Rusty wires and lights in a box

It's the current fashion to bash journalists in general and the broadcast media in particular.

Without pausing, of course, to note that pretty much everything you know about the apalling state of affairs in big media you read or saw in big media.

The sins of our times--an ill-informed electorate, a vulgar culture, an apathetic body politic--are all conveniently hurled at the feet of the media, most aggressively by the very politicians and corporate interest who themselves have the most to deflect.

Blame these vague Eastern establishments, run by secret back-room cabals of cigar-smoking white men, determined to: Lie to us! Keep us in chains! Cover up the truth! Serve as big business lackeys! Drive us into war! Foment dissent and hate at home!

Far easier to tear down Dan Rather than to do the hard work and put in the time necessary to stay informed in an increasingly complex and at times scary world.

Because of course, if it weren't for big media and "their" obsessive celebrity-driven fluff coverage--tawdry stuff that nobody we know watches of course--we'd all fulfill our dreams of being Renaissance men and women.

Because that, of course, is what we all want--if not for that damn boob tube that somehow keeps growing in size in our living rooms, we could all properly buckle down and read Plato and Aristotle and Balzac and Lao Tze and above all Shakespeare, that bard from the better days, he of the high-minded plays.

Gosh, things were so much better in the good old days carved out by Edward R. Murrow and George Clooney's father--back when we all were sober, well-informed, upright citizens, a generation that won the war and then rushed home to watch all the serious documentaries and exposes that broadcasters back then offered us (so much great stuff that the only one ever cited by anyone is Harvest of Shame).

The beatings in the streets of Selma, burning of Vietnamese peasants, spying on protestors--none of that could possibly have been done by this best generation, raised on a diet of sober broadcast programming, with its cosmopolitan knowledge of the world and deep understanding of all elements of American society, all thanks to Uncle Walty's 15 minute newscast each night and Edward's every-so-often CBS news specials.

Of course Nicholas Lemann, a print journalist with no broadcast experience, writing in the pages of the New Yorker, makes sense of it all for us in The Murrow Doctorine: Why the life and times of the broadcast pioneer still matter.

Commercialism and superficiality seem regnant in broadcast news. Owners avoid controversy, cut budgets, and focus on producing the profits that Wall Street demands—we’re back in the fifties. Murrow represents a kind of implacable, heroic journalistic courage that could sweep away all the obstacles in its path. ...

On network television, no news star would openly disavow Murrow’s legacy. The standard today is to have smart, competent, physically magnetic people who do straight news gravely and celebrity interviews empathetically, and who occasionally, strategically, display moral passion and then retreat, as Anderson Cooper, of CNN, did during Hurricane Katrina. Everyone suspects them of being lightweights when they first ascend, and then, when they retire, wonders if we’ll ever see their like again. If being in the Murrow mold entails occasionally editorializing on the air, and letting it be known that you aren’t getting along very well with your superiors, there are only a very few Murrow legatees—Ted Koppel and Bill Moyers come to mind, and they’ve left network television.

Back in the 50s? When were those macro problems with broadcast journalism left behind?! When was the golden age of broadcast journalism, if not now?

I doubt Lemann would agree, but I'd say broadcast news has never been more Murrow-like than in the modern era.

If nothing else, the quality of what's produced today is light-years better than it was even when Murrow was in his prime--how can it not be, when on the one hand you have Murrow and his boys on one radio network to weigh against thousands of journalists on dozens of national television and radio channels and hundreds of local stations?

Everyone today is in cutthroat competition with dozens of peers and via the Internet essentially everyone with access to a computer in the world, for viewers and listeners. And as we know from our friends the free-market disciples, if you have two markets, one where CBS Radio and Television fends off a few other giants, the other where people are fighting tooth and nail with an ever-increasing number of competitors eager to fill any news and information hole that springs up, there's precious little time or opportunity for interference from the corporate structure.

Maybe people who aren't in the industry don't understand this, but journalists are no less competitive than athletes. Last thing you do at night and first thing you do in the morning is check the scoreboard and see what stories the competition had that you missed.

Just win, baby--and the surest way to amassing ratings and dollars is still by breaking important stories first, and doing a better job of explaining what's happening in the world today.

Are all these men--and women--idiots that they can't do a better job than a dozen newsmen? Is Lemann saying his broadcast brethern are clowns, shams, fools, who go to journalism schools like his for two years and then show up for work every morning to put in a full day's worth of meaningless nonsense?

I mean, come on; Murrow was talented, and so was his team--but they weren't gods. And people beyond Ted Koppel and Bill Moyers--Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Jim Lehrer, Scott Simon, Bob Schieffer, Aaron Brown, Michele Norris, Diane Sawyer, Judy Woodruff are pretty good journalists too.

Are they so fettered by their blinkered corporate structure that these dedicated people--who have been in the business for decades and are supported by a pool of producers, researchers, writers, camerpeople, technicians, et al, and zounds of anything-you-want-anytime-you-want-it technology--can't do a better job finding out what's going on than a callow Murrow boy of 25, air-dropped into the middle of a war zone who files with bullets flying overhead?

Sheesh....

But if you don't believe in the truth-will-out journalistic process that undergirds the news business, or if you're one of those who are comfortable demeaning the integrity of an entire industry of men and women who have dedicated their lives to their craft--how about the end product?

Maybe Lemann considers the work of broadcasters today so beneath him that he doesn't watch television or listen to the radio. How else to explain:

“Harvest of Shame,” the great “CBS Reports” documentary on migrant farmworkers, which represented Murrow’s last major appearance on television, is also impossible to imagine on network television today—one hour, the day after Thanksgiving, 1960, of horrifyingly unpleasant images of poverty and hunger—and its aesthetic is straight out of the socialist-realist Depression-era work of Dorothea Lange and Pare Lorentz and Russell Lee.

Lemann later says of an interview Murrow did with Senator Joseph McCarthy:

It was great television, because it was a showdown between a journalist and a politician, but the days when a major figure on network television can pick that kind of fight, and openly state political opinions on prime time, are long gone. Today, famous broadcast journalists are far more likely to battle each other than Washington officials.

'Impossible to imagine today,' 'Long gone'--is 60 Minutes a mirage, 20/20 and Nightline and Frontline figments of our imagination? And where are these Washington officials who no longer feel battled by broadcast journalists?

The reports and footage from Ethiopia, Iraq, Bosnia, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, ANWAR--did we dream all that? Mike Wallace's interviews, Ted Koppel, Tim Russert--are these journalists not of this day and age? Are the Peabodys and Emmys and Columbia's own duPont awards given to fake stories that are broadcast in some parallel universe?

I mean, come on. There are thousands of broadcast stories airing every week on channels all across America--everything from schools to politicians to cops to large corporations are being looked at.

Not all the stories are stellar, far too many of them are fluff or entertainment-driven, a lot of them come out of the echo-chamber. But many of them are informative, and a substantial number of them are innovative and investigative--and a lot of them still give rise to change in the 'real world'.

Americans today have access to more and better journalism than we've ever had in our history. You just have to find it in the sea of programming; but it's your choice what to consume, and even if all you watch are the likes of FOX News, you'll be infinitely better informed about the world than almost any American living in Murrow's time.

And don't forget that through much of Lemann's golden age of Murrow the evening newscast was 15 minutes long, and anchors regularly pitched products before, during and after their broadcasts.

Read some of the transcripts of the newscasts sometime, it's quite astonishing how few stories were covered each night, and when they were covered, it often reads like a stenographer's notes of the government's daily press briefings.

There's very little imaginative journalism going on, and little-to-no challenging of authority; journalism then really was what some people imagine it to be today, a club of a few men sitting around deciding what the day's news was. (If you think the poor journalism of the day was limited to television, go read some of the newspaper articles from Murrow's day).

It's why Murrow had to do things like request 30 minutes of prime time to provide his sporadic special reports. There was no real news programming otherwise.

And maybe it's not a bad thing, given that the news was entirely reported by white middle-aged men.

Does Lemann seriously believe that the news business as a whole is worse today than that produced by Murrow, when women and non-whites were invisible on-air, and more importantly as producers and editors behind-the-scenes where story decisions were made?!

Lemann loses any remaining shred of credibility on this topic with the juxtaposition of two paragraphs:

By dint of trial and error, and of inspired hiring, Murrow wound up as a pioneer of virtually every variety of television journalism except evening-news anchoring: the documentary, the celebrity interview, the prosecutorial investigative piece, the on-the-scene sociological report, the expert-rich treatment of an “issue,” the gee-whiz account of one of the world’s wonders, the scary, exciting bout with danger.

Murrow’s McCarthy shows make an absurdity of the modern-day conservative accusation that, say, Dan Rather represents the introduction of a heretofore unknown ideological strain into broadcast journalism. The Murrow broadcasts were far more nakedly political than anything on network television today, and came from a source with a much bigger share of—and more adoration from—the audience than anybody has now.

Lemann first says Murrow was everything but an anchor; then he rebuts contemporary criticism of an anchor's role by using Murrow as an example?!

By confusing the two roles here and in a previous excerpt, Lemann reflects a profound lack of understanding of broadcast journalism--or at best he's just sloppy, which is ironic given his devotion to Murrow.

An evening news anchor in his role of presenting the reports of correspondents detailing the day's events has to take pains to come across as fair and balanced. That's why Dan, Peter and Tom never aired their investigative pieces on the same newscast they anchored, and that's why anchorman Rather's on-air confrontation with George H. W. Bush in 1988 stands out (incidentally, it was subsquently revealed that the Bush campaign planned the confrontation beforehand in a bid to dispel the image of Bush as a weak man).

If anchors display an ideological strain, that actually is a big deal; but it's not a standard that would be applied to the host of a news special, and so to contrast Murrow's political outspokeness with the demeanor of today's evening newscast anchors and reporters is ridiculous.

As someone who worked at the broadcast journalism trade organization that Murrow founded, and as someone who read years ago the transcript of his speech to that group that Clooney's film is built around, it's odd to read articles and criticisms like Lemann's of an industry that I actually have first-hand knowledge of.

I am by no means a Pollyanna when it comes to the state of broadcast news. The patient is nowhere near dead, but it's not exactly in the pink of health either. There are some fundamental micro issues about the medium and the way broadcast news is created on a day-to-day basis that--coupled with the macro structure of the industry, sometimes, perhaps even often times and maybe even increasingly as of late--keep the talented men and women who live and bleed journalism from sharing with the public the full benefit of their daily work.

That's a shame. Because at its best, and when these obstacles are overcome, there's no better way of understanding the world than to watch television news or listen to news on the radio. There's a melding of intellect and emotion that no other medium comes close to offering.

However, no matter the problems in the industry, it has never been better. There is no golden age of broadcast journalism, or any other type of journalism for that matter. We are it.

Even if you throw out the boom in the sheer number of people now devoted to covering the news, ignore the technological improvements that let reporters spend more time digging for stories and less time worrying about creating and transmitting them, if nothing else, this is journalism's golden age because the industry has never been as diverse as it is today. Both in terms of journalists themselves and in terms of access to story sources, so stories are less likely to be ignored or overlooked out of sheer ignorance.

It's hard to overestimate how important this is. Murrow and his boys never even had the chance to ignore or cover poorly 90% of the day's news, because they simply didn't know those stories existed. By the context of his time, he was a great journalist--if we reran his stories today, he would be seen as limited.

Today's diversity, again not just in people themselves but also in the sheer number of ideas they can access via things like the Internet, is not where it should or even could be. But it's still better than it's ever been.

And if you don't believe me, read Murrow's celebrated 1958 speech. Compare the bleak news landscape he describes to the vibrant, noisy one around us today--Murrow's life and he stood for is best exemplified by our times.

I began by saying that our history will be what we make it. If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us.

We are to a large extent an imitative society. If one or two or three corporations would undertake to devote just a small traction of their advertising appropriation along the lines that I have suggested, the procedure would grow by contagion; the economic burden would be bearable, and there might ensue a most exciting adventure--exposure to ideas and the bringing of reality into the homes of the nation.

To those who say people wouldn't look; they wouldn't be interested; they're too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter's opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.

Stonewall Jackson, who knew something about the use of weapons, is reported to have said, "When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.

Photo of Edward R. Murrow from the organization he started, the Radio-Television News Directors Assocation.

Pat the jackal

Imagine if Marion Gordon 'Pat' Robertson were Muslim.

Mullah Robertson--host of a TV show watched daily by a million Muslims, founder of major Muslim organizations, sought out regularly for comment by newspapers and broadcasters, a visible and prominent pillar of the Muslim community.

What would the reaction of the country be if Mullah Robertson said Ariel Sharon's massive stroke was punishment from God?

If Mullah Robertson warned the citizens of a small town that God may forsake them and hit the with a disaster after they decided not to proselytize for Islam in public schools.

If Mullah Robertson called for the assassination of the leader of a country to our south?

I wonder if Pat thanks God ever day for being born white and Christian.

I personally don't care too much about Pat; like his peer Pat Buchanan (what's Pat Sajak like? Pat Benatar?) he serves as a canary in a mine--his open words reveal what his followers and bedfellows try to keep hidden.

But I wonder about people like Daniel Ayalon, Israel's ambassador to the U.S., who called Robertson "a great friend of Israel".

Are you kidding? Robertson's a friend of Israel the same way a farmer's a friend of his slowly-fattening hog.

Pat, like many evangelicals, believes in order for the Rapture to come, Israel must be united--he sees Israel's entire existence as merely a stepping stone to what really matters... and once the Rapture comes, of course, Israelis as well as the rest of the non-evangelical world will be wiped out as God separates the wheat from the chaff and brings his chosen people home.

So I guess if you think a friend is someone who values you as a stepping stone to their eternal life, yeah, Pat Robertson is a friend of Israel (and all Americans).

Photo of Pat Robertson in Jerusalem by Brennan Linsley for the AP, via mentalblog.com.

There's an interesting Slate article, Supersede Me: Evangelicals rethink how to convert Jews that discusses Robertson, evangelicals and Jews that includes these lines:

The shift away from supersessionism is best articulated in the influential 2001 essay "Salvation Is From the Jews" (a quotation from John 4:22), by Richard John Neuhaus, the Catholic priest who edits the journal First Things. Neuhaus argued that American Christians needed to relate to Jews in a new spirit not of proselytism but of mutual edification. Jews in America aren't just potential Christians, he argued. They are unique conversation partners with insights that may help Christians better understand their own faith. "The salvation that is from the Jews cannot be proclaimed or lived apart from the Jews," Neuhaus writes. And elsewhere: "[W]e can and must say that friendship between Jew and Christian can be secured in shared love for the God of Israel." In other words, the continuing existence of Jews is not a failure of evangelism.

But Neuhaus does not mean that Christians should give up on converting Jews. Evangelicals are evangelicals, after all, not Unitarians. Rather, Neuhaus writes, "[W]e can and must say that we reject proselytizing, which is best defined as evangelizing in a way that demeans the other." ...

Most traditional evangelicals would agree with the Jewish literary critic Stanley Fish, who has argued that evangelicals are obligated, if they're intellectually honest, to proclaim frankly that theirs is the universal truth. Any hemming and hawing is just caving in to liberal sensibilities."

Modern day fairy tale

It's very strange, but just about every film review I've ever read gets details about the movie wrong. I'm not just talking about matter of interpretation--I'm talking about easily-verifiable facts that anyone with a half-way decent memory ought to get right to begin with.

It's not even that I have such a superior memory in comparison to the Eberts of the world. Rather, I think that if you 'get' a film, it's easy to remember things about the film--there tends to be an interior logic to things, especially if the film is well-crafted. And even for bad films, things tend to be bad the same way, so wrong details in reviews still jump out.

Just out of curiosity, I looked up Roger Ebert's review of a film I just watched for the first time, The Princess Bride. Which, incidentally, I liked--it's a good mix of sweetness and silliness, with lotsof quotable lines. I don't think it's an astonishing film; perhaps if I'd seen it aged 10 I'd have been bowled over. But I doubt it; it's too self-referential and clever, actually, to really be deemed astonishing.

Anyway, Ebert's eight-paragraph review gets scads of things wrong:

""The Princess Bride" begins as a story that a grandfather is reading out of a book. But already the movie has a spin on it, because the grandfather is played by Peter Falk, and in the distinctive quality of his voice we detect a certain edge. His voice seems to contain a measure of cynicism about fairy stories, a certain awareness that there are a lot more things on heaven and Earth than have been dreamed of by the Brothers Grimm."
-I think this is wrong; the grandfather isn't cynical at all, it's his grandkid who is. The grandfather has a certain roughness to him, but it's feigned and instead conveys great affection.

"The story he tells is about Buttercup, a beautiful princess (Robin Wright) who scornfully orders around a farm boy (Cary Elwes) until the day when she realizes, thunderstruck, that she loves him. She wants to live happily ever after with him, but then evil forces intervene, and she is kidnapped and taken far away across the lost lands, while he is killed."
-I don't find her tone scornful at the beginning, it's more indolent or this faux high-handedness, like she's practicing being nobleborn. He's not really a farm boy--there's really no such thing, that's just what she calls him (it'd be like saying Chewbacca is a 'fuzzball' since Han Solo refers to him that way); he's more like farm hand. She's not really thunderstruck when she discovers she loves him, it's not such a huge gap to overcome, they've constantly been around each other growing up. Her wanting to live happily ever after isn't interrupted by evil forces and she isn't kidnapped and taken far away across the lost lands--he goes away to make his fortune so they can afford to get married, she stays on the farm, then she hears he's been killed by pirates, and then she's selected to be princess and goes willingly because she thinks he's dead and has given up. After that, she's kidnapped, but the stuff in between is pretty key.

"Is this story going to have a lot of kissing in it?" Falk's grandson asks. Well, it's definitely going to have a lot of Screaming Eels.
-Well, there are two screaming eels in one one-minute scene, so that's not really a lot.

"The moment the princess is taken away by agents of the evil Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon), "The Princess Bride" reveals itself as a sly parody of sword and sorcery movies, a film that somehow manages to exist on two levels at once: While younger viewers will sit spellbound at the thrilling events on the screen, adults, I think, will be laughing a lot. In its own peculiar way, "The Princess Bride" resembles "This Is Spinal Tap," an earlier film by the same director, Rob Reiner. Both films are funny not only because they contain comedy, but because Reiner does justice to the underlying form of his story. "Spinal Tap" looked and felt like a rock documentary - and then it was funny. "The Princess Bride" looks and feels like "Legend" or any of those other quasi-heroic epic fantasies - and then it goes for the laughs."
-This is kindof true, but not particularly apt, I feel like there's too much sweetness and purposeful fantasy in PB to be compared to Spinal Tap.

"Part of the secret is that Reiner never stays with the same laugh very long. There are a lot of people for his characters to meet as they make their long journey, and most of them are completely off the wall."
-This is partly true, but one of the noted things about the PB is the same lines do come up again and again, to the point that one of the characters in the movies comments upon it at the end.

"There is, for example, a band of three brigands led by Wallace Shawn as a scheming little conniver and including Andre the Giant as Fezzik the Giant, a crusher who may not necessarily have a heart of gold. It is Shawn who tosses the princess to the Screaming Eels, with great relish."
-This is totally wrong--the princess jumps into the water to get away from the 'brigands,', the whole point is Shawn wants her to die on the border--not in some dark sea--so that he can start a war between two kingdoms. Andre the Giant at all times illustrates he does have a heart of gold, and ironically it's him who saves her from the eels, so that's made up too by Ebert or at least very clumsily written.

"Another funny episode involves Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya, a heroic swordsman with a secret. And the funniest sequence in the film stars Billy Crystal and Carol Kane, both unrecognizable behind makeup, as an ancient wizard and crone who specialize in bringing the dead back to life. (I hope I'm not giving anything away; you didn't expect the princess's loved one to stay dead indefinitely, did you?)"
--Montoya has a secret to the extent he reveals it early in the film as soon as he gets a chance to talk a little--it's not something he even tries to keep secret, if anything he insists on broadcasting it. And his character is not defined as heroic--he's driven by a desire for revenge, while heroes generally are more selfless. The Crystal sequence is no way the funniest--and he (let alone they) doesn't specialize in bringing the dead back to life, it's miracles he specializes in. Ebert makes it seem that the princesses' beloved stays dead from when he's 'killed' by pirates until Crystal shows up, but that's not true either. And Crystal isn't unrecognizable behind makeup, his voice is the most distinctive thing about him and comes through loud and clear.

""The Princess Bride" was adapted by William Goldman from his own novel, which he says was inspired by a book he read as a child, but which seems to have been cheerfully transformed by his wicked adult imagination. It is filled with good-hearted fun, with performances by actors who seem to be smacking their lips and by a certain true innocence that survives all of Reiner's satire. And, also, it does have kissing in it."
-I mean, given that Ebert gets things wrong that I saw with my own eyes, who knows if these additional 'facts' are properly copied from the film's press packet or not....

I actually generally like Ebert as a reviewer because he watches interesting movies, and he doesn't get details wrong any more than any other reviewer. And in the grand scheme of things, it's not such a big deal that film reviewers make mistakes.

It's just odd--and it does make me wonder when I read things other journalists write about things that are not as easily independently verifiable.

Are we living in an age when most people, even those supposedly masters of their craft, lack the ability to closely-read/watch/listen?

Princess Bride production still of Cary Elwes and Robin Wright Penn from Yahoo Australia movie page.

Lions, witches and wardrobes--oh my!

Disney's take on the classic C.S. Lewis work The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe isn't bad, actually. It's not that good--but the special effects, cinematography, and above all Lucy's character as played by newcomer Georgie Henley will keep your interest.

The problems with the film have less to do with Disney, and more to do with two factors beyond its immediate control: the books themselves, and our society today.

First and foremost, the Narnia series consists of seven uneven books. The LWW, although the first written (in 1950) actually comes second in Narnia time, The Magician's Nephew (1955) being a prequel that explains how Narnia and the wardrobe came to be created.

I probably liked MN the best, and LWW second, but all the books suffer from the unfortunate fact the Lewis was a clunky writer and often winds up 'cheating' by just inserting or asserting things.

Rereading them last year, I was struck at how limited Lewis seemed. The writing was often flat, sentences didn't flow, tart asides seemed the work of a cranky old man, and the story just didn't seem all that compelling.

It's tricky writing fantasy, even trickier when you take on the constraint of writing it for children. You need to create a believable, rich world populated with interesting characters tied together by an imaginative plot wrapped up with interior logic. So when John Doe does thing Z or says statement Y, it flows and seems inevitable, so that you don't see the strings dangling at the behest of the author's wand.

The master of this was Tolkien; anyone who's read the Hobbit/Fellowship books can't wait to reread them and yet is always wistful about not being able to rediscover them for the first time each time. Lewis is no Tolkien; Narnia is to Middle Earth as Aesop is to the Bible.

In my opinion Lewis is not even a Philip Pullman, whose His Dark Materials trilogy (the first book of which is the only children's book to ever win the prestigious British Whitbread Prize, placing Pullman in the company of Ted Hughes and Kazuo Ishiguro) is referred to by some as the anti-Narnia.

Maybe I'm expecting too much out of Lewis--after all, I remember being delighted with Narnia the first time I read through the series as a kid. It could be the books just aren't for adults.

Certainly the racism and sexism aren't for (most) adults. Don't get me wrong--I like Lewis as an author; Out of the Silent Planet is quite interesting, Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity are thought-provoking, and I'm definitely giving my kids Narnia.

But the racism is in the books like the N-word is in Huck Finn. Read the series and you'll find yourself cringing time and again. Lewis, after all, is a product of his times (and religion). I'd typify his as quietly seeping racism and sexism. It doesn't rush out at you and Lewis probably wasn't conscious of it, but it's always there, like the old man on the porch who good-naturedly tries to pat the head of his "Oriental" neighbor's kids while praising their work ethic.

The Horse and His Boy in particular really plays up the white people are the natural leaders over the swarthy masses aspect, but it's a foundational theme of every book.

The racism leaps out at you in a visual manner in the Disney film--four white children fall into a world and instantly are accepted as the natural leaders (think for a moment--if four black kids took over running a war with no previous training, don't you think the audience would've groaned a little at such PC-filmmaking?!), battling a White Queen (read race traitor) with her general (big black bull) leading an army of mostly swarthy and non-white foes (there's even a fleeting scene in the movie with evil Chinese-looking archers).

It'd be odd, actually, if Lewis were anything but racist and imperial--everything in Narnia is discernably from his post-WWII British perspective, when having been devastated and reeling from the loss of their sun-never-sets empire English authors churned out fantasy like never before, all emphasizing plucky yet cool white characters coming into their natural due after trials and tribulations against the forces of darkness. Ah, the poor British, rarely in the course of human events have so many lost so much so quickly!

But bad as the racism is, the sexism is what really rankles. Few people, after all, are holding up Narnia as a paragon for relations between whites and non-whites; but people are pushing it onto little girls everywhere hoping they'll model Lucy and Susan (wonder what they'd think of Polly or Aravis or Jill....)

Yet rereading the series as an adult, I thought Lewis definitely sexist, if not misogynistic. Philip Pullman wrote a much-celebrated (but short) essay that mentions this.

Most obvious is the White Queen as the serpent cum Eve cum women, a trope that appears literally in the Magician's Nephew but is always there elsewhere. Part of her sin is she dares usurp the natural order of things, trying to take over in a world where she does not belong after having literally destroyed her own world.

Thematically and literally, in the end Lewis' women are all subordinate to his male characters. The ultimate authority is always male, and there are many scenes in his series where the male character--Aslan, Peter, and others--is paid homage to in a way that emphasizes their manliness.

In the movie, for example, Peter forces Edmund to wear a girl's coat at one point, during the period in which Peter's asserting who's in charge. (Incidentally, how odd is it that the children spend much of their time in Narnia wearing fur coats while talking to beavers and other animals)

Lucy is the pluckiest of Lewis' females, but it's important to realize she's a young girl and hence not for real. She doesn't count ultimately, and indeed it's been suggested Lewis liked his women to stay child-like.

While Susan, who is womanly and could be on an equal footing with Peter, is consistently portrayed as shrewish and at the end of the series is singled out for punishment.

Like the Christian church, ultimately Lewis's women are all under the male's rule like children/parents, and submit to the natural authority of the male. Again, he was merely a product of his times--I'm not condemning him or saying not to read him. Let's just not close our eyes (or misread) and hold him up as some visionary.

Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker touches on some of these points about the underlying power dynamics of Narnia; he brings up another interesting point that gets at how Narnia isn't really a shill for Christianity, unless you're Christian the way Jerry Falwell is:

Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side.

If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory.

A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.

Whatever happened to the meekness and not lording it over others that seems so much a part of Jesus's teachings?!

Like the lion vs. the donkey, given the priviledged position white Christian males occupy in our society it's difficult to buy into the right's view of a religion under siege. And it's even harder to believe Jesus, were he to reappear, would gather Christians as his bretheren. Christ was always for the powerless--camel/needle's eye is the heart of his teachings; he'd be apalled by Falwell and his ilk, no matter how many times they whisper his name at night.

Gopnick's article also discusses how Lewis came to Christianity as simply the culmination of his lifetime interest in myth. It's an important point, because evangelicals are trying to reinvent Narnia as Christian allegory, much as they've tried to recast the Constitution as a Christian document (somewhere the founding fathers are rolling their eyes in their graves).

And indeed it seems to me the poor misreading of literature that Marxist scholars pushed in the 70s has given way to the poverty of evangelicals trying to suck the marrow out of every act of creation by anyone who happens to be a Christian.

Did C.S. Lewis Create Narnia as an Allegory? has an interesting take on this; I would add that to see Narnia, or Tolkien's works, as Christian allegory is to demean and sadly miss the entire point of what they believed and created.

Drafting it as allegory means you're saying the true heart of the work is in what it says about Christianity. But both authors strongly believed creating a world for its own sake was their highest purpose, and would be horrified and saddened by those who parsed their works, sifting out 'mere story elements' while looking for the Christian bits.

In Lewis' case especially, he wrote Narnia as children's stories--they were informed by his experience as a Christian, but in a way perhaps unimaginable to evangelical Christians today, the relationship of an Anglican and his faith was comparable to the relationship of a veteran to the war in which he fought.

It's a major, perhaps the major, experience in shaping who you are and what you believe and will permeate what you write. But it is still an experience mediated by you the person. It is not all-pervading, it is not your soul--otherwise, you suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome... or pre-rapture stress syndrome.

For both Lewis and Tolkien WWI and WWII, their love of mythology, and the effects of academia were as important in shaping their writing as their Christian background. You may as well read Narnia as a WWII allegory (well, the White Queen is a Nazi, Aslan the Americans...), which would likewise sap some of its life away and serve as blinkers on your understanding of the work.

It's not surprising to me that evangelical Christians are trying to claim Narnia for their own. It's just another dying gasp of this most-fearful segment of society, along with the putting the Christ back in Christmas hoopla, the puffing of Mel Gibson's wretched and anti-Semitic Passion, claiming credit for Bush's re-election, and pretending that Christianity is under siege.

It's not surprising that Lewis's mild racism and sexism feels familiar to the religious right, acquainted as it is with much uglier manifestations of two sins that apparently were left off their God's tablets.

But you know, Narnia is no Earth, and England circa WWII is not America today. Those days are over.

Frame grab from Disney's Narnia from unidentified website.

A museum grows in Manhattan

So I have a traditional list of the best museums I've been to:
-British Museum in London, gives you a good sense of all the things this little island nation has done, both positive--spectacular reading room--and negative--stolen, poorly-displayed Elgin Marbles.

-Imperial War Museum in London, possibly the protypical only-the-British museum--only people with an almost pathological sense of superiority could spend their free time cheerily visiting a recreated WWI trench, sitting through a simulated a WWII blitz, and climbing over a dowdy British-made Mark V tank in order to snap photos of an immense German Panzer.

-Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, a brand-new, huge collection smack in the middle of downtown that somehows smacks of authenticity.

-National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan, it's essentially thousands of years of China's cultural treasures, stolen away just ahead of the Communist's victory--unbelievably, the intricately carved ivory and beautiful jade jewelry all survived the long trip unscathed.

-Freer and Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., a world-class Asian art collection coupled with unparalleled arts and cultural programming, staffed by some of the nicest people around.

-Noguchi Museum of New York, dedicated to sculptures and other works of Isamu Noguchi, a Japanese American who seemingly existed out of time.

-The Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth is worth going to just for its Louis Kahn-designed building (fitting that it's the most prominent photo on the website).

-The Terra Museum in Chicago is my favorite small museum--it's tucked into a modest building right along the Magnificent Mile's shops, and is a wonderfully calm place to find some unexpected gems.

-The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the best museum I've ever gone to.

So now I've got to add a 10th museum to the list: The Rubin Museum of Art, dedicated to the art of the Himalayas.

It's located in Chelsea, near Loehmann's, in a building that was the original Barneys department store. Two of the amazingly friendly and knowledgeable gallery guides told us Donald Rubin, the museum's founder along with his wife Shelley, was looking for a site to open his museum in, happened along, went in, liked the building, and bought it.

It's that kind of a place--the collection is essentially whatever caught the Shelleys' eyes, the descriptions on the walls are refreshingly straightforward (WHAT is Himalayan art; WHERE does it come from; WHY does it look this way; HOW is it made), the staff walks around and talks to you, the space is airy and simply-designed, and there's even an area where you can write and submit your own exhibit captions.

And because the museum, organized around its geographic idea, is inherently multi-cultural and multi-media, you leave feeling as if you've really gotten a thorough education about the art of the region and the cultural and religious beliefs of its Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and Bon adherents.

Bon? Even one of the Rubin curators said she'd never heard of this faith before coming to the museum. It seems to have hundreds of thousands of practioners today, mainly living in Tibet--but its roots may stretch back thousands--5,000?!--years, and who knows, like Sanskrit gave birth to many of the world's languages, maybe Bon is one of our uber-faiths.

The Bon Foundation says:

The ancient roots of Bon religion derive from a profound respect for nature and emphasize the healing of physical and environmental as well as spiritual afflictions.

As Indian Buddhism was being established in Tibet, many native Bon elements were incorporated into the incoming religion, resulting in a distinct religion known today as Tibetan Buddhism.

In turn, Buddhist influences are abundantly evident in Bon religion as it currently exists. The two religions are distinct in many ways but share a strong and identical commitment to bringing an end to all suffering.

Although they trace their origins to ancient times, Bonpo practice a living doctrine dedicated to perpetuating the teachings of their founder Tonpa Shenrab, who occupies a preeminent position in Bon culture similar to that of Sakyamuni in Buddhism. Tonpa Shenrab's teachings are collectively known as Yungdrung Bon or the "tradition of Eternal Wisdom" and include the Nine Ways of Bon that outline the laws of cause and effect on the path to spiritual liberation.

Image from Rubin's 'The Demonic Divine in the Himalayan Art' exhibit.

Our blood and theirs

Someone could create an entire blog or PhD thesis around this article: Raised as Catholic in Belgium, She Died as a Muslim Bomber.

Religion, terrorism, racism, xenophobia, generation gap, nihilism, capitalism, Times speak, provincialism, sexism, cultural blindness, it's all in there.

I mean, where to begin?

[Muriel Degauque's] unlikely journey into militant Islam stunned Europe and for many people was an incomprehensible aberration, a lost soul led astray. But her story supports fears among many law enforcement officials and academics that converts to Europe's fastest-growing religion could bring with them a disturbing new aspect in the war on terror: Caucasian women committed to one of the world's deadliest causes.

The Times then tells us what these women are thinking:

Most of those in the conservative ranks are motivated by spiritual quests or are attracted to what they regard as an exotic culture.

And then, buried in the piece, is this:

Her mother told neighbors that she was pleased because Islam had helped her daughter stop drinking and doing drugs.

Muriel's Europe, I think, is lost; a rapidly aging Caucasian population is struggling against an influx of young non-white immigrants that it desperately needs to do the menial work and pay taxes, but that it deeply resents, is bewildered by and fears, the way old people everywhere always are by the young.

The age-old generation gap is supercharged by this clash of cultures that is finally stripping away the genteel racism Europe has always worn, and revealing the ugly bedrock racism that comes out when you fear for surival.

Survival on a personal level (terrorism) and societal level (Christian Europe not just being tuned out by the young, but being actively saturated by Islam).

And it's the old's fear of losing their young to such foreign forces as Islam and love across color lines that pervades the Times piece.

To this ancient conflict add the simultaneous crumbling of an economic system built upon the anachronism of socialism, speeded by the sense that new (non-white) powers are afoot in the world and are leaving old Europe behind.

A similar collision between just the generational and economic forces was sufficient to forge the soixante-huitards and barricadiers, the 1968 generation of radical political leftists that went from running from police in the streets to reshaping their countries by running for office and running businesses.

It is ironically this very generation of grown-up radicals that now finds itself at war with Muslims. And it is war, not civil war--because for most Caucasian Europeans, these Muslims among them are not Europeans; they are not the prodigal sons of '68, whose terrorism was all within the family and something to be grappled with and gone through together and ultimately worked out, no matter how hard and long the journey.

For Caucasian Europeans, the 'Muslim problem' is something that could end with separation. This 'if all else fails we'll just send them back' mentality is at the root of the ugliness in the streets.

This mentality allowing for the wholesale excisement of 'foreign' elements, like much else at the root of the Holocaust, wasn't brutally ripped out with the end of World War II.

There is still no concept in Europe today of citizenship being open to all; no parallel to the American assumption that anyone born in a country is a citizen like everyone else, or that all you need to do is live here X years and pass Y test and you're a full citizen.

Europe, to a degree unimaginable in the U.S., is still run on blood (yours and your parents), religion, and skin color.

Germany is a good example--believe it or not, until five years ago, in the words of the BBC, "an ethnic German from Kazakhstan who has never lived in Germany can claim citizenship, but not a Turk born and raised in Germany and speaking only German."

Until 2000, as the Germany Embassy in Canada explains, Germany's citizenship laws were "based upon the principle of the jus sanguinis ("right of blood"): a child inherits German citizenship from German parents."

But perhaps caught up in the euphoria of the new millennium, the Germans changed their laws:

The most important change in Germany's citizenship law is that the principle of jus sanguinis - of defining citizenship by inheritance - is supplemented with the principle of the jus soli ("right of soil") - of defining citizenship by place of birth.

Five years isn't much time for your average hausfrau to think of the Turkish immigrant she passes every day in the street as her equal, in the eyes of the state or otherwise.

Of course, even if you're born in Germany you're not a citizen unless one of your parents has lived there for eight years; as for becoming a naturalized citizen, a U.S. government study tells us it's still "at the discretion of the German naturalization authority."

Although this post is about Europe, a recent article in Japan Review entitled "Measuring Citizenship: Is Japan an Outlier?" adds additional perspective. The abstract suffices:

This paper explores the notion that Japan is an outlier in its definitions of citizenship. It looks at 190 states around the world and their sample political aggregates in order to test if "jus solis," or "citizenship by birth," is a common feature of all states. Analysis of the data indicates the opposite: that jus solis conferring states are within the minority. Japan is not an outlier.

The study finds that only two countries in Europe, France and Ireland, recognize anyone born there as a citizen.

But it's one thing for de jure recognition; citizenship in the eyes of your neighbor is very different. At least Caucasian Germans find it difficult to hide from their racism--it's just too obvious being there in black and white.

The Caucasian French, perhaps with typical Gallic ostrich flair, seem intent on proclaiming their model egalitarianism even as their cities burn.

As Semou Diouf said in the Times:

"I was born in Senegal when it was part of France. I speak French, my wife is French and I was educated in France." The problem "is the French don't think I'm French."

The Times piece continues:

That, in a nutshell, is what lies at the heart of the unrest that has swept France in the past two weeks: millions of French citizens, whether immigrants or the offspring of immigrants, feel rejected by traditional French society, which has resisted adjusting a vision of itself forged in fires of the French Revolution. The concept of French identity remains rooted deep in the country's centuries-old culture, and a significant portion of the population has yet to accept the increasingly multiethnic makeup of the nation. Put simply, being French, for many people, remains a baguette-and-beret affair.

The riots in France are just the latest in Europe's struggle with thousands of years of inured racism--when everyone around you has always been white, it's easy to spend your time lecturing America about its 'race problem'.

America is without question the least racist place in the world, which says something about how bad it is in other countries. We talk about race and struggle with it all the time because we have to--there are too many African Americans and Hispanics and Asian Americans to ignore the way Europe has tried to in various forms ignore or erase non-Caucasians. An archetypical example being the French's repeated avowals that it's their fundamental egalitarian nature driving things like banning headscarfs and yarmulkes in schools as ostentatious displays of faith (but not crucifixes or observing Catholic holidays).

Maybe the last word should just be this:

Ms. Degauque's mother answered the door at her home in Monceau-sur-Sambre on Monday, her blond hair neatly coiffed but wearing a weary frown. "I have nothing to say," she said, "I'm mourning my daughter."

Tokyo Orimpikku

I've been watching Tokyo Orimpikku, an idiosyncratic documentary of the 1964 Olympics by the Japanese director Kon Ichikawa.

From the opening scenes--which list each and every one of the previous 17 Olympics and host city--to the amateur joy of the athletes at the closing ceremony, it's unlike any sports-related film I've seen.

There are tight closeups of athletes, to the point that you feel disoriented not being able to see the context. Long minutes of natural sound from competition--just grunts, groans, screams, thumps, cheers.

And although the documentary roughly follows the chronological order of the Games in show each sport, from the perspective of someone used to the scripted storytelling of contemporary televised sporting events there can seem to be no rhyme or reason to what is shown.

Ichikawa spends minutes on minor events while big-name athletes in the glamour sports are seen only in passing. And he often doesn't follow an event through to conclusion. (You may feel the urge to visit this site afterwards).

This is the Olympics of gymnast Larisa Latynina, swimmer Dawn Fraser, and 5-time gold medalist Deszo Gyarmati--but the competition footage Ichikawa shows tends to linger on athletes who catch his eye for sometimes inscrutable reasons. It may just be a case of the camera happens to be where it happens to be, something rarely seen in today's world of replays from every conceivable angles coverage.

(A contemporary New York Times review says Ichikawa used 100 cameramen and 148 technicians to shoot 16 sports over two weeks.)

But once you adjust, you settle into the rhythm of his world. There's a certain nostalgic aspect to watching the film today--this is very much the 60s of mostly sunshine lighting up gray stone buildings, when the narration dwells on the brotherhood of the Games it doesn't jar or ring hokey. It's a world where Bobby and Martin are still alive, Vietnam hadn't exploded, Munich is just a town in Germany....

You understand what hosting the Olympics meant to post-war Japan; the feeling that they were once again taking their place among the world's leading nations after the self-inflicted devastation of World War II. Just by seeing the buildings and streets of Tokyo you get a feel for the gritty rebuilding the Japanese had undergone.

And Ichikawa lingers on the faces of ordinary Japanese, the spectators in the stadiums, fans lining the streets--bright excited kids, giggling groups of pretty teenage girls, strong and clean-cut young men in their suits, the spotted and deeply-etched faces of the old.

And even Emperor Hirohito makes his appearance as one among many spectators; there is no deity, just a spectacled man who haltingly opens the Games reading from notes.

My favorite scenes include:
-Russians and Eastern Europeans walking around straight out of central casting (these are the Communists who Americans feared were taking over)
-Tight shots of shot-putters with the shot up against their necks, with cuts to the shot thumping into the turf
-A Japanese gymnast's clean, exuberant floor exercises
-A runner from the "new nation" of Chad alone wherever he goes
-Various shots of chattering athletes and their food
-Segue from Herculean spotlit weightlifters to struggling wrestlers
-Joe Frazier walking off quietly under the stands after winning the gold
-Japanese women beating the Russians in the volleyball finals
-The slogging, rainy walking event (subject of a unique Cary Grant film)
-Elite marathon runners stopping to grab their drinks during the race

It's interesting that the other well-known documentary about an Olympic Game is Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia, about the 1936 Berlin Games.

In my mind, Japan and Germany are twinned:
-Historically hated and feared by their neighbors, yet also traditionally a regional power
-Hard-working, arrogant, disciplined, racist populace not known for their sense of humor
-Guttural language built on compound words
-Appreciative of clean art
-Obsession with women's roles in the home
-Makers of fine automobiles in robotized plants
-Perhaps best-described as 'brutally professional'?

Ichikawa, though, is the farthest thing from a fascist, unlike Riefenstahl, who in many ways (down to her stabs at revisionism) can be seen as one of the uber-fascists. (For more on this, see Fascinating Fascism, Susan Sontag's seminal essay on Riefenstahl and the aesthetics of fascism.)

I found Tokyo Orimpikku beautiful to watch--like the best in Japanese art it has a sense of purity without heavy purpose. There is no coercion in this film; you take it or leave it as you may, you won't feel guilty if you get a little bored and fast-forward.

And while Ichikawa does have his points (Hiroshima, participation, rebirth) he doesn't marshal film/sound/narration/script/graphics in lockstep to make sure you get it.

It's a refreshing break from contemporary sports coverage with its multiple announcers setting up the storyline, telling you what you're seeing, and circling what you missed; and the telegraphed films of Hollywood.

Photo of the Olypmic torch passing in front of Mount Fuji from Tokyo Orimpikku, via Terra Media.

Best books read in 2005

-Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series: I'm through the tenth book in what a Times reviewer called "the best historical novels ever written." They deserve all the superlatives they get--nominally they're about a British captain and ship's doctor during the Napoleonic wars (early 1800s), but really they're about men, friendship, art/science, politics, love....

And despite mostly taking place on ships in Her Majesty's Royal Navy, O'Brian books reminds me of Jane Austen's: both create a cozy, sharply-defined world within which they set loose interesting people. The musings and conversational asides of the characters and the author are often pithy, you find yourself reading and then laughing as you get it, or thinking wow, that's really it exactly. I actually prefer O'Brian to Austen--her world, perhaps because I'm a guy, reads like a long narrow hallway after a while, whereas his feels wide as the real world.

-Ann Patchett's Bel Canto: Every so often you read a book that everyone else has read and wonder if everyone else enjoyed it the way you did, or if for them it's just the latest Tuesdays with Morrie. The plot, based on true events, revolves around a South American revolutionary group taking an assortment of glittering elites hostage at an embassy party. There's a renowned soprano, a Japanese industrialist, an essential interpreter, and a pretty revolutionary--the plot bringing such different worlds in one space is interesting, but Patchett's prose, her ability to convey things like longing and telling mannerisms makes Bel Canto.

-Christopher Paolini's Eldest: He's barely 21, but Paolini is already one of the better fantasy writers out there. His first book, Eragon, set up the world of a boy and his dragon; I didn't have the same feeling of amazement reading the second book, but I did love reading it, it's an interesting world he's created and I'm impatient for the final book. It's more Harry Potter (you see the strings being pulled but can't wait to turn the page) than Urusla LeGuin (wow prose you reread and roll around in your head). But the home-schooled Paolini knows his stuff.

-Philip Roth's The Plot Against America: I'd never finished any novels by Roth/Bellow/Updike/Mailer; but I can see why Roth is in the modern pantheon (my own would include Rushdie/Hemingway/E.B. White/Nabokov). PAT imagines the fascist Charles Lindbergh beating FDR in 1940, from the point of view of a Jewish boy growing up in New Jersey. It's a "big" book--you could see it as a gloss of post-9/11 America, but I think Roth would find that too limiting. He's looking at the impact of fear on society, whether Weimar Germany or Caesar's Rome or Hobbes' England. But his ideas don't come at the price of story and character, PAT could just as easily be read as a classic American coming-of-age tale.

Photo of Patrick O'Brian from W. W. Norton & Company.

Upon the waters

If abortion--the ending of a fetus' life before it comes to full term--is murder, then shouldn't all miscarriages be investigated as possible homicides?

Or manslaughter or negligent homicide?

By right, shouldn't cities be hiring detectives to comb hospital records and track down the (crocodile?) tearing would-be-mothers?

NIH numbers show "among women who already know they are pregnant, nearly 15 percent will have a miscarriage," so there would have to be a lot of detectives.

'Ma'am, I'm going to have to ask you a few question. About your diet, level of exercise, work habits. Also, as in any other police investigation, I'm going to need contact information for your husband/parents/neighbors/coworkers.'

I think like much that is ugly in our society, the rhetoric of strident pro-lifers is made possible by perceived distance and a worldview of us/them.

As Christians, they've always been uncannily comfortable leading, teaching and--ultimately and always--in frustration proscribing for heathens the world over.

They're raised clear-eyed on their hill, grounded by faith and guided by the book. How else could 19-year-olds become missionaries and tell 91-year-olds (often through interpreters) the life they and all their ancestors lived is dead wrong.

This sense of us: grace/you: dark is sometimes tested for pro-lifers when a daughter or fellow church-goer chooses to have an abortion.

But if pro-lifers start inviting the government into their bedrooms whenever their wives or daughters miscarry, they could put to rest charges of hypocrisy a lot more frequently.

There's plenty of room in the ark, come on in.

Painting is from the Zubdat-al Tawarikh miniatures, via Dr. G’nsel Renda of Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey.