Occidents Will Happen

Colonizing the NBA

2012-01-19T17:53:00.000-08:00

Sportswriter Dave Zirin illustrates how America may have failed its youth: the Europeans are beating us at basketball.

It's surprising to look at the NBA and see not just a token lumbering Slav but several roster spots on each team being Europeans. Zirin blames American-style player development. We spur on top athletes with promises of cash, while hustling them through their education en route to stardom (or abject failure).

Meanwhile, European players must overcome a stereotype of overratedness. They have to learn to adapt to this country's more physical playing style by adding muscle. These players have changed the NBA with their combined height and jump shots.

Zirin only hints at my conclusion in this post. Elite athletes are the products of their homelands' economic system. Germany keeps pace with China in exports and virtually dictates Continental policy. It's no stretch to say that economic infrastructure produces guys like Dirk Nowitzki.

One more argument for disciplined planning and against America's "gambling-oriented plutocracy."

Porque No?

2011-11-07T20:50:00.000-08:00

I thought I should be consistent with the starry-eyed Wilsonianism, not to say total naivete, of this blog, so here goes: Europe is doing awesome! There may be austerity, corruption, undemocratic overreach by a handful of elites who foolishly created a monetary union without contemplating the absence of a fiscal union, but hey. I don't see a return to nationalism. I think the wreckage of all this could amount to better international solidarity, or a growing awareness of the raw deal that global capital offers everyone.

John Cassidy's got my back on at least some of this.

Government by Absence

2011-04-10T19:55:00.000-07:00

America has avoided a shutdown of its government but still inspired Joshua Keating to wonder why our European counterparts, basket cases though they may be, don't have to worry about shutdowns.

Belgium and Portugal illustrate how most countries avoid governmental gridlock. The premier and his staffers propose a budget. If it's rejected by the legislature, the premier resigns. This solution raises the stakes somewhat, but on the other hand, civil services tend to continue in Europe even after the resignations.

American bureaucratic sclerosis is keeping up with the Old World -- maybe even outdoing them.

With Everything Permitted...

2010-08-20T22:01:00.001-07:00

David Byrne wonders how access to an unending font of information can trivialize the act of reading. The singer and blogger thinks back to the days of the Communist bloc, "when nothing was permitted, and everything was important."

Richard D.E. Burton echoes this plaint for the vitality that repression gives culture. In his literary history of Prague, he says that any and all printed material in the pre-1989 era meant long lines in front of the bookstore. But after the Velvet Revolution, the cinemas filled up with American trash movies, and the diehards all shrugged.

A Fresh Face in England

2010-05-03T17:19:00.000-07:00

A serious challenge to the United Kingdom's electoral traditions is in the offing. Nick Clegg will probably force one of the two dominant parties (Labour and the Tories) into forming a coalition with his newly powerful Liberal Democrats after Thursday's election.

David Cameron of the Tories would appear to benefit from his Euroskepticism--a long-held feeling the U.K. and never more relevant in this period of meltdown--but his party is virtually tied with Gordon Brown's Labour. Simon Schama finds in this deadlock new hope for crusty old Westminster. Will Hutton sets out a vision in which Clegg's party governs the U.K. in a coalition with Labour.

And just what sort of man is this, who seems to be sweeping aside the two-party, "first past the post" system? His "My Hero" choice in the Guardian is risky and intriguing. He used to work for this curmudgeon. His multinational family will certainly invite comparisons to a certain American politician, and his Europeanness is not superficial.

Winter Olympics as a Reflection of GDP

2010-02-22T20:32:00.000-08:00

A perusal of the final medal count of this month's Winter Olympics looks a bit fishy. These podium-hogging nations seem to have something in common.

Why is it that the world's wealthiest countries dominate the Winter Olympics? Why does the medal total for events like luge and ice dancing so closely resemble this list?

The Olympics purport to host a contest for amateur athletes. In reality, producing elite athletes requires a substantial corporatist investment. Promising children must be culled from the hinterlands and isolated in frosty, impersonal training academies. There's plenty of snow in Chile, but that nation lacks the capital and social structure to give potential champions the means to refine their talents.

But money alone does not explain why Saudi Arabia and Brazil do not yet produce top skiers. Sure, there are factors like geography and custom. But to grasp the link between wealth and winter sports, you need to take into account just why homo sapiens decided to go out there in the snow, exerting himself.

Man's conquest over winter could not have taken place without the search for fuel that obsesses the global North. In the cold, rich countries, to survive means constantly hustling, gathering firewood, scavenging, accumulating resources at all costs.

Our sporting triumph is a highly technocratic one, involving advances in speed-skate design and skintight outerwear. In ageless competitions like running, the playing field is truly level, and underdeveloped economies like Jamaica and Kenya dominate.

Braving cold temperatures and the accretion of wealth are and forever will be intertwined. Perhaps an indicator of real national athletic achievement should account for the tremendous economic gap between competing nations. This formula divides the number of medals by trillions in GDP per capita (2009, according to the International Monetary Fund).

1) Slovenia: 65.79 medals per trillion dollars
2) Latvia: 58.65 mpt
3) Norway: 51.11 mpt
4) Belarus: 49.83 mpt
5) Estonia: 43.10 mpt
6) Croatia: 42.86 mpt
7) Austria 39.02 mpt
8) Slovakia 33.33 mpt
9) Czech Republic 27.27 mpt
10) Sweden 22.92 mpt
11) Finland 18.52 mpt
12) Switzerland 18 mpt
13) Canada 17.33 mpt
14) Korea 15.22 mpt
15) Poland 11.32 mpt
16) Netherlands 9.09 mpt
17) Russia 8.93 mpt
18) Germany 8.17 mpt
19) Kazakhstan 7.69 mpt
20) France 3.83 mpt
21) Australia: 2.97 mpt
22) United States: 2.57 mpt
23) China: 2.54 mpt
24) Italy: 2.17 mpt
25) Japan: 1.02 mpt
26) Great Britain 0.37 mpt

Of course many participating countries did not medal. Still, it's remarkable that the UK spent 2.6 trillion dollars for one lousy gold (Amy Williams in women's skeleton). It's also illuminating to note that China and America have near identical ratios--another indicator of the unification of Chimerica. Finally, it will be intriguing to see if the former Eastern bloc countries can continue their overachievement in winter sports as their economies grow.

For a hockey roundup, check out N+1.

Muslim Non-integration

2010-01-06T11:03:00.000-08:00

French laïcité has arguably advanced a specific kind of intolerance for Muslim identity. The tradition of keeping "ostentatious" religious symbols out of sight while in the public sphere (a sphere that includes pretty much all of France) has translated into a ban on the hijab.

To my mind it's a reasoned objection, even if it can get a little hysterical and xenophobic. I have a Parisian woman-friend who says she feels "violated" when she sees a veiled woman. As an American, I instinctively feel that curtailing personal expression in deference to "national identity" is a bummer. But of course it's complicated--veils mean stand for more than just modesty.

Switzerland has recently taken the attitude a bit farther with a ban on minarets. Carlin Romano seems to understand that fashion and architecture traffic in symbols, and this backlash to Islamic co-existence is more than just symbolic. Immigration restriction and societal exclusion are daily realities for Europe's millions of Muslims.

Hence that without policy change, building codes mean little more than that, and just end up inflaming opinion. It reminds me of when American Indian activist Russell Means stealthily installed a response plaque at Little Big Horn as a means of symbolic terrorism. Means wanted a more truthful memorial than the existing paean to Custer. It wasn't an assault on a source of power, it was an assault on a symbol.

A Crush on Italy

2009-12-31T12:03:00.001-08:00

Cinema is a Franco-American invention, but was there ever a country that the movie camera loved more than Italy? The dappled light, the antiquities, the dark-eyed maidens...the script writes itself.

And that's the trouble. With so much to look at, why struggle for any depth? Rob Marshall's Nine assembles an attractive cast and turns them loose on the stylish peninsula, then expects the audience to stay interested for three hours.

Nine's screenwriter Anthony Minghella was the man behind The Talented Mr. Ripley, a darker examination of Italy's seduction of innocents. Patricia Highsmith's source material was better adapted by homegrown Liliana Cavani in Ripley's Game, possibly because she didn't think to lean on the landscape.

Because when foreign filmmakers head south to where it's easy on the eyes, you can expect the scenery to pick up slack.

Spanish Civil Warriors

2009-11-06T20:14:00.001-08:00

Maybe time to take another look at that infamous disaster that so diverted the international left wing. Because certain have claimed that this war that was really a revolution was just an opportunity for Soviet insurrection, or for the aggrandizement of Ernest Hemingway.

James Neugass' recent memoir puts the human cost at the forefront. Like Orwell's famous missive, Homage to Catalonia, he has no specific agenda other than his own truth. Also like Orwell, he was way in front of Britain and the United States in recognizing the global threat of fascism. Even if World War II was worth fighting (it was), the '30s and '40s contained a level of political violence that would seem atrocious to anyone born afterward.

For example: Franco's first point of order upon seizing power was to assassinate the greatest poet in Spain. It wouldn't be long before he would suppress all Spanish fiestas and send all independent-thinking people in his nation fleeing to the Americas. His long-lasting brutality makes this story all the harder to believe, recounted to me by my American friend who lives near Madrid:

I was riding my bike in the same little plaza in our town where I ride every day. There was the usual assortment of local seniors enjoying the weather and in general treating the public square as their own living room, in the authentic manner of Spaniards. The difference today was that the street had been monopolized by a fashion magazine's photo shoot. Barriers blocked traffic and our usually calm space was disturbed. I was commiserating with the old-timers about the unfortunate circumstance, and one of them muttered: "This never would have happened under Franco!" I found myself reflexively agreeing, and it took me a minute to realize that this guy was nostalgic for fascism.

Totalitarianism has its perks, after all, but we should be willing to endure the decadent fashion industry if it means no Franco.

The Third Force

2009-10-27T16:14:00.000-07:00

Jean-Paul Sartre was the most embattled postwar French philosopher. His serious and original engagement in political affairs brought him the enmity of left, right and center, both in his own country and abroad. He was even haunted by imaginary lobsters. Still, he graciously absorbed the admiration of the world's disaffected youth, while quaffing sherry from his battle station at Café de Flore.

Western Europe was poised between two rival imperial forces. France tended to lean left but of course toeing the Communist line was difficult in the wake of Budapest '56, if not earlier. And so Sartre formulated a "Third Force," and created the Revolutionary Democratic Assembly, designed to keep his country autonomous from the era's two great powers. For this he was accused of demagoguery and blasphemy. Those who saw him as a Soviet agent felt confirmed when he rejected the Nobel Prize in '64.

The Revolutionary Democratic Assembly initially had wide support, including from Sartre's rival Albert Camus. Rebecca Pitt, from the International Socialism Journal:

Sartre's involvement in the Revolutionary Democratic Assembly (RDR): The RDR was formed in early 1948 as a response to the Cold War, the Stalinist PCF and Gaullism, and made clear where its principles lay:

Between the rottenness of capitalist democracy, the weaknesses and defects of a certain social democracy and the limitation of Communism to its Stalinist form, we believe an assembly of free men for revolutionary democracy is capable of giving new life to the principles of freedom and human dignity by binding them to the struggle for social revolution.

Formed as a left wing anti-Stalinist assembly, the RDR was able to "achieve a larger membership than any Trotskyist grouping between 1945 and 1968. However, as Birchall points out, the RDR contributed to its own downfall by failing to provide a clear position on the quickly developing political situation.

Sartre was no coalition-builder. He never got his revolution. But Sartre's radical notion of a European exception--a progressive, humane and powerful society--has indeed come to pass with the rise of the European Union.

Certainly he would have repudiated the taint of "rotten capitalist democracy." If the revolutionary aspect of Sartre's Third Force exists today, it's in the Latin American struggles for autonomy. But global politics is now "multipolar." Europe has transcended the power play between the U.S. and the shadowy East.

Astérix Lives!

2009-10-26T12:50:00.000-07:00

BBC man-in-Paris Hugh Schofield has some critical things to say about Astérix, the comic book hero and plucky symbol of Gaullist resistance. To Schofield and other fans, the indigenous warrior with the drooping mustache and magic potion has been phoning it in since 1977, when writer René Goscinny died.

What's revealing about Schofield's eulogy is the allegory to Franco-Belgian exceptionalism, under siege by a homogenized pax americana. Other critics saw parallels to other struggles--deriving from various French premiers, Corsican separatists, and even the Nazis. But the current foe is a loss of aboriginal identity to more powerful sibling nations. Astérix outwitted his cloddish Roman imperialist foes, and likewise sophisticated Europe sees itself as a bulwark against consumer culture.

But if Astérix is treading water, then what does that say for Europe's self-image? If he falls prey to Hollywood, as have his compatriots Tintin and Blake and Mortimer, then would that be an unpardonable cultural capitulation?

No, it wouldn't. Astérix is another distinctively European phenomenon that has become global. Just look at the comments page on Schofield's story: worldwide fans thrill to his antics in over 100 languages. His fiftieth anniversary is being feted in Angola. Lost amid the accounts of Europe's decline or its identity crisis is the view that the world has become European.

The Wages of Fear

2009-10-15T11:03:00.000-07:00

Henri-Georges' Clouzot's 1953 masterpiece features Yves Montand and a cast of pan-European ne'er-do-wells in the throes of physical and moral decay in a sleepy Central American town. Montand was a charming nightclub singer in Paris. For The Wages of Fear he had to become an unlikeable misanthrope.

The task for these men, put to them by a morally bankrupt American oil company, is to drive trucks full of nitroglycerine over a mountain range in order to put out a fire. It's a suicide mission, but one they all throw themselves into, so desperate are their straits. This film has a similar resonance to The Deer Hunter--an unflinching gaze into the abyss of human error.

The long prologue establishes the characters although it denies the viewer background information: how did they get to Las Piedras, what drove them here? They banter in a resigned linguistic soup--stateless postapocalyptic vagabonds in an environment of half-naked child-sadists.

You don't have to be a master dot-connector to see the anti-Americanism in the depiction of the oil company's merciless grip on the people and the place. But Clouzot's scorn does not stop there: the European hero/victims are just as cruel and selfish and arbitrary as their American manipulators.

The filmmaker claimed that a brush with death in a sanitarium turned him into an artist, although you've got to think Nazi Occupation and French collaboration were not far beneath Clouzot's bleak view of the world. The director received a lifelong suspension from French cinema for his purportedly anti-French Le Corbeau. It was later reduced and Clouzot returned to his depictions of sinister deeds.

Like so many French movies (Pépé le Moko, Mon Oncle), there is a yearning for an absent French essence. Jo and Mario talk about the streets in Paris they lived as they drive to their demise. The Wages of Fear was actually shot in the Camargue, the arid flamingo habitat in Provence.

Although the scorn may be spread evenly--blame directed at institutions and individuals alike--the demonization of American private enterprise feels like a touchstone in European leeriness. American foreign policy and unchecked industrial capitalism would continue to divide Europe and America.

Big in Europe

2009-10-12T18:01:00.000-07:00

European appreciation of American culture always can seem condescending, but I think they are just more wholehearted about "low art" then we are. My Belgian friend could take or leave the U.S., but he is hopelessly devoted to donuts with sprinkles on them, which are unavailable on his side of the pond.

The French are well-known and often mocked for their love of Jerry Lewis. American audiences have a hard time remembering any of his achievements prior to those muscular dystrophy telethons. Lewis was a son of vaudevillians, and a writer, performer, producer and director who shattered film industry barriers and invented video assist, allowing directors to review what they had just shot.

Stateside, his embarrassing brand of comedy has not aged well, but in the sixties the French managed to re-ironize the screen legend. Americans can be smartasses, but in France the phrase "une certaine perversité" is considered complimentary. The auteur theory, more prevalent in Europe, holds that a great film can emanate from a single brilliant mind. And Lewis, in spite of his terrible taste, joins the ranks of Chaplin, Keaton, and Woody Allen in leaving a powerful, personal, idiosyncratic imprint on his work. Incidentally, Allen is also more loved in Europe. In this movie, he insists that his films "gain something in the translation."

Susan Bernofsky says that the equivalent to Jerry Lewis in Germany is Donald Duck. Apparently this is not due to some intrinsic Germanness to the slobbering, pantsless cartoon character. Nor is it a failure of Americans to appreciate Donald's brilliance. His cult following in Germany arose thanks to the erudite translations of Erika Fuchs, described as "a free spirit in owlish glasses." My compliments to the voiceover artist in this clip--he nails the original Donald.

Long live cultural exchange, and may we forever delight in each other's detritus!

L'Affaire Polanski

2009-10-04T20:13:00.000-07:00

Listen to all that claptrap about the Roman Polanski situation. Granted, it's a sensitive subject to many, and you've got lots of intriguing facets. OWH offers a summary:

The term splashed across the headlines is "sex charge." This is not quite accurate. Polanski is wanted for a 31-year-old sex "conviction." He pled guilty to statutory rape, but admitted to drugging and raping a 13-year-old, a crime that could have landed him a much longer sentence. This should clear up any confusion about whether his detainment is evidence of some culture war between American prudishness and European pervishness. Every legitimate legal system would find him guilty.

But questions remain. The authorities have not adequately explained why they waited three decades to nab him. It must be that they resented this 2008 documentary's depiction of his trial as unfair and even illegal. Is it necessary that he return to U.S. to be sentenced for a case with whiskers so long on it? It can scarcely be argued that the California prison system can or should reform this heroic artist.

This is the most valid contention of the pro-Polanski people, which includes moviedom's finest: not that the man is innocent or above the law, but that the application of justice has nothing to offer society in this particular case.

Still, this reality has not quieted the critics of the pro-Polanski crowd. They maintain that his flight to France means that he has not accepted judgment. They also resent Polanski's claim that "there's a different justice for people who are public figures than for those who are not." It is not really notable that his victim believes that the case should be dropped--this is a common situation in sexual abuses.

Finally, an evaluation of his guilt must include an examination of his incredible biography: he was born to Holocaust victims, the Manson family killed his pregnant wife, and since his crime, he has made some okay films on the lam. Polanski is not a menace to society, assuming he won't ever make anything like "The Ninth Gate" again. But his defenders are naive to imagine a sinister conspiracy against him, and he does not deserve their tears.

Nattering Nabobs of Neo-Spenglerianism

2009-10-01T14:20:00.000-07:00

Pessimism, declinism, millennialism...it's all a belief in what a bummer tomorrow will be. The argument for downward trajectories of any kind is tempting but intrinsically misleading. It's easy to think of something great from the old days that isn't around anymore, or has been perverted. And it will be easy to reflect back on 2009 as a golden era.

If ever there was an era to feel gloomy about European affairs, it was the aftermath of World War I. Nationalistic aggression and incompetent leadership had brought about a slaughter of unprecedented scale. There goes our Whiggish self-improvement: sorry children, and children's children. Unfortunately, as Richard Overy points out in "The Morbid Age," the civilizational pessimism had much in common with incipient fascism, including the intellectual vogue for eugenics.

Today the bogeymen thought to undermine our seemingly steady world are moral relativism, shrugging permissiveness and atheism. These vices leave us open to the fundamentalists in our midst, assert Christopher Caldwell and Theodore Dalrymple. These thinkers are right to lament a lack of serious debate about the ramifications of immigration, and the blurring of personal emotions with broad political concerns. But they are wrong to believe that these unresolved questions can only hurt society.

Caldwell's anxiety about Muslim integration hinges on the primacy of Christianism to any respectable civilization. This view is out-of-date by at least one hundred years. Secularism is as valuable to the modern world as any of the teachings of Jesus. In the words of Slavoj Zizek, "isn't it time to restore the dignity of atheism, perhaps our only chance for peace?"

The Baader-Meinhof Complex

2009-09-21T20:36:00.000-07:00

This brutally literal film has landed in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the Red Army Faction was farcically reprised by Patti Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army. In this depiction, Andreas Baader and his co-conspirators are plenty farcical themselves, swilling beer and firing their guns in no particular direction. Moritz Bleibtreu as Baader has all the gravitas of Brad Pitt in Snatch.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex unfurls a suite of violent episodes, always punctuated either by strident Marxist rhetoric or defeated whimpering. The bank-robbing terrorists don't articulate long-term goals or even a theoretical success beyond their own martyrdom. Director Uli Edel is particularly hard on Ulrike Meinhof, once a prominent dissident journalist, who is eventually railroaded by her brattier counterparts.

This leaves the conscience of Germany to Bruno Ganz, who plays statesman Horst Herold. Only he can conjure some kind of meaningful context for all the slaughter. The Oliver Stone-style "upheavals of the sixties" montage doesn't contribute much--what does the RFK assassination have to do with any of this?

Most beguiling is why any of the gang's escapades had to happen. Meinhof abandons her children and career to follow thugs into a life of violent crime. The decision is portrayed as a choice to hurtle herself through an open window and on into the "underground." It is hard to imagine Naomi Klein picking up an assault rifle. But Meinhof was not the only roiling German seduced by mayhem: the Red Army Faction was a teenage sensation, inspiring a spate of pro- and anticommunist murders.

The killers are even more attractive in the film than in real life. But their startling popularity failed to materialize into an authentic challenge to state power, and their actions gained coherence only after their incarceration. The cruelest irony: in prison, the revolutionaries turn into cunning negotiators and bookish study-buddies, where before they dismissed theory as "intellectual masturbation."

Very little moralizing or historical cause-and-effect is presented in The Baader-Meinhof Complex, although one seeks meaning from both films and murders. Complaints that the film suffers from hero-worship are off-base, and rest on an assumption that all movie violence is titillating. Edel takes the killers on their own terms, although he does not give any time to the contention that the Nazis have been replaced by a new imperialist brutality. No attempt is made to contrast the RAF with an excessively obedient culture. And why are the police actions against the RAF and the Munich Olympics kidnappers so sheepish and non-committal? Because Germany was trying to shuck its Nazi tendencies through cowardly appeasement.

To Christopher Hitchens the cycle of cruelty, sexuality, extortion and self-manipulation is predictable, and he praises the film's debunking of radical myths. In that regard, The Baader-Meinhof Complex could be judged an anti-thriller, in the way that Unforgiven is an anti-Western.

The film wins the Award for Most Outlandish Use of Bob Dylan. "Blowin' in the Wind" is the closing credits music, moments after the last body hits the ground. The juxtaposition goes some way to reviving the worn-out ballad, its rhetorical questions all the more cryptic when directed at German terrorists.

Dream Home Heartache

2009-08-26T12:14:00.000-07:00

I just returned from breakfast at IKEA--they have a cheap though basic breakfast cafeteria and all-you-can-drink coffee for just one dollar. From the atrium, in my angular modern plastic chair, I looked out at the panorama of California freeway cloverleaf. A Mexican fellow climbed into the palm trees and chainsawed down the dead fronds.

IKEA is a triumph of consumerism as an aesthetic, rather than as an offering of commodities. The store transports you into a smarter, sleeker Scandinavian universe, never mind the garbage-furnishings that are for sale. It's so easy to get lost in there, with the different levels and the clever traffic patterns. You're supposed to get lost.

Another key to the IKEA mystique is the strange names for each product. A loveseat is known as Klippan, the Swedish word for "cliff." The DVD tower goes by Benno. The naming practice is due to founder Ingvar Kamprad's dyslexia.

Americans have flocked to their IKEA stores and have swallowed the Scandinavian design completely. For centuries French products were taken to be luxurious and desirable, but recently the Swedes have seized the upper hand by slashing prices. H&M and IKEA are two of the most famous European brands. The first Latin American store is due to open before 2010 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

IKEA boasts of their contribution to an eco-friendly lifestyle, which is a joke to anyone who has carried any of their furniture. Razing Brazil and Indonesia for cheap disposable trinkets is only "green" in the sense of "greedy."

In Every Dream Home a Heartache by Roxy Music

Holocaust What? Part 2

2009-08-26T06:32:00.000-07:00

I observed here that World War II does not bring out the best in American filmmakers. Most of them find themselves in too deep water. Now Quentin Tarantino has turned that quagmire into a waterslide.

The success of Inglourious Basterds in European markets is a strange moment of cultural communion: the movie is set in Europe but celebrates cocky Americanness. Its auteur has walked the line between Francois Truffaut-style cinéphile and Kevin Smith-style video store geek. August is traditionally the time for mindless shoot-em-up flicks and not weighty Holocaust fare, but the new movie appears to deliver both.

Farce is the new tragedy now that almost all the war's veterans are dead. Pat Buchanan and Nicholson Baker see no reason to go to war against the Nazis. This German reviewer is thrilled that Tarantino can bring as much unreasoned lunacy to depicting the Third Reich as they brought to their task of world domination.

But the joyless Jonathan Rosenbaum calls Inglourious Basterds offensive and likens its director to Sarah Palin. The critical community has tended to agree, and holds that Tarantino has no moral authority whatsoever.

Which is funny because Tarantino's greatest theme is the dissolution of moral authority in the age of talking images. The vile doings of his characters are viscerally exciting and often go unpunished. His misspelled new movie seems a culmination of a tendency to shirk serious questions about violence. The cinema of Tarantino is not so much amoral as anti-moral: he thinks cheap titillation serves the movies better than historical lesson-learning.

All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war. War, and only war, makes it possible to set a goal for mass movements on the grandest scale while preserving traditional property relations...Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.

--Walter Benjamin, from "The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction"

Will Occidents Happen?

2009-08-19T23:32:00.000-07:00

"Urbanization" carries a connotation of deracination and oppressed flight from the country. At least in America we like to imagine rural farm cultures as our original, unspoiled society. But the truth is that the explosion of the world's urban population is beneficial to humanity. Subsistence farming is always perilously close to starvation, whereas 21st century cities will be rookeries of high-tech communications.

Environmentalists also insist on high-density urbanism as a more sustainable human lifestyle. Less space around you means less carbon output, more proximity to jobs and social activity, and more competition to overwhelm failures. Not living off the land also means less incentive to breed. This guy wants to bet you that global population in 2060 will be less than it is today.

So...cities. Paul Romer wants to build new ones in the developing world, and use the capital and political structures of the first world. These "charter cities" would provide a non-coercive lure to locals and offer Western-style prosperity to the teeming global south.

The way that Romer packages his concept is pedantic and unpersuasive. He leans heavily on the terms "rules" and "choices." Why does he make up a post-colonial British name for his protagonist? Why does he decline to mention the actual country Wilson (Nelson?) is from? Romer invokes China's rising "GDP per capita." This is a trick of the free market crowd that disguises discrepancies between rich and poor. There are lots of wealthy people in China today but many more who live under a toxic brown cloud.

Instead of syncretic, Romer's generalizations are vague. He would do better to come clean: he is a capitalist, and wants to undermine the power of developing world bureaucrats by entering their subjects into the global free market. His analogy to the British Empire is apt, but his struggle is to recast Charter Cities as different from colonialism, or even from the fiendish free-trade pacts.

Romer should be lauded for taking philanthropy out of its paternalistic mindset. And brand new, well-managed cities harnessing the frantic ingenuity of the third world seems like a promising marriage, if still very politically sticky.

Whither Moldova?

2009-08-18T19:16:00.000-07:00

Sandwiched unpromisingly between Romania and the Ukraine, Moldova is by some measures the poorest country in Europe (its rival for this dubious honor is Albania). Personally I often confuse it with Malta. The country of four million somewhat inadvertently stormed global pop culture with the boy band O-Zone's "Dragostea Din Tei" and the subsequent viral Internet permutations of that track.

Moldova is split between its EU aspirations and a dependence on rogue Russia. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russian soldiers are still installed in the separatist region of Transnistria. The Kremlin, of course, holds the ace card of petroleum: Gazprom can pull the supplies and bring the country to its knees, as it has done in Georgia and the Ukraine.

Which is what makes the Moldovan Communist Party a curiosity. A final, pyrrhic victory for President Voronin makes his the only Communist government left in Europe, although he has pledged to work towards a "European Moldova," with friendly ties to East and West. Unpersuaded protesters rocked the capital city of Chisinau upon his re-election, and now a new coalition government may or may not take shape.

Moldova will remain backward no matter how this political spat works out, a long way from joining the global community.

The Mask of Childhood

2009-08-06T17:28:00.000-07:00

This just-completed audio play tells of the conflict between Mai Zetterling and Shirley Temple at a film festival in the '60s.

Zetterling is a Swedish filmmaker whose work explores sexual malaise and often features political outsiders. Temple of course is the greatest child star in the history of cinema, a tireless patriot who later become a prominent California Republican.

The Mask of Childhood begins when Temple resigns from the festival's panel of judges over Zetterling's Night Games, which Temple found obscene. The antipathy is not reciprocated though: Zetterling idolized Temple from a young age.

European art film had a reputation during the period for being sexy and open-ended, while Temple's movie musicals did all they could to endorse militarism and reinforce power structures. Zetterling's career was full of dilemmas and irresolution but achieved a lasting integrity.

The Mask of Childhood by Burke Bindbeutel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Kieslowski's Blue

2009-08-01T14:32:00.000-07:00

Krzystof Kieslowski's film Blue tells of a prolonged and painful attempt to create a symphony for European unification. Critics described the film as an "anti-tragedy," because although Julie (Juliette Binoche) loses her husband and daughter in a car accident, and succumbs to a period of reclusion, the blow does not destroy her.

Blue could be an allegory for a continent seeking to turn its back on a bloody past. Ambiguity mars the authorship of the pan-European anthem, as it is suggested that it was Julie and not her late husband who is the true genius behind the work. The music is subjected to a stalled collaboration that eventually falls apart, although the music does pull Julie out of the withdrawal that followed her personal catastrophe. The finale delivers the completed symphony, and a montage of each of the characters whose lives Julie has touched.

Kieslowski was a Polish filmmaker that made his bones in France. He made resolutely apolitical work that always drew the wrath of the state censors. Although he began his career as a documentarian, Blue is shot through with magic.

Books Roundup

2009-07-31T20:09:00.000-07:00

Tim Blanning cites Gutenberg's printing press as a key technological innovation in the rise of the composer. The modern West elevates its musicians above all other artists, and the availability of printed material just increased the worship of Beethoven and Lizst, even more than Dante and Shakespeare. For John Warne Monroe, urbanization and the innate predilections of the mind also help to make music so celebrated...

If you believe the name of their website, then Three Percent of literature read in America is translated. Even for a country with a gigantic literary heritage, and a penchant for processing other cultures through its own machinery, this is a lamentably small portion. Peruse their reviews, and examine their collection of links, and marvel at all the great literature you'll never get around to reading...

That list of links neglects to include the Dalkey Archive Press, from the University of Illinois. Check out that Ezra Pound quote about translation. The English language is the biggest bastard of them all, and there's no reason to end the miscegenation now...

Apparently there are neither definite nor indefinite articles in the Polish language. In spite of this fact, 20th century Polish literature has enjoyed tremendous stateside acclaim, and a new collection of essays shows no sign of the trend's abatement. Poland and America are strange cultural bedfellows, but immigration has made them conjoined twins, with Chicago the shared hip. The literati have been oppressed in both countries for opposite reasons, although this is no longer true now that Poland is a member of NATO and the EU...

Whither France?

2009-07-23T12:16:00.000-07:00

For centuries the French seemed to hold a monopoly on top-notch dining, but their gastronomic reputation has recently simmered down. The average French dinner has shortened from 105 minutes to a cursory half-hour, and the very déclassé "steak-frites" was voted France's favorite dish.

Multiple courses and wine at lunchtime seems extravagant to les américains. But in France it is a traditional practice, under siege by a streamlined culture. Edward Cody identifies a Sarkozy-era push to "modernize" France, that is, to make her competitive on the global marketplace. This movement serves up a distinctively Anglo efficiency to eating, first developed by the fourth Earl of Sandwich.

But the real story is not the lapse of food-seriousness within France, it's the extent to which France's culinary traditions have sopped across borders. Guy Savoy cannily recognized this when the Michelin Red Guide was taken over by a German woman. These were not spaetzle-noshing barbarians at the gates. The first foreigner at the helm the famous restaurant guidebook is a sign that French cuisine has become global fine-dining. The French after all are universalists--but of course their universe is a thoroughly French one.

Mike Steinberger, on the other hand, has a few choice words for those ostensibly prestigious Michelin stars. He claims that the narrow-minded obsession with fulfilling mysterious criteria has a negative effect on the French dining scene, driving one ill-starred French chef to suicide. Michelin-starred restaurants after all are part of an outdated, royalist tradition. They serve only a few tables a night, and do not at all reflect the way real French people eat. Michelin rarely celebrates the Middle Eastern cuisine that is served in some of the country's best restaurants.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Alain Passard (whose vegetables ride the TGV each morning) is Denis Hennequin, who helped turn France into McDonald's number two market, in spite of José Bové's 1999 attack. The Illinois-based fake meat juggernaut has ironically become popular in the land of foie gras, although it's interesting to read about how the French enjoy McDonald's in their unique way: they go almost exclusively at mealtimes, in groups, and they linger much longer than North American fast food customers. These conscientious diners probably have a hard time relating to Morgan Spurlock's point.

"Fast food," translated literally into French becomes "la restauration rapide," a contradiction in terms. Bové and his anti-GMO crowd have coined the term "la malbouffe" to describe the pablum that threatens to destroy both public health and French culture. But the French still love McDonald's, and in spite of all the cultural degradation at work, one still eats better in France than just about anywhere else.

Choreographed Car Crash

2009-07-17T23:54:00.000-07:00

Born in France to Russian and Dutch parents, Jacques Tati is OWH's choice for Man of the (Twentieth) Century. His work casts a wistful eye to the Europe of warm neighborliness, although it stops short of the righteous, anti-establishment indignation of Godard (see Weekend) or the hallucinatory dreamscapes of Cortazar (though the latter was also inspired by French highways to create La Autopista del Sur and Autonauts of the Cosmoroute).

All of these artists explored the havoc that the automobile has wrought on the human psyche and the physical environment. Cars represent individual freedom, yet they trap their masters in steel cages on infinite expanses of concrete. Godard used cars to denote nihilisic hypercapitalism. To Cortazar they were portals into the infinite subconscious. Tati just finds them amusing: witness the hilarious and somehow delicate car crash an hour into his film Trafic.

Tati's first four films evince a nostalgia for the humanistic, sensuous and self-contradictory aspect of France. Trafic enlarges the auteur's scope to gently mock sterilized international business culture. The French term "le trafic" refers more to the exchange of commodities than it does to automotive congestion, but after viewing the film you're inclined to think that you can't have one without the other.

Tati's alter ego Monsieur Hulot, a doting sort of Bugs Bunny with highwater pants and an umbrella, designs a camper van and endeavors to transport it to a trade show in Amsterdam. His team is interrupted by countless ironic hijinks set off by precise sound effects and garbled, dubbed dialogue. It looks as vivid and radiant as a summer swimming pool, with less of the intensely organized spaces of his masterpiece Playtime. Hulot's oddball physicality is undiminished although he is over 60 in this film.

Regretfully Yours

2009-07-14T12:34:00.000-07:00

One of culture's most salient ironies is the innate cosmopolitanism of the rube. People reared in the most provincial circumstances often become more worldly than their urban or suburban counterparts.

The preeminence of Irish writers in world literature illustrates this paradox. Joyce, Wilde and Yeats all lived and loved on the continent rather than the drizzly backwater where one must "set his watch back five hundred years." Samuel Beckett joined this pantheon of Irish-Universal titans, and his recently published letters confirm his place in world literature. In his youth he always sought an escape to Europe, although he also feared that he would "probably crawl back with my tail coiled round my ruined poenis."

This is the first volume in a promised series of three, culled from over 15,000 different missives. It's an enormous editorial task that gets creative with the author's wish that only letters "having bearing on my work" be published. When your work encompasses little foibles like mortality, annihilation and the futility of human endeavor, it's not really a hat that you can take on and off, as Anthony Lane points out.

So chronologically, this is Beckett the underemployed, frustrated, dead-broke student and dropout. He halfheartedly tries out several careers including, terrifyingly, airline pilot. He wanders Paris until his shoes "explode" on the Boulevard St. Germain. The rising tide of fascism and the troubled global economy do not seem to make an impression on this passionate aesthete. Though Beckett became a staunch anti-anti-Semite and joined the French Resistance, he couldn't take Hitler seriously in the 1930s.

Joseph O'Neill, himself an Irish-born itinerant, notes Beckett's astounding multilingualism. Beckett claimed that writing in English made him feel "depersonified." He felt freer to express himself within the scope of German, Italian or French, in which he wrote one of the 20th century's great plays.

An exile on good terms with his family, Beckett presumes all the same that his mother seeks "to keep me tight so that I may be goaded into salaried employment. Which reads more bitterly than it is intended." Beckett was a polite and reserved genius, fixated on decay, so it is natural to find him nonplussed in the springtime of love:

There is a French girl also whom I am fond of, dispassionately, and who is very good to me. The hand will not be overbid. As we both know that it will come to an end there is no knowing how long it may last.

This is the woman he would wed and remain with until death.

J.M. Coetzee laments that Beckett and James Joyce often lived in the same city, Paris, and thus had no cause to correspond. Beckett apparently had some kind of affair with Joyce's daughter Lucia.

The author also employed many scatological terms (his poems are "turds") and underwent psychoanalysis, then a novel and subversive practice. He had a knack for neologisms: "daymare" being a real-life bad dream, and "eyedew" meaning tears.

All in all, a feast of humanism, anger, longing, and radiant pessimism.

Triumphant British Melancholy

2009-07-11T19:56:00.000-07:00

The most interesting choice in Patrick Humphries' 1997 Nick Drake biography is in the introduction. In this book about a depressed singer-songwriter, the stage is set with the sinking of the Titanic. The only link between Drake's life and the 300-foot gash in "The Unsinkable" is the presence of the biographer's Uncle Jim at the Titanic's launch. This same uncle would officiate at the birth of Nick Drake, in colonial Burma.

The fate of the Titanic is an appropriate beginning to the Nick Drake story because of the historical sweep of Humphries' book. The biographer situates Drake in the context of a tragic century. The Titanic in 1912 foretold the end of peaceful industrial technotopia. Two years later the assassination of an obscure nobleman would lead to a serious derailment of civilization. Drake would inherit a world where atomic bombs had exploded, where genocide had been carried out on an unimaginable scale...and where the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race was not taken for granted.

England's post-imperial decline has been steady. And yet somehow the rainy island has kept its grip on global capital as well as cultural prominence. No one still regards the English as the greatest people on Earth, and the notion of a happily Anglicized planet is laughable, even if parliamentarianism and beans-on-toast have gained footing overseas.

The secret to England's baffling relevance lies in their genius for flipping the script. In the glory days of Her Majesty's Empire, the doctrine in play was British triumphalism--and the world cowered in fear. Now, no one exceeds the British at acting miserable. It is this trait of expressed thwartedness that is the true genius of the English. The rest of the world rushes to comfort England's sensitive males.

Nick Drake was only the first in a line of world-conquering sadsacks. Ian Curtis, before joining Drake in an early grave, caught the world's attention with the depths of his misery. Then came Robert Smith of the Cure. Today, Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Pulp's Jarvis Cocker lead the phalanx of unhappy English anti-heroes.

But no bloke's self-pity has been globally indulged like Morrissey's. Moz has transcended the great guitar band he used to sing in and is now alone atop a majestic, melancholy pedestal. His fame is utterly borderless, having caught on especially with Mexican-Americans. The artist Phil Collins has explored the strange power of this Mancunian to tap into the alienated feelings of people from Turkey to Brazil.

The English hold a near-monopoly on fashionable sadness, although Russia is poised for a meltdown, India has yet to shed its caste system, and Germany seems to have a congenital knack for the morose.

Sexcidents Will Happen

2009-07-01T20:06:00.000-07:00

Ooh, another hardback entry in the "sexy medieval" genre. You remember Sex with Kings, a salacious historical romp, The Other Boleyn Girl, another salacious historical romp, and of course, take your pick of erotically-charged rehashes of Camelot.

Now we have the academicky East, West and Sex, a new book that gleefully probes the tendency of Western men to patronize Asian prostitutes. Author and "rice daddy" Richard Bernstein enthusiastically flouts the wisdom of Edward Said, and agglomerates North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, China and Japan into "the East." The premise of the study is that the cliché is true and there does exist an admirable sexual permissiveness in the East that presents a lovely opportunity to "liberate" European men from their Judeo-Christian prudishness.

This is a laughably naive view of prostitution, and totally one-sided, as it skips right over the moral disaster of keeping sexual slaves. Laura Miller is right to point out that it's not some advanced sexual culture that beckons to Johns, Juans, and Giannis. (Even if it were, Western women should be lauded for demanding liberation even if it makes them less likely fantasy objects). The economic reality of the East-West duality is simply that our side can command more stuff from their side, hookers being similar to cheap plastic tchotchkes in this respect. An ascendant China may start to minimize the disparity between buyers and sellers--lock up your daughters, struggling British financiers!

This WSJ review takes the book completely on its own terms, as a self-serving justification of abhorrent exploitation. For a glimpse inside the moral reasoning of today's high-financial world, feast on this incredible excerpt:

There may have been -- and may still be -- an inequality of bargaining power in many of the sexual transactions in question.

Really? An inequality of bargaining power between a globetrotting merchant and a harem girl? Perish the thought!

Elsewhere Johann Hari identifies the irony of these transactions' long-term cultural effect: although harems may have helped to loosen up visiting Venetians, it was the missionaries that won the argument--puritanism has successfully taken root in Arabia, India and points east. The Slate reviewer also makes the connection between the sexcapades of American soldier/suitors in Vietnam and the long, shameful bloodbath that occurred there. To say nothing of the rape that created Latin America. Would Bernstein say that opening up Western libido is worth the human cost of colonialism? Because that would make him a total perv.

Whatever the advance on Bernstein's book deal was, I will double it if he will go to Thailand, set up shop in a tin-roof shack, and celebrate the happy communion of cultures by pleasuring whatever strangers force themselves on him.

Tear Down this Slum

2009-06-26T19:48:00.000-07:00

The plan to demolish up to 40 percent of the housing stock in Flint, Mich. looks canny and forward-thinking, in light of the obvious decline of that city. The Kildee plan could have Flint vibrant again as a scaled-down version of itself, and newly enriched by "nature" where old brick mansions used to be.

Shrinking cities is a bold enterprise that has not been pioneered overseas, in spite of European population decline. In this study, Emmanuele Cunningham-Sabot calls for strategic shrinking of cities in France and Great Britain. This goes against the cultural prejudice, existent on both sides of the Atlantic, that supports incessant growth.

On the last page she points to fallacy of rebranding urban areas as opportunities for chic lifestyles. This marketing push distracts from the urban decline and dearth of services that so many cities endure. Cunningham-Sabot calls urban economics "post-Fordist," but it would be more insightful to note that the British public sector has been looted in the wake of Thatcher.

Although creative solutions to urban decline are welcome here at OWH, it behooves government to bulldoze carefully. The century-old brick homes of Steel Age scions may seem draughty and a poor investment, but with hordes of recently foreclosed-upon families, existing housing should be considered an asset before a liability.

P-Funk

2009-06-22T16:53:00.000-07:00

The results of the European Parliamentary Elections are in, and as predicted, 736 people will occupy positions of no clear importance. Voter turnout dropped two percentage points from 2004's elections to an overall 45 percent.

Since the Lisbon Treaty has not been ratified (owing in large part to the failure of Ireland's referendum), the largest trans-national election in history will seat into Strasbourg's comfy chairs a crop of parliamentarians of a still-theoretical supergovernment. Amazingly, Europe's social democrats took a beating, in spite of the collapse of the economic system they have consistently criticized. This could mean that the crisis is still viewed in national terms, freeing voters to elect xenophobes and hatemongers.

Still up for debate is the usefulness of the legislative body itself. Here's a Tory bloke with nothing but bad things to say about Parliament (and mind you, he himself was elected to that body). The British-led "anti-federalism" recalls the birth pains of the United States of America.

Those indefatigable Esperantists have their own transnational party that advocates the EU's adoption of Dr. Zamenhof's invented language. They have been labeled wingnuts and monomaniacs, exploiters of the parochialist tendencies that the EP encourages. But if a legislative body is just "a chamber of notables," then why not let a thousand flowers bloom?

The Kindly Ones Roundup

2009-05-30T22:48:00.000-07:00

This one seems like a corker: a new novel, written in French by an American, outlining in first-person the 1,000-page odyssey of a Nazi as he murders his parents and has sex with his twin sister.

Everybody's got something to say about it:

Paul La Farge, in the Believer:

When you’re talking about novels, the word for a completely worked-out world in which the characters act according to a grand design is escapist; when you’re talking about life, the word for a world like that is totalitarian.

Michiko Kakutani, in the New York Times:

The novel’s gushing fans seem to have mistaken perversity for daring, pretension for ambition, an odious stunt for contrarian cleverness.

Michael Korda, formerly of Simon & Schuster:

I guarantee you, if you read this book to the end, and if you have any kind of taste at all, you won’t be able to put it down for a moment — lay in snacks and drinks! — you will be upset, disturbed, revolted and deeply challenged.

Samuel Moyn, in the Nation:

Toward the end of the novel, [protagonist] Aue follows the death marches in the winter of 1945, the catastrophic months of the regime's collapse. And in the book's closing pages, he encounters Adolf Hitler in his bunker. Aue is a Nazi Zelig.

Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah:

This man who doesn't know what a memory is somehow remembers everything.

Not exactly summertime beach-blanket reading, but worth a look.

Making Georgia Howl

2009-05-05T10:22:00.000-07:00

The Eurovision Song Contest has bowed to pressure from the Kremlin to oust the Georgian entry, a dance-pop ditty titled "We Don't Wanna Put In." Eurovision apparently has rules against political statements.

Georgia has responded in an inspiring way -- they have declared their own Alter/Vision, a protest song contest that will flout the "bureaucratic control and censorship" of Eurovision. You simply can't divorce political statements from pop music, no matter how high-minded the goal of European unity may seem. In other words, no one wants to be part of a neutered, apolitical Euroculture.

Another World is Possible!

Go Rimbaud!

2009-05-04T23:44:00.000-07:00

My review of Edmund White's Rimbaud is up on the Rain Taxi website. (The print version of the Spring 2009 issue features a review I did of Mike Marqusee's If I Am Not For Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew).

White is a poet, critic and novelist who balances an account of Rimbaud's misadventures with an appreciation for the poet's genius. He recontextualizes Rimbaud's sexuality and backgrounds the boy's artistic awakening with the failed utopia of the Paris Commune.

Arthur Rimbaud offers readers the conviction that the fate of the world is in the hands of the artists, and the stakes could not be higher. His career trajectory also disproves a common trope about artists--that they must create at all costs, because it is "in their blood." After turning literature upside down, Rimbaud abandoned his poetry completely to become a frustrated gun runner in Africa.

Iced In

2009-05-02T17:44:00.000-07:00

The best thing I've read about Tough Times '09 is this Vanity Fair profile by Michael Lewis, money analyst and sportswriter. In a visit to the economically devastated nation of Iceland, Lewis goes beyond faulty strategies and the facile blame game. The entire culture of finance is revealed as a confederation of deluded machismo, on thin ice that finally broke.

It's not Lewis' first probe of the hypocrisy of money. His first book Liar's Poker called bluff on the big-swinging-dick world of 1980s Wall Street.

An intriguing aspect of Iceland's buffoonery is the image of cultural superiority, or at least underratedness, that the isolated country has long engendered. Sumarlioi Isliefsson examines the platitudes that the overinvestors told themselves, some of which have a creepy racial component.

I admit to harboring a foolish fascination with Iceland. Empowered women. Hot springs (Reykjavik means "bay of steam"). At least one literary titan. I even irrationally entered a sweepstakes for a free trip.

The Tyson-Wilde Comparison

2009-04-29T23:52:00.000-07:00

James Toback's new Mike Tyson documentary features the unhinged prizefighter reading an excerpt from Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Aligning Mike Tyson, a convicted rapist with a fondness for firearms, with Oscar Wilde, an aesthete sent to prison for his homosexuality, deserves the Academy Award for Audacity.

(If you get to Paris, then head to Cimetiere Pere Lachaise and skip Jim Morrison's final resting place. Check out Oscar Wilde's tomb, known as L'Homme-Oiseau. Also worth a look is Victor Noir's, murdered in 1848 and renowned for his power to make women fertile from the afterlife.)

The Battle for "Eurasia"

2009-04-28T10:13:00.000-07:00

Robert D. Kaplan has a new bibliography for American imperialism. Lately he has been reading Victorian geographical determinists, and he finds much to support the premise of the War on Terror.

Kaplan believes that the new globalized world has eroded the power of the nation-state and brought to the fore the all-powerful forces of geography. You wouldn't think he put much stock in information technology or stateless economic forces. Apparently, as in an endlessly repeating game of Risk, the battles for world domination keep happening in the same spots.

The great French historian Fernand Braudel, who along with Claude Levi-Strauss helped found Brazil's first university, is cited for his emphasis on the influence of the physical environment on history. Poor soils in southern Europe lead to Greek and Roman conquests. (Kaplan neglects to mention that Braudel's masterpiece was written from memory in a German POW camp, perhaps because Germany/France doesn't fit into his list of Eurasian "shatter zones").

In the same vein, Jose Vasconcelos has pointed out that the internal combustion engine never would have been hit upon by the Ancient Egyptians due to their warm climate--it took the shivering German obsession with fuel-gathering.

Halford Mackinder is the thinker that Kaplan is most attracted to. To Mackinder the game of Risk is won or lost in the Central Asian steppe (Here the metaphor breaks down. Experienced players know that Australia is the key to the game). Resources dwindle and factionalism grows and there's your Eurasian tinderbox. Kaplan slyly shifts his overarching metaphor from Vietnam to the Cold War, realigning his view of the future with what Bush 43 sometimes called "the global struggle against violent extremism."

The conclusion of Kaplan's paper, that geography still matters, is unimpressive. It's refreshing to survey a period when historians had a vision with grand sweep. Redressing injustices or adhering to politically correct guidelines meant nothing to Mackinder or Braudel. But let's keep this former Israeli soldier away from America's foreign policy.

Light Meat, Dark Meat

2009-04-21T17:06:00.000-07:00

The Economist's favorite hobbyhorse is the inclusion of Turkey into the European Union. It seems like every time I pick up that magazine, its anonymous British editorial voice advocates the EU's expansion, specifically to the southeast. If commerce is the grand panacea, then might Euro-prosperity tame even the most fervent Muslim cleric?

Turkey was graced with a visit from the U.S. president on his first overseas trip. Obamaphilia spread across Europe and Asia Minor while the prez kept a light diplomatic touch. Turkish TV news beseeched him in blackface, for some very strange reason.

Obama said that Turkish inclusion into the E.U. is something for the E.U. to decide. While this restraint is understandable in the wake of the my-way-or-the-highway Bush administration, and the currently dissolving global economy demanded most of his attention, Obama seemed to shrink from a campaign promise to declare Turkey's slaughter of Armenians a genocide.

This week Obama finally got down to brass tacks. While stopping short of the g-word, he put to use his erudite, cosmopolitan image and employed the Armenian-language characterization of the events, "meds yeghern," which means "great calamity." Obama will clearly err on the side of rhetorical caution as Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan try to straighten out their fraught relations.

But the not-quite-secular government of Turkey may have blown their opportunity to cash in on that sweet Euro-action. There is a whiff of the totalitarian in the Turkish government's snubbing of the Danish premier, to say nothing of widespread poverty and a checkered human rights record.

The idea of Turkey as the great example for the rest of the Caucasus and Middle East, a functioning secular democracy in a Muslim culture, still exists. Europe has certainly also noted its potential as an oil conduit. But for now borders remain borders.

The Man Who Believed He Was King of France

2009-04-16T23:31:00.000-07:00

Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri's book recounts the misadventures of a 14th century Sienese man who combined the "sacrality of royal power and the commercial culture of the merchant class." Born into the humble role of small-time trader, Giannino di Guccio is informed that he was switched at birth with Jean le Posthume, the King of France who was believed dead at infancy.

It was Cola di Rienzo, the political maneuverer, that cooked up this conceit. The fake history exalted a 38-year-old merchant into an immediate royal, which is of course slightly more than a mortal human being. Guccio embraced his new title but, as can be imagined, events were not kind to this pretender to a throne that was already in dispute amidst the sieges and magma-dousings of the Hundred Years' War. This made him a sort of Ross Perot circa '92: a trouble-causing idealist whose quest was over before it started.

The background of this book is a Europe in crisis mode. The Muslims have Jerusalem, the Pope's in Avignon, and the Black Death has ravaged the continent. Guccio's plan to seize the kingdom of France was not just egocentric--he felt the calling to right a sinking ship. This was at least in part an altruistic attempt to save Europe, which was then called "Christendom."

Medieval politics were not as media-sodden as the contemporary equivalent, and so the consensus reality was mutable. In those days, you could head out to the town square and proclaim things and if you weren't swiftly killed then you had some authority. As a medievalist the author is clearly drawn to this fungible quality of reality, which should also attract anyone that employs a contradictory and self-sabotaging regimen of problem-solving.

On the other hand, casting around for assertions of authenticity from the halls of power (Guccio's main strategy) carried great personal risk. A trumped-up letter from a Hungarian royal is as much a liability as an asset, and the great irony of Guccio's endeavor is that he sought what he believed was truth and justice through deception and forgery. Upon returning to his hometown, Sienese magistrates took him at his word, revoked his citizenship and clapped him in irons.

Many scholars assumed Guccio's story to be legendary -- stories by Alexandre Dumas and Mark Twain feature regular Joes seeking rightful royal status. Falconeri demonstrates that Guccio was real. Part of the proof for this assertion is the paradox of just how typical Guccio's story is--no supernatural interludes and no fawning maidens to the person of the King. It's a straight story about a businessman who sought immortality, sought to turn money into magic. The shitstorm of 2008-9 could use a few of this type of outside-the-box operators.

Krugman in Europe

2009-03-27T18:43:00.001-07:00

Whether or not the Nobel Prize for Economics is a "real Nobel," Paul Krugman knows more about money than you do. So it was unsettling to see his suggestion that the European Monetary Union could have been a mistake.

According to Krugman, it's not the cumbersome welfare state that has Europe in so much economic trouble. He argues that financial authority has not been centralized enough in Europe, that is, that the slow development of E.U. political institutions has prevented decisive action to save the economy. Hendrik Hertzberg compares the current E.U. to our own Articles of Confederation-era, when state sovereignty precluded cohesion.

Just like America, Europe has a sunny southern peninsula that recently enjoyed an ill-considered housing boom. All the construction led to an influx of immigrants into Spain, a country that historically exported more people than it took on. Spanish unemployment has always been pretty high and now it will get bad. Krugman points to the impossibility of devaluing a currency that many economies share.

With the benefit of hindsight, maybe the Lisbon Treaty should have been ratified long ago, so that there would then be enough of a federal presence to make some deals. But this is Europe we're talking about, 23 official languages, 730 million souls, and a justifiable skepticism of bold political leaders.

Charles de Gaulle said about France that it was impossible to have a one-party system in a country that has 246 varieties of cheese. The body politic is too variegated. Maybe, in the long run, it's better that way.

At Your Service

2009-03-18T22:38:00.000-07:00

I think I saw Thomas Friedman today at my place of work. He was all sweaty and had dorky little shorts on, and his mustache was flecked with gray whiskers just like in his author photo.

He came into the cafe to buy a turkey sandwich. Like Friedman, the cafe has planet-saving pretensions: recycled paper cups and compostable cutlery.

The three-time Pulitzer Prize winner was mealy-mouthed and took a long time deciding what he wanted, and when he got it he was unappreciative. The young lady I took to be his daughter shot me a friendly glance though. She and I commiserated in a moment of "Isn't my dad embarassing?"

She was right. Thomas Friedman is an embarassment and his green capitalism is a sham in a thunderingly obvious way.

Christopher Hitchens is another columnist whom I'm told lives out here in California much of the time. In spite of his hawkishness, I would thank Hitchens for his moral seriousness and thoroughly entertaining command of the language. I would not be tempted to put a booger in his sandwich. Whether you agree with him or not, Hitchens will never bore, as Chomsky so often does. But it's doubtful that the tubby Englishman would ever come in, though, because he's a dreadful food snob.

One other world-redeeming luminary, a recent Oscar winner, ordered a grilled cheese sandwich off the kids' menu some years ago. When asked if he wanted milk or apple juice with his kids' meal, the famous actor replied: "I just want a grilled cheese sandwich. Is that so hard?"

Bruno in U.S.A.

2009-03-18T01:18:00.000-07:00

"Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand." --Mark Twain

If this quote is true then Sacha Baron Cohen is an envoy sent from Europe to destroy America. The conservative backlash to the comedian/chameleon has been considerable, and his "invasion" is now dogged by a raft of lawsuits.

Cohen's hijinks began as English-on-English spoofs, then developed into a series of lampoons on an ignorant and intolerant stateside culture. The humor in his put-ons comes both from how far he goes and from how far his interview subjects allow him to go. Borat Sagdiyev, the faux-primitive Kazakh TV journalist, can sing a disgusting song called "Throw the Jew Down the Well" at a rodeo in Arizona, but the joke is not on Jews, it's on the crowd of American rednecks that applaud the song.

Of course in Borat the developing world didn't come off well either. The lead character defacates on the sidewalk and tries to throw Pamela Anderson in a "traditional wedding sack." In Cohen's work, everyone and everything is pulverized in a hailstorm of ridiculousness.

Replacing Borat, from a Central Asian backwater, is Bruno, a gay Austrian hairdresser with no decorum at all. The laughs in these sketches derive from Bruno's unapologetic sexuality, contrasted against a background of American puritanism. Bruno is an explicitly European character. His stealthy cosmopolitanism will push America's buttons in the upcoming movie.

Apparently in one scene, Bruno will try to seduce Congressman Ron Paul on camera. A quick survey of the sexual peccadilloes of Paul's colleagues in the legislature would suggest that a sex tape with a famous Republican is not such a farfetched idea on Bruno's part.

Sometime decades hence, Cohen will be recognized for pointing out the departures America has made from mainstream Western culture.

Taciturn Italian Beelzebub

2009-03-14T14:13:00.000-07:00

Can you name the two countries in which lawmakers can hold on to their seats for life? Hint: one is shaped like a boot.

Only Italy and Burundi share this outdated and anti-democratic provision. An incident on Italian television last year should prompt a long look at the seven remaining lifetime senators. On a talk show, 90-year-old Giulio Andreotti failed to respond in any way at all to the question "What is the future for our children?"

The influential politician has earned the nickname Beelzebub for his relationship to a certain Italian fraternal organization. In his appearance on Canale 5, which like most Italian TV is owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, he appears to suffer from a stroke or some kind of mental breakdown. After a long and awkward pause, the show cuts to a commercial break, after which Andreotti seems to have recovered. The host apologizes for "technical difficulties," and everyone applauds. For some reason two stunningly beautiful women have appeared at either side of the Senator-for-life.

Is this what passes for serious political discourse in Italy?

Dutch Baseball Heroes

2009-03-11T22:38:00.000-07:00

To fill out a sixteen-team international baseball tournament you need to send out plenty of invitations. While it's true that the game is an internationally-beloved phenomenon, it falls into a category with rugby, ice hockey and BMX: important in a few countries but far from global in the way that soccer is.

According to baseball's creation myth it was organized and refined by Abner Doubleday, but this explanation falls short of explaining the international popularity of the sport. Ball-and-stick games have appeared in many cultures. The urge to pick up a stick, swing at a small moving object and then take off running is an elemental urge shared by every member of the human family. More concretely, America's peripatetic military has been an ambassador of the game.

This month's World Baseball Classic features ballgame-loving countries like the U.S., Japan and Cuba, but apparently to complete the bracket there are also delegations from Chinese Taipei, Italy and the Netherlands (China is a natural participant because they will certainly field the best team in five or so years, and they're a lock to put on the first baseball game in space).

Of the two European teams, Italy was predictably an early-round elimination, but the Netherlands shocked the world by twice defeating the powerful Dominican Republic. The Dominican squad included as many Major League Baseball stars as the American one, but couldn't summon the hitting to defeat the Dutch.

Eligibility for the Classic demands that at least one parent be born in the nation a player competes for. Hence the Italian team was largely made up of Italian-Americans. As for the Netherlands, the Dutch possessions in the Leeward Antilles, just off the coast of Venezuela, have produced more baseball talent than the motherland, although don't repeat this sentiment in any of the dugouts of the Honkbal Hoofdklasse.

Turns out that in spite of widespread continental indifference, the Confederation of European Baseball has played a championship every year for decades. Eurobaseball lags behind the Caribbean, Pacific Rim and of course North America, but this upstart Dutch squad could make their mark on behalf of an overlooked baseball culture.

There is Power in a Union...

2009-03-06T13:38:00.000-08:00

...as Billy Bragg sings. In the case of the European Union, there's also money, of course.

Everyone could have predicted that the first great challenge to the EU would be a global recession. And here we are. Europe's decade-long tear is over. They were on the point of surpassing the dollar as the world's reserve currency when the crisis hit. Eliminating exchange rate risk, lowering tariffs, and broadening consumer bases can still net the New Europe a lot more money.

What is counterproductive is shifting blame according to national rivalries. The Hungarian premier pointed to "a new Iron Curtain." I'm with Anne Applebaum when she says that the crisis will consist mostly of political squabbling and should not pose a serious challenge to unification. It may be true that Western car-makers are being lowballed by the Czechs, but what about those cheap vacation to Prague that the French, Germans and British have loved for so long? All that cheap labor, and cheap land? It's tit for tat. For the Economist, not cooperating is impossible at this point.

And don't forget what makes money make money: the dream of something better. The New Europe's higher goal, besides getting rich, is the surpassing of the nation-state. It's been working better than anyone had thought. This blog is here to tell you that a new culture is emerging, and that this guy's dichotomous thinking is wrong:

I lived for about a decade, on and off, in France and later moved to the United States. Nobody in their right mind would give up the manifold sensual, aesthetic and gastronomic pleasures offered by French savoir-vivre for the unrelenting battlefield of American ambition were it not for one thing: possibility.

You know possibility when you breathe it. For an immigrant, it lies in the ease of American identity and the boundlessness of American horizons after the narrower confines of European nationhood and the stifling attentions of the European nanny state, which has often made it more attractive not to work than to work. High French unemployment was never much of a mystery.

Americans, at least in their imaginations, have always lived at the new frontier; French frontiers have not shifted much in centuries.

The Europeans will keep their nannies, but gain broad horizons anyway.

Get Your Treaties off my Asparagus

2009-03-06T13:04:00.000-08:00

Foraging is the same as smuggling if you draw lines around it. A village in Cyprus can't get to their wild asparagus crop due to the U.N.'s demilitarized zone that divides ethnic Greeks from ethnic Turks. (Maybe this forbidden zone will one day become Cyprus' most beloved attraction, as the DMZ is now in Korea)

It's one more example of a socially-constructed barrier that fails to recognize the way life really happens. As in the Bosnian film No Man's Land, the arbiters wear the smurf-blue of the United Nations. That film is thick with ironies, the least of which is that the English idiom "no man's land" has been borrowed into common use in several European languages.

Georgia Fights Back with Disco

2009-02-19T13:32:00.000-08:00

The Eurovision Song Contest, just like the World Cup, is an easy outlet for national rivalries. But this year's event promises bonafide political statements.

Georgia had planned to boycott the event, to be held in May in Moscow, but changed its mind and will offer Stephane and 3G's "We Don't Wanna Put In," a danceable attack on the Russian premier.

If only Vladimir himself would dress up in a spangly uniform and try to express Russia's re-emergence through synthesized pop.

God's Crucible

2009-02-17T18:54:00.000-08:00

Are Islam's fundamentalists taking a good thing too far, or has Islam always been destructive and anti-democratic? Militant secularists and xenophobes believe the latter is true. Last year David Levering Lewis issued a loud disagreement with his book God's Crucible.

Muslims have also been Europeans for almost as long as they have been anything. Al-Andalus was the name of the westernmost province of the Islamic empire, which included most of Spain. They've been present in eastern Europe as well (Quick: what's continental Europe's largest city? Hint: It's a Muslim one.)

The Dark Ages were in fact only dark if you were down with Jesus. While Christendom slumped, Islamic culture created the greatest libraries ever, advanced astronomy, algebra and medicine, and invented chess. We owe what knowledge we have of ancient Greece to Arab scholars.

So it's clear that Islam is capable of sustaining a great empire, even a tolerant, pluralistic, peace-loving society. Lewis takes this thread a step farther and bemoans the Arab defeat at the Battle of Poitiers in 732. In God's Crucible he openly roots against the prevailing Christian army, on the premise that a bigger Muslim expansion would have benefited Europe.

Critics have called this thesis a bit of a reach. John Derbyshire points out that Lewis' argument rests on "counterfactual speculations," that is, arguments that do not rely on evidence. It could well be that a uniformly Muslim Europe would have advanced technology and prevented the Crusades, but it didn't work out that way. Historical "what ifs" can go no further than that: there's nothing to back up the theorizing.

Joan Acocella says that writing from the West on Islam tends toward the polemical, due to both the ideology of post-colonialism and the recent prominence of the Islamic terrorist. This is the major problem with Lewis' book. He gleefully plows a cultural minefield by calling Islam advanced and Christendom backward.

To wish that the Hawaiians conquered the world rather than the British is exciting, but the argument can't overcome its burden of political resentment. To sincerely appreciate what al-Andalus was, rather than could have been, there is plenty of material.

So what's Lewis up to? He is not a scholar of Islam. His previous subject was W.E.B. Du Bois, which gives a clue to what Lewis is seeking in his lament for Muslim Europe: racial harmony. Al-Andalus' most notable characteristic was la convivencia, the somewhat peaceful, intermittently tolerant cohabitation of three religions. There's plenty of evidence though of animosity towards Christians, Jews and Vikings during this putative Muslim utopia.

Lewis' unwavering endorsement of Muslim Europe arrives when immigrant communities permeate the Continent. There are urgent questions as to the inclusion of these people, often decried as premodern zealots, into the world's most advanced society. The issue has many faces: the legacy of the Rushdie affair, the possibility of Turkish admission into the European Union, and the French ban on the veil. It's clear one way or another a new convivencia must emerge, but there's no use wishing for a time machine.

Forgiveness and Irony

2009-02-13T09:38:00.001-08:00

This essay in City Journal by Roger Scruton ambitiously attempts to right the course of civilization. But first we need to accept that the good guys have deviated in some fatal way.

The jihadist with a Western passport is a troubling development in the United States, the U.K., and continental Europe. Here we were, undertaking to impart the triumphs of our inclusive style all over the world, and beneficiaries of that style are talking about destroying it. It's not limited to religious fundamentalism. The malaise is more pervasive. Children are shooting up their schools all the time now. "Ideas of liberty, equality, or historical right have no influence on their thinking," writes Scruton. So it's no use picking a bone with them, since they haven't yet articulated an itinerary beyond mayhem.

The "evildoers" are not Scruton's target. He diagnoses a "culture of repudiation," widespread in our polis and abetted by multiculturalism. According to Scruton, the West has lost its mission civilisatrice and is foundering in a relativistic swamp. This generation has shucked the obligations of "citizenship," and we're well on our way to a moribund society, dangerously open to violent extremists.

I don't think anyone has to choose between multiculturalism and forgiveness. Scruton's disavowal of multiculturalism contains a repudiation of tolerance, which is the greatest weapon the West has. As I argued in my Huntington critique, a society need not march in lockstep to be powerful--quite the contrary.

This is why Scruton signals a crisis. He thinks we've fallen out of touch with our roles as citizens. But this is a natural development in a democracy: we can't be great citizens if everyone agrees that we're great citizens. Revolt and patricide are also important ingredients. Not to mention hesitation and empathy. All this makes us better defended against terror, not worse.

The Judeo-Christian"forgiveness" that Scruton calls for is really just multiculturalism in action, or what I prefer to call toleration. He fails to see the key irony of this policy: that it is a weapon in an asymmetrical cultural war. We tolerate creationists because to censor them would only strengthen them. We have faith in the free exchange of ideas.

Scruton's call to better citizenship is laudable, but he opposes multiculturalism for the wrong reasons. (Here are some better reasons).

Holocaust What?

2009-02-12T17:50:00.000-08:00

Hollywood loves to remember the Holocaust. That was the adventure when Americans discovered unfathomable evil, and then eradicated it. Never mind that confrontations with death camps too often lead to the same old homilies about courage under fire, or the power of the imagination, or the role of America as the world's last, best hope.

Portraying unfathomable evil on film is tricky...because it can't be fathomed. Instead, the Nazi aesthetic is conjured in a trice to serve as shorthand for the ultimate foe. Claude Lanzmann in his nine-hour documentary Shoah never showed any archival footage of concentration camps--the only reality was the testimony of survivors and perpetrators.

Would that Spielberg, Benigni and now Stephen Daldry had learned from this restraint. A backlash is mounting to the Oscar nominations of The Reader, which forgives Kate Winslet's war crimes by sympathizing with how hard it is to learn to read in prison.

The Reader is far from the most hackneyed Holocaust retread of the award season. That would be Valkyrie, which features Tom Cruise as a treacherous Nazi would-be assassin with an eyepatch. Let's not forget about "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," "Defiance," and "Adam Resurrected." In these films, the Nazis are outdone by the innocence of childhood, an ass-kicking Jewish resistance, and the psychic powers of Jeff Goldblum, repsectively.

Will a film ever tackle the subject of the unpunished Nazi doctor, and the postwar world that allowed him to go on with his life? It could be a sort of anti-Munich, emphasizing the shape-shifting nature of evil. Heroism and perseverance, moviedom's prized virtues, would not come off well in that story.

American memory of the Thousand Year Reich is crisp and unambiguous, which clashes sharply with the European experience of surrender, collaboration and annihilation. Jews are Hollywood's favorite victims, but what about the French, Norwegians, Dutch? The Spaniards, whose fascist dictator was never deposed? Or the country that lost 26 million people to the war, and of course never saw a dime of the Marshall Plan.

For my money, the one Holocaust film to stick in a time capsule is Errol Morris' Mr. Death, about an execution specialist from New England traveling to a concentration camp to deny the Nazis' crimes. Fred Leuchter Jr. is an eccentric on a picaresque journey that, midway through the film, turns into a ridiculous nightmare that destroys him.

But Leuchter's failure to understand the severity of the Holocaust is our own. We prove our inadequacy of confronting genocide with each new tearjerker that arrives at the multiplex.

Environmental Roundup

2009-02-07T19:17:00.000-08:00

Emissions be damned! The British are burning their trash. New findings are complicating the conventional wisdom that particles released into the air lead to health problems. The Danes, world leaders in green technology, burn roughly 40 percent of their garbage. An unscientific survey of my own lungs indicate that they are holding up pretty well, in spite of my roots in the Ozark borderlands where trash fires are as common as turkey poachers...

Keep your eyes peeled for NASA's rubber ducks, which will emerge like unfrozen phoenixes from Greenland's glacial ice floes. Be sure to email Dr. Alberto Behar when you find your duck...

The Americans and the Dutch share a conservation-minded land ethic, but they arrived at their policies in opposite ways. Scarcity forced the Dutch to take their land back from the sea, whereas plenty induced the Americans to settle and consume land as quickly as possible. Engineering innovations created the Netherlands. Many now hope that they will save America...

The new EU president is a global warming skeptic. Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic has fought the liberal consensus, led by Germany's Angela Merkel, to reduce carbon emissions, insisting that science has not proven the urgency of this policy. He is also an avowed enemy of the EU in general. Of course the recent economic catastrophe has played into the hands of those who bristle at unification...

Less debate is heard about the ownership of Earth's most precious resource. Water is to a greater and greater extent under the control of the wealthy, but a new "virtual water footprint" statistic should raise awareness about this inequality. The metric shows how even rainy northern Europe imports fruit, cotton, beans and wood from the developing (and increasingly dry) world. With guys like these extolling the virtues of bottled water, a return to local-water drinking is long overdue.

The Brecher-Hanson Beef

2009-02-06T15:33:00.001-08:00

Liberals compare the second Iraq war to Vietnam. Conservatives compare it to World War II. It takes the outside-the-box thinking of Victor Davis Hanson to find commonalities between today's Iraq War and the Peloponnesian War, which is just 2400 years old.

The redoubtable War Nerd took Hanson to task for this outlandish analogy and brought about a rivalry between the two war hawks. Gary Brecher is a fictional war columnist from Fresno who writes for the Russian webzine eXile. Even a rabid enthusiast for armed conflict like Brecher thinks Bush's war is a disgrace. Not Hanson, though. The Fresno State classics professor is still an adherent of the Bush Doctrine.

You don't need to draw historical parallels to offer meaningful analysis. The facts speak for themselves. Even calling the ongoing bloodshed in the Middle East a "quagmire" feels quaint and insufficiently outraged.

Boggle with Zizek

2009-01-30T17:46:00.000-08:00

If you like your Marxist cultural theory "Seinfeldian," then Slavoj Zizek is your man.

Violence is his latest volume of highbrow Lacanian philosophy, eastern European jokes, Hitchcock fandom, capitalist critique, and revolutionary yearning. The Zizek mode of writing is to identify the liberal democratic consensus position, turn it upside down playfully, let himself be reminded of a movie that he loves, and finally decide that the West has got it all wrong...maybe. There's enough obscurantism and slapstick comedy to have readers scratching their heads over whether the book is an earnest denunciation of the "systemic violence" of contemporary life, or just provocative schticking.

Take Zizek's arsenal of pop culture references. He calls The Sound of Music "one of the great achievements of Western civilization," and has a silly soft spot for The Matrix (Welcome to the Desert of the Real is named after a line in the Keanu Reeves film). Zizek is capable of illustrating American mores with a description of the TV show Nip/Tuck, then wandering into an exploration of the way that Europeans number the floors of buildings differently than Americans do. In Violence, Elton John is cited for his views on organized religion.

This is cheeky. These wanton departures from academic philosophy are attention-grabbing, and draw the ire of responsible liberals. But Zizek deserves credit for operating outside the cloisters of academe. His appeal beyond the philosophy department is the envy of his critics and rivals. The media needs more rigorous thinkers than this guy, even if what it gets is a slobbering Slovene who embraces buffoonery from time to time.

Violence is most astute when describing the 2005 violence in the Paris banlieue as a post-ideological attempt "to gain visibility." The rioters lacked a coherent program, evidence to Zizek of the death of our political imagination. Zizek's enthusiasm for Christianity, in conflict with his devout atheism, is also a sumptuous feast of contradiction. He stares into the abyss of the Israel-Palestine conflict and outrageously calls for Jerusalem to become a radical free zone, open to all, purged of religious affiliation:

Israel--officially representing Western liberal modernity in the area--legitimizes itself in terms of its ethnic-religious identity, while the Palestinians--decried as premodern "fundamentalists"--legitimize their demands in the terms of secular citizenship...the further irony is that according to some polls, Israelis are the most atheistic nation in the world: around 70 percent of them do not believe in any kind of divinity. Their reference to the land thus relies on a fetishist disavowal: "I know very well that God doesn't exist, but I nonetheless believe that he gave us the land of Greater Israel."...The U.S.-Israel alliance, this strange association of the most religious (developed) nation in the world insisting on the separation of religion and state, and the most irreligious people in the world existing on the religious nature of their state, can thus present itself as an axis of victims...

Love him or hate him, take him as a serious commentator or a comedian, Zizek is hard to put down.

The Guy

2009-01-13T21:30:00.000-08:00

It's almost time. The President is muttering about Harry Truman. There are no hotel rooms within 100 miles of Washington D.C. It's almost time! Europe is excited. America is excited. Kenya is excited. But what about Pakistan?

He will be loved in Europe forever because of his cosmopolitanism, or if you like, his Omni-Americanness. Loved for just what was supposed to cancel his support in "middle America," wherever that is.

The main thing is that the eight year-long suspension of American diplomacy is over.

Of Paradise and Power

2009-01-13T18:04:00.000-08:00

Robert Kagan's book-length essay Of Paradise and Power is about Iraq, mainly. That's at least the sharpest instance of the policy divide between the two titans of the West: Europe and the United States. Kagan argues that there is growing a perhaps irrevocable shift in the two powers' styles: one deliberative and process-based, the other urgent and unilateral. Kagan thinks he knows who should be behind the wheel and who should be fussing with the map.

But in the years since he wrote this manifesto, Europe has gained power both economic and military. It would be hard to argue that the inevitable clash between the two modes of governance has been approaching. Any damage to the transatlantic alliance can be ascribed to actions that Kagan himself has argued for.

Kagan co-founded the Project for the New American Century in 1997, and urged Bill Clinton at that time to invade Iraq. The 21st century, his recent article in the New Republic claims, will look like the 19th. Kagan has no faith in the consensus of the Enlightenment's ideas, no faith that democracy will prevail. This, from a man born in Athens, Greece. He sees the civilized world as hanging on by the barest of threads. And of course the only way America could escape this imminent standoff is to shoot its way out.

Of Paradise and Power faces the irony of this situation. America, Kagan argues, is a land of naturally progressive people who could only justify military intervention if it was carried out in the name of protecting or advancing civilization. Europe, on the other hand, is the land of mercantilism and colonialism and imperialism, what Kagan calls machtpolitik. How did these roles get reversed, with America now belligerent and Europe reliant on "soft power"?

Who knows? The main thing is, Russia's got oil and they hate us. Kagan foresees a long miserable ideological conflict wherein the petrostates, China, maybe even western Europe too, will fall like...wait for it...like dominoes, and religious fundamentalism and autocracy will reinstate itself all over the world.

The anti-pessimists and the starry-eyed Wilsonians and I disagree.

La Haine, pt. 2

2009-01-10T11:40:00.001-08:00

...President Nicolas Sarkozy debated Mathieu Kassovitz in 2005 on the riots that swept suburban Paris, when Sarkozy was Minister of the Interior. Sarkozy retains his notoriety for the blunt and unsympathetic way he described the rioters: he used the term "la racaille," which means scum. You can see "Sarko=Fachot" (Sarkozy equals fascist) graffiti all over Paris.

He angers the left mostly for an apparent anti-humanism in the face of suburban welfare slums, which is the French incarnation of the world's most pressing social crisis. Mathieu Kassovitz and Sarkozy have a robust exchange on this subject on the Criterion Collection's website for La Haine (translated from Kassovitz's blog)

As president of France, he has certainly earned a reputation for a heavy hand. He called a press conference on a beach to tantalize the world with his beautiful new wife's body. Apropos the global financial crisis, the former Minister of Finance, a putative friend to the free market, said "le laissez-faire, c'est fini."

Sarkozy also drastically and controversially redefined the role of EU president during his stint at the end of 2008. The heads of state of member nations rotate the still largely undefined role of president. When Sarko's turn came up he began to dictate policy directly rather than casting around for a consensus view.

All this identifies Sarkozy as a tough and somewhat nationalistic leader, in the grand tradition of tough and somewhat nationalistic French leaders. Like Bush, he entered the presidency as a scrappy conservative outsider, and also like Bush, it is hard to imagine a career more entrenched in the political elite.

La Haine, pt. 1

2009-01-08T19:39:00.000-08:00

I can hear a police helicopter now above Oakland. This is due to last night's riot, where 105 people were locked up as they protested the January 1 murder of a young black man by a transit policeman.

Quite coincidentally I had been planning to review La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 film, which rocked France for its depiction of the hostility between public housing denizens and the police. Kassovitz is an actor/filmmaker best known outside France as Amelie Poulain's crumpet. La Haine presents a decidedly different vision of Paris than Jean-Pierre Jeunet's fairy tale.

It's the story of three young men, a Jew, a black, and a North African, and of their hostile, bored, tragic lives in the city's banlieue (poor suburb). They pass their underemployed days clowning around and getting high. But when Vinz (Vincent Cassel, maybe France's greatest actor) comes into possession of a gun, their frustration is concretized into violence.

La Haine is distinctively French in its style and setting. The boys hang out on a rooftop and imagine that they can kill the lights of the Eiffel Tower. They speak in verlan, a slang of inverted French vocabulary that owes its roots to Africa. And its hard to imagine the three main characters' ethnic mix coming together anywhere other than Paris' banlieue.

But the influence of this film went far "beyond the hexagon," as the French say. It is not an exaggeration to say that it began a new genre: the tense, funny and tragic urban survival film. City of God and Slumdog Millionaire belong to this genre. Costa-Gavras, in the DVD's liner notes, said

I consider La Haine to be a metaphor for our world. More than ten years ago, Mathieu Kassovitz showed us at the scale of a neighborhood what is happening today at a global level. The peacemakers, those who are supposed to spread democracy and justice on behalf of our sated and self-satisfied societies, are spreading death, contempt, racism and humiliation.

Kassovitz's film is not only prescient with respect to the conditions of outer Paris. It identifies a very contemporary sort of malaise and precarity. It's the condition of marginalized groups on the immediate outskirts of the consumerist paradise of the First World. This is a phenomenon not just in France or Europe but all over the world. The response of world leaders has been less than inspiring...

The Solar Anus

2009-01-03T23:28:00.000-08:00

A few excerpts in case you don't have the stamina to get through this Georges Bataille essay:

Coitus is the parody of crime...

An abandoned shoe, a rotten tooth, a snub nose, the cook spitting in the soup of his masters are to love what a battle flag is to nationality...

Love and life appear to be separate only because everything on earth is broken apart by vibrations of various amplitudes and durations.

However, there are no vibrations that are not conjugated with a continuous circular movement; in the same way, a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis.

Trees bristle the ground with a vast quantity of flowered shafts raised up to the sun...

Communist workers appear to the bourgeois to be as ugly and dirty as hairy sexual organs, or lower parts; sooner or later there will be a scandalous eruption in the course of which the asexual noble heads of the bourgeois will be chopped off...

I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night.

Marilyn vs. Marlene

2009-01-02T14:23:00.000-08:00

Who is your feminine ideal? Is it a smoking hot, utterly clueless blonde who needs a big strong man to take care of her? Or is it a smoking hot, fully empowered blonde who leaves a trail of dead big strong men in her wake?

Marlene Dietrich has international appeal. She belongs to the world, and conquered it like Bonaparte and Hitler never could. In Paris cabaret legend, she tamed Ernest Hemingway. Poets and presidents were reduced to crumpled, whimpering fools, but she claimed her heart belonged only to Orson Welles--a love never consummated. Dietrich became an American citizen in 1939 but is buried in her native Berlin.

But Marilyn Monroe is the one who enjoys the status of ultimate starlet. Maybe this is Andy Warhol's fault. Marilyn is always depicted as completely vacant, lost in the world, and totally unprepared to think for herself. Is this what endears her to moviedom, this quality of being easy to manipulate?

Quentin Crisp, the noted midcentury moviegoer and homosexual, puts a fine point on the difference between the two in his memoir The Naked Civil Servant:

I was still a devotee of the divine woman...In my lifetime she changed her name three times, calling herself first Brigitte Helm, later Greta Garbo, and finally Marlene Dietrich. I thought about her a great deal, wore her clothes, said her Sphinxlike lines, and ruled her kingdom. I came to the conclusion that beauty was not a girl but an Aryan face seen through Semitic eyes. This was what gave her that tragic and remote quality. If what the Wandering Jew (who might by now have changed his name to Fritz Lang) most longed for was unbearable pleasure indefinitely prolonged, then he had to invent for himself a woman who was both beautiful and unattainable.

We have come a long degrading way from Miss Helm to Mlle. Bardot. The fault lies not in our movie stars but in ourselves. Those beauties of the last generation symbolized hopeless love. Now it is too late for tears. What modern young man has the time to play a guitar under his true love's window or the energy to climb up the ivy into her room? In bed, he is embracing the bomb. Someone had to invent espresso sex, and to serve each cup of this tasteless beverage there had to be a mechanical doll whose only recommendation was her infinite availability. The woman who came to embody this ideal to the full was Marilyn Monroe. Her directors persuaded her to flaunt her astonishing sexual equipment before us with the touching defenselessness of a retarded child. She was what the modern young man most desires in life--a mistress who could be won without being wooed. She was the football pool of love.

Asymmetrical Warfare

2008-12-31T09:50:00.000-08:00

The Mouse that Roared is a 1959 Cold War comedy starring the greatest performer in the history of the movies, Peter Sellers. Five years before his turn in Dr. Strangelove, this film sees an ad hoc military force from tiny "Fenwick" invade Manhattan and capture a doomsday device. The action bizarrely anticipates both the Cuban Missile Crisis and the challenges of less technologically advanced military foes that still haunt the U.S.

Militarism is ludicrous in The Mouse that Roared. The Fenwick Army does jumping jacks in their chainmail on the poop deck of their one vessel. They shoot arrows at anyone who challenges them. Needless to say, the U.S. does not respond with an effective "counter-insurgency." But beyond the obvious silliness, this film confidently presents war as a profitable deception fought by pawns.

What got me thinking about this movie, though, is the deployment of European troops outside the continent in order to protect an investment (Fenwick invades the U.S. because California's wine industry is threatening their own). This was cheeky and unrealistic from 1959 until now.

A new flavor of military action is taking shape--one that lacks U.S. leadership. Somali pirates seized a huge Saudi oil tanker in November. It becomes clear why this shocked the international community when you see in this clip how little these pirates are working with. And while it's true that the push to combat piracy off the Somali coast has been multilateral, it hasn't been from the U.S.-led NATO. It has been a Franco-British police action, with help from such unlikely military players as Japan and China.

The 100,000 American military troops on European soil mean that the U.S. takes care of much of the defense budget for European countries. But there has been some complicated political pressure for Europe to kick in more resources to NATO. It's complicated because in the zero-sum game of militarism, empowering others means you yourself are weaker.

One small tip in the balance of power was the deployment to Macedonia of the European Rapid Reaction Force (ERRF) in 2002. The ERRF consists of 60,000 on-call soliders from the national armies of the member states. It's a sort of Euro-SWAT team, that could theoretically deliver bandits back to a theoretically-functioning Somali government.

This is not the return of Napoleon. But maybe at least we won't see any more comedies about the U.S. army humiliated by "a bunch of fifteenth century Europeans."

Two Dead Curmudgeons

2008-12-29T18:52:00.000-08:00

Samuel Huntington is dead at 81.

Huntington is most famous for his mistrust of multiculturalism. In his "Clash of Civilizations?" essay, monolithic cultural blocs hurtle toward each other and unavoidably result in mass murder. These cultures include Latin American, Islamic, Hindu, Japanese, "African," "Orthodox," "Western," and, vaguest of all, "Sinic," a blanket term for Korean, Chinese and Southeast Asian.

Of course, as this obituary in the Times of India points out, the most important thing to grasp about "the Islamic world" is that it is not uniform. Senegal, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Turkey cannot be said to share the same culture. No one uses the term "Christendom" anymore for the same reason.

In his book The Third Wave, Huntington attacks Confucian and Islamic heritages, characterizing them as inherently anti-democratic. In "Who Are We?" he uses the baffling term "ampersands" to describe American citizens with backgrounds that aren't completely WASP-ish.

Huntington believed that an empowered developing world could only lead to the disintegration of "American values." His pessimism found its full flower in The Clash of Civilizations? a warning of the imminent dissolution of America due to the Hispanic immigration wave.

In the 21st century, democracy will be pluralistic and inclusive, and will not live or die on the criterion of total national solidarity. America, as well as the unified Europe, will find strength in ideological diversity rather than uniform patriotism. Huntington did not understand this.

Here I pass the mic to the eminent Louis Menand:

...If the world is becoming more porous, more transnational, more tuned to the same economic, social, and informational frequency—if the globe is more global, which means more Americanized—then the need for national cultural homogeneity is lesser, not greater. The stronger societies will be the more cosmopolitan ones.

Perhaps this sounds like sentimental internationalism. Let’s be cynical, then. The people who determine international relations are the political, business, and opinion élites, not the populace. It is overwhelmingly in the interest of those élites today to adapt to an internationalist environment, and they exert a virtually monopolistic control over information, surveillance, and the means of force. People talk about the Internet as a revolutionary populist medium, but the Internet is essentially a marketing tool. They talk about terrorist groups as representatives of a civilization opposed to the West, but most terrorists are dissidents from the civilization they pretend to be fighting for. What this kind of talk mostly reveals is the nonexistence of any genuine alternative to modernization and Westernization. During the past fifty years, the world has undergone two processes. One is de-Stalinization, and the other is decolonization. The second is proving to be much more complicated than the first, and this is because the stamp of the West is all over the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is now putting its stamp on the West. There are no aboriginal civilizations to return to. You can regret the mess, but it’s too late to put the colors back in their jars.

And why isn’t internationalism, as a number of writers have recently argued, a powerful resource for Americans? The United States doesn’t have an exclusive interest in opposing and containing the forces of intolerance, superstition, and fanaticism; the whole world has an interest in opposing and containing those things. On September 12, 2001, the world was with us. Because of our government’s mad conviction that it was our way of life that was under attack, not the way of life of civilized human beings everywhere, and that only we knew what was best to do about it, we squandered our chance to be with the world. The observation is now so obvious as to be banal. That does not make it less painful.

Harold Pinter is dead at 78.

Where Huntington challenged the consensus of Western multiculturalism from the misguided American right, Pinter attacked Western power from the humorless British left. Imagine Samuel Beckett, but bleaker.

The London playwright turned out modern plays rife with uncomfortable pauses, profanity, and a wide streak of misanthropy. But he became better known for his political positions. Pinter opposed bombing in Serbia in 1999 and in Afghanistan in 2001. He supported Fidel Castro and Slobodan Milosevic. Pinter was a dedicated anti-American, and when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, critics alleged corruption and narrow-minded Eurocentrism.

More than any other playwright Pinter's work best illustrates Claude Levi-Strauss' complaint about modern theater: that it feels like "witnessing a domestic argument which has nothing to do with me."

Here's an excerpt of Pinter's scintillating verse:

The lights glow.
What will happen next?

Night has fallen.
The rain stops.
What will happen next?

And:

Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armored parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America's God.

In this Al Jazeera interview, it is evident that the gravelly old man had courage. But nowhere does radicalism appear less fun than it does in the work of Harold Pinter.

The Art of Being Tintin

2008-12-29T10:26:00.000-08:00

My family's obsession with Tintin began early when Santa Claus left my brother a copy of The Black Island. Inside the large hardback comic book, the generically European boy reporter dons a kilt and outfoxes both a crime syndicate and a huge gorilla on the craggy Scottish coast. As a gambit to induce my brother to love reading, Tintin was a success, but today he is more likely to do Tintin stuff (scramble over fences, tackle evildoers, stow away on steamships) than he is to read about Tintin stuff.

The distinctively post-World War II series of adventure comics is poised to crossover into the English-speaking world. Commercial moviemaking's two heaviest heavies have promised to turn Tintin into a turgid, American-style trilogy of blockbusters.

This defies reason. There is no more European hero than Tintin. He's an intellectual given to feats of derring-do. His jaunts into the wide world lead him into ancient and insoluble enigmas, but through a balance of patience and guile he arrives at solutions.

Tintin can travel to the moon but his adventures leave no trace. He's not engaged in nation-building or altering the course of history. This is exactly as post-colonial Europe imagines its role in the world: a polite and quite selfless crusader for the greater good. The militaristic fulminations of Tintin's friend Captain Haddock contrast sharply with the hero's carefully considered actions. Haddock always ends up an ineffectual clown.

Although the very visual and action-oriented medium of comics theoretically lends itself to cinematic interpretation, Tintin has until now resisted the movies (mostly). This mediocre animated version offers some clues as to why. Notice how uncomfortable the lad is after knocking the chessboard over at 2:50. This is a hero who hates being disruptive. Also, Tintin doesn't have an acquisitive bone in his body: he never gets the girl, and he never reaps a reward from all the good work he does. Indiana Jones, he is not.

The characters are another reason why Tintin works best inside little rectangles on a page. They are both rich and one-dimensional. The countenances of General Alcazar or Nestor the butler at Marlinspike Hall are distinctive and instantly recognizable, but the hero himself seems to have no psychological complexity. He barely even has a face. It's hard to imagine actors bringing these characters to life. The filmmakers' avowed approach of "photorealistic animation" seems to skirt the issue.

Tintinology is a rich vein of cultural criticism on the continent, as analyzed as any bit of postwar literature. But only recently has the discussion moved into English, with the publication of Tintin and the Secret of Literature, by Tom McCarthy. In the book-length essay, McCarthy weighs the literary merit of the series by "unleashing the arsenal of post-modern literary criticism."

It is taken for granted in Tintin's homeland of Belgium that comics are an art form of serious importance. Brussels' best highbrow comic shop is even called Le Neuvieme Art in deference to the medium. In the English-speaking world where Tintin is less of a phenomenon, and "graphic novels" are a fairly new innovation, the a defense of comics still feels bold.

McCarthy finds that if Tintin is not literature, then he's better than literature, or at least more fun. Since each page was published serially, the narratives are shot through with cliffhangers. The settings all sparkle, alternately with domesticity and exoticism. And how many geopolitical murder mysteries do kids and adults enjoy with the same level of enthusiasm?

Toward a Euroculture Pt. 2

2008-12-20T23:12:00.000-08:00

Everybody wants to live in the Europe of the Eurovision Song Contest. It's garish, arbitrary, democratic, and sexy.

The contest is the most successful of the European Movement's efforts to introduce the concept of Europa über alles into popular culture. Europe Day, on May 9, is not as celebrated as the various national holidays. But on the second to last Saturday in May, the Eurovision Song Contest draws millions of viewers from across the continent, who phone in their votes for best cheesy song.

Frenchman Marcel Baison created the first contest in 1956. A Europe-wide celebration of televised pop music could help to forge a continental identity, but it was also a marketing opportunity. For a while there were language restrictions in order to preserve some idea of authenticity, but these concerns have been dropped. Also, there are no nationality requirements, so it was perfectly fine for Canadian Celine Dion to win for Switzerland in 1988.

Acts have recently tended toward the ridiculous in order to distinguish themselves. Fifty-one countries have participated at least once, stretching far beyond Europe's geographical borders. Special priority, though, is given to the four countries who pony up the most money for the event: the UK, Spain, Germany and France.

The sound of Europop emerged in 1974 with the triumph of ABBA's "Waterloo." On the first morning of my last trip to Paris, I heard this song as I woke up jet-lagged in a youth hostel in the 15th arrondissement. This is as good a candidate for a European anthem as "Ode to Joy." It commemorates the end of European unity through militarism and announces a surrender to the binding forces of love.

Last year, with the event scheduled to broadcast from Belgrade, riots swept the Serbian capital following Kosovo's declaration of independence. But the event prevailed, with beefed up security for the Albanian, Israeli and Croatian delegations. The contest went off without incident, and Russia's Dima Bilan took home the prize with an earnest-but-animated rendition of "Believe." Maybe trashy pop music can function as a panacea.

2009's event will take place in Moscow, in keeping with the custom that the previous winner's home country gets to host the contest. This presents problems, and not just monetary ones, since the resurgent Russia has criticized NATO presence in its midst and apparently will not consider membership in the European Union. The proceedings this year will emit a miasma of geopolitical intrigue that is sure to heighten interest.

Only soccer tournaments can claim the sort of supranational appeal that Eurovision does. It's the closest that the one billion Europeans have come to cultural communion. Of course, culture will follow economics. When financial borders have been as permeable as they are today for a whole generation, then a sort of European identity may emerge.

Toward a Euroculture Pt. 1

2008-12-20T20:32:00.000-08:00

Attempts at codifying a borderless, streamlined Europe have usually been heavy-handed. Like Esperanto, which is a beautiful idea on paper, learning tools like The Raspberry Ice Cream War tend not to inspire actual Europeans. They would rather not have their identities molded for them.

The Raspberry Ice Cream War: A Comic for Young People on a Peaceful Europe without Borders was a minor scandal upon its release in 1998. In it, three children of ambiguous nationality are whisked back to the "Dark Ages," when Europe was a maelstrom of warfare and customs headaches. One of our heroes enlightens a medieval king:

...there are no borders anymore and the governments put their heads together to decide what's best for everyone ...you can go anywhere you want, work, study, buy things, go on holiday....

A pretty succinct description of a consumerist paradise. But would you really want to live there?

Content's Dark Ages

2008-12-18T21:03:00.000-08:00

In October, Occidents Will Happen sent a very lucky correspondent to the oXcars, a copyleft festival in Barcelona. Exgae, the host of the festival, is an organization dedicated to reforming intellectual property laws.

The downloading community in Europe and elsewhere is united in resisting the suffocating system of strict copyright. In the digital age, information can no longer be considered a commodity, and so authors cannot really be proprietors of their work in the way that a hen is the proprietor of her eggs. The internet means that sharing is required of all content, and we are all the richer for it.

Los Piratas Son Los Padres is the booklet that Exgae released to coincide with the oXcars, and here is a translation of just one taste of the funny, radical, and deeply humanistic work that they do.

The Dark Ages: A General History

by Josianito

Halfway through the 21st century, the copyright protection of authors over their work was extended in perpetuity.

The content industry then decided to secure its market position by impeding new competitors, and thus gain infinite profits. For this to happen, no more authors could exist.

The abolition of the concept of “original creation” came about at the end of the 22nd century.

The action of juxtaposing different past authors’ works was called “combination.” Every person had the right to combine, but they always paid for it. There always existed a past author that held exploitation rights. If there were no trustees, then profits went to one government or other, depending on the nationality of the author. The people who made combinations were known as “combiners.”

All human culture had been painstakingly registered and digitized. Every completed combination was processed by an analysis of sophisticated algorithms that identified the correct proportions of original content and assigned percentages of profits to the original creators.

Writing thus became a hobby of the rich. As for popular culture, only haiku survived (easy to record and transmit verbally).

The classics all entered the commodities market and the prices at which they traded signified the fashion of the times. The Bible, Shakespeare and the Beatles became secure investments, the equivalents to gold in the raw materials trade.

The great crisis of the 23rd century came about when documents were unearthed which demonstrated that “Shakespeare” was a pseudonym under which many authors wrote. The impossibility of correctly identifying the author of his work shattered the confidence of the content industry, and its shareholders fell into penury. To avoid future crises of confidence (the attribution of other classics was also in question), the combination of works before 1923 was prohibited.

The Dark Ages ended after the Galileo Trial. The brilliant lawyer May Terr criticized the commercial exploitation of the Bible, arguing that the text was divinely inspired, and thus had no human authorship. The lack of any document signing over the rights to Peter, nor to the Roman Apostolic Church (the possessor at the time of exploitation rights), made piracy legal.

This decision brought about the greatest economic crisis in history. The stock market price and the combination system were suspended. God was called upon, but he didn’t show up. Finally, under careful analysis all texts were attributed to God, although subsequent testing cast doubt on the existence of the Author. After a thirty year trial, the judge decreed that God did not exist (His having not shown up was a decisive factor), and so all previous decisions were null and void.

And afterward the entire content industry went bankrupt.

Financial Crisis Roundup

2008-12-15T18:54:00.000-08:00

It has not fallen to the intrepid staff of Occidents Will Happen to inform the general reader about the global financial meltdown. You know all about it already. But here are a few interesting perspectives anyway:

Iceland has suffered the collapse of its banking system, but on the bright side, they're the happiest people in the world. John Carlin attributes the honor to its roots as a pagan culture, the empowerment of women, social acceptance of nontraditional families, and hot sulfurous mineral water for every household...

The flow of capital across middle Europe just got a little faster, but don't make the mistake of thinking that the Swiss are now team players. They just agreed to open their borders and allow traffic through without passport checks. The agreement also means that Switzerland has access to the Schengen Information System, a pan-European database with information on stolen property and missing persons. So, rather than doing away with the border, they have just moved it farther out of the physical realm and into the informational one...

Daniel Gross sends up Thomas Friedman's discredited McDonald's theory of conflict resolution with his new Starbucks theory of international economics. Countries that optimistically overextended themselves in the last few years (Spain, the U.K.) are the hardest hit by recent bad times. They are also the most likely to overcharge for whipped, sugary hot drinks. What more appropriate harbinger of decadent lending practices than the spread of the Seattle-based coffee chain? Billy Childish, in an interview with Ian Svenonius, puts an even finer point on it:

[In England], we don't have any industry anymore. We've got coffee. Frothy coffee with a funny name. Some people serve it and other people drink it. Other than that, we don't have industry. So you can actually divide the western world up into producers of strangely-named cappuccinos, and people who drink it...and I suppose I'm a producer of froth.

JCVD

2008-12-13T13:02:00.000-08:00

Jean-Claude Van Damme's latest film toys with your expectations of a Van Damme film. The Muscles from Brussels has built his career on cheap titillation, but JCVD is no action flick. It's a portrait of the Universal Soldier as a victim and a fraud.

When the body-builder followed Schwarzenegger to Hollywood in the '80s, he began a long series of forgettable action movies that brought him fame if not acclaim. Now he returns to Belgium and plays himself, a star in miserable decline.

When Van Damme stumbles into a bank robbery, the stage is set for his usual heroics: roundhouse kicks, gunplay and innuendo. Instead, extremely long takes and inconsistent punch-landing erode Van Damme's aura of invincibility. The confused, wounded masculinity on display would make even Mickey Rourke blush.

The film's emotional center is Van Damme's awkward, tearful monologue about his life and career. It's an astonishing bit of acting that oscillates between sparkling improvisation and and bungled cue card-reading (Van Damme mispronounces the word "penthouse"). This abrupt binge of self-doubt would have derailed a lesser film, but self-doubt is the very heart of JCVD, and the hope for redemption through ass-kicking vanishes amid the whimpering.

JCVD's treatment of violence contrasts starkly with Hard Target or Death Warrant. Director Mabrouk El-Mechri deconstructs the vengeful, redemptive hero, so ingrained in American cinema, and reveals a quivering mass of insecurity, regret and powerlessness. Van Damme's return to Europe is more than just a geographical shift: the violence in JCVD is senseless and demoralizing, where in a Mel Gibson film it would be an apotheosis.

Europe has been blunt in criticizing America's proclivity for violent intervention. Here, in the crying face of Jean-Claude Van Damme, is European cinema's rebuttal to America's failed military solutions.

Lisbon Treaty Redux

2008-12-12T18:36:00.000-08:00

The Irish are now remounting an attempt to pass the proposed EU constitution by popular referendum. The first one failed in June 2008. Ireland's notorious flat tax, their abortion ban and their military neutrality were contributing concerns to the last failed referendum.

But of course this is a much larger issue. Every democracy must bear a wearisome bureaucracy. Citizens often find the bureaucracy intrusive, unjust, and impersonal. Just imagine the hostility towards a bureaucracy of bureaucracies, that is, an empowered EU federal government.

The Lisbon Treaty has proposed a reformed European constitution but is far from close to seeing it ratified by all 27 of the EU’s member states. Failing in one state means no constitution anywhere. The first draft, penned by eminent French statesman Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, was rejected by France and the Netherlands in 2005.

“Euroskepticism,” the reluctance to grant more power to the EU, is animated by any number of concerns. Small countries point to the disproportionate power wielded by larger countries: EU member states send anywhere from 6 to 96 MEPs (Members of European Parliament) to Brussels. Euroskeptics have also criticized the expansion of the law-drafting powers of the unelected European Commission.

The Lisbon Treaty would streamline the EU as a decision-making body. Its proposed constitution is a major step towards European unification. Representatives of the EU's 27 member nations signed the agreement in December 2007, but it was only ratified in 18 member states, and of those, only three approved it by referendum rather than parliamentary vote (Spain, Luxembourg, and Romania).

Europe of course has a strong allergic reaction to utopian thinking or final solutions, and so will hem and haw about a stronger EU for a long time. They are far less likely than Americans to be rallied by optimistic rhetoric, and even if the Lisbon Treaty passes, unification will remain a far off dream.