the next forty years. We could not expect Russian cooperation would come without a price, and that price involved the sphere of Soviet power expanding some distance to the west (how far depended on the contingencies of war). What would Bush have done? Short of declaring war and trying to drive the Russians out--at the cost of more lives and more misery for already war weary populations--there was nothing to be done. The Russians were going to leave eastern Europe about as fast as we left western Europe and there things stood.

Though Bush sneers at the value of stability, after six years of war and fifty million deaths, a sensible person should begin to see its charms. For all the pleasure Bush takes in the notion of democracy as a vast army on the march, he clearly understands nothing of the suffering, the sorrow, or the anguish of warfare. All he sees is the awesome power of advancing armies of freedom, bright and shiny in the sun. Dress him up in a fuzzy hat and pin a few medals on his chest, and he'd look very like a member of the Politburo, standing behind Stalin at the May Day parade, seeing in the faces of the Red Army troops a tantalizing glimpse of the New Soviet Man.

UPDATE: Nice to see that someone else noticed.

One last thing

I forgot to say something about this line from Kevin Smith's review:

"This flick is so satisfyingly tragic, you'll think you're watching 'Othello' or 'Hamlet'."

I don't know, Kevin. I think I'd have to take a lot of hallucinogens to be fooled that way. Lucas may be many things, but Shakespeare he's not. This statement makes me wonder if Kevin Smith has ever actually seen OTHELLO or HAMLET, or if he's familiar with them only as brand names signifying tragedy. The STAR WARS films are, or can be, fun; but they don't bat in the same league with Shakespeare, Cervantes, Homer, Virgil, or Orson Welles or Stanley Kubrick for that matter. To claim otherwise is to demonstrate either a profound ignorance of the subject matter, or a complete lack of discernment.

Excuse My Absence

I've been pounding away at a screenplay lately, and between that and my kids I just haven't had the energy. I did, however, think I'd bang away at a couple of geeky topics--STAR TREK and STAR WARS. This will go on for a while. So settle back, fluff your cushions and begin.

STAR WARS first.

Kevin Smith (he of CLERKS, and CHASING AMY fame) gives us a fan-boy's eye view of STAR WARS: EPISODE III here. I can't honestly debate whether the movie is, in his words "fucking awesome", because I haven't seen it yet, but the terms on which he recommends it need comment:

"'Revenge of the Sith' is, quite simply, fucking awesome. This is the 'Star Wars' prequel the haters have been bitching for since "Menace" came out, and if they don't cop to that when they finally see it, they're lying. As dark as "Empire" was, this movie goes a thousand times darker - from the triggering of Order 66 (which has all the Shock Troopers turning on the Jedi Knights they've been fighting beside throughout the Clone Wars and gunning them down), to the jaw-dropping Anakin/Obi Wan fight on Mustafar (where - after cutting his legs and arm off, Ben leaves Skywalker burning alive on the shores of a lava river, with Anakin spitting venomous sentiments at his departing mentor), this flick is so satisfyingly tragic, you'll think you're watching 'Othello' or 'Hamlet'."

To begin, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK was notable not so much for its darkness as for the quality of the writing. I can, even today, quote a number of memorable dialog exchanges among the characters that bring smiles to my otherwise grim visage. The characters themselves were charming, witty people who could hold up their ends of the conversations. None of this is true of the last two STAR WARS movies, and I doubt it will be true of this one. (Unless Lawrence Kasdan came back and script doctored for Lucas, as a favor to him and the movie-going public at large). The scripts for the last two STAR WARS movies violated all eighteen of Mark Twain's rules for romantic fiction. A quick sample:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.

What, exactly, did the last two STAR WARS movies accomplish? They delivered little in the way of news about the characters, and scarcely anything about what drove them to make the decisions they ultimately made. This movie series was always going to have to problem of a certain lack of suspense--because everybody knows what's going to happen to everyone. But the solution for this problem was to find greater character depth and a sense of irony, both of which are uttlerly lacking here.

2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.

None of the incidents in the previous two STAR WARS movies can be called necessary, because there was no central point to develop.

4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.

Jar-Jar Binks is the most egregious example. His mannerisms may have been irritating, but I could have lived with him if he'd added something to the tale, instead of functioning as a bumbling distraction.

5. The require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.

I can really only remember two bits of dialog from the last two STAR WARS movies, and neither one for admirable reasons. They are part of Anakin's attempts to seduce Senator Amidala.

"I'm haunted by the kiss that you should never have given me. My heart is beating... hoping that kiss will not become a scar. You are in my very soul, tormenting me... what can I do?- I will do anything you ask."

And...

"I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything is soft and smooth."

Sound like human talk? Is such talk as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances? Interesting to the viewer? Help out the tale? Each one strikes out. I can't imagine anyone, under any conditions, say to someone he cares about "I'm haunted by the kiss you should never have given me." The passive voice makes it sound unnatural. A more reasonable line would be "Why did you kiss me? Just to torture me?" "Should never have given me" sounds inappropriately formal. It should appear in the sort of letter a person would send Amazon.com when he's received 5000 copies of "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" by mistake. "You should never have given me these books, and if you fail to take them back, and pay postage, I shall insert them sideways into your rectum." As for the "Sand" line, of what possible interest would that be to someone you're trying to flirt with? It's clear the "soft and smooth" part refers to Amidala, but it seems frustratingly indirect and even creepy, as if Anakin had transformed into Torgo, the shaky-handed groper of "Manos, the Hands of Fate". Compare this style of flirtation to this, taken from THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK:

[a tremor knocks Leia into Solo's arms]
Princess Leia: Let go.
Han Solo: Shh.
Princess Leia: Let go, please.
Han Solo: Don't get excited.
Princess Leia: Captain, being held by you isn't quite enough to get me excited.
Han Solo: Sorry sweetheart. I haven't got time for anything else.

Now that's the stuff. Simple, direct, flirty. A little bit of Beatrice/Benedick style cut and thrust. Wit and charm. And the last line is an exit line. I like these people, and I want to spend time in their company. Which brings me to the last and most devastating rule breakage.

10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of [Star Wars Episodes I & II] dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.

With the early STAR WARS movies, I cared about the fates of Luke, Han, Leia, and the others. When Han Solo was dropped into the carbon freeze unit, I feared for his life and checked the film magazines from the time EMPIRE closed to the time RETURN OF THE JEDI opened to see if Ford had been cast, and if so, whether that meant that Han Solo would return for another movie. My reaction to his freezing was much the same as that of the little boy in THE PRINCESS BRIDE when his grandfather tells him that Wesley is dead.

The new STAR WARS movies have left me with no one to root for or worry about. The characters aren't really characters. They're just plot points, marking time until Anakin puts on the black armor and gets medieval on the Jedi. When Anakin and Amidala fell in love, they brought as much passion to it as they would have to signing complicated insurance forms. I didn't believe that they were in love. I believed that the plot required them to say that they were. (I've polled a number of my female students on this, and they assured me that anyone who laid this "kiss you never should have given me" line on them would have been given the friend speech or been kicked to the curb. This line is better birth control than any doctor can prescribe.) I don't like these characters. I don't care what happens to them, and the one upside of Episode III that I can see is that I can watch a good many of them die horribly.

Enough of that. On to STAR TREK. Orson Scott Card takes a moment to dance on STAR TREK's grave in an LA TIMES column.

Now, I don't take much of what Mr. Card says seriously...amend that, I don't take anything Mr. Card says seriously. (You should read his political columns sometime. It's like Ann Coulter, only longer. Much, much longer.) But I did want to get at his premise that STAR TREK was grade school science fiction from which we have graduated.

What must be understood about STAR TREK is that when it came out, it was the first major prime-time television science fiction series that wasn't aimed primarily at small children. It was also the first science fiction television series to give us a self-contained, internally consistent world where we saw a large number of science fiction concepts (Space travel, time travel, talking computers, transporters, aliens, advanced weaponry, wireless communications, and medical scanners) used simultaneously as if they were a natural part of the scenery. It came out at a time when most people outside the very small universe of science fiction fans looked down on science fiction if they bothered to look at it at all. Conversely, science fiction fans tended then, as now, to regard themselves as members of an exclusive enclave where the masses weren't welcome. In the introduction to Harlan Ellison's "Dangerous Visions" anthology, Ellison describes the state of affairs as they were in the 1960s:

"It is 'steam engine time' for the writers of speculative fiction. The millenium is at hand. We are what's happening.

"And most of those wailing-wall aficionados of fantasy fiction hate it a lot. Because allofasudden even the bus driver and the dental technician and the beach bum and the grocery bag-boy are reading his stories; and what's worse, those johnny-come-latelies may not show the proper deference to the Grand Old Masters of the field, they may not think the Skylark stories are billiant and mature and compelling; they may not care to be confused by terminology that has been accepted in s-f for thirty years, they may want to understand what's going on; they may not fall in line with the old order. They may prefer 'Star Trek' and Kubrick to Barsoom and Ray Cummings. And thus they are the recipients of the fan-sneer, a curling of the lips that closely resembles the crumbling of an old pulp edition of 'Famous Fantastic Mysteries.'" (1967)

"Star Trek" functioned, for science fiction writers like Harlan Ellison, Ted Sturgeon, Robert Bloch and, Asimov, as a kind of pop culture acknowledgement of science fiction (itself a creature of pop culture, but a more obscure and varied one than television is). They knew that for the first time their work was being taken seriously in a place that could deliver a mass audience. Ellison, Bloch, and Sturgeon all wrote for the series. (Ellison wrote one episode, the experience leading to an understandable estrangement from Roddenberry. Sturgeon wrote two episodes, and Bloch wrote three.) Asimov, in an essay describing the "Star Trek" conventions, said this:

"These were the enthusiastic people of all ages who had taken part in the STAR TREK experience, who had been and were participants in the most sophisticated example of science fiction on the television screen, and a little of whose lives had been permanently marked as a result.

"The trekkies are intelligent, interested, involved people with whom it is a pleasure to be, in any numbers. Why else would they have bene involved in STAR TREK, an intelligent, interested, and involved show?"

Of course, this describes the trekkies of 1976. I don't think he met the woman who refused to take off her uniform for jury duty...still...my point is this. If STAR TREK was relatively simple science fiction by literary sf standards, it's because it had to be. Most of the audience members weren't also members of fandom. (Most weren't trekkies either.) They, as Harlan Ellison put it, "wanted to know what was going on." And why shouldn't a show that needs twenty million viewers a week to stay on the air let them know what's going on? If TV science fiction has grown more than an inch or two conceptually in the intervening years, I need proof.

As for the lack of series-long through-lines which became fashionable in later decades of television, STAR TREK was hardly unique among shows of its era in that respect. "The Avengers", "The Saint", "The Andy Griffith Show", "Gunsmoke", "Paladin" and most other shows of the era were bascially anthology shows with a continuing cast. (Limited run series like "The Fugitive" and "The Prisoner" are exceptions.) While many of them maintained a level of series continuity--Opie aged, STAR TREK and "The Saint" had sequels to episodes--the shows couldn't manage through-lines because of the nature of production in those days. Most producers felt, and I'm not knocking the theory, that audiences wouldn't want to come into the middle of a show that had already started if they needed to understand too much backstory. (For this reason, among others, I've never watched an episode of "24" or "Lost".) Also, because series were filmed rather than taped, processing the shows often made it necessary to deliver or show episodes out of sequence, fouling up any prospect of maintaining a through-line. This would be especially true on a show like STAR TREK, which not only had to process and color correct the film, but would also need to prepare optical and sound effects for insertion into the live footage. Depending on the episode, this could take some doing. This would also complicate any serious changes to characters during any given season, because there was always the chance that another episode, filmed earlier but shown later, would violate continuity. A character could change, but it would have to be a change that would take place after a good number of episodes had aired, in order to be safe. Now Mr. Card may not like this. I don't especially either. But that was how things worked at the time, not just for STAR TREK, but for everyone.

The subsequent STAR TREK shows did pick up on the fashion of longer term through-lines. I remember several in STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION and DEEP SPACE NINE. I don't know VOYAGER or ENTERPRISE as well, for reasons I'll get to in a minute.

What killed STAR TREK was not, I think, that science fiction on television became more sophisticated. It is rather that the later STAR TREK series tended to rely on a variety of deus ex machina endings to survive from week to week, and that the characters were, like the characters in the last couple of STAR WARS movies, simply less interesting. Frequently, a contemporary STAR TREK show would end when some technician said, "Oh, all we have to do is re-phase the positve ion capacitor in order to restore containment in the anti-matter pods, allowing us to move at warp speed and get away from the guys with weird brow ridges." This happened more often than a Fenimore Cooper character stepped on a twig. Suddenly, whoosh, the ship comes to life and the crew lives to do it all again next week. This flaw might, however, be forgivable, if the characters engaged us in some way. Mr. Card may not like Kirk, Spock and McCoy, but lots of other people did. If nothing else, it was fun to watch them argue, even if the episode was generally subpar. I found, however, little pleasure in the company of the later STAR TREK characters. Hadn't the writers ever met anyone fun, or witty, or charming? Did they not know what charisma looks like? I seldom watched VOYAGER or ENTERPRISE because I simply didn't care about the characters on the show.

In spite of what Mr. Card says, STAR TREK is not gone. You can watch it on DVD or the Sci-Fi channel almost any time you like, an indication that large numbers of people haven't graduated from it (though they may, as I do, watch BEING JOHN MALKOVICH along with it). Paramount just isn't making new episodes, and while that's as fine with me as it is with Card, our reasons are different. I think that, if Paramount can't find people who can make newer episodes of STAR TREK as compelling as what's come before, they should leave us with what we have. All shows end, and it's best if they do so before they become stale. I actually think the British have the right idea in ending TV shows after six episodes. It keeps the material fresh. It's a model HBO has more or less copies for their originial series. Do you imagine THE SOPRANOS would be nearly as good if David Chase and company had to produce thirty shows a year? Card, conversely, seems to feel that the world might have been better off if STAR TREK had never existed in the first place.

In a sense, it may be true. Without STAR TREK, science fiction might never have achieved the level of mass popularity and acceptance it has since enjoyed; and Orson Scott Card might never have lived long or prospered as a best-selling writer of the form. Since I've never been able to endure more than a few pages of his work, I might consider this a blessing undisguised.

Still, history is immutable, so I'll have to consider the co-existence of STAR TREK and Scott Card a fair bargain.