Category: Politics (implicit)

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Response and responsibilities

For a month or two, Slate has been running excerpts from Clive James’ new book, Cultural Amnesia, which it describes as a “re-examination of intellectuals, artists, and thinkers who helped shape the 20th century.” The excerpts are presented as A-Z profiles, and some are compelling enough that I put the book on my Amazon Wish List. (However, since I know I won’t get around to reading it for quite a while, I’m figuring I’ll end up buying the paperback in 2008 or ’09. Or I’ll find a remainder/surplus copy at the Strand, as is my wont.)

I thought the Terry Gilliam one went off the rails a bit, pursuing a discussion of torture that probably could have been written without including Gilliam’s masterpiece, but it’s still an engaging essay. With a number of the other essays, James appears to be pursuing the question of artists’ responsibilities in the world, vis a vis the political tumult of the 20th century. (It’s not only about artists, but they seem well represented in the 110 profiles the book contains.)

Thus, the discussion of Borges has to get at his relationship with Argentina’s junta, while the take-no-prisoners profile of Sartre posted today questions the nature of JP’s resistance during the war as well as his avoidance of the truth about the Soviet Union. (It also touches on the subject of the necessity of bad writing, a favorite topic of mine.)

The excerpt that I enjoyed the most — I haven’t read them all — is the one discussing Rilke and Brecht, even though I haven’t read much of Rilke beyond his poetry and know nothing of Brecht’s work. The essay contrasts Rilke’s art-for-art’s-sake with Brecht’s art-as-politics, and finds Brecht wanting. (Okay, it finds Brecht a noxious scumbag.) But James goes on to make an interesting and subtle point about the relation between the artist — particularly the ‘word artist’ — and his beliefs, and perhaps between the artist and the audience.

Give it a read (and go check out some of the others) and let me know what you think.

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Not just tan: Spartan

In keeping with my inner classics-geek of that previous post, here’s Victor Davis Hanson on 300, the movie adaptation of Frank Miller’s comic book about the battle of Thermopylae:

[T]he impressionism of 300 is Hellenic in spirit: its buff bare chests are reminiscent of the heroic nudity of warriors on Attic vase paintings. Even in its surrealism — a rhinoceros, futuristic swords, and an effeminate, Mr. Clean-esque Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) who gets his ear flicked by a Spartan spear cast — it is not all that different from some of Euripides’ wilder takes, like Helen or Iphigeneia at Taurus, in their strange deviation from the party line of the Homeric epics. Like the highly formalist Attic tragedy — with its set length, three actors, music, iambic and choral meters, and so forth — 300 consciously abandons realist portrayal.

I don’t remember a ton of the comic book. The one time I read it, I was at a friend’s house in Auckland, NZ, trying desperately to stay awake till nightfall, so as not to get wrecked by jetlag. Fortunately, he was one of the greatest cartoonists in the antipodes, and had a room full of comics that I hadn’t read.

And, yes, I’m thinking of catching 300 at the local IMAX. Sue me.

(Here are some terrible pix from the premiere.)

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China Syndrome

This massive article on China purports to have been written by only two reporters, but its portrayal of China’s economy and social condition is so fragmented and contradictory that I have to assume at least six different writers contributed pieces to it, and that their editor was on vacation.

This piece on China’s first-strike capacity is much more internally coherent. Unfortunately, it seems to propose we return to a cold war-style arms race.

Oh, and Yao Ming is the slowest guy in the league.

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300 Pimps

I’ve never been a car aficionado. My brother seemed to inherit Dad’s Corvette-gene. Not that he would go off and spend big cash on a sports-car or anything, but he did go for a Mustang back when he was single. Me? I’ve owned three cars: a Hyundai Excel, a Saturn SL1, and a Honda Element. I’m not exactly stylin’ and profilin’.

That said, I admit that I once had a certain fondness for the Chrysler Crossfire. I think it’s largely because it looks like a coupe that a Micronaut would drive.

In the last year, I’ve become enamored of the Chrysler 300. I think it’s largely because it looks like something Batman would drive.

At first, I thought the 300 was a car for oldies, but then I noticed younger drivers in them, and started seeing tricked-out (sorry: pimped) models. Personally, the “black rims” thing always struck me as silly-looking, but it was a good indicator that the big-barrel sedan had crossed over. I found that I really liked the car’s lines, and wondered if it might be time to retire the Element of Style.
I was able to talk myself out of buying one because of Chrysler’s corporate ownership. Mercedes-Benz, which acquired (“merged as equals with”) Chrysler in 1998, employed Jewish slave labor during WWII. Around the time of the merger, economist Steve Landsburg wrote a neat article about the implications of “punishing the child for the sins of the father” when it comes to corporations:

Corporations can be punished for misdeeds in at least two ways. One is a consumer boycott and another is a (voluntary or involuntary) fine. Both kinds of punishment have been visited on Daimler-Benz (though arguably at levels that are small compared with the underlying offenses). In the 1980s, the corporation paid about $11 million to the descendants of its slave laborers.

Who exactly suffers from those punishments? You might think the $11 million came from the pockets of those who owned Daimler-Benz stock in the 1980s, but that’s not necessarily the case. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that in 1950 it becomes foreseeable that Daimler-Benz will eventually make reparations. Then every share of Daimler-Benz stock sold between 1950 and 1980 sells at a discount reflecting that expectation. Without the discount, nobody would buy the stock. So given sufficient foresight, the prospect of a 1980 punishment hurts the 1950 owners, even if they sell in the interim. And those who buy stocks after 1950 are not punished at all, because the discount compensates them for the fine.

He makes some interesting arguments in that piece. Lately, I’ve been rethinking my aversion to buying a sorta German car, and not because I wanna zoom around in that 300. It’s more a question of globalization, and the moral lines we draw in the sand. I mean, because I drive a car, I can’t help but prop up Arab dictatorships. That said, I can elect not to do publicity for a country that has a strict anti-Israel policy. But I don’t know how viable it is to protest so selectively.

For instance, my wife drives a Mini Cooper. The parent company is BMW, which makes it problematic for me. My knee-jerk reaction is not to support a German car company.

That said, the car is assembled entirely in the UK, and it seems to me that the British could hold an awful lot of resentment toward Germany. So, does the fact that commerce helps both nations serve to ameliorate some of the ill-feelings from from those nations’ past behavior?

I don’t think I’d ever buy a German-brand car (M-B, BMW, VW), but I can imagine that people whose family served in the Pacific theater consider me a traitor for buying a Honda. Any of you guys have issues about this sorta stuff? Are there nations/nationalities you wouldn’t buy from?

Anyway, all of that is a very roundabout way of posting links to a couple of BusinessWeek articles. The first is about how DaimlerChrysler’s CEO is under siege because of the company’s poor performance (and its avoidance of reality). The other is about Freeman Thomas, the guy who designed the 300. Both stories come with neat slideshows, including shots of two of Thomas’ new vehicles for Ford.

Thomas’ description of the philosophy behind The Interceptor (no comment) probably skewers my exact reason for liking the 300: “This is a car that is at once for the mature car buyer, but for someone who likes to stroke his bad boy side. He wants a grown-up car, but wants to feel fun.”

For the record, I would not ‘stroke my bad boy side’ with a German car.

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In review

I read two articles/posts this morning that I found quite affecting. First, judiciary-writer Dahlia Lithwick at Slate, who isn’t given to alarmism, draws some nefarious conclusions from the Bush administration’s legal wranglings in the terror-war:

But it has finally become clear that the goal of these foolish efforts isn’t really to win the war against terrorism; indeed, nothing about Padilla, Guantanamo, or signing statements moves the country an inch closer to eradicating terror. The object is a larger one, and the original overarching goal of this administration: expanding executive power, for its own sake.

Now, this may seem like a slam-dunk conclusion to some, but she puts some interesting evidence together to explore the mechanics of how this has occurred. Give it a read.

In the other piece I read this morning, Ron Rosenbaum discusses the lessons of Cambodia, and explores the possible historical parallels with the current war. It’s an interesting article because Ron uses it to examine the evolution of his attitude toward the Vietnam war:

My opposition to the Vietnam war, developed during my college days was based on the oversimplified premise—which turns out, by most serious accounts, now bolstered by the former Soviet archives—to be false or seriously flawed.

My belief and that of most of the anti-war movement—that the North Vietnamese regime represented an indigenous, nationalist movement expressing the Vietnamese peoples centuries-long struggle for independence from foreign control—was only half-true at best.

There was a germ of truth in it, but more than a germ of foreign control in Hanoi, whose government was in fact a Stalinist puppet state of the Soviet Union (here’s where the diplomatic cables in the former Soviet archives are so important and dispositive).

His post covers more than this, particularly the failure of the “world community” to prevent or stop genocide, but I found it important that he was able to reassess that situation in history, as more of “the truth” comes out. I’ve long contended that we can’t understand the situation in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, etc. without taking into account the history of Soviet aggression in the area. Just because the USSR has collapsed doesn’t mean that its influences were erased.

Which is to say, while people blamed “U.S. withdrawal” from Afghanistan for the failed state that led to the rise of the Taliban, they managed not to blame the Soviets for invading Afghanistan in the first place, which led to the U.S.-sponsored mujahideen. It’s interesting to me, how often people will seek out “the truth” in issues like this, but stop once they get to the conclusion they wanted to reach.

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But, plug?

Here’s a piece from Cato fellow Jerry Taylor on the hype for plug-in hybrid cars:

Of course, if [plug-in hybrids] really were the wave of the future, there would be no need for ranting in Washington — automobile manufacturers would be busy making them as we speak. It’s only when corporate America is cool to an idea that the prophets turn to the taxpayer or the regulator. This illustrates Taylor’s law — “the commercial merit of any particular technology is inversely related to the degree of political tub-thumping heard in Washington for said technology.”

Here’s the issue I have with these proposed cars: just because they use less gasoline doesn’t mean they’re better, because their power still has to come from somewhere. “Plug-in” doesn’t mean its power miraculously appears from a wall-socket. It means that the electricity infrastructure has to deliver power to keep a car going. Given that we’ve received plenty of alarms about how The Grid is doomed to collapse as our electricity demands keep rising — and that a large portion of that electricity is generated by burning coal — I don’t get how plug-in cars are going to “solve our oil addiction” without creating even greater problems.

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The information

I, for one, find it refreshing when a scandal in the Catholic church doesn’t involve the rape of an underaged boy.

This story — about the newly appointed archbishop of Warsaw having to step down because he was informing for the secret police back in the ’60s — reminds me of Timothy Garton Ash’s book The File, in which he checked out the Stasi’s records on him after East Germany’s truth commission made that stuff available. I recall Ash marveling over the sheer volume of reports, and their utter minutiae.