Radical Aloofness in Brazil

I have never been a soccer fan…except for that weekend in Portugal in 2004…but I confess to being entranced by this summer’s World Cup action. The beautiful game really is “a chess match with running,” and success, when it comes, feels like the grace of God: mysterious and exhilarating. How do the world’s best succeed at this foot-ball game? Years ago Adam Gopnik lamented the primacy of defending, blocking, stalling, gumming up the action. Victorious teams hang back and thwart offenses, only occasionally springing into counterattack. But then, Spain, Brazil and a bunch of clubs that I don’t pretend familiarity with flipped the script. “Tiki-taka became the dominant style: crisp, accurate passes and confident ball possession would win the day. The defense-minded, antagonistic squads (cough, Greece, cough) were finally being given their just desserts. Except then Spain got their asses handed to them by Netherlands and Chile. Even the ruthless accuracy of the Germans came up short in a draw against Ghana. Something else is in the tropical air. Before this tournament is complete, a new soccer paradigm will reign. And I’m pleased to share that after watching two matches last Sunday, I’ve discovered it. The Belgians bested Russia in spite of themselves. Whenever they had the ball, they looked baffled, dogged, reticent (the best part of writing about soccer is the adjectives). The commentators thought Belgium dishonorable and muddled. On the other hand, the United States spent ninety minutes looking downfield and executing brilliant passes that for the most part had no impact against Portugal. How could it be that American hard work and courage was not paying off? It’s because that is not the way that international soccer is to be played in 2014. The team that wins this tournament will be the team with the most reluctance. Frantically seeking opportunities to score goals is not a winning strategy anymore. The only result of that kind of play is exhaustion and hoary emotion. Better to flip the ball around behind the center line, and if ever you realize you have an open shot, to indifferently fire it over the crossbar. This may not sound sensible, but bear with me. Belgium spent their entire match last Sunday listlessly looking around. When a lightning cross to Axel Witsel petered away, the announcer said “Witsel looked like he wanted no part of that pass.” Truly: Witsel was shocked that his teammates were experimenting with aggressive playmaking. Belgium is a team of talented, cautious young midfielders and a striker who is only there to distract (Romelu Lukaku). They peer down the field skeptically and then decide that it’s not worth it. Then, after 87 minutes of discomfited jogging, someone like Eden Hazard sheepishly breezes by defenders and delivers an assist of astonishing accuracy. In their first two matches, Belgium’s three goals were scored by substitutes, and only after the 70 minute mark. They are one of four teams in Brazil with a perfect record. Compare this with the manful efforts of the Americans. Portugal watched them exert themselves like maniacs, then responded by relaxedly dropping a ball past Tim Howard in the final minute. When the USA looked like it had energy, Portugal would writhe around on the ground (dishonesty is part of the game, and the Americans have got to learn that). Big crosses and antic loping are really just signs of insecurity. In Manaus, it was only when teams were at their most Belgian (read: indifferent) that they began to break through. In fact, holding the ball inside the box and maintaining perfect stillness is when you know that a goal is in the offing. Clever passing and hustle? Please. So join me in respecting the aloof, consistent Belgians. “Splendid attacking football” is charismatic and good for TV ratings, but the real champions are the ones wasting time and teaching us patience.

Better Swedes than Babies

Ross Douthat thinks that we're missing a vibrancy and an optimism that accompanies high birth rates. That may be true, probably not, but what really bugs me is the argument that the wealth of nations depends on the quantity of babies produced.

Labor markets can be corrected by immigration policy. If the Japanese quit reproducing, there's a wealth of human capital in sub-Saharan Africa. Now that we've overcome our respective national chauvinisms (ahem), teamwork can remedy the imbalances in our demographics.

Take for example those historic rivals, the Norwegians and the Swedes. Once Norway discovered its oil and became decadent and effete (in a Douthatian sense), it decided to import loutish labors from its eastern neighbor. Which keeps a smirk on Norway's face, but also enriches everyone, so that no one has to implore women to crank out more.

Colonizing the NBA

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?

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"