“History will be kind to me”, Winston Churchill said, “for I intent to write it.” Sir Winston was an author and had not yet discovered the advantages of being an auteur. Books are, compared to movies, relatively ineffective at establishing conventional wisdom. Who did Fletcher Christian look like on the HMS Bounty? Why Marlon Brando of course, if not a young Mel Gibson. That’s how they’ll always be remembered. The Christian Science Monitor reported that “television and movies” are more important than books for teaching young minds about history. Now the Washington Post cries foul. In an editorial it protests that “Fair Game”, a movie which depicts the adventures of Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame, bears to no resemblance to the events reported in its pages.
“Fair Game,” based on books by Mr. Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions – not to mention outright inventions. … The movie portrays Ms. Plame as having cultivated a group of Iraqi scientists … Ms. Plame did not work directly on the program, and it was not shut down because of her identification … the movie portrays Mr. Wilson as a whistle-blower …
Advertisementan investigation by the Senate intelligence committee found that Mr. Wilson’s reporting did not affect the intelligence community’s view on the matter, and an official British investigation found that President George W. Bush’s statement in a State of the Union address that Britain believed that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger was well-founded …
“Fair Game” also resells the couple’s story that Ms. Plame’s exposure was the result of a White House conspiracy. A lengthy and wasteful investigation by a special prosecutor found no such conspiracy – but it did confirm that the prime source of a newspaper column identifying Ms. Plame was a State Department official, not a White House political operative.
Why would they expect a movie to accurately depict the truth? The easiest narrative to write is one in which the good guys are handsome and the bad guys are ugly. Moreover, they should play recognizable types. Once these types have been constructed, and many have been constructed by the Washington Post itself, the audience expects to find them in the story. Modern mass culture has already created a number of such archetypes. The bigoted preacher, the crusading reporter, the greedy Republican, the wise Chinese kung-fu master who only speaks in riddles and of course, the Whistleblower. Since reality doesn’t always oblige by conforming to the stereotype, the filmmaker is often faced with a dilemma? Do you make a move that the audience can believe or a movie that is true?
The answer is that it is hard. Culture has already created a number of narrative “primitives” — building blocks from which a film-maker must construct his story. Unless he is willing to take the trouble to create custom characters like a sincere preacher, a lying reporter or glory-seeking whistleblower, he would be better served to order out for a standard part. No filing down or adjustment is thereafter necessary.
One way out of this bind is to make films which make no claim to depict real events. “The characters and events depicted in this photoplay are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” Then you can use stereotypes to your hearts content. Otherwise some persons in the audience may actually think the events described in the script are true. And sometimes they think it is true anyway. In 1938 Orson Welles’ radio dramatization of the War of the Worlds caused a panic. The effectiveness was due in part to Welles’ adoption of the signal characteristics of a radio bulletin.
Thousands of people, believing they were under attack by Martians, flooded newspaper offices and radio and police stations with calls, asking how to flee their city or how they should protect themselves from “gas raids.” Scores of adults reportedly required medical treatment for shock and hysteria.
The hoax worked, historians say, because the broadcast authentically simulated how radio worked in an emergency.
“Audiences heard their regularly scheduled broadcast interrupted by breaking news,” said Michele Hilmes, a communications professor at University of Wisconsin in Madison and author of Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922-1952.
Despite the fact that “Fair Game” is coming out in movie houses, in a format traditionally reserved to serve up entertainment, fantasy and fiction, a lot of people, as the Christian Science Monitor notes, will still use it as a reference for history. They don’t perform a signals analysis. They just believe things because Sean Penn says so. Fortunately, serious intellectuals would never fall for such a thing as the War of Worlds hoax or a fictional depiction of Valerie Plame. They know better. They get their facts straight from the source, like Wikileaks. They know it is true because they recognize the format: diplomatic cables and military message heades. Why of course it’s true.
“History will be kind to me for I intent to write it” are wise words to remember from Sir Winston. But he also said this, “in wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” Or as I like to put it: in wartime lies are so effective, they must always be surrounded by a filler of truth. Maybe we should ask Scooter Libby what he thinks.
Can we have a Da Vinci Code? Hollywood has yet to figure out that you can have entertainment + historical accuracy. I suspect that too much of HW has fallen into liberal hands. Shoot, I’m even weary of documentaries. It’s just not Hollywood. TV and film reaches the most audiences, and can combine more of the senses than just a book. I wonder if that has an impact to it. I get irritated with some of the social engineering writers put in dramas and games.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the long term effects from movies and other forms of celluloid media. Simply put, these items simply won’t survive in the long term. You won’t ever see some archeologist pulling a usuable film out of the desert sands two thousand years from now. The shelf life is too short. Even a minor dark age will result in all of this stuff melting away. Too, material from decadent times rarely survives when the forces of conservatism reassert themselves.
Marlon Brando will be lucky to be remembered in a thousand years. If he is, it will likely be due to a toss away line in some history text written during our time. Think of the reference to Callipedes in Tacitus. That’s Marlon Brando’s fate.
A large part is played by audience, which is not everybody.
Mostly audiences tend to soap opera females, which is the reliably attracted audience. There’s no point in writing for an audience that won’t come.
History is written by soap opera writers, because that’s the genre that pays.
The MSM news, as it presents itself to me anyway, here.
Oliver Stone flicks are the classic example of Hollywood propaganda presented as history. I consider Oliver Stone to be relatively harmless because his propaganda is so transparent. Far more dangerous is a movie like “Avatar” by James Cameron. “Avatar” is stridently anti-American while being extremely entertaining. That’s a dangerous combination.
If conservatives are going to roll back moonbat corruption of our culture, we need to expel leftists from the entertainment industry along with the MSM and academia.
The truth of the story is less important than the truth of the overall narrative.
There are many stories to be told, and some we will never know. In our office in the Pentagon a map of the world as it was in 1939 covered all of one wall. Push-pins had been stuck in various spots and the holes were still evident. Around the locations of major battles and anchorage in the Pacific so many pins had once been stuck that the spots were all but obliterated. It was not hard to imagine someone in that room tracking ships or aircraft units during the war.
But what were those holes down there at spots in, say, the interior of South America? What was going on there?
I often thought the map would be a good opening for a WWII novel. But even if the story so generated were entirely fictional, based entirely on unfounded speculation about some holes in the wall, it would do no harm if it conveyed the truth of the real overall narrative. The Axis powers were mostly bad and the Allies mostly good and they fought for two different sets of beliefs, even if what they both did simply amounted to protecting and furthering those beliefs.
In contrast to “Fair Game” consider the movie “The Rocketeer.” It’s wholly fictional, but if someone came away thinking it a docudrama it would do no one any harm. The Nazis really were evil, really did work on advanced rocket technology, really did have spies in the USA (and it has even been claimed that a certain movie star was a Nazi sympathizer) and did fly airships to the USA before the war. Unlike “Fair Game” the fiction of “The Rocketeer” fits the overall truth.
And besides, I bought a set of blueprints for the rocket pack and expect to have one operational shortly.
RWE,
I enjoyed “The Rocketeer”. Unfortunately the rocketeer was doing way too much flying around with only two quarts of fuel. I hope you’re not serious about trying on a rocket pack (a good way to live a short life).
A fun movie in terms of alternate WW-II history is “Hellboy”. The history in “Hellboy” is laughable nonsense. They seemed to go out of their way to present false history such as showing a woman dressed up as an SS officer or a black guy fighting as a US Marine before Truman integrated the American military.
“Can we have a Da Vinci Code? Hollywood has yet to figure out that you can have entertainment + historical accuracy.”
Thanks for the laugh. More better then “the economy is so bad…..” jokes. Hollywood sells dreams. It sells those dreams to buyers drowning in reality. Why would some one up to their armpits in reality and sinking fast PAY for some more? Think about it.
I don’t worry what history will say in 1000 years except if it reflects that the US went to hell in 2011, which I fear. And as for what history will say a thousand years from now, that is, in fact, in part a product of what dishonest films say today and what their audiences believe is real.
The Wilson/Plames are a sorry lot. As a retired Foreign Service Officer I can honestly say I’ve served with several ambassadors who were insecure, dishonest, and impossible to work with. A colleague who worked with Wilson said that was his experience.
So let Hollywood write and produce what they will, but I wish the films had to carry a disclaimer similar to the ones carried by cigarette packs: “this stuff will kill ya” or something like that. There are lots of impressionable minds out there who believe everything they see on the silver screen. F
Silly me. I thought the deconstructionists and relativists got rid of that old fashioned concept of truth. Strange to see any of them worrying about it now.
And there you have it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-66AcTo9TU
Robert Novak died without ever giving a coherent justification for his naming Valerie Plame as a CIA official. After reading his autobiography, I think that Novak assumed mistakenly that she wrote the CIA report about her husband Joseph Wilson’s trip to Niger. Based on that mistaken assumption, Novak thought Plame should share the scrutiny and blame for any misunderstandings that developed because of Wilson’s report.
I read Plame’s autobiography too, and she wrote that she played no role at all in the CIA’s process of debriefing Wilson and writing the subsequent reports. Two CIA officers came to the Wilson-Plame home one evening soon after Wilson returned from Niger. Plame left the room and the two CIA officers debriefed Wilson.
The subsequent events were a comedy of errors. With regard to the enormouus amount of money and effort that were wasted and to the personal damage to Scooter Libby, the one person who is most to blame is Robert Novak.
I explain this thesis further in this Facebook article.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1554023238#!/note.php?note_id=136626318944&id=1554023238
Leftists preaching through a celluloid pulpit to the plastic choir.
Truth is a trifling thing to propagandists. Penn is an anti-American, pro-anarchist, tear down the system, flaming crank.
His raging tantrums play to the frothing left. Pablum for immature minds flexing scrawny. pipe cleaner sized political muscles. The left has lost their mojo. All they have is a bunch of lies and a bucket of spit for their venom.
Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, Sean Penn, James Cameron can be as anti-American as seditious and despicable as they want. The First Amendment guarantees them that right. And the childlike fools who lap up their venom, can let it course through their toxic veins. The rest of us simply await 2012 with patience and resolve.
Maybe we should ask Scooter Libby what he thinks
exactamundo.
ms @ 11: Robert Novak died without ever giving a coherent justification for his naming Valerie Plame as a CIA official.
I would think it was because (allegedly?) she volunteered her husband for the gig in the first place, putting the sleazebag in motion. Not to mention that being his wife and in the CIA (whether we knew it or not) she might have advised him to tell the truth or otherwise keep his trap shut. IOW she should have done something to protect herself from her husband, if there was actual damage to be done from the affair … which is the most dubious point in the whole story. Only Scooter Libby suffered. Follows the old saw about corporate projects – after they fail, promote those responsible and blame those who had nothing to do with it.
Wow, an editorial in the Post condemming that movie? “Man Bites Dog” indeed!
It’s ironic, because a Post movie critic or Style section cow/bimbo wrote a review/opinion piece in favor of the movie where she carried the “fake but accurate” paradigm excuse to absurd lengths.
It’s also noteworthy that the Post has admitted that the Bush WH did not out Plame. It woul have been nice if they had also typed in “Richard Armitage,” and nicer still if they had admiited this 3 years ago, but hey, why look a liberal MSM gift horse in the mouth?
Wikileaks latest;
I just followed a link to “Western Rifle Shooters Association” blog,
Seems that wikileaks is giving 404 – not found errors in US, Switzerland and India.
Is it being blocked, or is its bandwidth all used up? WRSA suspects the former.
15 Keith
Could be both. It’s been booted off servers in the US and some other countries, and PayPal just announced it has cut off WikiLeak’s donations account: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/12/04/paypal-cuts-wikileaks-money-flow/
MY OLD PLAME
Spike Jones and his City Slickers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D2A32KUTq0
My old Plame
I can’t even think of her name
But it’s funny how and then
That my thoughts go running back again
To my old Plame
I’ve met so many who had fascinating ways
A fascinating gaze in their eyes
Fascinating ways to their lies
And when she wrote a book
We counted all the lies it took
From my old Plame
My old Plame
She let Scooter take all the blame
She had all the Dems to thank
As she ran not walked into her bank
Did my old Plame
And now a movie tells her story sad and true
A story only cameras can tell
How one Bob Nowak made her life hell
But now she’s in the chips
And now the past is just some blips
For my old Plame
Interestingly enough, or not interestingly enough, Valerie Plame was a high school classmate of my son, where she was very shy and very much a wallflower.
Making a film from a historic event is often problematic.
“The Great Escape” actually occurred. And there were some American prisoners in that camp.
But a few weeks before the break-out, the Germans transferred all the Americans to a different camp. No particular reason, they just did it.
Imagine what that would do in the film – several major characters abruptly taken out of the story with no cause (or significant effect to them). It would confuse the audience and disrupt the narrative.
So the film had the Americans stay in the camp and participate in the escape. It was fake – but harmless to the truth of the drama. Several of the actual participants were consultants to the filming, and they approve.
On the other hand, film (or novels, or plays) can be a clever way to rewrite history. Shakespeare did it to Richard III, Welles did it to William Randolph Hearst.
“Fair Game” seems like yet another move in that direction.
Canada imports yellowcake uranium from Iraq for use as fuel in our heavy water ‘CANDU’ reactors. You can see the imports listed in our (online) trade stats. Of course the yellowcake is not Iraqi but originated in Niger. But Wilson said no uranium had been shipped from Niger to Iraq. Discuss…
Eggplant:
Actually I DO have a set of blueprints for the “Cirrus X-3” rocketpack. A guy over in Orlando (or at a place very near it) got the originals from the movie, made high quality copies, and sold them on ebay.
And I have a flying rocketpack, of sorts. The type of airplane I spent a delightful 1.2 hours flying this morning was the first rocket powered aircraft flown in the US. They had a problem then that the solid rocket motors they made would explode if they waited more than 24 hours after they cast them. So they had to make a batch at Caltech early in the morning and run them out to March Field for the flight tests. And they still had one blow up on them in flight.
On the History and Discovery Channels I see all kinds of errors. Sometimes they repeat the same old tired wrong information. Sometimes they make things up out of whole cloth. And I am talking about real history, not UFO reports.
On the other hand, a documentary on one of those channels revealed one of the most famous examples of invented history. Adm. Yamamoto never actually said the “Awaken a sleeping giant…” line. It was a fabrication for the movie Tora Tora Tora. The film’s writers defended what they did by saying “Well, Yamamoto should have said that.”
As for the Plame case, we know now what really happened. Fitzgerald was on the list of Federal Prosecutors to be fired; instead of 7 it was to be 8. He had to gin up something on a high level member of the Bush Admin to keep his job; they would not dare fire him then. So even though he knew from Novak damn well that Scooter Libby did not sill the beans about Plame and even then had to eventually conclude there was no case to investigate he went ahead anyway. The parallels with the Duke Lacross Team rape case are too close.
Shakespeare wrote many history plays, as did everybody else really going back to the old Greeks. I bet that, in every case, when the true course of history conflicted with what Shakespeare or Sophocles wanted to do dramatically that history lost. They were dramatizing history for their own reasons, harboring a correct assumption that the audience was sophisticated enough, even in the case of Shakespeare’s groundlings, to understand the terms of the drama.
What has changed, I suppose, is that we’ve got celluloid or pixelated entertainment packaged as movies. Also, most people’s window on the world flows through the same window in the form of television, video, and Internet. Are people sophisticated enough these days to understand what Shakespeare’s groundlings did when watching Henry VIII? I assume the answer is yes, of course they are.
That’s not an assumption Hollywood makes, however. The great power and the use/misuse of media are among the greatest themes entertained by the Hollywood navel gazers. And they assume the multitude are hopeless at best.
It is an amazing con that Oliver Stone’s “histories” get passed out to teachers on DVD complete with teaching guides. What’s only more remarkable is that the kiddos in the seats are generally wise to the con, even if the teacher isn’t. Sure, they’ll parrot back what they think the teaching guide wants them to say (they can easily imagine it). But who brings up such claptrap as Oliver Stone when the question is even given to such camp, consipiracy, and theater as who shot JFK? Or what was Tricky Dick really like? The film in question, “Fair Game”, even got booed at Cannes, where this genre of revisionist history theater is wearing thin.
As it should. Shakespeare & Co. should never be thought less of because they falsified history. History was always clearly presented by them as a mere vehicle for their craft. That craft being the human heart above all else. Shakespeare & Co. do not enlist the authority of history to make their point, they enlist the pageantry of it. They are unlike Stone & Co., whose craft is partisan politics, which they hope to slip in on the cheap under the name of history’s authority.
Such is a miscreant’s game, a shyster’s game. Greats in the field have no need, or desire, to go there.
“Master and Commander” is a good example of a movie that hews pretty closely to, well, a semblence of historical reality. The action and outfits are pretty good for Hollywood. Only problem is the ship that Crowe and company are chasing should have been an American Vessel…change the year, change the book, it is all so easy in Hollywood. Watch the movie again and every time you see the “Phantom”…think “USS Essex” and see how you view the movie if you’re American. But they couldn’t sell a sequel, and O’Brian had provided 19 other opportunities. Cartoon adaptations sell more tickets.
Speaking of Scooter Libbey, Obama has just released a list of folks receiving a presidential pardon for the holidays. It looks like a scatterplot of 130 or so random cases. It seems odd. If you were president, would you risk pardons on draws from a hat? They can come back to bite you, as Dukakis kind of proved with Willy Horton. Or would you establish a stringent criteria for them? Wisdom recommends the latter course.
But Obama’s large list of pardons here looks like a scatterplot. It makes me wonder if there’s not a firecracker in there, hidden like a needle in a haystack. Just a suspicion.
The Fabian Socialist and Playwright George Bernard Shaw ended the “Devil’s Disciple” with the following exchange between General Burgoyne and one of his officers (about some bureaucratic foul-up that caused a major British defeat during the American Revolution).
Swindon: What will History say?
Burgoyne: History, my dear sir, will tell lies as usual.
The same could be said of Fabian Socialists. But at least Bernard Shaw kept the big facts straight in his story — such as who won the war.
Yes, dPercy! I for one so much enjoyed “Master and Commander”. FWIW, interest does exist for a sequel. 20th Century Fox has been shopping the idea. Russell Crowe has expressed interest. I’m with you for hoping it does come together!
Scratch that on Obama’s pardons. I read a bum commentary. There aren’t 130 scatterplot pardons – those where ones he rejected. There are nine.
Responding to John Lang (#19) Canada imports yellowcake uranium from Iraq for use as fuel in our heavy water ‘CANDU’ reactors. You can see the imports listed in our (online) trade stats. Of course the yellowcake is not Iraqi but originated in Niger. But Wilson said no uranium had been shipped from Niger to Iraq. Discuss…
—-
Iraq’s nuclear program started a long time ago. One of Iraq’s nuclear facilities was bombed by the Israeli Air Force in 1981, which was 29 years ago.
President Bush claimed in a State of the Union speech in 2003, which was only seven years ago, that Iraq recently had bought uranium in Niger.
The Bush Administration itself admitted a long time ago that the Niger claim was false and never should have been included in the speech. Discuss THAT.
Okay, finally, a topic I know something about. (kinda sorta)
Rich Rostrum makes an important point. Movies and TV have to make sense first and foremost as stories, with coherent plots and characters with sufficient motivations and character arcs. They have to have the right dramatic beats in the right places, because audiences respond subconsciously to that and become dissatisified when the beats are either missing or mistimed. (That said, it’s amazing how many movies don’t even do these basic things.)
History, like life, is messy. Classical storytelling can’t afford to be. Even the most well-done biographical documentary leaves out about, what, 99% of its subject matter? We don’t need all the gory details about stubbed toes and gaseous emissions, thanks. And HBO’s “John Adams” miniseries contained a sex scene between John and Abigail that, frankly, I think the world would have been just fine without. (Almost as bad as imagining your father having sex is imagining a Founding Father having sex.)
History geeks love all the little Easter eggs in historical films and shows but, let’s face it, the period tie pin is not affecting the narrative one way or another.
*******************
Wretchard’s point that several thousand years of sitting around campfires listening to hunting & war stories has hard-wired in us certain expectations about things like stock characters, is worth considering. We humans WANT to hear about heroes vanquishing villains. We WANT virtue to be rewarded and evil to be punished. We want to be frightened vicariously and laugh between the scary bits.
These primal narratives are how culture gets transmitted. The same stories get repeated over and over and over, with only the details changed. Consider how many underdog movies are also sports movies (and vice versa). And yet most of us never get tired of watching “Miracle” and “Rocky” and “Seabiscuit” and “Rudy” even though they are all the same primal narrative.
A movie like “High Noon” transmits a vital cultural message, in a way that a lecture or monograph about the implacability of evil and the necessity of standing up to it, could never accomplish. That single shot of Kane, standing there alone on the main street of Hadleyville, as the camera crane recedes like the the sea of faith in “Dover Beach,” is more powerful than the best dissertation on the subject.
That conservatives largely abandoned storytelling, and therefore the transmission of culture, to the progressives some 40- or 50-odd years ago is a very shameful chapter in post-WWII America. Because what the progressives have been doing ever since has been to try to turn all our primal American narratives on their heads. “All your heroes were racist warmongers,” etc ad nauseum. It’s one thing for Pappy Boyington to say, “Show me a hero and I’ll prove he’s a bum,” because Pappy was himself a hero, and we pick up on the self-negating aspects of his statement; i.e. regardless of what he says about heroes we know we are looking at one. When a guy like Michael Moore tells us the same thing, however … WTF and who the he** is he to speak on this subject at all?
We have Uphams making our war movies, serial philanderers making the love stories, and the atheists and nihilists feeding us narratives about faith and civilization. Riiiiiiight.
No wonder the audience is tuning them out in ever-increasing numbers.
Cowboy: That would be great, but I hold out little hope. A good friend of mine made all the hammocks for the movie. The ship is already worth no more than a breakwater. Shame. Come to think of it, couldn’t someone make a thriller about the Jacobins and show how evil they really were? I wish they would.
Bogie: Of course, but when you give the crowd good v. evil they show up in droves. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, etc… Hollywood is always amazed at what sells. I wonder why…but not much.
I’ll say only this.
http://www.canada.com/windsorstar/story.html?id=afc753d5-bb92-4c7f-87c1-103a4e1b1611
Maybe this too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_7th_Armoured_Division
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rat_Patrol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-571_(film)
I keep wondering how Shakespeare would treat the material of the Valerie Plame case. I think he would play it in one of two ways, either focusing on Fitzgerald or Libbey. The case involves a crime, and, to everyone’s agreement the ultimate victim who played the highest price, Scooter Libbey, wasn’t a party to it in any way. Shakespeare would have found riches in Fitzgerald, a la Macbeth, a man tragically warped by the vortex of evil he started swirlling. Or he’d have found riches with Libbey, a King Lear figure raging in vain against the Sturm and Drang.
What can be made of Plame and Wilson themselves? They’re much like Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, actually, figures famous mostly for their triviality and their venality.
Of course those are the ones Hollywood wants you to know the best!
About Wikileaks: Apparently they we hosted n the Amazon cloud. There are reports that Amazon booted them. This is most likely the reason for the 404.
I think the ” Plame Chronicles” or whatever the stupid agitprop movie is called will have a short shelf life. If it’s not about sex, slapstick or morons calling everybody “Dude”, it won’t be of much interest to the bored youth of America. How did all those anti- Iraq war movies do?
@ Mike Sylwester
“President Bush claimed in a State of the Union speech in 2003, which was only seven years ago, that Iraq recently had bought uranium in Niger.”
Umm, no.
Bush actually claimed in his State of the Union speech in 2003:
“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. ”
No mention of Niger. No mention that Iraq had actually done this. Onus is on his assertions about British assertions.
Discuss why google is our friend and Hollywood relies on people who don’t know how to use google to carry their message forward.
Eggplant…
WRT USMC…
1943 is the magic year…
USMC started inducting both gals and southern boys.
Obviously, the gals never led any assaults.
AFAIK African-Americans were never placed in combat, but they were given plenty of duties.
Like the European Theatre, the black soldier was confined to drudge work: transport and ‘engineering.’ Only, the occasional, specialty outfit, entered combat.
As for integration…
My father was on the Red Ball…
It was integrated — de facto. His own trucking company was integrated years before Truman!
And now you know!
( That’s what improvisation will do! )
WRT Master & Commander…
The Constitution was so hyper dominant that the Admiralty completely reversed course: RN Frigates were prohibited from engaging the Yankees!
The RN re-rated the Constitution and her sisters as being ’64′s’ — a designation for razee ships of the line or better.
While nominally termed a ’44′ the USN cheated!
Even more guns were rolled about her weather deck!
RN Captain Dacres spilled the beans to the Admiralty after his encounter with the USN Constitution.
“They found that the enemy was the heavy frigate USS Constitution under Captain Isaac Hull armed with thirty 24-pounders on the main deck, twenty-four 32-pounders and two bored out 18-pounders on the upper deck. Out of 476 men, nine were killed and thirteen wounded. Captain Dacres was surprised and shocked to find a large proportion of British seamen amongst her crew, a number of whom had joined in the boarding party.
The Guerriere was too badly damaged to take in, so as soon as the wounded had been taken out, she was set on fire by her captors, and the Constitution returned to Boston, Massachusetts. Dacres wrote a report of the action to the commander of the North American Station, Vice-Admiral Herbert Sawyer. A court-martial was held on board HMS Africa at Halifax on 2 October. It found that Captain Dacres was justified in surrendering his ship to save the lives of his remaining crew. The court also found that the masts going overboard was due more to their defective nature than the fire of the enemy. Captain Dacres was later given command of the 38-gun fifth rate HMS Tiber.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Guerriere_(1806)
Mahan’s action account is even more lopsided.
That all of the above occurred AFTER Trafalgar…
The USN frigates are the FIRST instance of Pocket Battleships.
The USN Grand Strategy of 1812 ends up being the German U-boat Campaigns of WWI and WWII.
Just ask Karl Doenitz.
For those not so retro as to groove 18th Century naval affairs…
The Main Deck refers to the classic guns you’ve seen in the movies like Master & Commander.
Upper Deck refers to guns topside… You’ve NEVER seen them depicted in Hollywood film.
These are guns able to roll from port to starboard… as the captain sees fit. Hence, they count DOUBLE WEIGHT in slow combat.
The admiralty was agag…
32 pounders are normally Man-of-War guns! The stinking USN is staging sneak firepower!
Doing the math…
An American 44 would hit like a Ship-of-the-Line 74!
Egads, man.
Hence, the RN simply shunned the American frigates and confronted them with multiple 74′s. The RN had so many ships after Trafalgar that this was VERY do-able.
The USN eventually became super-saturated with RN Ships-of-the-Line.
Years after the war the USN showed off their latest creation: the USN Ohio.
The RN was so impressed… they went to IRONCLADS.
The USN Ohio, then, is the apex of wood and sail.
( The USN Ohio was to be the standard USN ship-of-the-line from 1820 onward… IIRC…she ended up being a one and only… Simply no enemies… no Congressional support for the USN. The Ohio was America’s only attempt at building a Ship-of-the-Line ’74′ IIRC . RN accounts indicate it would take a Man-of-War to face USN Ohio. USN, cheating… again!)
http://books.google.com/books?id=JEkV5RyAIKMC&pg=PA101&lpg=PA101&dq=USN+Ohio+Sailing+ship&source=bl&ots=HvgjGs7lze&sig=m36SZkhar_HVGDrYQIn2eJLsCas&hl=en&ei=mi77TMCOJ5KWsgPEzqT3DQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CDgQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q&f=false
bw/28; that is a stand-alone essay better than in any slick on a newsstand –
***
Anyhoo, Fox reporter James Rosen has had a book out for a year or two on –well long-short, Watergate, and he makes the point with evidence that the ‘third-rate burglary’ was the subject of Katherine Graham and Ted Kennedy meetings on how to amp the fresh item, the then-tiny little episode in the long then-styled ‘dirty tricks’ universal campaign modality, into a durable crisis across the nation, and make it into a scandal with which to wreck Nixon (who had earlier banned some hostile reporters from the WH, thus giving Graham room in her mind to ‘save America’).
Naturally, because Nixon was Nixon, after he started reacting to the Graham-Kennedy attack, the coup was all but done.
To this day history plays it as Nixon’s abuse of power –and that’s true in the sense that he should have found a way to finesse the thing, even w/ WaPo and the MSM and the Kennedyites keeping it above the fold forever.
But at the heart of it, his enemies successfully drove the message home to America that Nixon couldn’t stay president because he had enemies that were driving the message home to America that he couldn’t stay president.
So yes, WaPo is in familiar territory with Plame. I just wonder if the whole thing wasn’t cooked up in the same office that Watergate was.
Shakespeare certainly was advancing partisan politics and not just exploring the human heart. He was establishing the legitimacy of the Tudor line. That was no mean feat given that Henry Tudor was a Welshman who’s claim was based on his Great Great Great Grandfather being Edward III of England by way of an illegitimate birth to the future third wife of a third son. It shows how efficiently the old nobility had killed themselves off that he got away with it.
The right playwright for the Plame Libby Firzgerald story would be Robert Bolt IMHO.
As for the First Amendment right to produce Sedition, I don’t see how that protects anyone who is not a US citizen. James Cameron as far as I know isn’t. He just hangs out here to avoid Canadian taxes and complain. It would not cost me any sleep if the US cleaned him out down to his last nickle and sent him home to go back to driving trucks.
Upper Deck guns were portrayed in Captain Horatio Hornblower with Gregory Peck and Virginia Mayo, now that was History.
On Monday, September 29, 2003, Slate opined on the Plame Game and the effect of what happened at the WaPo mother-ship:
So what is this stuff about “Hollywood myth-making?” As Wretchard entertainingly points out, this boils down to the “Which came first?” question and an infamous pot looking for a kettle to blacken.
dPercy @ 22, Cowboy @ 25 and blert @ 37:
I also enjoyed “Master and Commander”. It’s an excellent movie and Russell Crowe was well cast in the lead role. It’s clear that the French “Phantom” was aliasing the “USS Essex”. The defeat and capture of the Essex by a conventional British frigate along with a sloop-of-war is an embarrassment that many American historians would prefer to forget (much better to focus on the USS Constitution). There’s a wonderful book by C. S. Forester about the naval battles of the War of 1812, titled “The Age of Fighting Sail”.
Blert
Please re-consult your Chapelle’s History of the American Sailing Navy. There was nothing new or sneaky about 32 pounders on the American 44 frigates. They were carronades, invented about 1702 by the Carron Iron Works in Scotland, and were a short barrelled gun, lighter than a standard long gun because of the shorter barrel length, and because of that a ship was able to carry more guns. The 44s actually carried 56 guns, a combination of long 24 pounders on the gun deck and carronades on the upper deck. Carronades were essentially very large shotguns, their effective range about 50 yards. If any American 44 ever ran into a British 74 the issue would not have been in doubt. A 74 carried long 32 or 36 pounders on the gun decks, (not carronades), and would have outgunned and outranged the 44′s long 24 pounders. The 44 would have been destroyed. Fortunately the 44s were faster than any 74 afloat, (except for USS United States, known as Old Waggoner), and could easily avoid combat, and if combat could not have been avoided, the 44 would have instantly, and honorably, struck. The 44s were superior to the standard 18 pounder 38 gun frigate (which also carried carronades and therefore more than 38 guns) because the 44 was bigger and heavier and therefore capable of carrying heavier guns than the 38s.
The Royal Navy did not go to ironclads because they were impressed by an 1820 never completed wooden American liner, they built the Warrior in 1853 or 54 because the French had launched the Gloire.
Blast from the Past, huh?
William Shakespeare was a total reject from the literarti who scorned the mere shepherd’s son who dared to think he could turn verse.
Survey his poetry, both his “high poetry” (sucktastic, turgid long poems) and his “low poetry” (mindblowing awesomeness by which we know his name).
What we know of Billy Shakespeare is that he went to London, became a playwright loved by the masses and scorned by the “serious men of letters”, then he retired back to Stratford-on-Avon.
He was always an outsider deemed unfit by the English tastemasters. He was encouraged (Elizabeth noted and laughed over Falstaff), but William Shakespeare was never accepted by London’s kewl kids and certainly was a bust at court. He was an actor, then a playwright. Things you didn’t want to be in Elizabethan England.
Then, he scurried back to Stratford-on-Avon, retiring early, bought the biggest house in town, and was never heard from again. He made bank at the big city, and prolly hated it. Rustic knowledge of the country life and ways permeate his work. Shakespeare was what we’d call “a redneck”.
And that’s exactly what doomed him with London’s hoity-toity, who would have no part in him.
Then, and to this day, people say he couldn’t have really written his plays. It was Francis Bacon, or some neurotic earl, or somebody, anybody, but that yahoo from the sticks who just rocked it.
C/44; heh –just like old Ronnie Reagan –”someone hadda be behind him”
***
w/43; to extend a bit, the “swivel gun’ is always confused with the “smasher” –the true Carronade, which actually replaced the deck-clearing smaller bore swivel gun, which iirc is featured in Master & Commander.
Speaking of “Old Ironsides”, if you ever find yourself in Boston wondering what to do, please, do yourself a favor and go take the tour of the USS Constitution. The tour is fantastic, and the guides are top notch. At least my tour guide was!
This was a very memorable thing, this tour of the Constitution. Somewhere down in her bowls she’s got the essence of the Age of Sail chained up. But it wafts out for you when you tour her.
It’s magnificent. She is something not to be missed if you’re ever around Boston.
–still have Nelson’s ship Victory afloat too, in Portsmouth.
Fantastical technology –starting with seven years drying time for the oak, before the keel was even laid.
If you ‘knew the ropes’ you knew something –
Buddy Larsen @ 47 said:
“still have Nelson’s ship Victory afloat too, in Portsmouth”
Actually the Victory is in permanent dry dock. Fortunately the Constitution is still floating. It’s my understanding that very little of the Constitution is original wood, e.g. the keel. That’s the downside with keeping an old ship afloat.
ah –thanks eggplant –i had seen a recent tv show with Prince Andrew taking the cameras for a tour, and she seemed to be afloat –i should double check ‘fore i write –
@Eggplant of #4,
“If conservatives are going to roll back moonbat corruption of our culture, we need to expel leftists from the entertainment industry along with the MSM and academia.”
Wrong! That would be playing their little censorship games along with them. Leaving aside the fact that they’d be better at such games at we through longer practice, that would make us every bit as vile as they. Unless you were thinking in terms of making the entertainment industry as irrelevant as Old Media by creating a better alternative that would make it easier for new startups? o_O
Otherwise, Bogie Wheel at #28 is the one who has it right. Instead of worrying about *their* tribal lays we should concentrate on making our own. Certainly, we have one important advantage over them. Unlike them we understand that the Muse prefers storytelling to politics and will abandon without mercy those who lay their politics on too thick! ^_~
I think O’Brian owned a time machine. And I think Libby is about to step out of one.
===================================
Films like “Fair Game” are well loved- by Hollywood reviewers. Look for it in the $5.00 DVD bargain bin at Wal- Mart soon, right between “Green Zone” and “Capitalism- A Love Story”.
Clanging irony: fraudulent attacks on ‘abuse of power’ that being fraudulent are the highest possible abuse of power.
***
Calling George Orwell:
Is ‘abuse of power’ secondarily that which happens when a party of the first part abuses the power of the party of the second part?
Is a ‘melting pot’ not only a pot used for melting, but a pot that is itself melting?
Speaking of rewriting history – what about rewriting science?
The American Association of Loony Psychiatrists has announced that “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” is no longer an officially recognized mental disease.
Wonder why that picked that one NOW?
Anyway, Obama is Normal now folks. So is Charles Manson, so give him a cellphone. Nothing to see here, nothing to talk about. These aren’t the droids you are looking for. Move along.
RWE, you beat me to it.
We, our children, grand children and great grandchildren are going to have a massive task on our hands.
The wells of knowledge have all been peed in, crapped in and had the garbage and rotting carcasses of the various isms dumped into them. they’re a veritable “boggle hole”*
Everything has to be inspected, the obvious floaters carefully picked out, the remainder filtered and boiled before it is fit for any sort of use and consumption.
I’m and engineer, and fortunately maths and engineering appear to have escaped some of the pollution, other areas, “geography#” for example with its malthusians, its regional development plans and its warmerists… even animal behaviour; A pal who researches it was complaining that the studies finding altruism and collectivism in west african chimps were by an overt marxist (there’s a supprise, eh?), and naturally enough the hippies who studied bonobos found both “peace” and “free love”…
Same pal had witnessed Chomsky in action at a conference about language, and said he never addressed the opposing arguments, relying instead on ad hominae; criticizing the opponents newness to the field, their class background, the institutions where they studied…
*Nineteenth century industrial towns in Britain, generally had a “Boggle Hole” which served as the water source for the various water carriers, and doubled as a dumping ground for refuse, including the carcsses of dead cats and dogs, and the night soil. The misery from the resulting outbreaks of typhoid and cholera were usually sufficient to prompt the town corporations to invest in reservoirs and piped water supplies.
# Geography, a poor lost subject at the meeting points of earth sciences, economics, meteorology, cartography, sociology…
I find it difficult to suspend disbelief when I’m watching films now.
Partly it’s because I don’t (and won’t) have a TV
But also, I find them so predictably formulaic; we (plural) went to see the latest Harry Potter (we’d both read the book).
five minutes in and what was more a running of the gauntlet in the book has become a stereotypical Hollywood car chase.
The chase with catchers has the characters running through a wood with the sound effects of pistol shots and splinters bursting off trees as spells hit them. at least we were spared the special effects of an entire rimmed cartridge case, head stamp, primer and all emerging from a gun barrel in slow motion…
A couple of questions arise;
Is this predictability because that’s what special effects guys know how to do?
and / or
Do the financial backers have a check list with boxes to be ticked before they’ll lend money; Car Chase, long silence followed by loud frightening surprise, bullets hitting things, sad weepy scene…?
_______________________________-
Several people have already picked up on the general unreliability of historian’s accounts.
Reading Bastiat’s “The Law”, he gave several examples of classical historians attributing the wealth or otherwise of states to their king.
Bastiat in part blames some of these accounts for the delusions of present day top down planners.
In the latter chapters of War and Peace, Tolstoy launches an attack on the role of “great men” in events, to the effect of; history is the fitting of a post hoc narrative onto events, where no narrative existed.
Re: #43
There is a nice piece in the Nov – Dec Issue #265 of Strategy and Tactics, “The Carronade” by Mark N. Lardas
It’s surprising to see this expose in the WaPo. Maybe someday they’ll do an expose on the most vile, dishonest slander that I can remember in our modern political history – you know the one – “Bush Lied.”
I was disappointed that they didn’t mention that it was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s right-hand man and closest deputy, who “outed” Plame, albeit innocently and accidentally. The WaPo fuzzed his identity as “a State Department official.”
This incident exposed Colin Powell as a dishonorable, small man. He knew immediately about this “leak” because Armitage told him. Powell never came forward and explained, instead letting the poisonous charges and angry vitriol boil for almost two years as liberals self-righteously condemned the Bush White House for endangering CIA operatives for selfish political gains. Powell could have stopped that, could have healed a ragingly infected national wound, and he let it ride, to the General’s eternal dishonor.
Of course, Inspector Fitzgerald knew about it early in his investigation, Armitage told him, but Fitzgerald showboated and damaged America during war time nonetheless.
The confirmation of Armitage’s role has provoked criticism of both him and the special counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who learned of it shortly after his appointment in 2003. Some have questioned why Armitage waited so long to speak up about it, and why Fitzgerald spent two years appearing to chase a question that had already been answered.
Armitage said yesterday that he did not disclose his role before now because Fitzgerald had asked him not to.
WaPo – 8 Sept 2006 = Armitage Says He Was Source of CIA Leak He Says He Did Not Know Covert Status
Penn comes by his leftism from the cradle. His father, Leo, was an actor/director and an open communist. Penn (the younger), unsurprisingly for the Hollywood set, has not delved over “power point deep” into his father’s beliefs.
“and an official British investigation found that President George W. Bush’s statement in a State of the Union address that Britain believed that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger was well-founded …”
yeah, and guess who were supposed to supply this yellow cake ? The French of course ! except that that was a hoax, scenarised by the good ol american State department people, I wonder if Ledeen wasn’t a scenarist, cuz it started from a supposed italian witness !
Now, wikileak, if you read mead me tell us who were the people at the origin of this bad farce !
Is this predictability because that’s what special effects guys know how to do?
and / or
Do the financial backers have a check list with boxes to be ticked before they’ll lend money; Car Chase, long silence followed by loud frightening surprise, bullets hitting things, sad weepy scene…?
The moolah drives darn near everything. If you are spending $150 million to make a film then you have to aim for the broadest audience possible. i.e. your box office profit is NOT going to come exclusively from an American audience; it will have to include the international audience. So. Dialogue, outski. Action and SFX, inski.
Bill Whittle had a piece on this on PJM a few moons ago. he put it pretty succinctly. Hollywood used to be in the business of bringing America to the world via movies. Now it’s in the business of bringing the world to America. IOW when some of your biggest financiers are members of the Saudi royal family, whose cultural values & worldview do you think are going to get imprinted on that movie?
Entertainment headline, July 1, 2010:
“New Wonder Woman Loses Patriotic Costume in Favor of ‘Globalized’ Duds”
http://tinyurl.com/26ve977
*********************
The critical question then becomes, why does it take $150 million to make a movie?
Answer: It doesn’t. It only takes $150 million to make a certain kind of movie.
Famous director makes $15 million on the pic. Top star makes $20 million. Throw in $5 – 10 million each for the supporting cast and you are already over $50 million and you haven’t even shot a single foot of film (or digital) yet. Because a lot of these ATL contracts are structured so the talent gets paid up front, regardless of how the movie does at the B.O. Up till now, getting your money on the back end was how stars & directors got pet projects done (see Mel Gibson, “Passion of the Christ,” funded I believe mostly out of his own pocket). But someday, somewhere, a studio bean counter will scratch his/her head and say, WHY the french are we always paying these people double-digit millions up front with NO relationship to performance results?
Above-the-line costs are ginormous.
And yet that’s the template for most Hollywood studios. It is insane.
The indie film world makes as good or better movies for a lot less … but they don’t have the distribution & marketing networks the studios do. But that too is changing. Digital production & editing. Internet. All slowly chipping away at the dinosaur.
Times they are a-changin’ all around. The Hollywood bubble will burst at some point, God willing, and the lefty dingbat prettyface millionaires will not have to feel so guilty about their multi-millions and five-mansion lifestyles anymore.
I think bogie wheel is on the right track.
The truth would not make as good a dramatic movie–the good guys wouldn’t be good enough, and the bad guys wouldn’t be bad enough.
That leads to some deeper questions…
–what wretchard speculates about in our collective cultural memory and expectations of what makes a good narrative
–why the particular people making teh film, and their understanding of their audience as well as their own inclinations, defines which side as the good guys or the bad guys.
I mean, you could take the same reality and start with the premise that Plame and Wilson are self-aggrandizing lefty egomaniacs, and the Bush administration was a bunch of guys who meant well and were trying to play a very difficult hand. Then, make your exaggerations for the sake of drama, and you get a completely different but equally entertaining movie.
Just thinking out loud
“Canada imports yellowcake uranium from Iraq for use as fuel in our heavy water ‘CANDU’ reactors. You can see the imports listed in our (online) trade stats. Of course the yellowcake is not Iraqi but originated in Niger. But Wilson said no uranium had been shipped from Niger to Iraq. Discuss…”
the Iraki Yellow cake was ALREADY there at the first Irak “Desert Storm” campain, isn’t it funny that GW Bush’s Father didn’t find it dangerous then !
Actually the iraki yellow cake dated from Osirak for civil energy purpose, one doesn’t ignore that the site was bombed by Israel who feared that Saddam would project a nuclear bomb (the reason that was given then), but like Iran still hasn’t found how to transform benin uranium into a dangerous stuff, Saddam had no knowledge, nor the infrastructures to make it, then after his condamnation by the UN, he had no means to buy such a sophisticated technology, therefore the yellowcake was a “dead” matter, (probably, until he would join the camp of the “goods”, like Kadhafi, who was allowed to by a diplomatic trick)
Candu is known for using pure uranium, this is how Pakistan and India could make their A bomb, because Canada sold them such civil nuclear system. Now in Osirak, it wasn’t a Candu system, but a system where uranium needs a sophisticated transformation to be used, wether as civil energy, wether as a military arm, but the both “cases” aren’t compatible, if you opted for civil energy, (like it was the case then, when Saddam was still the “friend” of the Americans, (and of the French by extension) then the final uranium can’t be reverted to a armful uranium, that’s why no terrorists tried to use “civil” uranium to make bombs (except Candu before), it would cost them too much, too much time too for a non significant result (at least it could remove a house), as they act on urgence, they focused on stuff that can quickly be operative, such “plastic”… planes into buildings…)
The ones that none can fool with “nuclear”, are the French, this is why the yellowcake supposely supplied by Chirac, was such a big “joke” (for us, bu not really as a result for the Americans who, as a whole, condamned us as if we were their true enemis, when the whole “hoax” was scenarised by official “virtuous” persons to undermine us. I’m sorry, but I will never perdon these liars !
BTW, I happen to be a big fan of the “Iron Man” movies and at the same time acknowledge that the franchise is to be included in the “insanity template” described above. (As I guess I, as an audience member, am also part of the problem, for buying the tickets & DVD.)
The special features on the IM1 DVD have a revealing episode. Director Jon Favreau (no, not the Obama speechwriter; this is the movie actor/director) makes several trips to the digital SFX house that is working on the animation for the IM costume itself. (The movie is so complicated the tasks get specialized and parsed out.) The SFX guys have spent the better part of 1 or 2 days working on ONE SHOT, all of 1 or 2 seconds screen time, in which you see IM’s visor close. They have been rectifying the “problem” that there was no interior back-of-the-helmet visible at first when the visor was open; it showed empty space.
So a “problem” that affected the storyline not one whit, which would pass by so quickly on screen in the theaters that no one would see it, and which could only be detected by geekboy fans freeze-framing the DVD (who if they wanted to complain, could be told, Go pound sand, geekboy, and make your own damn film), proceeded to cost most likely six figures to rectify.
Multiply that “problem” by the dozens, and you begin to understand where some of the costs get eaten up in SFX.
Yep, what you see looks way cool. But millions upon millions are spent on stuff you don’t see, either.
Perfectionism is fun and fine … in a time and culture that has the luxury to drop cool millions on raindrops and gunshots and comic-book hero helmet interiors.
But what can’t go on forever won’t.
My guess is, this can’t and won’t. For a period, anyway.
Cowboy…
The 17th Earl of Oxford is widely considered to be the man behind the pen of Shakespeare.
His library has been preserved… and many of his volumes dovetail with Shakespeare’s.
Beyond that, some of the most memorable lines in Hamlet are word for word lifted from QE’s Lord Chamberlain — who raised the orphaned Earl in his own house.
Taken together with Shakespeare’s immense knowledge of Court life all signs point to the Earl.
Even that Hamlet tale of a prisoner talking his way out of captivity by invoking his Royal connections actually happened — to the Earl !
——-
buddy larsen @ 49 concerning the Victory:
I actually toured the Victory and noticed that she was in permanent dry dock. The British learned from the Golden Hind which was one of the earliest examples of a historic ship maintained for public display. The Golden Hind floated in the Thames estuary for almost a century before she rotted away to nothing. Quite sad actually, since the Golden Hind was an important piece of history.
Earlier I made the comment:
“If conservatives are going to roll back moonbat corruption of our culture, we need to expel leftists from the entertainment industry along with the MSM and academia.”
Towering Barbarian @ 50 replied:
“Wrong! That would be playing their little censorship games along with them. Leaving aside the fact that they’d be better at such games …”
Nope, you’re incorrect. Socialist power does not emanate from the strength of their argument but rather because they control “the narrative”. This is Gramscian agit-prop. Due to Gramsician agit-prop, your typical leftist useful idiot can not form a rational argument (that cartoon Wretchard linked in “Extranormal Debates” was an excellent example). Permanent roll back of socialist influence begins after conservatives gain control of education, journalism and entertainment. Those three sectors are currently under leftist control.
58. Tony & 32. Cowboy
Thanks for interjecting the key facts about Armitage and Powell into the Plame discussion. Without their inclusion it’s impossible to have an accurate and truthful analysis of this sorry debacle. Fitzgerald’s actions should, if we had a “real” Justice Department, merit prosecution or at the very least firing. Armitage is nothing but a military/political flunky, so no big deal or surprises there. It’s Colin Powell, however, the putative noble, principled “statesman” who has covered himself in shame and disgrace.
I have one nit to pick however, deriving from Cowboy’s comment about the so-called crime. Aside from the dubious contrivance of Libby’s process crime of perjury, there was no crime committed by “outing” Plame. The CIA never would certify explicitly, and Fitzgerald never demanded it of them, whether Plame’s duty status at the time in question was “covert”.
He bandied about the term “classified” at every opportunity but it was a red herring to divert everyone’s attention from the actual legal requirements for outing Plame to have been a crime. There were two specific statutes which could have been invoked but they both required her status to be “covert” for revealing her identity to be a crime.
Eggplant @66
“Permanent roll back of socialist influence begins after conservatives gain control of education, journalism and entertainment. Those three sectors are currently under leftist control.”
Reading that is like chicken soup for the eyes…
The dinosaurs in the print media are certainly feeling the change, I keep dropping the occasional tip for blogs for friends to check out as my little contribution towards wiping them out. The blogs certainly showed a greater aptitude for investigative journalism than the old gatekeeper media did over climategate.
In the broadcast media, a conservative (or even better a libertarian
)host is way more fun than a concern* of bleeding heart lefties. Conservative advertisers will help that along, and a de-funding of tax payer supported broadcasters will force then to consider their market.
A few policy changes will start the process for education. Here in Ireland, the teachers are absolutely fire proof – about the only way for one to get fired is to bugger the bursar. Making them sackable and making people pay for their own post 18 education will soon clear the moonbats out.
*collective noun for social workers, as in “a flock of sheep, a gaggle of geese, a concern of social workers, and a whinge of school teachers…”
68:keith: I prefer “an empathy of schoolteachers” since how you feel has become more important than what you know.
–a “jerk” of journalists
–an “orgasm” of entertainers
There seem to be several of us who read and comment here in the confines of Belmont whose careers have been linked to the entertainment industry. That culture may be centered on Hollywood and NYC, but its adherents, creative types, financiers, and disciples can be found everywhere, in households in every village, town, and city.
As PJM’s Bill Whittle has described, anyone who has worked for or in an advertising agency, film/video production studio, network television HQs and their local affiliates, and the various unions that claim to protect the interests of the workers in those, will be able to confirm that those groups seem to concentrate dogmatic progressivist liberals among their ranks.
Part of this follows directly from the nature of the business — since advertising and entertainment are predominantly concerned with crafting messages that resonate with viewers’ emotions, feelings, and inarticulate sub-rational Gestalt impressions of the world. They have long studied and honed to near-perfection a systematic process designed to short-circuit and bypass the viewers’ intellectual and cerebral analytic capacities.
Cinematic planning and narrative techniques are a tremendously powerful set of tools for engaging an audience, seducing them into relaxing their critical skepticism, and accepting the premises of the story. This is wonderful for fiction and fantasy.
For documentary presentation of fact — so that citizens can absorb and evaluate information so as to make choices of the deepest consequence to their society and world — they can be poison.
Several crippling obsessions have come to dominate US culture: celebrity; posture over deeds; cosmetics rather than authenticity. Taken with the progressivist impoverishment of public education these have produced three or four generations of high school and college “graduates” who can’t logic their way out of a doorless toilet stall.
Can’t read much more than comic books, can’t spot logical flaws in a lie or distortion, have no clue how to verify facts or evaluate the sources of their information.
Perfect audience for Liberal demagogues and provocateurs.
Hey, Eggplant!
correction re your #06 — “RE-integrated the U.S. military.”
(and Buddy, please add “Circle” to your first term.)
58. Tony:
This incident exposed Colin Powell as a dishonorable, small man. He knew immediately about this “leak” because Armitage told him. Powell never came forward and explained, instead letting the poisonous charges and angry vitriol boil for almost two years as liberals self-righteously condemned the Bush White House for endangering CIA operatives for selfish political gains. Powell could have stopped that, could have healed a ragingly infected national wound, and he let it ride, to the General’s eternal dishonor.
Of course, Inspector Fitzgerald knew about it early in his investigation, Armitage told him, but Fitzgerald showboated and damaged America during war time nonetheless.
Precisely. But remember, their intentions were good. They only wanted to replace an illegitimate President and end an illegal war. So treasonous behavior, in this instance, shouldn’t be held against them.
Fitzgerald also put Conrad Black in jail on flimsy charges, where he remains today.
One of Dubya’s greatest failings was loyalty to people like Powell who undermined him at every turn.
Re Fitzgerald, GWB’s AG Alberto Gonzalez deserves a mention here –Borked and double-borked for firing a handful of US Att’ys who were flagrantly shielding the Dem party from already-referred and in-progress criminal investigations –
Of course, GWB’s bookend Dem presidents did the same thing –and not for cause but for politics –and nary a peep was heard from the MSM (AKA the Dem Party Communications Industry).
jWarrior…
I agree 100%.
That Powell gets a free ride on his judgement errors — stopping Gulf War I CAUSED Gulf War II — good grief!
Powell ran an anti-Bush policy tank at SoS.
(Sink our Ship)
Of course, Fletcher Christian looked like Clark Gable — and Captain Bligh like Charles Laughton.
The point being, history in all its forms is constantly being rewritten and Mr. Stone’s versions will fade from memory too.
It’s only now that FDR’s aura is dimming and his flaws exposed. It just takes time for all of one’s admirer’s to die.
Why, indeed? The newspaper account didn’t accurately depict the truth either.
bogie wheel @ 61:
But not just ANY world — Hollywood is in the business of bringing the COMMUNIST world to America.
Mad Fiddler @ 72 said:
“correction re your #06 — “RE-integrated the U.S. military.””
Okay, I’ll take the bait: When was the U.S. military integrated prior to Harry S. Truman?
Eggplant @ 80:
It was integrated from the very beginning — one of the men killed on Lexington Green on April 19,1775 was a black slave named Prince Estabrook.
Keith@56: I find them [films] so predictably formulaic
Haven’t read all comments so the point may have been made, but Hollywood, as a cultural icon, exists as part of the USA sovereign identity. It is hard to over-emphasize the superiority of foreign films (and some independent films) over the modern Hollywood product – and it’s across the talent spectrum from screenplay to acting to direction. (Interestingly enough, many of the Hollywood musical scores are pretty good.) Of course one can argue that the increased tendency to, if not overt reliance upon, lying as a form of communication is a subset of the modern cultural malaise, but, unlike Hollywood, distancing oneself from the truth is not unique to USA.
In the latter chapters of War and Peace, Tolstoy launches an attack on the role of “great men” in events, to the effect of; history is the fitting of a post hoc narrative onto events, where no narrative existed.
Those Russian writers were a moody and curmudgeonly lot.
But it raises a lot of questions. If history is not a narrative, then what is it? A series of disconnected events? Obviously not, but, less pedantically (and blatant examples notwithstanding), the recording of ‘history’ is a tough assignment, made no easier by issues of abbreviation and granularizing an ‘accurate’ picture. All the more reason to begin taking our world more seriously, specifically, starting with this country; more specifically, starting with public and private leadership in what is, yet, a land of freedom and beacon of hope to much of the world.
marlowe @ 81 said:
“It was integrated from the very beginning — one of the men killed on Lexington Green on April 19,1775 was a black slave named Prince Estabrook.”
A quick review of Wikipedia indicates that Estabrook originally served as a slave and was emancipated only after joining the Continental Army. Did Estabrook really have a choice? Was he merely functioning as a replacement or proxy for his owner? Did he have the option of not serving after his emancipation? Did Estabrook carry a gun or was he acting as someone’s orderly?
To be precise, the Continental Army was integrated, though I believe that they may have stopped taking in new AA recruits at some point. The U.S. Army wasn’t integrated until Truman.
The Confederate Army was, oddly enough, though how many free blacks actually served in combat is unknown, I believe. The Confederate War Memorial, erected during the 1880s, has a black soldier right alongside the whites.
73. Sirius – Hah, sir!
Powell endorsed Obama, Affirmative Action guys stick together. Powell is now endorsing Surrender to Russia II. What did we get for surrendering in Obama’s first year with the missile defense system, and why is Poland asking to get it back?
To think that at one time I admired GEN Powell – yikes!
I just finished Bush’s “Decision Points” – he has nary an unkind word for anyone, but the lack of any kinds words for Colin says it all.
Eggplant…
President Wilson reversed the US Army policy of racial integration in time for WWI.
Blackjack Pershing got his nic because of his Afro-American troop relations.
So the un-integrated era — Jim Crow in the US Army lasted from WWI thru WWII. Even then, it broke down under combat stress as officers started shifting bodies to plug holes. This has gone virtually unrecorded by modern viewers since the outfits so integrated were supply and engineering troops on an ad hoc basis. On paper, the outfits were nominally segregated. Not so much in the field.