Write your own caption. From a recent rock festival. What’s the political analogy?
Large standing military and security forces have troubled ruling regimes from the dimmest tribal pasts down to today. Governing ideology doesn’t matter: totalitarian, Marxist-Leninist, Mao-ist or American corporatist democracy/demotic – all rely on and are often threatened by these – in political science terms – ‘power institutions.’
What’s most discomforting to you? The Administration starts its 4th year of protracted, partisan trench warfare. Somehow it forgot that Catholic bishops and their friends nearly derailed the entire health care boondoggle over abortion issues. How precisely does one forget that searing experience?
Obama apologists claim re-energizing a new ideological front against them was the goal all along. Or if not the goal, they quickly add, don’t worry. Rick Santorum benefits – genius kung fu.
All of which tells us that Obama and Friends really don’t understand contemporary politics and our polity. Still. At this late date. Their calculations remain small, traditional, rooted in the Old Consensus.
Galvanizing reluctantly dormant social wedge issue politics will not serve to improve participatory political pluralism. Such easily avoided political malpractice energizes the most anti-liberal democratic, anti-Enightenment forces and gives them legitimacy.
Whether it temporarily benefits the electoral fate of a single individual is completely besides the point. Only neophytes look at this in the temporary tweet blip landscape. Giving voice to these forces needlessly will de-stablize and echo in politics beyond today’s 24 news cycle. Amateurs may think this is just a hornets nest within Rightist circles (a) today’s Movement began as ‘just a hornets nest’; (b) MSNBC, San Francisco and the Upper West Side are not the only Democratic weathervanes.
Obama by necessity is not only his own political agent. He — as any president — serves as steward for the fabric and weal of society. Some compromises and concessions are the oxygen for participatory democracy. When that itself is under siege and question, all the more reason to avoid such a Freshman Unforced Error.
Astute observers of American culture and politics know this to be true. This unnecessary political fumble? An augur. And reminder of what ‘victory’ will mean.
If today’s GOP primary was a Japanese horror supernatural anime (all rights with respective owners). In both the Movement and Japanese imagination, conveniently blonde hair plays an outsized role. We think Ms. Base Babe definitely should pack, and it’s nice the pointy-headed-liberal here is wearing glasses. Probably went to a better school than Newt.
Issue No.1s are always tricky – introducing the main characters and the hero’s initial journey. While keeping a menace on the horizon. So did we miss anyone? Possibly in the Campbell tradition, the older mentor who must die for the hero to move on. That came to mind.
Leave suggestions for Issue No. 2 below.
Newt’s many faults are discussed everywhere.
So it’s impressive how little people get Newt. Even while talking about him ad nauseum.
Newt’s actually a chemist, of a sort. His favored (and necessary) efforts are to turn politics into their most gaseous state, that is to say radicalized and unpredictable. Amorphous. In this sense he truly is the anti-Romney and vice versa.
As a chemist, Newton Leroy Gingrich’s accelerant always is expediency. Look at the major events of his life. Expediency defines him from his first divorce through his calamitous years as Speaker to now running against LBOs and runaway judges. (An old acquaintance helped write that 52 page whackadoodle thing; if our experience writing for Newt is any guide he skimmed the intro then scrawled “Good effort, keep pushing. Newt.”)
All the Interwebs are buzzing about de-railing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate counterpart, Protect IP Act (PIPA). Those kidz at Reddit started a campaign against a company (GoDaddy) so dull (it registers Internet domains and sells email) it gets marginal mindshare deploying quasi-strip tease acts for ads designed to be blocked at the Super Bowl. Technology companies flirting with the IP crowd are now backing away.
SOPA is kitchen table talk now. Perhaps everyone wants to at least feel like they’re ‘in’. Like Tina Fey-kinda-in. It’s a simple talking point, too. Why, allowing Hollywood lawyers to tell backbone companies to block websites the lawyers deem carrying pirated material? That would “break the Internet.” Angry Birds would die. Mafia Wars end. And so on.
We won’t rehearse all the original machinations of the Motion Picture Association of America, the Business Software Alliance (MSFT eta al.). You’ve seen it elsewhere. And of course, watching MSFT and others at BSA cave to pressure and retreat is not un-fun. But it’s the same old story of IP holders’ greed and fear from the DMCA days. Turned up a notch. Except now there’s social media – like Reddit. And it bit them in the backside but fierce.
Still, it’s a bread and circuses thing. We’re just puzzled why Amerikhuns care more about access to online porn, Pirate Bay wannabees and LOLCats than, say, oh, their personal freedom. Nobody lifted a finger to slow PATRIOT down then. Except Dick Armey and a few who demanded and got sunset provisions. OK, it was right after 9/11. Feelings were raw.
Feelings weren’t that raw when Democrats and Republicans voted to blow past the original sunsets. How raw could feelings be with the Boy King in office? To get *expansions* to the PATRIOT Act, notwithstanding its classified offshoots. Chirp. Chirp. You’d think this would be something custom made for social media, ala Cairo, etc. But alas, people can’t conceive of losing something that’s not tangible, like a shiny new iPad suddenly no longer showing a favorite website.
So if you go to one of those usual suspect aggregators news sites proclaiming this ‘dramatic’ SOPA victory to ‘preserve the Internet’, just remember, sure, Amerikhuns may get LOLCats unimpeded. And the torrents running free in Sweden.
High fives all around. Because, like, saving the “integrity of the Internet” is so much more important than a constitutional republic. You know we’re right.
From all of us here to you. May the holidays and new year find you and loved ones well. We’ll probably interrupt the patriotic embrace of the QVC experience to post over the coming days as well.
The 2011 cinematic version of Le Carre’s finest novel, Tinker, Tailor is a competent procedural that manages to tell the story of a 1970s British mole hunt with diligent attention to period atmosphere. Those unfamiliar with the book or lyrically accurate and evocative 1970s BBC mini-series with Alec Guiness likely will find the movie fine entertainment.
Both the book and BBC series at heart are about layers of betrayal: to colleagues, to institutions, to ‘set’ or social caste, to spouses, to country and ultimately disappointed life entitlement. It’s no accident the BBC series’ credits roll with Oxford spires and a choral lament. That is the alpha and omega of the story. None of that is in the movie. And thus we are left with something less.
The movie also misses a key character. 1970s Britain. Swedish director Tomas Alfredson works overtime to pull the viewer into his re-created 1970s world. Shot after shot lingers on mini-skirted extras, 1970s furniture rejected by “Mad Men” as not innocently 60′s enough, period wall paper in the background and lots of 1970s cars. The film chromatic scale even seeks to lure the viewer in. Yet it’s a manufactured strain that still can’t capture what the BBC cameras did effortlessly — London (and Oxford) as imperial detritus, floating on memory.
The screenplay invents some new scenes and omits others but like a good CSI or NCIS episode tells how a British mole burrowed to the aorta of British intelligence and turned it all into an arm of Moscow Center. When confronted after capture the movie’s mole declares his rationale “I made my mark.” Very 21st Century. In the book and BBC series, this scene is a complex fugue like crescendo of all the cascading betrayals.
The major theme? Young men working in intelligence during WW II, recruited from Oxford to rule the world themselves betrayed by fate. Their youthful expectations to preside over an empire invisibly now just a bitter joke in a world of American and Soviet preponderance. The movie doesn’t touch this but inserts serial betrayal as simply dastardly acts. Tinker, Tailor on Auto Tune.
Some changes are just odd. The original plot device to start the book and BBC series is a sabotaged covert mission to Warsaw Pact Czechoslovakia. The cat’s paw here was fake Soviet mobilization along the NATO border to trigger a crisis in London. For some reason, the movie puts this mission to Budapest and Hungary. Why? Soviet mobilization in Hungary? Even then. Puzzling, maybe, but yawn.
Perhaps modern audiences can’t conceive of Czechoslovakia as ferrin enough. After all, Czech super models adorn beaches from the Aegean, Dubai to the Hamptons. The whole “New Europe” thing? American BMD sites? Recently departed Vaclav Havel being so familiar for decades ? So . . . Hungary?
We felt the movie generally miscast but the acting solid and serving the truncated procedural format. Our new Smiley, as mole hunting protagonist, is stoic and purposeful, with hesitancy intended to show character. Gone is the apparently befuddled, genuinely uncertain (about Ann and many things) Smiley, quiet but with intellectual stride. Gary Oldman, Commissioner Gordon from Batman to you kool kidz, said he modeled his take on Le Carre himself.
Oldman in one or two shots is shown to act physically weak. That’s age but not character. Oldman’s Smiley vehemently confronts Lacon and The Minister that they’ve been duped by The Mole, etc. Oldman’s viscerally assertive, combative and unabashedly confrontational. The anti-Smiley. On all counts. But exactly what a 127 minute procedural format requires.
The rest of the major cast are too young to be men of WW II now in the 1970s. John Hurt, playing Control, rips off his earlier portrayal of Chancellor Sutler from “V for Vendetta”. (We did think about a chest burster but that’s just us). His Control is a alcoholic who likes to socialize with the staff. The movie abandons Control’s journey of quietly frantic desperation to fend off an internal coup. That would have been more valuable than the fabricated scenes of his drinking and carousing.
Similarly, we thought fabricated scenes of violence gratuitous. They seemed tacked on to remind today’s audience that “THE SOVIETS ARE MEAN.” Maybe that was the smart thing to do.
The Bill Haydon and Jim Prideaux cast in the movie are improbable urchins. Both actors are fine, but there’s no way in hell that Prideaux, the spy betrayed in Czechoslovakia Hungary was “Old Circus” – i.e. an institutional legend, whose stature in fall would topple Control from his throne. This Prideaux looks like the guy you see when you walk by Charles Schwab who welcomes new customers. Haydon, too. Far too young to be the foundational superstar. The movie’s Haydon plays the louche well but simply lacks the internal, instinctive Christ Church hauteur essential to his Miltonian Fall. And without that, all you have “I made a mark.”
A few minor quibbles with supporting roles. Toby and Bland get so little screen time their performances don’t register much. Greatly missing, however, is Toby’s unctuous superciliousness. Ricki Tarr comes across as a petulant tennis coach. His time on screen outsized given sacrifices forced on other characters in the screenplay.
Percy in this movie is a complete fumble. YMMV. And Peter Guillam? What’s with that?
Lacon, the permanent career intelligence functionary is reduced on screen to a quasi- accountant/minder (who plays squash). Gone are his estate, the foundation of his knighthood and pre-occupation with order and appearance. Again missing are motivations and impulses driven from entitlement and prestige. Perhaps this is surgical precision here – if that overarching theme is absent why provide Lacon the buttressing details?
All in all, the audience appeared to enjoy the movie a great deal. If Smiley here is not quite Horatio Cane or Gibbs he still wraps up the puzzle nicely in 127 minutes (and is shown at close assuming Control’s throne (again out of character) triumphantly). We give it a good 3 Leos out of 5. Those less immersed in the BBC series or book may rate it higher.
And so Obama completes another Bush Administration milestone. The formal withdrawal of American forces commences from Iraq — although the Obama Administration fought hard (and bungled negotiations) with the Iraqis to leave a residual force. A goal to which ‘serious’ people like Joe Lieberman and John McCain still cling.
Oddly, the Senators and CENTCOM may get their way even so. Iraqi domestic political opposition (which centered mostly about language in negotiations re legal jurisdiction over American troops and initiation of military activity) may require American troops to ‘leave’ before they are ‘invited’ back. So don’t be too surprised to see American contingents re-flow back to supplement the tens of thousands of contractors and other assorted flotsam and jetsam left behind. Like some kind of cruddy residue.
The ‘support our troops’ stickers in SUV windows are fewer now. The magnets tucked away. Many Americans possibly sense things are different because NCIS no longer features Iraq-related plots prominently. For several seasons now.
Those who lied the U.S. into war a war of aggression or continued to support those lies after exposure? They’ve collectively (nice word, that, no?) have paid little or no price. Many personalities are regulars on the cable TV circuit. Some churn out mind numbing books that like Speer and Posnan try to argue ‘they did not know’ (and weren’t there). It’s their good fortune that Iraq is already becoming the (second) ‘Forgotten War’.
Others are less fortunate. Some returning home will be shocked at the society they thought they were defending. Welcome to the 99%.
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