On what accounting does a 67 year-old grandmother in Kansas called Irene, perched on some town square with an Uncle Sam top hat and miniature American flags duct-taped to her Dollar General lawn chair, become "anti-American", a "terrorist", a "suicide bomber", a "hostage-taker", a "hijacker", an "extremist", "dangerous", a "threat", and a "Salafist/Wahabbist/Hezbollah-ist/Taliban"? On the accounting of your garden-variety leftist commentator and elected Democrat, if the magic-markered posterboard that Irene is holding reads some variation of "Stop the Spending!"
I'm no head-shrinker, but over the years I have given this sort of thing a deal of thought and so I will try my hand at diagnosing the leftist impulse for war against the Irenes of America, following the lead of MSNBC, which brought in a psychologist and psychotherapist to diagnose the psychological disruptions that MSNBC imagines must explain this "dangerous" phenomenon of Tea Party insistence on cutting spending.
Now, the first point to be made is that there is nothing remotely extreme or disturbed about concern for goverment spending when in four years under President Obama, America will have added $7 trillion to its national debt, after taking two and a quarter centuries and 43 presidencies to add the other $10 trillion. That MSNBC head-shrinker -- besides finding parallels between the Tea Partiers and the Norwegian shooter/bomber who killed a hundred innocents -- diagnosed the Tea Partiers as "delusional. But my best assessment is that the delusion in this is to be found much more in the notion that we can go most of the way to doubling the national debt in just four years, and carry on spending still more indefinitely.
The second point to be gotten out of the way is that these elites and leftists (if there's a distinction anymore) who have discovered "terrorism" and "anti-Americanism" in the decent, law-abiding, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, backbone-of-the-nation folk of America, are the same elites and leftists who have no interest whatever in fighting the actual enemies of America who actively want us all dead and burning in hell. The Left and the elite who damn decent folks within their own borders as "the Hezbollah wing of the Republican Party" have nothing but sympathies and excuses and apologies for the actual Hezbollah and like Islamic terrorists and fascists and eliminationists, and the greatest shock in all this is seeing them use "Hezbollah" as an epithet. But that's as may be. Onto the amateur head-shrinking.
The easy diagnosis is desperation, and that makes a fine start. Then there's the less psychiatric easy explanation: the dearth of intellectual rigor and the reliance on cribbing the arguments and even the verbatim coinages of other, more original commentators and politicos. So some highly overrated New York Times columnist types up some line about the Tea Party being "the Hezbollah wing of the Republican Party", and the next thing you know it's being aped by every leftist hack who thought "Bushitler" was clever circa 2003.
Also, the old-line press corrodes the Left and enables their extreme and extraordinary public pronouncements. The press subjects Republicans and conservatives to the most merciless scrutiny and skepticism, while any Democrat and leftist in America can be assured they will never be called out in the mainstream for contradicting themselves or fudging and fabricating their figures or making outlandish claims about their enemies. They do it because they know they'll get away with it, and over time they lose sense even of where the line is drawn.
And because politics is religion to the Left, there can be no vice in advancing the leftist cause. To be a leftist and an elite in the 21st Century is to be post-Christian, and when it is politics that takes the place of religion, the descent into ends-justify-means-ism must surely follow. Say and do whatever can be gotten away with, if it is necessary for the cause. So if it is necessary for the leftist cause that the Tea Party be repudiated and ruined, and if that means biscuit-baking grandmothers must be demonized by the nation's leaders as America-hating terrorists, well, the ends justify the means.
But why accuse the Tea Partiers of "anti-Americanism" of all things? When the Left and the elite aren't busy accusing the Tea Partiers of trying to blow up the country, they're scorning them for their earnest, childlike, rah-rah-sis-boom-bah patriotism. The America-haters claim may be explicable in some part by the conservative theory of leftist "projection", i.e., much of what leftists accuse their enemies of is in fact what's in their own hearts. So the Left reflexively accuses conservatives of, say, staging phony, "astro-turf" protests, because that's just the sort of thing they get up to, with their "Rules for Radicals" seminars and their college courses on activism and their paid labor-union rent-a-mobs bussed in from out of state. And if the Left is motivated by contempt for America then that's just the motivation that they'll project onto their opposition. Projection may explain some part of the leftist accusations of anti-Americanism in the flag-waving, flag-wearing Tea Partiers of all people, but I'd guess there's something more semantic at play.
The American conservative's patriotism is for the nation and not the government; the leftist's equivalent to patriotism is more or less the contrary. The conservative trusts that a nation of individuals pursuing what's best for themselves and their loved ones can only be the happier, richer, and freer nation; the leftist starts with a disdain for the average man and distrusts him to make the "right choices" for himself if left to his own devices, and sees the state as the font of all things good, the rightful distributor of wealth, the patron of the approved and scourge of the unapproved, and as the teacher of the nation, correcting its unenlightened history and base nature.
Well, if you're the sort of person who imagines that the good in the country is reposed in its government, then you're liable to regard the Tea Party and its rearguard action to roll back the cost and reach of government as a dagger at the heart of all that's right and good. Only, the very most foundational principle of the United States is freedom from government, of restricting and restraining the state. Which is why a lot of statists damning limited-government Tea Partiers as "anti-American" is the world turned upside down.
August 4, 2011
May 7, 2011
The Adoration of The Obama
I wouldn’t have felt compelled to add my own blot of ink to the metric tons already dumped on the subject of the killing of Osama bin Laden, except that we are now coming to Day Seven in one of the most unbecoming spectacles I’ve yet seen out of even Barack Obama.
Some part of me can’t blame Obama and the Obama-adulating old-line press for their interminable Glory Tour, because of course the hunt for Osama bin Laden is just about the only thing that’s not gone from bad to worse in the Age of Obama. Indeed, the fact they’re all making so very much of this, for so very long, is final proof that Obama has no other success to show for his two years and three months as president. By this point in his presidency, George W. Bush had led America in the tearing down of two of the very worst regimes on earth since the Second World War, and the implanting of decent, democratic systems in their place, making 50 million Muslims free citizens for the first times in their histories.
And that’s the trouble with this Adoration of The Obama, as much as anything else: the bin Laden operation was a sort-of SWAT team swoop on a man who hadn’t been out of the house in half a decade; the Afghan and Iraq wars were earth-quaking re-makings of ancient and malignant whole nations. There is no perspective in this bin Laden affair whatever, for the obvious reason that Obama and all that the press had invested in him are on course for a historic repudiation in 2012, and so he’s desperate for a shot in the arm.
America is today losing in Afghanistan, and the killing of Osama bin Laden does nothing to arrest or reverse even that, much less every other blessed thing that’s gone the wrong way. America is losing also in Libya, which is a war without a cause and which no-one even dreamt of until the moment we learned we were at war, Obama having decided to take us to war in that country the night before. And I will spare the reader a recapitulation of all those other troubles, and let it suffice to say only that the share of Americans on food stamps stands today AT 14 PERCENT.
One could go on, but it’s all been said ad nauseam already so I’ll endeavor to make a point or two that have been under-made or not made at all:
*There’s a reason some of us Bush-nostalgia-ists have lamented that Bush and his administration have not been more credited in the bin Laden mission, and it goes beyond the usual reasons -- the intelligence trail that ended at bin Laden’s bedroom a week ago, began with Bush's “enhanced interrogations” including at “black sites”, and progressed with the interrogation of al-Qaeda captured in Iraq; the CIA team on the ground in Pakistan that tracked bin Laden the rest of the way was instituted under President Bush; and the Navy SEALs team that did the deed in the end was part of the Joint Special Operations Command which had been denounced on the Left as “Dick Cheney’s assassination ring”; and so on. The deeper reason we whine that Obama is credited with the bin Laden operation single-handed, and Bush mocked, is that Obama damned all of this as senator and candidate, and then outlawed some part of it as president, and so one cannot but fear that the bin Laden operation was the cashing in of investments that have not been kept up since the day Barack Obama moved into the White House.
*The man most responsible for the 9/11 attacks and their success was in fact not Osama bin Laden but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and of course Obama wanted him granted the rights and protections of a U.S. citizen, in an open-ended civilian trial in New York City, in which the United States itself and especially the Bush Administration would have wound up in the dock at least as much as the enemy leader responsible for the worst attack on America in its history. Obama suspended for two years the military commission case against KSM, in which Mohammed had already pleaded guilty. If it had been up to Obama, that civilian trial would be ongoing even now, but blessedly it was not up to Obama, and the Congress intervened to deny funding for any such abominable thing.
*The Greeks and Romans were great ones for warning leaders and the sycophants who stroke them, and so it’s not for nothing that so many of the best words to describe Barack Obama generally and in this instance especially come to us from the classical languages: narcissism, hubris, vanity, etc. Had Obama been a man, and honorable and meek, he’d simply have authorized some functionary to break the news of bin Laden’s death, as for instance President Bush did on the occasion of the capture of Saddam Hussein, instead of calling a televised address for 10:30 Eastern on Sunday night to announce the news personally and peppered with the personal pronouns (for which Obama was an hour late, as ever, while the nation panicked at what emergency must be warranted by such an extraordinary development), and then giving a blockbuster, blow-by-blow interview for Sunday evening TV, staging an event at Ground Zero, accepting a presidential jersey at Fort Campbell, etc. Had Obama been the breed of man who truly does great and heroic things, he’d have gone about his business and let other folks talk about heroism and greatness if they cared to. But Barack Obama is not that kind of man; he is the kind of man who will fly very high and in the end be brought very low, like in those Greek myths and Roman cautions.
Some part of me can’t blame Obama and the Obama-adulating old-line press for their interminable Glory Tour, because of course the hunt for Osama bin Laden is just about the only thing that’s not gone from bad to worse in the Age of Obama. Indeed, the fact they’re all making so very much of this, for so very long, is final proof that Obama has no other success to show for his two years and three months as president. By this point in his presidency, George W. Bush had led America in the tearing down of two of the very worst regimes on earth since the Second World War, and the implanting of decent, democratic systems in their place, making 50 million Muslims free citizens for the first times in their histories.
And that’s the trouble with this Adoration of The Obama, as much as anything else: the bin Laden operation was a sort-of SWAT team swoop on a man who hadn’t been out of the house in half a decade; the Afghan and Iraq wars were earth-quaking re-makings of ancient and malignant whole nations. There is no perspective in this bin Laden affair whatever, for the obvious reason that Obama and all that the press had invested in him are on course for a historic repudiation in 2012, and so he’s desperate for a shot in the arm.
America is today losing in Afghanistan, and the killing of Osama bin Laden does nothing to arrest or reverse even that, much less every other blessed thing that’s gone the wrong way. America is losing also in Libya, which is a war without a cause and which no-one even dreamt of until the moment we learned we were at war, Obama having decided to take us to war in that country the night before. And I will spare the reader a recapitulation of all those other troubles, and let it suffice to say only that the share of Americans on food stamps stands today AT 14 PERCENT.
One could go on, but it’s all been said ad nauseam already so I’ll endeavor to make a point or two that have been under-made or not made at all:
*There’s a reason some of us Bush-nostalgia-ists have lamented that Bush and his administration have not been more credited in the bin Laden mission, and it goes beyond the usual reasons -- the intelligence trail that ended at bin Laden’s bedroom a week ago, began with Bush's “enhanced interrogations” including at “black sites”, and progressed with the interrogation of al-Qaeda captured in Iraq; the CIA team on the ground in Pakistan that tracked bin Laden the rest of the way was instituted under President Bush; and the Navy SEALs team that did the deed in the end was part of the Joint Special Operations Command which had been denounced on the Left as “Dick Cheney’s assassination ring”; and so on. The deeper reason we whine that Obama is credited with the bin Laden operation single-handed, and Bush mocked, is that Obama damned all of this as senator and candidate, and then outlawed some part of it as president, and so one cannot but fear that the bin Laden operation was the cashing in of investments that have not been kept up since the day Barack Obama moved into the White House.
*The man most responsible for the 9/11 attacks and their success was in fact not Osama bin Laden but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and of course Obama wanted him granted the rights and protections of a U.S. citizen, in an open-ended civilian trial in New York City, in which the United States itself and especially the Bush Administration would have wound up in the dock at least as much as the enemy leader responsible for the worst attack on America in its history. Obama suspended for two years the military commission case against KSM, in which Mohammed had already pleaded guilty. If it had been up to Obama, that civilian trial would be ongoing even now, but blessedly it was not up to Obama, and the Congress intervened to deny funding for any such abominable thing.
*The Greeks and Romans were great ones for warning leaders and the sycophants who stroke them, and so it’s not for nothing that so many of the best words to describe Barack Obama generally and in this instance especially come to us from the classical languages: narcissism, hubris, vanity, etc. Had Obama been a man, and honorable and meek, he’d simply have authorized some functionary to break the news of bin Laden’s death, as for instance President Bush did on the occasion of the capture of Saddam Hussein, instead of calling a televised address for 10:30 Eastern on Sunday night to announce the news personally and peppered with the personal pronouns (for which Obama was an hour late, as ever, while the nation panicked at what emergency must be warranted by such an extraordinary development), and then giving a blockbuster, blow-by-blow interview for Sunday evening TV, staging an event at Ground Zero, accepting a presidential jersey at Fort Campbell, etc. Had Obama been the breed of man who truly does great and heroic things, he’d have gone about his business and let other folks talk about heroism and greatness if they cared to. But Barack Obama is not that kind of man; he is the kind of man who will fly very high and in the end be brought very low, like in those Greek myths and Roman cautions.
March 21, 2011
No way to fight a war
Seeing as how we’re at war in a Mideastern Muslim nation which to my knowledge we've not intervened in militarily for a quarter-century, it might be worth blowing the cobwebs off this blog, which was for its first three years a repository mostly of military news and analysis. This just seems to me to be no way to fight a war:
1. One day in March, we woke up with no conception that we’d be at war in some godforsaken, basket-case country called Libya; as of suppertime, we were at war. Up until the moment that the war vote came down in the United Nations Security Council, there was not the first hint that America was going to war.
The President and Commander-in-Chief who was ordering the United States Armed Forces into this new war had not given the faintest indication that he had been headed toward war, because until the moment he decided on war, he in fact wasn’t headed to war. If the silence had been to preserve some operational secrecy and element of surprise, that would be one thing, but the reason we had no inkling that we’d be at war on that day in March was that the Commander-in-Chief himself had no conception of it and had done none of those things that any other president of the United States would have done to prepare his forces and brace his nation for a military campaign.
2. To broadcast that we’ll bomb a bit for a few days and then quit is to tell the enemy to just hang in there. Anyone plucked at random from a Tulsa, Oklahoma Walmart would understand that implicitly, and yet Obama has made this same mistake twice now as commander-in-chief of the greatest armed force the world has ever seen, the first time being his declaration on the occasion of his Afghan faux-surge order, that he’d start hauling out come hell or high water 18 months later. The very Commandant of the Marine Corps reported that the date-certain for withdrawal was “giving sustenance” to the enemy, and yet here is Obama duplicating his mistake and announcing that his campaign will last “days, not weeks” -- i.e., just hang in there for a few days, Moammar; there’ll be some smoke and noise, but keep your head down and it’ll be over before you know it. The way to go about it is to set objectives and to declare that the campaign will last for as long as it takes to achieve those objectives.
3. I am sympathetic to the argument from history and necessity that a president and commander-in-chief needn’t always seek and receive Congressional authorization for an act of war before the bombs start flying, but in those cases where he must act first and ask later, he had darn well better get that authorization after the fact, and of course Barack Obama has not so much as suggested that Congress authorize his new Libyan War. Oh, yes, and Obama lectured the last president on the Constitutional requirement for Congressional authorization of acts of war, despite that President Bush had authorizations for both of his wars from a Republican House and Democrat Senate.
4. There is not the faintest, nascent notion of a mission, beyond "protecting civilians" -- from tens of thousands of feet up. We’re lobbing some bombs for a few days. At what, who knows? To what end, who knows? And what next, who knows?
5. The time for no-fly zones was two to three weeks before the no-fly zone vote at the UN. I'd have supported a no-fly zone over Libya at that time, and I’m compelled to support it now, but now it’s a dollar short and a more than a day late. There was a time, a couple weeks before the intervention, when the Gaddafi regime had lost effective control over most of the nation to the rebels; at that time Gaddafi’s only prospect was importing mercenaries and outside help to prop himself up and try to push back the ascendant rebels. And at that time a no-fly zone and naval blockade would have gone a long way toward denying Gaddafi the means of saving himself.
Wars aren’t won by air power alone, but air power may in fact have been decisive at that stage of what became the Libyan Civil War, in guaranteeing rebel gains on the ground and in preempting Gaddafi’s counteroffensive.
But by the time the no-fly zone was agreed to at the UN Security Council and the first British and French warplanes lifted off to enforce it, Gaddafi already had his mercenaries and outside support, and had pushed the rebels back to not much more than Benghazi, which is Libya’s second city but nothing to compare with the rest of the country.
The British Prime Minister was calling for a no-fly zone at the time when it might have made the difference, and so indeed was Sarah Palin, but Obama was disengaged as ever on the rolling Arab revolts, caught flat-footed by each and every development and following the now-familiar pattern of silence, then flailing and incoherence, then calls for the inevitable and the faits-accompli, and finally self-congratulation. Four days before he went to war, Obama played the 61st golf game of his presidency and attended a Beltway soiree, and two days before he went to war he was filling out his March Madness "brackets" for ESPN. We had our chance to do this on the cheap and win the war for the rebels before the bloodshed started in earnest, and we missed it.
6. If we’re lobbing Tomahawks into Libya, then at least one of them had better have Moammar Gaddafi’s name on it, however it may be spelled. Libya is at this point as close to a one-man regime as you’re liable to find -- Gaddafi is dependent for his regime on mercenaries and outside help -- so hit Gaddafi and his regime may very well expire with him, the war may be ended blessedly quickly, the rebels may be spared and untold unlucky civilians besides, and there may just be some outside chance of a decent society emerging in that godforsaken country. There is no telling what atrocities have been committed already or are forming in the mind of a terrorist madman dictator who uses language like “cleanse” in describing what he means to do to a rebel-held city.
President Reagan tried hitting Gaddafi in ’87 because Gaddafi was by that time a known terror-sponsor with the blood of innocent Americans on his hands; today there’s all that plus the immediate humanitarian reasons to argue in favor of a hit on Gaddafi. But as of this writing, the United States government is expressly not targeting the actual culprit in all this, and I’m afraid they really mean it.
7. And another thing: when a commander-in-chief launches a war, the place for him is his White House, and on no account should he be swanning around Rio de Janeiro while the bombs fly. A president of the United States can cancel a prior engagement, and the Rio trip could have waited.
1. One day in March, we woke up with no conception that we’d be at war in some godforsaken, basket-case country called Libya; as of suppertime, we were at war. Up until the moment that the war vote came down in the United Nations Security Council, there was not the first hint that America was going to war.
The President and Commander-in-Chief who was ordering the United States Armed Forces into this new war had not given the faintest indication that he had been headed toward war, because until the moment he decided on war, he in fact wasn’t headed to war. If the silence had been to preserve some operational secrecy and element of surprise, that would be one thing, but the reason we had no inkling that we’d be at war on that day in March was that the Commander-in-Chief himself had no conception of it and had done none of those things that any other president of the United States would have done to prepare his forces and brace his nation for a military campaign.
2. To broadcast that we’ll bomb a bit for a few days and then quit is to tell the enemy to just hang in there. Anyone plucked at random from a Tulsa, Oklahoma Walmart would understand that implicitly, and yet Obama has made this same mistake twice now as commander-in-chief of the greatest armed force the world has ever seen, the first time being his declaration on the occasion of his Afghan faux-surge order, that he’d start hauling out come hell or high water 18 months later. The very Commandant of the Marine Corps reported that the date-certain for withdrawal was “giving sustenance” to the enemy, and yet here is Obama duplicating his mistake and announcing that his campaign will last “days, not weeks” -- i.e., just hang in there for a few days, Moammar; there’ll be some smoke and noise, but keep your head down and it’ll be over before you know it. The way to go about it is to set objectives and to declare that the campaign will last for as long as it takes to achieve those objectives.
3. I am sympathetic to the argument from history and necessity that a president and commander-in-chief needn’t always seek and receive Congressional authorization for an act of war before the bombs start flying, but in those cases where he must act first and ask later, he had darn well better get that authorization after the fact, and of course Barack Obama has not so much as suggested that Congress authorize his new Libyan War. Oh, yes, and Obama lectured the last president on the Constitutional requirement for Congressional authorization of acts of war, despite that President Bush had authorizations for both of his wars from a Republican House and Democrat Senate.
4. There is not the faintest, nascent notion of a mission, beyond "protecting civilians" -- from tens of thousands of feet up. We’re lobbing some bombs for a few days. At what, who knows? To what end, who knows? And what next, who knows?
5. The time for no-fly zones was two to three weeks before the no-fly zone vote at the UN. I'd have supported a no-fly zone over Libya at that time, and I’m compelled to support it now, but now it’s a dollar short and a more than a day late. There was a time, a couple weeks before the intervention, when the Gaddafi regime had lost effective control over most of the nation to the rebels; at that time Gaddafi’s only prospect was importing mercenaries and outside help to prop himself up and try to push back the ascendant rebels. And at that time a no-fly zone and naval blockade would have gone a long way toward denying Gaddafi the means of saving himself.
Wars aren’t won by air power alone, but air power may in fact have been decisive at that stage of what became the Libyan Civil War, in guaranteeing rebel gains on the ground and in preempting Gaddafi’s counteroffensive.
But by the time the no-fly zone was agreed to at the UN Security Council and the first British and French warplanes lifted off to enforce it, Gaddafi already had his mercenaries and outside support, and had pushed the rebels back to not much more than Benghazi, which is Libya’s second city but nothing to compare with the rest of the country.
The British Prime Minister was calling for a no-fly zone at the time when it might have made the difference, and so indeed was Sarah Palin, but Obama was disengaged as ever on the rolling Arab revolts, caught flat-footed by each and every development and following the now-familiar pattern of silence, then flailing and incoherence, then calls for the inevitable and the faits-accompli, and finally self-congratulation. Four days before he went to war, Obama played the 61st golf game of his presidency and attended a Beltway soiree, and two days before he went to war he was filling out his March Madness "brackets" for ESPN. We had our chance to do this on the cheap and win the war for the rebels before the bloodshed started in earnest, and we missed it.
6. If we’re lobbing Tomahawks into Libya, then at least one of them had better have Moammar Gaddafi’s name on it, however it may be spelled. Libya is at this point as close to a one-man regime as you’re liable to find -- Gaddafi is dependent for his regime on mercenaries and outside help -- so hit Gaddafi and his regime may very well expire with him, the war may be ended blessedly quickly, the rebels may be spared and untold unlucky civilians besides, and there may just be some outside chance of a decent society emerging in that godforsaken country. There is no telling what atrocities have been committed already or are forming in the mind of a terrorist madman dictator who uses language like “cleanse” in describing what he means to do to a rebel-held city.
President Reagan tried hitting Gaddafi in ’87 because Gaddafi was by that time a known terror-sponsor with the blood of innocent Americans on his hands; today there’s all that plus the immediate humanitarian reasons to argue in favor of a hit on Gaddafi. But as of this writing, the United States government is expressly not targeting the actual culprit in all this, and I’m afraid they really mean it.
7. And another thing: when a commander-in-chief launches a war, the place for him is his White House, and on no account should he be swanning around Rio de Janeiro while the bombs fly. A president of the United States can cancel a prior engagement, and the Rio trip could have waited.
February 15, 2011
Any story about an author
I just can’t do it. Try as I might, I cannot sit still for another indulgent, navel-gazing, semi-autobiographical story about a writer. I refer of course to Any Human Heart, from the novel of the same name not a decade ago, adapted for Channel 4 in England in ’10 and duly picked up by PBS for Masterpiece Classic, which was called Masterpiece Theater back when it was worth spoofing on Sesame Street with Cookie Monster. (Incidentally, I fail to see how any nine-year-old book qualifies as a “classic”, but I suppose I ought not be such a dreadful pedant.)
So following is what’s the matter with Any Human Heart; points so obvious as to be gleaned merely from periodically checking in on the first installment.
For a start, the protagonist is an author. When they say “write what you know,” a writer needn’t take them so literally as to write about a writer, who writes and thinks about writing and meets other writers and talks about writing. It’s indulgent, overdone, and plain boring. We -- and I think I speak for nearly all of humanity here -- do not find authors endlessly fascinating or terribly important.
Point Number Two is the “historic sweep of the changing 20th Century”. That was quite a neat little device at one time -- my, how things change, didn’t they wear funny clothes back then, see how world events shaped our hero’s life, didn’t they listen to funny music back then, etc., etc. Indeed, it became a device of the mob movie, from the Godfather movies to Goodfellas to Casino. And that’s precisely the point: it was old when Martin Scorsese did it in a gangster movie in 1995; quit it, already.
Then there was the “protagonist walks home on Cloud Nine after first date with girl of his dreams” scene. That was probably old when Ernest Borgnine did it in Marty circa 1955. Is this really a “masterpiece”, or is it a string of literary and cinematic clichés?
And fourth, as if to answer that last question beyond all doubt, is the “writer with writer’s block stares at blank sheet in typewriter” scene. Was there no-one at the BBC, which is after all the preeminent broadcaster in the world, to observe that it might be wearisome to bludgeon the viewers with a “writer’s block/blank page” scene in which the unmarked paper in the typewriter is actually shown on-screen? Surely the writer’s block scene was clichéd before my time, and it was past old in I Capture The Castle the best part of a decade ago. Maybe those film schools and “creative writing” courses never get around to the class about how the great stories tell new things, and when they must say old things they come up with some novel way of saying them.
Why, yes, I am bitter to see such resources devoted to such cliché-flogging. And it’s a good job I couldn’t stand to watch but a few bits here and there, else this would run 3,000 words and be at least as tedious as the show itself.
So following is what’s the matter with Any Human Heart; points so obvious as to be gleaned merely from periodically checking in on the first installment.
For a start, the protagonist is an author. When they say “write what you know,” a writer needn’t take them so literally as to write about a writer, who writes and thinks about writing and meets other writers and talks about writing. It’s indulgent, overdone, and plain boring. We -- and I think I speak for nearly all of humanity here -- do not find authors endlessly fascinating or terribly important.
Point Number Two is the “historic sweep of the changing 20th Century”. That was quite a neat little device at one time -- my, how things change, didn’t they wear funny clothes back then, see how world events shaped our hero’s life, didn’t they listen to funny music back then, etc., etc. Indeed, it became a device of the mob movie, from the Godfather movies to Goodfellas to Casino. And that’s precisely the point: it was old when Martin Scorsese did it in a gangster movie in 1995; quit it, already.
Then there was the “protagonist walks home on Cloud Nine after first date with girl of his dreams” scene. That was probably old when Ernest Borgnine did it in Marty circa 1955. Is this really a “masterpiece”, or is it a string of literary and cinematic clichés?
And fourth, as if to answer that last question beyond all doubt, is the “writer with writer’s block stares at blank sheet in typewriter” scene. Was there no-one at the BBC, which is after all the preeminent broadcaster in the world, to observe that it might be wearisome to bludgeon the viewers with a “writer’s block/blank page” scene in which the unmarked paper in the typewriter is actually shown on-screen? Surely the writer’s block scene was clichéd before my time, and it was past old in I Capture The Castle the best part of a decade ago. Maybe those film schools and “creative writing” courses never get around to the class about how the great stories tell new things, and when they must say old things they come up with some novel way of saying them.
Why, yes, I am bitter to see such resources devoted to such cliché-flogging. And it’s a good job I couldn’t stand to watch but a few bits here and there, else this would run 3,000 words and be at least as tedious as the show itself.
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