Coincidence: today being the day of a massive leak of papers about the Afghanistan war.
Glenn Greenwald discusses how today’s leak compares to the Ellsberg leak.
Note also Wikileaks as the medium. I’ve written about them before, in the post that was read by 10,000x more people than any other post I’ve made.
Doco about Daniel Ellsberg, an ex-Marine Pentagon/Rand staffer whose eventual conclusion that Vietnam was unwinnable then turned to horror when he discovered that the U.S. had been the instigator from the beginning. Ellsberg then leaked the history of the origins of the Vietnam War, first to senators and congressmen who did nothing with the information, and then directly to the press. Cue uproar, and Nixon in full-on supervillain fury mode.
Ellsberg was disappointed that the leak didn’t have the impact he’d hoped. Predictably, the story became about him, not about the facts of the origins of Vietnam. The fury he must have felt watching the similarly contrived build-up to war in Iraq can only be guessed at; Ellsberg is depicted protesting against that war too.
I found this fascinating and educational. I only knew the broad strokes of this story, so it was great to have it unpacked and explored. And as much as Ellsberg was unhappy the story became about him, his personal story is indeed fascinating, such as his on-again off-again love affair with a woman tied to the peace movement while he was working in the Pentagon on the war.
I would have appreciated a bit more detail on the secret history Ellsberg was unveiling. The collusion of five U.S. Presidents in lying about Vietnam was sketched very briefly – a few more minutes on the subject seems worthwhile to me, as I expect many in the audience would be just as uncertain about the detail as I am.
Apart from that, a solid doco, well-made, about a subject that rewards the interest. It doesn’t strive to illuminate any higher truth, which is probably to its benefit. To be honest, it felt like reading a really well-written chunk of journalism from the New Yorker or the Atlantic Monthly, and I mostly mean that as a compliment but an also an observation about style. A lot of film docos use the medium to explore things no magazine article could touch, but I don’t think that was much the case here. This was a more traditional journalistic style, rigorous and eye-opening. Recommended.
Sometimes the gags take a while to come. Comedy is hard, man. But it’s nice to see my relatively weak gag in yesterday’s post get beautifully developed by C G in the comments. You should pop across to his Sleep Dep blog and the funny, weird rhythms of his Joe Korea story (starts here).
And while I’m talking about gags, this tweet about Kiwi Karl Urban being cast as Judge Dredd was met with silence. Obviously my genius will only be appreciated after my death. (Context for durty furriners.)
This was from Stephen Judd if I remember right: Bruce Lee’s audition for Green Hornet in ’64. Dude is charming and moves like lightning. For once YouTube comments not full of inane 14yo insults, instead full of comments about how damn hot Bruce is.
From Jenni, Young Me Now Me – I think this has been developed out of another “recreating old photos” site, because I recognized a couple of the pics I looked at, but in any case it’s lovely.
Lego tattoos. No, the other way around.
Mash brings down the Baudrillard in a response to the “how to fix Doctor Who” post linkied last week.
Hyper-realist painters. I find it odd that they almost all paint commercial products – post-Warhol I guess.
WWII reconsidered as a poorly-written TV series
My friend the Ruggerblogger is decamping to the Northern Hemisphere and expanding her rugby bloggery! Rugby enthusiasts would be well advised to read along with her.
In honour of SDCC, aka nerd prom, here’s Improv Everywhere doing Star Wars in a subway car.
And here’s a Brazilian site that’s probably saying something mean about Cosplayers photoshopping pics of themselves!
And finally, here’s an Instant Darth Vader Nooooooo button!
As I’m gonna be a dad in December, I figure I need to get myself schooled up in being a parent. So I’m going to be contemplating my major life influences and distilling the key parenting tips that I’ll need to be a great dad.
#2. Invite child to help you at work.
To the tune of “The Final Countdown”: it’s a mi-ning back-down… dada daa daa… dada da da da…
The government has abandoned plans to mine in highest-value conservation areas. Needless to say, this is a good thing, and stems directly from the massive public outcry.
As far as handling the backdown goes, the Nats are basically in denial mode. There are two lines you’ll hear in the official comments: “aren’t we great for being democratic?” and also “it was a worthwhile exercise because we’ve educated people about the natural resources available in this country”. (That’s if you even manage to hear them – National Radio this morning said they’d tried to get the PM to comment, but he’d declined saying only Gerry Brownlee would talk to this issue, and Brownlee’s office declined to speak as he’d already said enough on this matter. He didn’t even last out the 24-hour news cycle, poor dear.)
Both those official spin lines are weak to the point of comedy, and they suggest to me that the Nats, as previously speculated, are massively out of touch with our national identity. Moreover, the over-disciplined, almost paranoid and belated backdown suggests they still can’t quite believe it. I should clarify – I don’t think they’re amazed they got it wrong – I think they’re amazed that the electorate is so stupid that it can’t see they got it right!
But it was always about ideology, not facts. Brownlee never showed any convincing numbers about the simple value of this mining, let alone numbers that would somehow make despoiling prime conservation land all right. As much as the Nats would love for us to become Australia, we can’t give ourselves massive mineral reserves by wishful thinking. NZ’s valuable natural resources are its natural environments (both for tourism and for the “NZ brand” which has enormous value in the export market and on the global political stage) and its ecological security (which will see us ride out the water wars and food distribution breakdowns that will be the main story of the 21st century). I am unconvinced that there’s a single person in the National government who really understands how valuable these things are and how much better off we are than Oz.
Anyway. The Nats will continue with their plans to mine conservation land that isn’t high-value – the Labour government was happy to do the same, and I doubt the electorate is going to mobilise to stop them. The polls for the Nats haven’t shifted throughout this affair, so I doubt it’s even going to cost them much at the next election, unless opposition parties can effectively make this a campaign issue – and whether they can do that depends on what happens in the next few weeks. If Labour, in particular, doesn’t land some solid hits about this in the next fortnight, then it’ll be forgotten by voting time.
Next flim fevistal offering: Candyman. NZ filmmaker Costa Botes went to California to make this documentary about David Klein, the inventor of the Jelly Belly jellybean. This was a candy product that, not to overstate the case, revolutionised candy production in the U.S. (and, some speculate, helped humanise Ronald Reagan). Klein sold out of Jelly Belly in the 80s, for a pittance relative to the worth of his invention. More importantly, he has been written out of history by the Jelly Belly company, who simply do not acknowledge his existence.
So the film is a character study of an interesting character who had a great idea, followed it through with his heart and soul, then lost everything.
Klein is fascinating. He’s entrepreneurial and good at business operations, with an instinctive eye for marketing and branding – the Mad Men advertisers could learn something from him. But at the same time he’s compeletely not cut out for business-as-she-is-played. That fateful act of selling out was a ridiculous decision from any sensible business perspective. More importantly, Klein’s heart is not in profit at all – he marries his business sensibility to a deep love of helping people, regardless of the cost to himself. Unfailingly, stupidly, generous, he was never going to thrive in the world of real business.
So this is a fascinating doco looking at Klein, at who he is and what makes him tick, as well as the ins and outs of the Jelly Belly story. It will particularly resonate in the U.S. where this candy brand is a genuine cultural icon.
However, I can’t recommend this unreservedly. It felt, to me, like a 45 minute documentary packed into a 75 minute package. There wasn’t enough in it to sustain my enthusiasm.
So: very good, but not great.
(And, special mention to the music by Lower Hutt’s finest, Tom McLeod. Music in a doco is often hard to get right, but this was a delight – it’s no surprise Costa made special mention of it when introducing the film.)
Nothing to see here, just trying some stuff out.
This is the Asian Association of Social Psychologists.
The url is http://www.asiansocialpsych.org/
Some of these people are my friends, but that’s not important right now. What matters is, I need to try some stuff in relation to their site, and I need an external link to play with. So this is that external link.
Seriously, carry on. This is boring work stuff. Apologies for the interruption to your day.
First Flim Fevistal experience of the year was this animated piece by the fine minds behind Triplets of Belleville. It’s an adaptation of an unproduced (and apparently deeply personal) script by French comic filmmaker Jacques Tati. In the fading years of Vaudeville, a stage illusionist travels where the work takes him, and in the Scottish Highlands he acquires a young girl who is enchanted by him and believes his magic is real. The remainder of the film plays out in Edinburgh, as the illusionist tries to make ends meet, and the girl – a true naif – starts learning a thing or two about life.
We bought the tickets to this one based on Katie’s recommendation on my grumpy-about-film post. It was indeed a stunningly beautiful rendering of Edinburgh, enough to load me with a heavy shot of missing the place. That mood sat well with the film itself, which was gentle and wry and shot through with sadness, right to its final frame. Not a happy movie at all. It didn’t fully transport me, principally because the story never quite resolved its fable-aspects with its realistic-aspects, but it kept me engaged and fascinated throughout, and the ending was marvellously right. (And endings are so very, very difficult to do well.)
So, a successful outing. Good flim. Has chipped away some of the film-grumpiness of recent times.
Next NZFF: Candyman. (Not the guy wth the hook – the guy with the jellybeans.)
Just collected parents from airport where they were returning from that North America. They seemed wired and tired at the same time – I remember that feeling.
Here are some wired/tired linky for your wired/tired Friday.
Awesome life-size dinosaur puppets.
Password Card – remember more secure passwords.
A secret station on the London Underground, three floors above street level. And via Malc, here’s a tour of a tube station abandoned in 1938.
I haven’t listened to any of this yet, but: free album download – a tribute to Doctor Who. Presumably contains the only Doctor-Who-themed hip hop you will ever need.
Also, via Jamas: fixing the latest Doctor Who season. Worth a look if you’re a writer type and know what happened in season 5 of Who which hasn’t finished yet in NZ, spoiler warning.
Crazy U.S. right-wing pundit launches own university. This happened a while back but I was thinking about it again in light of the Krugman book. It is still mental.
Cute little AT-AT:
From Maire, a science-based discussion of gender differences in little childrens: Out with Pink and Blue
And finally: art exhibition inspired by Law & Order episode summaries. (Features Kate Beaton!)
Train reading over the last little while (when not listening to the Mayo/Kermode podcast) has been Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming America From The Right (2007, this edition paperback with new foreword from 2009).
The book is essentially a history of “how we (the U.S.) got into this mess”, combined with an emphatic reminder “yes, this is a mess”. It tracks through the last century-plus, where the Long Gilded Age of massive inequality was succeeded by the New Deal which introduced a welfare state and (with the help of some wartime measures) brought about what Krugman calls “the great compression”, where the extremes of inequality shrunk massively and the U.S. became a middle-class nation.
Then it tracks the rise of movement conservatism through its capture of the Republican party, and shows how the political shifts from Reagan onwards pushed inequality back towards Gilded Age levels. And it does all of this from an explicitly liberal, progressive viewpoint (Krugman discusses the use of both terms) that gives a prescription for pulling back from inequality and, crucially, completing the New Deal by developing health care for all.
It’s a great and readable book, putting a framework around a lot of things I only knew in bits and pieces. It’s a refreshingly candid argument, too, with an appeal to the fundamental morality of political liberalism and a reminder that it is liberals who are always on the side of democracy:
When liberals and conservatives clash over voter rights in America today, liberals are always trying to enfranchise citizens, while conservatives are always trying to block some citizens from voting. When they clash over government prerogatives, liberals are always the defenders of due process, while conservatives insist that those in power have the right to do as they please. After 9/11 the Bush administration tried to foster a deeply un-American political climate in which any criticism of the president was considered unpatriotic – and with few exceptions, American conversatives cheered. (p267)
Implicit in Krugman’s argument, but mostly unexplored in favour of other lines of discussion, is the power of social identity in shaping politics. Krugman gives convincing evidence that America is in fact a liberal country – that when you poll Americans on policy initiatives they would support, liberal policies are highly favoured. However, many of these same people identify as Conservatives. This is partly thanks to movement conservative’s skill at putting values issues to the forefront, a trick learned from Nixon; partly it’s a legacy of endemic racism in the US. In fact, if there’s anything in Krugman’s book that shocked me, it was his matter-of-fact conclusion that racism in the U.S. – specifically, the race relations problems that are the legacy of the slave trade – is the point of differentiation that explains why the US is so different to its neighbours and contemporaries. Since Reagan’s “welfare queens” comment, the hidden element of economic discussions in the US is that supporting poor people means supporting black people, and that is not a vote-winner.
Krugman gives a good account of the rise of movement conservatism. This was a small set of intellectuals in favour of minimal government and unregulated economic activity, and who saw the welfare state as anathema. They developed over time into a complex system of media channels, think tanks, and political operations that co-operate and, crucially, protect their own by circling them around through the system while ejecting those who stand against them (e.g. by shifting towards a more Eisenhower-Republican stance). However, he doesn’t have much to say about why people become movement conservatives – about the appeal of the ideology, in its purist form as well as its popularized (tea party) form. (The tea party movement hadn’t happened at the time Krugman wrote, of course, but the elements of it could be seen in the Joe-the-Plumber/Sarah Palin crowds.) To be fair, that’s well out of Krugman’s area, but I would have appreciated some comment from him on this. Movement conservatism, it seems clear from Krugman’s account, is not fundamentally concerned with social dividers like race and homosexuality. Movement conversatism is about the relationship between wealth and government, which are not identity issues in the normal sense; and yet the ideology seems to resonate as powerfully as any identity politics might.
This post hasn’t been a very good review or description of the book, more some random musings that it has prompted in me, but there you go. As usual, reading about the U.S. political scene is an exercise in wonder and frustration for me as a non-U.S.ian, but the influence of the U.S.A., and of movement conservatism, is clearly felt over here in countless ways so this kind of understanding is very handy. Book now available for borrowing, Wgtn/Hutt folks!