Fredric Smoler
Around Midnight (A Day After Mass Terror)
Maybe the most crucial news is that there’s no reason to be confident that we know much about what’s happening.
Mountains Beyond Mountains
In the New Republic‘s August 10th issue Katherine Stewart published a long and learned account of the now openly anti-democratic polemicizing at the Claremont Institute, titled “The Claremont Institute: The Anti-Democracy Think Tank” (https://newrepublic.com/article/174656/claremont-institute-think-tank-trump) pointing out that what was once a sort-of normal conservative think tank has since 2015 become something much uglier: “In embodying a kind of nihilistic yearning to destroy modernity, they have become an indispensable part of right-wing America’s evolution toward authoritarianism…Claremont represents something new in modern American politics: a group of people, not internet conspiracy freaks but credentialed and influential leaders, who are openly contemptuous of democracy. And they stand a reasonable chance of being seated at the highest levels of government—at the right hand of a President Trump or a President DeSantis, for example.”
With a couple of trivial caveats, this seems right.
My Father’s War
Originally published here in 2011.
Unsentimental Internationalism
I
One faction of neoconservatives were wittily defined as people for whom it is always 1938. Whoever so defined them may not have considered the possibility that there are also people for whom it is never 1938, and that for some of that latter group even 1938 is no longer 1938 (a very partial version of that last view can be seen in a recently released film in which Chamberlain is credited with having bought the time for Britain to rearm).
McWhorter’s Rare Dare
The second and third volumes of Stoppard’s trilogy on 19th C. Russian revolutionaries, The Coast of Utopia, is mostly set in exile, but Voyage, the first volume, is set in Russia. A brilliant speech opens its second act: Alexander Herzen, appearing for the first time, addresses the audience, explaining both a children’s game and picture book titled ”What is wrong with this picture?” and the situation of Russia under Nicholas I. Herzen gives some examples of what is horrifically wrong under Nicholas’s autocracy, and concludes “Something is wrong with this picture. Are you listening? You are in the picture.” It is the most theatrically brilliant moment in the trilogy. Herzen suggests that we do not seem to take in the grotesquerie of what is happening, or are perhaps merely afraid to speak of it. I think he is also implying that whichever is the case, in not noticing what is supremely visible and in not speaking about what is clearly outrageous we are to a degree complicit in such things, also more vulnerable to them happening to us.
This is pretty much John McWhorter’s strategy in Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.
Did Afghanistan Have a Chance?
In the main I agree with Michael Walzer—this is almost invariably the case—but since broad agreement is rarely the stuff of mesmerizing political discussion I’ll declare a few reservations.
Putting Women First
The first photograph I remembered showing the Taliban at work actually dated to the Soviet occupation. It showed a victim of the mujahedin, a woman in a burqa lying on the ground with a caption explaining that she had been shot to death for teaching girls to read. I think my mistake came from later reading about such killings by the Taliban. One of the more horrific newspaper anecdotes I can remember about the Taliban was very recently repeated, probably in either the Times or the Washington Post, by a reporter apparently once as startled by it as I was—it related Taliban amputating the finger tip of a woman who’d applied nail polish. The most memorable internet-viewable home video showed a middle-aged man identified as a member of the Taliban morals police repeatedly beating a woman in a burqa with a leather paddle, the woman screaming, and her screams translated in the subtitles as something like “Just kill me”. The relatively frequent news stories about the forced marriage of quite young girls to Taliban fighters were much more common, also arguably worse, so it is presumably the rarity of the video, perhaps surreptitiously recorded on an early smart phone, that made it stick in my mind.
A Hard Case
Ralph Peters–longtime Fox News commentator–just published an op-ed piece in the Washington Post explaining “Why I left Fox News.”
General Kelly’s Devolution
General Kelly is back in the news. He yesterday announced that he has no reason to apologize to Congresswoman Wilson, also that Robert E, Lee was a hero, since “It was always loyalty to state first back in those days.” This last pronouncement would have startled both the 115, 000 Southern whites who enlisted in the Union Army and their 180,000 or so black comrades, the vast majority of them southern, who also bore arms for the United States.
Trump’s Alt Reality (& Policing the Crisis)
Despite a lot of persiflage to the contrary, Donald Trump is sometimes a remarkably cautious man. Yesterday he was able to see many sides to the controversy down in Charlottesville, and was strikingly careful about inflaming any of them.
The Resistance to “Confederate”
Game of Thrones’ show runner David Benioff and his collaborator D.B. Weiss announced on July 19th that HBO had commissioned Confederate, elsewhere described as an alternate history drama imagining, among other things, slavery in a Confederacy surviving into our own day. An immediate twitter storm ensued, followed within few hours by the first of three NYT articles about the tweets, two of them enlivened by serial fatuities from notional experts—after all, there are no experts on television programs that have not yet been written, nor on history that didn’t happen.
A Guided Tour Through a Graveyard: Some Representations of War and the Hazards of Strong Contextualism
I shall describe and attempt to interpret a difference in representations of war in two television series made by the same people about the same war, Band of Brothers, which aired in 2001, and The Pacific, which aired in 2010. I hope to show that despite influential argument to the contrary—most notably Paul Fussell’s celebrated The Great War and Modern Memory—it is imprudent to make strong historicist or contextualist claims that the transformed nature of war since 1914 is a sine qua non for explaining modern ironic and anti-heroic representations of combat.
Brexit Dreams and Brexit Nightmares
Adapted from the 17th annual Bozeman Lecture at Sarah Lawrence College.
Deep France
Un village français, a French television serial, was first broadcast on France 3 in 2009; the channel began showing the serial’s seventh and final season in October of 2016, and at the end of its run sixty-six episodes had been broadcast. Around the time it first appeared a Francophone friend recommended it as startlingly good TV, but warned that subtitled versions other than one season with French subtitles had proved impossible to locate. The belated appearance of a version subtitled in English is a very welcome gift. Along with the policier Engrenages, which stars several of the same actors, Un village français made even malevolent foreigners concede that French TV, under de Gaulle sometimes pilloried as a medium specializing in documentaries about beehives, had no reason to fear comparison to any televisual culture in the world.
An Alternate History Lesson on the Clean Left
Underground Airlines by Ben Winters. Little, Brown and Company, 2016.