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Monthly Archives: November 2012

“Altogether Too Reflective”

Søren Kierkegaard

I am well aware that as a human being I am very far from being a paradigm; if anything, I am a sample human being. With a fair degree of accuracy, I give the temperature of every mood and passion, and when I am generating my own inwardness, I understand these words: homo sum, nil humani a me alienum puto [I am a human being, I hold that nothing human is alien to me]. But humanly no one can model himself on me, and historically I am even less a prototype for any human being. If anything, I am someone who could be needed in a crisis, as a guinea pig that life uses to feel its way. A person half as reflective as I would be able to be of significance for many people, but precisely because I am altogether reflective I have none at all. As soon as I am outside my religious understanding, I feel as an insect with which children are playing must feel, because life seems to have dealt with me so unmercifully; as soon as I am inside my religious understanding, I understand that precisely this has absolute meaning for me. Hence, that which in one case is a dreadful jest is in another sense the most profound earnestness. Earnestness is basically not something simple, a simplex, but is a compositum [compound], for true earnestness is the unity of jest and earnestness. —Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way

 

The Bludgeon

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German POW Surrendering to Russian Defender at Stalingrad

For us, it was the last “Good War.” For the Russians, it was “The Great Patriotic War,” in which 20-30 million soldiers and civilians died defending the Rodina, or Fatherland. I am currently reading David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House’s When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler.

I’m not going to say we had it easy on the Western Front: There’s a lot we don’t know and perhaps never will know about some of the horrors of the Sicilian and Italian campaigns, as well as D-Day and its aftermath in France, Belgium, and Germany. (If you can, see John Huston’s WW2 documentaries, especially The Battle of San Pietro.) But there was something particularly horrible in the way that the two great 20th century dictators, Hitler and Stalin, moved great numbers of men and materiel across the Russian steppe as if it were a chessboard:

The superb German fighting machine was defeated by more than distance. The German rapier, designed to end conflict cleanly and efficiently, was dulled by repeated and often clumsy blows from a simple, dull, but very large Soviet bludgeon. That bludgeon took the form of successive waves of newly mobilized armies, each taking its toll of the invaders before shattering and being replaced by the next wave.

Stalin had a huge supply of manpower at his beck and call. Once the Nazis invaded Russia during Operation Barbarossa, their forces kept getting farther and farther from their source of supply, while, at the same time, the Russian supply lines were getting shorter and shorter as the battle zone neared Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad.

It was not just a matter of manpower, however.The Russians were developing new tanks that could take on the best that the Panzer divisions could throw against them, new fighters and bombers that harassed the rapidly dwindling Luftwaffe, and bringing terrifying new weapons such as the Katyusha rocket launchers that helped to turn the tide against the hapless Germans, who were stuck fighting a two-front war once the Americans and British invaded North Africa, Italy, and France.

We don’t think much about the Eastern Front. After all, we weren’t there. And we were taught that the real show was in Western Europe. The Germans knew, though, that it was in Russia that the coffin nails were pounded into the Thousand-Year Reich. Hitler wound up blowing his brains out, while Stalin died in bed.

No, we don’t like to credit the Russians for their victory; but they deserved it. They certainly gave up enough to achieve it.

 

 

Best American Films By Year, Part One

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Lobby Card for Josef Von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934)

One day, my friend Lee Sanders and I started chatting about our favorite American films. From a capacious bag full of various literature, Lee whipped out a list of “The Best American Films of the Year,” spanning the years 1915 through 1977.  Now, for the most part, Lee and I see eye-to-eye. Where we don’t, I propose my own alternative. Where two films are listed for a particular year, the first one is Lee’s; the second, mine:

1915 – The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith)
1916 – Intolerance (D. W. Griffith)
1917 – Straight Shooting (John Ford)
1918 – The Whispering Chorus (Cecil B. DeMille); Shoulder Arms (Charles Chaplin)
1919 – Broken Blossoms (D. W. Griffith)
1920 – Way Down East (D. W. Griffith); The Last of the Mohicans (Maurice Tourneur)

1921 – Dream Street (D. W. Griffith); The Kid (Charles Chaplin)
1922 – Robin Hood (Allan Dwan)
1923 – The White Rose  (D. W. Griffith); Our Hospitality (Buster Keaton)
1924 – He Who Gets Slapped (Victor Seastrom)
1925 – Seven Chances (Buster Keaton)
1926 – The General (Buster Keaton)
1927 – Sunrise (F. W. Murnau)
1928 – The Docks of New York (Josef Von Sternberg)
1929 – Lady of the Pavements (D. W. Griffith); The Love Parade (Ernst Lubitsch)

1931 – Dishonored (Josef Von Sternberg)
1932 – Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch)
1933 – Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch)
1934 – The Scarlet Empress (Josef Von Sternberg)
1935 – Barbary Coast (Howard Hawks); The Devil Is a Woman (Josef Von Sternberg)
1936 – The Road to Glory (Howard Hawks)
1937 – Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey)
1938 – Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks)
1939 – Stagecoach (John Ford)
1940 – His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks)

That’s all for the first installment. My differences with Lee in the above listings relate more to his love of D. W. Griffith’s later melodramas. I will continue in a week or so with the remainder of the list.

Any comments? We old film freaks used to call this activity “trading bubble gum cards.”

“Like Beads on a String”

Kurt Vonnegut

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “So it goes.”—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

Living With the Mau Mau

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Mau Mau Terrorists in Kenya

Things change. I remember during the 1950s reading horror stories of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya. There were ghastly tales of what the Kikuyu were doing to British settlers. Around the same time, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was taking place. I still remember reading—was it in The Reader’s Digest?—of the Communist Secret Police (the dread AVO) taking captured Budapest prisoners and grinding their living bodies into hamburger meat. For themselves? To feed to their pets?

Not too much time passed before Jomo “Burning Spear” Kenyatta, one of the leaders of the Mau Mau, was named President of an independent Kenya in 1964. Then, after the Hungarian Revolution was ground into goulash by the Russian Tanks of Nikita Khruschchev, Hungarian President János Kádar developed a reputation as being one of the most enlightened Communist satellite leaders—without in any way sacrificing his Marxist/Leninist credentials.

We are perhaps facing a similar situation with the changes wrought by the Arab Spring. Groups that had been associated with terrorism may perhaps turn out to be our Middle East allies of tomorrow:

Amid chaos and uncertainty, the Islamists alone offer a familiar, authentic vision for the future. They might fail or falter, but who will pick up the mantle? Liberal forces have a weak lineage, slim popular support, and hardly any organizational weight. Remnants of the old regime are familiar with the ways of power yet they seem drained and exhausted. If instability spreads, if economic distress deepens, they could benefit from a wave of nostalgia. But they face long odds, bereft of an argument other than that things used to be bad, but now are worse.

These are the observations of Hussein Agha and Robert Malley writing in the November 8, 2012, issue of The New York Review of Books in their excellent article “This Is Not a Revolution.”

 

Watering the Forests of the Northeast

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Forest in Maine

To return for a moment to my recent vacation, one thing I forgot to tell you was that I had forgotten to pack one of my diabetes medications, namely the Metformin HCL. One result was that, even taking insulin, my glucose reading was running rather high (in the 300s). Apparently, when that happens, I have to urinate frequently, about every thirty to forty-five minutes.

While Martine was driving toward the end of our vacation, I felt as if I had to stop by every other tree in the forests of New Brunswick and Maine to water it. That got particularly difficult when there was a chain-link fence separating me from the trees, making it difficult to disguise my actions from other motorists.

That last day from Bar Harbor, Maine, to Manchester, New Hampshire, was definitely the worst. Not only did I have to have Martine stop the car ten to twenty times, but there was a driving rainstorm once we passed Augusta.

Somehow I survived. As soon as we returned to Los Angeles, I started on the Metformin at once. Within a few days, the readings had declined to an acceptable level; and I no longer had to evaluate the cover possibilities of nearby trees.

I can tell you, I left a part of myself in the Northeast,

Exit David Petraeus

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David Petraeus

I am curiously torn about David Petraeus, who just resigned his post as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after admitting to an affair with another woman. This is not standard operating procedure in American political life. Usually, it is preceded by a sleazy denial, which nobody believes. And then there is an onslaught from the media, who troll for salacious details damaging to everyone involved, their families and friends.

No, either the General is a compulsive truth-teller or he is afraid of being blackmailed. Let me see, are there any compulsive truth-tellers in the military or political arenas? I suspect not. It’s too radical an idea for now.

As I said at the outset, I am of two minds about Petraeus. On one hand, he was appointed by George W. Bush, which immediately made me suspect him at the outset. At the same time, he is probably the most effective U.S. military leader since World War II. He reminds me of another general, some sixteen hundred years ago, who administered a decisive defeat to Attila the Hun at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in A.D. 451. Flavius Aetius (396-454) was called “The Last of the Romans” for his victory.

Could Petraeus have won in Iraq and Afghanistan? I doubt it, because the enemy is hydra-headed. There are so many warlords and involved parties that, when one was beheaded, others would spring up. Remember when we killed the head of Al Qaida in Iraq? That didn’t accomplish anything in the long run. He was simply replaced. There are plenty more cockroaches-in-waiting to assume the job.

Edward Gibbon called Aetius “the man universally celebrated as the terror of Barbarians and the support of the Republic.”

In general, our times keep reminding me of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Today’s Los Angeles Times predicted that the Chinese economy would overtake us within four years. Oh horrors! (Not that it matters: By then China will be a polluted, smoking ruin from ignoring certain simple responsibilities of governance.) What with global climate change and the staggering world economy, there is an end-times feel to the decade. Not that we won’t somehow prevail in the end by dumb luck or changing our behavior.

Men like David Petraeus are rare in our society. Too bad.

A Classification of Animals

Mythical Animal

These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”

On Suffering

Thomas Merton

Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.—Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

The Biggest Losers

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Sheldon Adelson of Las Vegas Sands Corporation

Millions of dollars were all but thrown away by many of America’s most wealthy right-wingers. Heading up the list is Sheldon Adelson of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation. Out of $53 million he injected into the 2012 election, his only winner was a minor Michigan ballot initiative. If his political investments were race horses, they were mostly glue factory material.

Remember Karl Rove, whom George W. Bush nicknamed “Turd Blossom”? He came a cropper with his American Crossroads Super PAC, which spent $103 million in attack ads with a paltry 1% success rate. And here we thought the man was invincible, instead of being just another reputation on the rocks.

It is possible that the Citizens United decision which opened the political contribution floodgates did more of a disservice to American millionaires than it did to the electoral process. You may recall from several of my recent posts that I thought all this political advertising would ultimately be regarded as mere noise in the system which voters would just tune out. That is a typical American failing: If something works once, say the Willy Horton ads that sank Michael Dukakis’s campaign for President in 1988, that doesn’t mean that a thousand-fold increase in negative advertising will bear a thousand times as much in the way of results.

No, there are limits. You know that I don’t listen to political advertising at all. I even throw out all the political bulk mail I get without reading it. For me, information is not something I am force-fed, but something I go out and actively seek, carefully judging the accuracy of the source.

So now there are quite a few millionaires out a lot of money. I’m sure they’re on the horn with their accountants right now trying to figure out how to expense their contributions so that they won’t have to pay so much in taxes. I frankly hope they get audited and convicted. The jerks!