Category: Best

Posted on

Fast Cuts: Mediocre Directors

All right, you’ve finished shooting. You assemble your video and your audio and your special effects and start trying to pull it altogether into a coherent whole. You think you’re finished and the big moment arrives– you show it to your friends, some crew, film company execs, sponsors, whatever. It’s boring. It’s dull. It doesn’t “move”.

You are mortified. What can you do? Don’t give up! You promise everyone you’ll go back into the editing suite and fix it. But you can’t reshoot, because the actors have gone home, the crew is dispersed, the light’s different…

No problem. Just shorten every cut. Shorten every cut to about .6 seconds. That’s right, less than a second. Cut, cut, cut. Then add some more sound effects, lasers, metal on metal, whoosh! More cuts. More, until you have about 40 cuts a minute, if not more. Loud music, loud effects. Now, let’s jiggle the camera, as if your camera was drunk, staggering around in circles, totally discombobulated. That’s it– makes it look like this is really happening to Brad Pitt, right. You can tell it’s really happening because the camera man is jiggling the camera, man. That like a documentary! Looks real. Looks really real.

Fast cuts never make any scene look great, but they prevent lousy scenes from looking really, really bad. You can’t tell any more– each shot is only on the screen for a second or less. What you have is the illusion of action and movement, which is analogous to being able to be the eyes in the heads of five different people in rapid succession. This does not reveal anything to the viewer: it merely keeps him from realizing that the director is unable to develop an interesting sequence of actions from a single point of view.

This is not the same as Eisenstein’s theory of montage: in Eisenstein’s view, each cut provides a comment on the previous and succeeding cuts, thereby creating a coherent sequence that gives meaning to the action. The famous scene of the baby carriage rolling down the steps and the Cossack holding his sword aloft and the woman about to scream…. Modern action films simply provide a succession of shots without any inner coherence at all. That would require work.

Sergei Eisenstein, also known as the Soviet Eraserhead.

 

Why do ALL the previews now have quick cuts going to black? Can’t anyone do anything on their own nowadays? Who started it? Who did it first? Who said now everyone has to do it the same way: short, quick cuts, fade to black, fade to black, fade to black. The audience can really tell that this film has lots of action, so they will want to see it. Do not, under any circumstances, give the audience any idea of what the movie will actually be about, because it’s not about anything: it’s guns, helicopters, and babes, and moving cameras, and explosions, and revenge and mayhem.

Event the trailers for the films that appear to be about relationships or character are now chopped into tiny little disconnected shots, fading to black…

Posted on

Portugal Ends its War on Drugs

Apparently, we crazies are right.

Portugal legalized all drug use in 2001, reasoning that:

  • it was more expensive to incarcerate drug users than to treat them
  • interdiction was a waste of money and resources that could be better allocated elsewhere
  • it’s very expensive to build prisons and hire police officers to enforce the law

So they abolished most criminal penalties for possession of drugs.

A nightmare was forecast.

It didn’t materialize. In fact, there were a number of positive developments. No miracles, really, but some positive developments, including a huge increase in the number of drug addicts willing to enter programs to address their dependencies.

From Time Magazine:

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.

Wow. Pretty impressive.

It has long been my opinion that drug abuse in Canada and the U.S. should be treated as a public health issue, not as a criminal issue. With the vicious gang wars in Mexico making the news the last few years, the massive increases in costs of prisons and law enforcement, and the stunning persistence of large scale drug abuse, one wonders what it would take to prove to people that our current drug policies are ineffective.

We have no excuse– a vast majority of citizens already believe that prohibition (of alcohol) was a monumental failure, and help incubate the development of powerful criminal organizations. The only reason large numbers of citizens continue to believe that marijuana and cocaine are different from alcohol is because alcohol was the drug of choice for “respectable” middle-class citizens. They didn’t mind feeling righteous about telling “others” that using intoxicants for pleasure was wrong– as long as it wasn’t their intoxicants.

The same hypocrisy is applied today to psychotropic drugs which provide similar but milder effects, can also be addictive, are often revealed to be ineffective at treating various alleged neuroses, but earn millions for drug company shareholders because they can be patented.

Without a doubt, legalization would result in many people continuing to abuse drugs. How is that a different result from spending billions on interdiction?

Posted on

Bullies

There is a grave flaw in the conservatives’ argument that the government should stay out of our lives as much as possible. Or maybe it isn’t a flaw. Maybe it is the real essence of conservatism.

If our world is a school yard, big corporations and the rich are like the bullies. Conservatives want the government to stay out of it: the bullies knock you down, kick you, and take your lunch money. They abuse the girls, toss their garbage wherever they like, and when the ice cream man arrives, they take all the ice cream, drive off the ice cream man, and then resell it to the rest of the kids at twice the price. Oh wait– the school yard does have an army. It’s role is to go to other school yards and bully those kids and take their lunch money. They bring it back and have a parade commemorating their success, and then keep it all for themselves. Every day, they remind you that the bullies in the other school yards are all plotting to steal your lunch money, or worse. They make up songs praising themselves and force everyone to sing them.

If George Bush runs this school yard, then the bullies take your credit cards and run up a huge bill buying weapons with which to go invade other school yards. They buy these weapons from themselves and make huge profits. Most of the weapons cost a lot but they don’t work properly and eventually get tossed. Then they hold solemn parades on the basketball court. “If only,” they tell us, “the other bullies would stop trying to take our lunch money, we could have peace!”

In Glenn Beck’s and Sarah Palin’s ideal world, that’s the way it should be. If you’re not big enough or tough enough to stand up to the bullies, too bad for you.

They look solemnly at the faces in the school yard: you don’t want the government telling you what to do, do you?

Posted on

Jon Stewart’s Compromise

How anti-establishment, really, is Jon Stewart? He sounds independent. He seems to be authentic. He sounds like he thinks he is saying exactly what he thinks we think he thinks.

Then why the hell is there bleeping?

No, I don’t believe Jon Stewart is being naughty. Genuinely naughty people do not appear on Oprah, or host the Oscars. Genuinely naughty people don’t get tv shows, with the enormous costs underwritten by Time Warner, one of the most “established” media companies there is.

He is not exploding with righteous indignation, so overwhelmed that he must use the strongest word he can think of to express his outrage. No, he isn’t. If he was, there would be no bleep, because the bleep is not what most people think it is– it is not a network censor alertly snuffing an obscenity while monitoring a live broadcast. The bleep is done by an employee of Time Warner.

So you have to ask yourself, why doesn’t Time Warner simply tell Jon Stewart to stop using words that it has decided should not be allowed on television? Why not? Come on– think seriously about it. Forget the drama that plays every night on “The Daily Show” and consider the reality instead: why not? And why, if Jon Stewart has such high personal standards for honesty and integrity, does he allow them to do it? And since he allows them to do it and they keep doing it and he keeps doing it — isn’t what we have here actually a little “drama”? A shtick?

The idea Stewart wants to believe is that Stewart authentically wants to be himself but the deep, dark forces of repression prevent him.

I don’t believe he wants us to hear anything quite so much as the bleep itself, to imply that he is so naughty, so out-of-control free-spirited and independent, that he just says whatever he thinks, even if some weird authority– who is not stopping him from criticizing politicians– has to bleep it out. So, are we to believe that these authorities who are protecting our delicate moral fiber from being sullied by foul language, don’t care when he criticizes the government?

Or is the bleeping intended to give us an illusion? We are so cool because we listen to a guy who is so toxic to the government, that they have to bleep him? It doesn’t make any sense. The network (HBO, which is owned by Times Warner) pays Jon Stewart a lot of money to be on their tv show so they show him to as many people as possible and make lots of money selling advertiser dollars. If Stewart was really subversive or dangerous in any way, the government would express its displeasure to Times Warner’s Board of Directors (rich, anonymous bastards, who have dinners with politicians) and the Board of Directors would call in the producers and the producers would tell Jon Stewart not to go there.

If Stewart, like Bill Maher before him, decided to “take a stand”, don’t think for one second that Times Warner would hesitate to fire him. You think Jon Stewart’s too popular for them to do that? He’s not too popular to be bleeped. He’s not too popular to sit in that same seat night after night knowing full well he will get bleeped again and again.  He’s not too popular to consent to the bleep.

It makes me wonder what a real rebel would sound like. Probably something like Pete Seeger.

We know that. A real rebel says things like this: you can say what you want about the terrorists who crashed their planes into the twin towers but one thing you can’t call them is “cowardly”. A real rebel says that and the real rebel gets fired from a show that claimed to be “politically incorrect” .

It was a magical moment of transparency for television that nobody seemed to even notice. A television program billing itself as “politically incorrect” and ostensibly containing the free, independent expressions of opinion and ideas, was obviously a charade, a hoax, a fraud. The first time someone on the program expressed an opinion that was really at odds with the powers-that-be, the establishment shut him down. And barely anyone complained. They were too busy protesting Janet Jackson’s nipple.

So what’s the point of the show? Why did they bother to let it on the air if they were only going to shut it down if it ever actually was “politically incorrect”? Obviously, the point is to give the illusion to everyone that we have freedom of speech. We are free country. Nobody is telling you what to think.

So the fact that Jon Stewart is still on the air is somewhat distressing to me. It makes me suspect that Jon Stewart is on the air to convince the American public that they have been regularly exposed to the full range of intelligent opinion about serious matters social, economic, and political. All they have to do to exercise their freedom now is choose between, for example, John McCain, who wants to continue to use rendition to deal with suspected terrorists, continue to abridge the civil rights of all Americans, continue to use torture on the illegal prisoners, keep health care in the hands of private, for-profit insurers, and continue the war in Afghanistan, and Barack Obama, who wants to continue to use rendition to deal with suspected terrorists, continue to abridge the civil rights of all Americans, continue to use torture on the illegal prisoners, keep health care in the hands of private, for-profit insurers, and continue the war in Afghanistan.

I think most Americans don’t think the idea of consuming less, for example, is a serious opinion. Or the idea of self-restraint. Or putting part of your wages aside into a savings account. Or waiting until you have a legitimate down payment before buying a house. These are opinions even Jon Stewart will not express. It is one thing to attack them– the big banks, the Bush Administration– because everyone can still feel innocent. Attack the real cause of the economic meltdown– the utter credulousness of the American consumer along with his passionate greed– and you will be regarded, decisively, as politically incorrect.

In “Ladies and Gentleman, Mr. Leonard Cohen”, Cohen is shown about to do a recording in a studio. A producer reminds him, just before they start, not to use any “dirty” words. Cohen, who is normally the most sanguine of poets, is briefly visibly annoyed, and says: There are no dirty words, ever.

Years later, Cohen bleeped himself in performances of “The Future” substituting “careless” for the word “anal” in this line:

Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that’s left
And stuff it up the hole in your culture

Posted on

Decrypt-Kickers: RIM’s Blackberry

I personally find it hard to believe RIM’s assertions that the encryption on the data stored by their Blackberry servers can only be cracked by the user. The spiel given to the media today sounded painfully precise and specious.

India, China, Saudi Arabia, and several other nations have announced that they want RIM to give them access to software that will allow them to read users’ messages and data. For a week or so, it seemed like it was something RIM could do, but didn’t want to. Then they announced that, no, they couldn’t do it. Only the user could unencrypt his own data.

Hmmm. Hmmmmmm.

Silent through all this was the U.S. Government, which, thanks to the Patriot Act, can now lock you up without a warrant, send you to Jordan or Syria to be tortured, then imprison you in Guantanamo for five years, with no consequences whatsoever (thanks, Obama, for tricking us into believing you really thought this was unconstitutional or an affront to human rights in some way). Does RIM want me to believe that the U.S. government was content to be told that they would not be allowed to look at anyone’s data? Tough luck, Mr. Cheney– that is a user’s private information. You have no constitutional authority to look at it without permission.

I believe Obama probably doesn’t really like the Patriot Act. I’ll bet he also really thought he was going to change things. I believe that he doesn’t quite have the guts we thought he had when he was running for president. The American military and intelligence establishment, I figure, confronted him with their juiced-up scenarios of what could happen if one of these guys that they just know is a terrorist were able to blow up a subway station or the Statue of Liberty or something, and I’m sure the Republicans made sure he knew that they would be all over Fox News blaming him– and liberals in general– for the heart-rending deaths of innocent, lovable, happy, employed American citizens.

The essential dynamic here is this: if the intelligence agency really had enough accurate information to justly convict a person of a terrorism-related offense, they could easily do so legally any time they wanted. In fact, American juries fall all over themselves to convict anybody– especially colored or foreign people– of any offense imaginable, given the opportunity to do so, upon even the flimsiest evidence (and even, as recently reported, when the suspect has been exonerated by DNA evidence!).

The Patriot Act only exists so that the government can circumvent the normal, rational requirements of the constitution and lock somebody up just because they just know, in some intangible, irrational, unprovable, way, that the varmint was up to no good.

Posted on

Ridiculously, He Won

Palin owes her power to identity politics, pitched with moralistic topspin. She exploits the same populist impulse that fueled the career of William Jennings Bryan—an impulse described by one Bryan biographer as “the yearning for a society run by and for ordinary people who lead virtuous lives.” From Vanity Fair, September 2010

Is it even remotely possible that this dangerous lunatic could end up as President of the United States? The story is that she is preparing a run, setting up fundraising bodies, collecting direct-mail lists, distributing IOU’s to any number of Republican House and Senate candidates. That looks like groundwork. This looks like someone who believes her own (selected) press. I am so smart that even I don’t know how smart I am. Everybody who matters knows how smart I am.

There is something seriously demented about American politics. Americans hate their government. They believe that Washington is full of idiots and liars. These are the people they elected. Okay– so we were a tricked. These people were good when I voted for them, and then they got corrupted by Washington.

So a new guy comes along and says I won’t get corrupted. I’m going to clean out Washington. So they elect him. Two years later they hate him too. They hate him so much that when he spends $30 million smothering the state with ads declaring that his opponent is a child-molester and a heretic, they vote for him again. That’s all it takes, apparently, to fool the American voter. $30 million, supplied by the lobbyists representing the companies that persuaded their representative to do their bidding instead of the voters’.

So ask these voters, what’s ruining this country? Those damn unpatriotic foreigners! Feminists! People who don’t wear American flags in their lapels. Moslems! Mexicans! Homosexuals!

My friends, there isn’t a single Mexican in the country who can pay your Congressman enough money to do his will– but that’s who you’re upset about? You complain about the government wasting money on roads and schools, while they build billions of dollars of weapons for imaginary enemies? You have been driven into massive debts and bankruptcy and you’ve lost your job and your house because of the actions of greedy, dishonest American investment bankers, and you don’t like Obama because he’s smart and thinks he’s better than you?

The Vanity Fair piece on Palin is fascinating if only for a glimpse on that perennial American political paradox: how millionaire white American capitalists inevitably campaign for political office as “just folks” and try — and often succeed in painting their Democrat opponents as “elitists”.

Sarah Palin is America’s Evita in that regard– the poor little aw shucks hockey mom with down home values and divinely inspired common sense. How far that can take you in federal politics if you don’t even know who Margaret Thatcher is (presumably, she does now) is the question to be answered in 2012.

A friend of mine has mused that the Democrats should have lost the last election on purpose– the country was going to hell as a result of George Bush’s incompetence and there would be hell to pay and most people are too stupid to connect policies and consequences and delayed consequences, so whoever was in charge at the moment would get the blame.

My theory is that the Democrats did try to lose the election. They almost nominated a woman, realized she might win, thought better of it, and nominated a black man instead. Ridiculously, he won anyway.

There really, somewhere, should be a picture of John McCain sitting in an easy chair smiling. Smiling away…. Well, he should be smiling– instead, he seems bitter. Does he seriously believe that he could have come up with a plan that would have balanced the budget and reduced unemployment to 7% by now? Sure– by cutting taxes for the richest 1% of the population.

 

Posted on

Paying the Artist

“The chart linked to the left gives you a rather dramatic picture of the state of the art in terms of artist’s earnings from recorded music. As you can see, the picture is rather dismal. It appears that an artist’s best chance of making any kind of living at all from his own recorded songs is to sell the CD directly to the public, at gigs or online.

Music Industry – the Chart!

You can’t ignore an omission (forgivable– that’s not what the page is about): the chart doesn’t account for the role of publicity and promotion in CD sales. But it does make it clear that the trade-off, for the artist, is absurd. In exchange for access to the “star-making-machinery” of Sony or BMG, you sell a gazillion units, and then get to turn over pretty well all of your earnings to the record company. No– you don’t even “turn over” the profits– you will never even see them, for the music industry skims off almost everything– and I mean that literally– almost everything– before turning over a pittance to the artist. But then, you get to be on TV. You get promoted. You get fame. You get the girls. You get broke.

I have said this before and I’ll say it again: I believe the government should step in and set standards for contracts between musicians and record companies which guarantee that the artist receives a “reasonable” portion of royalties for every unit sold. It also needs to regulate how much the recording industry can deduct from an artists royalties for the cost of “promotion”. To me, those charges have always seemed like General Motors deducting money from the wages of assembly line workers to cover “advertising”. Why the hell should the assembly line workers pay for the cost of doing business? Especially when you find that a lot of these expenses are fees paid to shadow entities that are actually owned by the record company itself– like “image consultants”, market researchers, arrangers, and so on.

The most compelling paradox of the music industry remains this: would any artist be happy to know that his music is not being pirated? Yes, nobody’s stealing your music. You are so lucky.

So what’s a young recording artist/singer/songwriter to do? Would they really want to go back to the pre-internet lottery system: if you get chosen (by a record company) and you’re lucky and you get a contract, you get rich? And everyone else has absolutely no way to reach a potential audience.

I suspect that the current reality is what is going to work as well as anything can work in this world. New artists practice and play when they can, record their own CD’s cheaply with newly accessible technology, and sell them online and at their performances.

The music industry has never, probably, been so democratic: anybody can reach a large potential audience via the internet, post a video on Youtube, post their music at iTunes, and keep their fan base informed via Facebook.

But without the machinery of the music industry establishment, their prospects are dismal.

Posted on

President Mrs. Wilson

For the last 14 months of his second term as President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson was virtually incapacitated. His condition was kept secret from the American public and most of the government. His wife, Mrs. Wilson– Edith Bolling Wilson– effectively ruled for him, appointing and dismissing officials and advisors, and shielding him from the scrutiny of members of Congress and even the vice-president.

How does a person know if one is not competent? Woodrow Wilson, apparently, did not know he was incapacitated. Mrs. Wilson did not know that she was not qualified to run the United States of America.

The sky did not fall.

On the other hand…. The New York Times article (sidebar) by Morris makes the argument that history might have been radically altered had Mrs. Wilson properly notified the authorities that her husband was no longer capable of executing the office of President of the United States. Instead, in what is surely one of the most outrageous cases of hubris in history, she decided that she would just do it herself. These men! These cabinet secretaries and advisors and senators and staff… what do they know that I don’t know?

That’s what Morris’ article is about– how do you know what you don’t know? The answer, of course, is that you can’t know what you don’t know. In other words, if you are incompetent, you are not likely to have the faculties of good judgment that would allow you to accurately assess your own performance– by definition.

Think about this the next time you see Timothy Geithner or Lawrence Summers or Bernard Bernanke on TV. Think about this as Senators fall over themselves to eulogize Robert Byrd, Senator for over 50 years, who seems have been much beloved. Who loved him? The citizens of West Virginia who rhapsodize about all the goodies he brought them from the federal government, all the buildings and freeways and public squares now named for him.

Edith Bolling Wilson was careful, in her auto-biography, to insist that Wilson was mentally competent at the time, and that it was Wilson’s own doctor (who was dead when she published), among others, who insisted that humble little Edith Bolling undertake the task of relaying Wilson’s authentic wishes to the world. But Wilson’s doctor and chief steward, in their own accounts, were clear: Wilson had no capacity whatsoever to convey any wishes, authentic or not, to anyone, or to govern; his reason was impaired. Though he later improved somewhat, he was never the same person after the stroke as he was before it. Edith Bolling Wilson, however, issued numerous communiqués from her husband which were invariably written in her own tiny little script. No one else was permitted anywhere near him.

There was no way for any reasonable person to get past Mrs. Wilson to determine if it ever actually was Woodrow who was doing to governing.

It was a critical moment. The international treaty creating the League of Nations was up for ratification in the U.S. Senate. Senate Republicans, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, were against certain provisions of the treaty. But Wilson seemed to take a hard line: no compromise. He’d rather see the bill fail than make a few adjustments, or give the Republican’s a face-saving concession. Wilson– or Mrs. Wilson, concerned that anyone should perceive a vacuum of leadership, brooked no dissent, no argument.

The treaty went down in flames.

Vice-President Thomas Marshall would surely have agreed to some of the amendments proposed by the Republican opposition– as might have a healthy, rational, Wilson– and the treaty would have been ratified, and the might and influence of the United States might have saved the League of Nations from it’s cruel fate of impotence, ineffectiveness, and its ultimate collapse in the face of German aggression and French and British intransigence.

It is possible– perhaps even likely– that no stroke: no Hitler.

This is not the same as saying that Woodrow Wilson was indispensable. The tragedy of Edith Bolling Wilson’s deceit was precisely the result of her delusion that Wilson was indispensable, that no one else should be allowed to lead the country at a critical moment in world history –the same delusion held by Robert Byrd who should have retired years ago.

It should also be said that a responsible Cabinet minister or Secretary of State or General should have insisted that Mrs. Wilson step aside and allow accountable political leaders to determine if the President was capable of carrying out his duties.  If Mrs. Wilson had insisted on blocking access to her husband, they should have followed the law and removed him from office.

But you can see the difficulty.  Do you have the Secret Service arrest Mrs. Wilson?  What if Mr. Wilson was partly coherent?

Tonight, I watched a documentary on the Berlin Wall. There it was again– Eric Honecker, Chairman of the Council of State for East Germany during the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Honecker also did not know what he did not know. As Hungary opened it’s borders and Lech Walesa overturned the Polish government and Gorbachaev transformed Russia with perestroika, Honecker clung to what he knew: the totalitarian communist state.

As tens of thousands of East Germans marched in the streets, he ordered the police to crack down, like the Chinese in Tiananmen Square. His deputy, Egor Krenz, simply refused to transmit the order, and a lower echelon functionary inadvertently– I’m not making this up– announced that the borders were open, immediately. The guards, confused, confronted with streaming crowds of refugees, opened the gates, and the genie was out of the bottle.

The Unknown Unknowns

  • Marshal Petain did not know that he did not know how to fight a war in 1939.
  • He still had all the knowledge he needed, however, to fight another war in 1914.
  • The White Star Line did not imagine that a situation would occur in which the number of life-boats on board the Titanic would matter.
  • Richard Nixon did not know that his actual culpability for the burglary of the Watergate offices of the National Democratic Party Headquarters would not matter, but his discussion of the incident in the Oval Office would eventually lead to his impeachment.
  • Nicholas II did not know even the Russian peasants no longer regarded his position as the result of the direct intervention of God in the affairs of men.

Errol Morris in the New York Times

Eric Honecker

Posted on

Dien Bien Phu

The Japanese took Viet Nam away from France during World War II. At the end of the war, France– it’s manhood seriously in doubt, I suppose– tried to take it back. To do this– believe it or not– they accepted the assistance of some Japanese forces that had yet to be repatriated. You can’t make this stuff up.

Let’s go back a little further: history is incredibly rich in instructive detail about empires and irony.

The French chose sides in a long-standing civil war in Viet Nam, which had it’s roots in the 1850’s. Eventually, the French and their proxies simply elbowed aside the natives and took over. Why? History books simply tell you that the French “took control” as if there was something logical and reasonable about a European Nation walking into a foreign country on the other side of globe and taking control. It’s ours now. Your wealth will now flow into our pockets. You are now working for us.

With the defeat by Nazi Germany, France lost control of their colonies, to the Japanese. During the Japanese occupation, Ho Chi Minh agitated for a end to any foreign domination, and formed a guerrilla movement. When the Japanese were defeated, Ho proclaimed an independent Viet Nam. That seemed an insanely rational thing to do.

The French, deeply moved by the sad experience of being occupied by an evil foreign power, congratulated them and moved on.

Hoo hah! Did you believe that even for a second? No, France said, not so fast. They offered a puppet state to Ho; he declined.

It was the French and the Americans who defied rationality. The French decided to try to take Viet Nam back, as if they had some sacred title deed to the nation. After the negotiations failed, the French moved their armies in. A little cheesy, you might think. Having been soundly defeated by the Germans and restored to power by the Americans and British, they go marching into Viet Nam all bluster and courage and medals and parades. In fact, General Gracie, the British commander, allowed the Japanese to be re-armed in order to help the French retake Viet Nam from the Viet Minh!

It reminds me of those parties in New York where people you thought were political or literary enemies all gather together and toast themselves.  Kissinger and Truman Capote and Barbara Walters and Jackie Kennedy and Prince Andrew– all together, schmoozing.

Here is the fork of history– how many lives would have been saved if the French had simply admitted that they didn’t belong there in the first place, and if they had simply congratulated Viet Nam on their independence and moved on? Where would we be today? How many French, Americans, and Vietnamese, and Cambodians, and Laotians, would be alive and well and perhaps even prosperous today, if some asshole Frenchmen had not decided that it would do France’s honor some good if it could bully some Asians into submission and take their rubber?

Yes, what they wanted, I believe, was the rubber.

Let’s not be overly simplistic– the communist government in the North were no saints; they destroyed the economy and caused famine into the 1950’s. Russia and China interfered, using them for their own purposes. But the decisive matter is this: Viet Nam resisted both the French and the Americans because they wanted independence, and once the French and then the Americans were gone, they turned on the Chinese and the Russians and did just what they said they would do originally: take control of their own nation. Had the French departed in 1950 as they should have, they would have learned their lessons about management of the economy much sooner. The moderates would also not have been driven from all levels of government the way they were when civil war broke out.

The Americans, we are told in one documentary, confronted Chinese troops in Korea, which led them to believe that communist China must be “contained”. The glib voice doesn’t tell us how the Chinese came to be involved in Korea, of the arrogance of McArthur, and the diplomatic bungling, or the hubris of the allies. (China wanted to stay out, but the Americans blundered into the border areas in order to crush the North Koreans. China warned the U.S. that they had an interest in who occupied the towns near or on their borders– the U.S. ignored the warnings and were completely taken by surprise by the Chinese attack.)

So the French, in order to cut off a possible Viet Minh initiative into Laos, moved about 10,000 troops into a valley in North Western Viet Nam called Dien Bien Phu. Comments on Youtube in response to a documentary on Dien Bien Phu rhapsodize about the honor and courage of those 10,000 French.  These commentators want you, the reader, to be willing to do the same thing, because it’s so honorable and courageous, for your government, if they ask you do.

Are you mad?

What is “courage”, when placed in the service of idiocy and patriotism?  The French built an airstrip and fortifications and promptly found themselves surrounded by 50,000 Viet Minh. Even the possibility of retreat had been excised.

In early stages of the battle, the Viet Minh lost 10,000 casualties to 1,700 French. At that rate, you might think the French might eventually win.

But all the lessons the U.S. later took 13 years to learn were in full expression at Dien Bien Phu already in 1954.

  • technological superiority may not prevail
  • the determination of the enemy should not be underestimated
  • an enemy with a deep and abiding knowledge of the terrain and culture will drive you crazy
  • a war should never be about settling scores or proving your manhood or making points: what, really, was the French interest in Indochina?
  • the full support of the nation is required for a long, drawn-out conflict
  • God knows that you are sacrificing the lives of others. God knows that you asked others to risk what you yourself would never risk for anyone: your life.
  • God knows that you were blinded by self-interest when you assessed the relative risks and benefits of the military actions you commanded.

How many of these lessons apply to Iraq?

They almost certainly apply to Afghanistan which, after 10 years of occupation, shows no sign of pacification.

Above, the monument to Ho Chi Minh.

It’s always been the oil. It’s never been about anything other than the oil. And the fact that naive Americans still fervently believe that it is about anything other than oil tells you a lot about how astoundingly successful the massive public con of “patriotism” has been. My goodness- it’s there, right in your face. It’s not even camouflaged. It’s Dick Cheney in the White House actually admitting that it’s about the oil. And the open question about whether George Bush ever, deep in his heart, did not believe it.

Invariably, the terms offered during negotiations after fighting has broken out and the costs have become clear are worse than those offered initially.

And so it was in Viet Nam: in 1953, the terms offered to the French were far less attractive than those offered at the start of the civil war in 1950. If you were the parents or wife or lover of a young soldier who died in the civil conflict before 1953— would a monument ease your sense of lost?

There is a magnificent monument to Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. Isn’t it beautiful? You should read about Viet Nam in the 1940’s and 50’s and 60’s, and the wars, and the betrayals, and the genocides, and the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia to put a stop the Khmer Rouge, and then the Chinese putting a stop to the Vietnamese… you should look at the monument and contemplate it’s stolid quiet complacency, the almost zen-like beauty of it’s ghostly visage against the horizon, and you will see history. You will see the millions of shattered and destroyed lives, the starvations, the tortures, the explosions and fires, the bombs and bayonets, the rivers of blood– there they all are, asleep, anesthetized, dreaming of the lives they might have lived, were it not for the grand mission of history embalmed in the monument by the name of a general or king or president for life… in this case, a dried up old corpse named Ho Chi Minh.

Posted on

The Lofti Raissi Case

The Lofti Raissi Case

It’s been a few years since Lotfi Raissi was finally released but people who actually believe in the competence, wisdom, and good judgment of the authorities in Britain, Canada, and the U.S., should reread this account every day. I mean every day–first thing in the morning, like a prayer: this is your tax dollar at work. You are paying for the keystone cops. But this is not a harmless comedy– these people are doing real damage to all of us.

The important thing about the Lotfi Raissi case is what it reveals about the practices, policies, and — most importantly– competence of American and British police authorities. What it reveals, actually, is that the idiots are in control. What it also reveals is that law enforcement officers have been consistently willing to lie to obtain convictions.

It is the tragedy of our age that the public largely supports violent, inhumane measures against anyone the police think might have ever been thinking of becoming a terrorist. We’re not safer– we’re generating 10 new terrorists for every new outrage. If you were an Algerian, just how would you feel about the treatment of Lotfi Raissi?