The best account of Hollywood's anti-American films

... is in Maclean's by Mark Steyn. Here. It will disappear after awhile, so check it out.

I myself don't take movies except as light entertainment. I also regard the "documentary film" as, by definition, propaganda - and that includes even ones with which I agree 100%, such as Indoctrinate U. Cognition requires reading, not watching. Anyone who gets their politics or, worse, the confirmation of their politics, from the movies and actors, music and musicians, teachers or professors deserves exactly what they get. Excerpts from Steyn:

***
Hollywood shoots itself in the foot:

Its anti-war films may be aimed at Bush,
but what they're really destroying is storytelling

Maclean's
MARK STEYN
November 15, 2007

A few months back, Peter Berg attended a test screening of his new film in California — not Malibu or Beverly Hills, but out in farm country. The Kingdom is about FBI agents (Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, etc.) investigating a terrorist attack on Americans in Saudi Arabia, and finally, about two hours in, the star talent gets to kill a bunch of jihadists. As Entertainment Weekly described it, "the packed house went completely bonkers, erupting in cheers" — and poor old Berg was distraught. "I was nervous it would be perceived as a jingoistic piece of propaganda, which I certainly didn't intend," the director agonized. "I thought, 'Am I experiencing American bloodlust?' "

You really want an answer to that? Okay, here goes: No. It's not American bloodlust. As they say on Broadway, the audience doesn't lie, and, when they're trying to tell you something, it helps not to cover your ears. For all Mr. Berg's pains, The Kingdom was dismissed by the New York Times as "Syriana for dummies." That's to say, instead of explicitly fingering sinister Americans as the bad guys, it merely posited a kind of dull pro forma equivalence between the Yanks and the terrorists. It came out, oh, a week and a half ago and it's already forgotten in the avalanche of anti-war movies released since. There's Lions for Lambs and In the Valley of Elah and Redacted — no, wait, Rendition. No, my mistake. There's a Redacted and a Rendition — one's about American soldiers being rapists, one's about American intelligence officials being torturers. Every Friday night at the multiplex, Mr. and Mrs. America are saying, "Hmm, shall we see the movie where our boys are the torturers? Or the one where our boys are the rapists? How about the film where the heroic soldier refuses to fight? Or the one where he does fight and the army covers up the truth about his death?" And then they go see Fred Claus, which pulled in three times as much money as Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs on both films' opening weekend.

As Roger L. Simon of Pajamas Media (and a screenwriter himself) put it: "Hicks Nix Peaceniks' Pix." These films tank at the box office, and disappear from the shopping malls before you've had time to refill your popcorn, and next Friday there's a brand new critically acclaimed anti-war movie in its place. The faster they fall, the more Hollywood is convinced of the "courage" of its "dissent." Tired of hailing pictures no one goes to see, the New York Times' film critic A. O. Scott now routinely pre-empts accusations that the drearily consistent world view of these works is "anti-American." Of Rendition, he wrote:

"It has timely issues and serious ambitions, and it also has movie stars — Reese Witherspoon with a huge pregnant belly! Meryl Streep with a Southern accent! Jake Gyllenhaal with sad, sleepy eyes! — as well as young romance, breathless chases and violent explosions. Honestly, what could be more American than that?"

Mr. Scott trembles, albeit accidentally, on the brink of a great insight here. Hollywood assumes that if you have enough beautiful stars making out and getting shot at and running up stairwells and diving through windows and outrunning the fireball, that that is sufficiently "American" (as Mr. Scott puts it) that the absence of a heroic narrative won't matter. The movies have divorced the form from the content, or, if you prefer, the telling from the story. You see it most obviously in almost any remake. Take the old 3.10 to Yuma, which chugged in last month, remodelled for the 21st century. The 1957 western was nobody's idea of a masterpiece but it had a moral seriousness: Van Heflin's broke and he'll lose his farm so he agrees to escort a violent felon to meet the train that will take him to prison. He's doing it for the 200 bucks — or so he thinks. But along the way he comes to understand that he's doing it for rather more. When a disaffected sibling of one of Glenn Ford's victims tries to kill him, Heflin prevents him — because, in a civilization as fragile as the young West, he thinks it important that it be the law that dispatches the prisoner.

All that's gone in the new version, with Christian Bale in the Heflin role and Russell Crowe as Ford. For Bale, it's just about the money. Now the guy who tries to intercept the prisoner en route is not a vigilante who wishes to shortcut the law but the law itself — a rogue cop as brutal as the man he pursues. Oh, and the 2007 3.10 also gives us a Pinkerton agent who enjoys killing Injuns just for kicks, which even Russell Crowe primly draws the line at. There's no moral universe, just a rotten state in which wickedness and violence are tempered only by degrees of politically correct squeamishness.

A decade or so back at some confab at Paramount, I met Lionel Chetwynd, a writer and producer who was raised in Montreal and in his pre-showbiz days served in the Black Watch (the Royal Highland Regiment), in the course of which he met several Canadian veterans of the Dieppe raid. After recounting their story one night at a party in Malibu, he was invited to pitch it as a project to some network honcho. He laid out the bones of the plot — a suicidal dry run for D-Day against a heavily fortified European port.

"Who's the enemy?" asked the network exec.

"Hitler," said Chetwynd. "The Nazis."

"No, no, no," she pressed. "Who's the real enemy?"

"It was the first time I realized," Chetwynd later told Cathy Seipp, "that for many people, evil such as Nazism can only be understood as a cipher for evil within ourselves." Who's the real enemy? Ike. Churchill. The Imperial General Staff. Us.

Ed Driscoll, who's been scanning the shrivelled horizon of an ever more parochial movie industry for some years now, likes to cite that anecdote as a kind of shorthand for the Hollywood aesthetic: who's the real enemy? In this season's crop of movies, the enemy is never al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Baathists . . . Sure, they're out there somewhere at the fringe of events, but they're just Hitchcock's MacGuffin — the pretext for the real story. And that means the heroes can never be, say, a bunch of U.S. Marines who leap from their Humvee on the outskirts of Ramadi because something goofy's going on. No, the heroes have to be dogged journalists or crusading lawyers or obstinate wives who refuse to swallow the official explanation. And the real enemy are renegade government officials, covert agencies, right-wing senators, Halliburton. And, unsurprisingly, despite the unpopularity of Bush and the Iraq war, the public simply doesn't buy the idea of their country as a 24/7 cover-up for rape, torture and war profiteering.

Which brings us back to those yelps of delight when the Americans clobbered the jihadists two hours into the test screening of The Kingdom. Pace Peter Berg, it's not "bloodlust": if you want that, you're best to stick to the amoral fetishization of violence in the 3.10 remake. What the preview crowd were telling Berg is, hey, we'd love to see one film where our guys kick serious terrorist butt — and there isn't one, and there hasn't been one for six long years. If you buy the argument that Hollywood's anti-Americanism derives necessarily from its role as purveyor of entertainment to the entire planet, well, so what? Terrorists killed a bunch of people in Bali, Madrid, London. Alongside the kick-ass Americans, sign Hugh Grant as an MI6 agent and Penelope Cruz as his Spanish dolly bird and Cate Blanchett as the head of the Australian SAS and Russell Crowe as her Kiwi bit of rough. As long as the enemy's the enemy, and not a Dick Cheney subsidiary. It's fine to show the American war machine warts and all, but Hollywood is showing only the warts — and, even if you stick perky little Reese Witherspoon in the middle of it, it's still just another pustulating carbuncle.

***
(Etc.)

US official oaths of office

It's a minor point, but Joe Klein is mistaken in his description of the presidential oath of office. Klein says, in his new Time magazine column:

As Dodd said, when the President takes the oath of office, he (or she) promises two things: to protect the Constitution and to protect the nation against enemies, foreign and domestic.

That's not actually what the Constitution says at Article II, Section 1. The required presidential oath reads instead:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Klein appears to be conflating the presidential oath with the Congressional oath or the military oath (whether upon enlistment or the somewhat more elaborate commissioning oath) which do use the words "enemies domestic and foreign":

"I, {insert name here}, do solemnly swear, (or affirm,) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God." (Note that the last sentence is not required to be said if the speaker has a personal or moral objection.)

Congressional and other oaths of office (I'm using Wikipedia here, but yes, it's correct) also are oaths of office to the Constitution, not the nation, the state, or any other entity. The Constitution specifies in Article VI, clause 3:

"The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

For other officials, including members of Congress, it specifies they "shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation to support this constitution."

At the start of each new U.S. Congress, in January of every odd-numbered year, those newly elected or re-elected Congressmen - the entire House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate - recite an oath:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.

"So help me God" is customarily added to the end of the oath, but cannot be required as part of the oath of office in the United States. This oath is also taken by the Vice President, members of the Cabinet, and all other civil and military officers and federal employees other than the President. While the oath-taking dates back to the First Congress in 1789, the current oath is a product of the 1860s, drafted by Civil War-era members of Congress intent on ensnaring traitors.

***
Well, do these distinctions make any difference? Obviously it's a minor quibble with Klein's column. However, the larger point is more significant than one might imagine.

First, it is not accurate to say that the oath of the president, or of Congress, or of any member of the military is to protect the nation against enemies foreign or domestic. It is to support the Constitution. The same is true of the miltary oath and every other federal oath.

Earlier generations of Americans thought this was, in fact, a great distinction - the obligation to the Constitution, rather than to the "nation," was a formative part of our civic constitutional religion, something understood as separating the great American experiment from the mere passions of nation and nationalism of the countries and imperialisms of Europe. Certainly defending the Constitution means protecting the people of the United States from their enemies, but it has always meant protection in a stronger and broader sense of a certain political system embodied by the Constitution.

Second, the presidential oath of office is different from every other oath in specifically using the phrase "preserve, protect and defend" the Constitution rather than simply an oath to "support." Lincoln, in particular, believed that the difference in language, and the more pressing language of the presidential oath gave the president greater power and executive scope of action in emergency - he believed it gave him constitutional authority for at least part of his unprecedented exercises of presidential power in the Civil War.

It is noteworthy that Vice Presidential counsel David Addington - someone whom I have described as somewhere between Zen monk and thug - is painted by Jack Goldsmith in The Terror Presidency as a close student of Lincoln and a believer in the view that those additional words in the presidential oath carry a genuine distinction for executive authority.

(ps. I see Diane Marie Amann making much the same correction re the exact language of the oaths, here. Great minds, of course, naturally think alike!)

An alignment of interests in the Middle East?

Could Mark Helprin be right about a rare alignment of interests among Israel, the Palestinian Authority, the US, and other Arab states? Here in the Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2007. Excerpt:

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The United States has fought the war in Iraq as if history, strategy, maneuver, preparation, foresight, and common sense did not exist. Nonetheless, the impact of the war has been to shatter the politics of the region and create new opportunities, one of which is the potential for a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. Some quarters of government, burnt by the predictable failure of the current administration to transform the political culture of the Middle East into that of a Vermont town meeting, are pessimistic by analogy. But the analogy is invalid. The conditions are not the same, the task is different, and, unlike the United States, Israel has no timetable for withdrawal from the region—as its enemies well know.

As America blunts its sword in Iraq it has relieved Iran of much anxiety in regard to its own vulnerabilities, set up a predominantly Shiite state in Baghdad, and made the Arab world more receptive to Iranian views. The Shia ascendancy comprises a resurgent though weak Iran, a Shiite Iraqi state in critical condition, a Shiite rump in Lebanon chastened by the war it "won" a year ago (with such a victory, defeat is unnecessary), and the alignment with Iran of Syria and Sunni radicals such as Hamas.

Contrary to the received wisdom, last summer Hezbollah overplayed its hand. Israel emerged shaken but with few casualties and an economy that actually grew during hostilities. The vaunted Hezbollah Katyushas had a 1% kill rate, with not one launched in the year thereafter. Israel showed that upon provocation it could and would destroy anything in its path, thus creating a Lebanese awakening that has split the country and kept Hezbollah fully absorbed. Though Hezbollah is rearming, it remains shy of Israel.

Hamas, too, has overplayed its hand, providing the opening from which a Palestinian-Israeli peace may emerge. For the first time since 1948, a fundamental division among the Palestinians presents conditions in which the less absolutist view may shelter and take hold. Mahmoud Abbas is weak in many ways, but he has decisively isolated the radical tendencies. Hamas loyalists in the West Bank (according to the latest polling, less than 25%) face a different demographic in a different economy that can be richly watered if Israel is wise enough to do so. Surrounded and interpenetrated by the Israeli army and Palestinian Authority forces now strengthened by Israel and the West, Hamas is not what it once was.

In economically besieged Gaza, Hamas is corralled by Israel, Egypt, and the sea, its apparent strength exaggerated by the fact that Abbas did not choose to fight on this battlefield but rather to profit by its loss, much as did King Hussein in regard to the West Bank. The starving and oppressed Palestinians who watch Hamas fire rockets the chief effect of which is to summon Israeli tanks, may soon see a prosperous West Bank at the brink of statehood and at peace with its neighbors and the world. The quarantine of Gaza will cast a bright light upon the normalization of the West Bank. And although Hamas portrays Abbas as a collaborator, it is they who may be held to account for keeping more than a million of their own people hostage to a gratuitous preference for struggle over success.
* * *
The sudden and intense commonality of interest between the Palestinian Authority and Israel is the equivalent of the Israeli-Egyptian "anvil" of 1977. But unlike 1977, the Arabs, in the second circle, have largely reversed position. Fearful of Iran, they are rushing to bend the rejectionists against the anvil. They have so much to contend with at home and in the east that they cannot afford an active front in their midst, and are therefore forming ranks against Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas.

We are at the potential beginnings of a rare alignment of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the leading Arab nations, and the major powers. Though it is true that one of Russia's chief interests is to keep the Middle East roiled so as to preserve the high oil prices that are now Russia's life blood, when the region moved from Soviet to Western arms Moscow was relegated to the periphery. Though Europe is militarily paralyzed it wields great economic incentives, and though the United States has not done very well of late, its powers remain preeminent and its will constructive.

The principals, the important Arab states, and the international community are arrayed against a radical terrorist front that, unlike in Iraq, is geographically fractured, relatively contained, terribly poor, and very much outnumbered. Anything for the worse can happen in the Arab-Israeli conflict and usually does, but now the chief pillars of rejectionist policy lie flat, and the spectrum of positions is such that each constructively engaged party can accommodate the others.

In the heat of a failing war, historical processes have unfrozen. If the principals pursue a strategy of limited aims, concentrating on bilateral agreements rather than a single work of fallible grandeur, they may accomplish something on the scale of Sadat's extraordinary démarche of 30 years ago. The odds are perhaps the best they have been since then, and responsible governments should recognize them as the spur for appropriate action and risk.

Remembrance day

A year ago, at a meeting in New York, I was slightly surprised to see my friend John, arriving from London, with a cotton-made orange poppy in his lapel. In my lifetime it has never been remembered here in the United States with anywhere near the same care as in Britain; in this time of war, one better recalls. But it is one of those holidays that cuts across various lines - it can be a symbol of the madness of war, the nobility of war, or both together. The poppy in John's lapel was just that - a symbol of remembrance, not of a political statement as such.

And so I'd prefer to leave it here, today. Any reader of this blog will have a sense of where I stand on war, war on terror, war in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'd rather register my remembrance of those who died who died in defense of freedom in these and earlier wars, to whom I and the rest of us owe gratitude. They are first; and then to the memory of those who died on all sides in all conflicts; God grant them peace.

Well, almost leave it here. For this must seem, to those for whom patriotism and nationalism are by definition the same thing, both sentimental and atavistic. John is an intellectual and a cosmopolitan, but he is also among the last of the generation who could be counted with Orwell as the English left-patriots. The ranks diminish apace. The intellectual worlds which I mostly inhabit have long since departed any concept of place, anything as parochial as nation and home, for versions of cosmopolitanism which, on the one hand, seem to demand everything in the way of commitment - for people one does not know and whom one has no particular idea even exist, save in the abstract - and nothing in particular, except some donations of cash over the internet. The idea of country is deliberately alien to them; likewise alien, however, are the particulars of the cosmopolitan jet-stream which they imagine themselves to inhabit; the invisible college of international law; the only-too visible college of the global new class. Which makes me think of this passage, perhaps the most honest and morally most compelling thing from Michael Ignatieff:

It is only too apparent that cosmopolitanism is the privilege of those who can take a secure nation-state for granted. Though we have passed into the post-imperial age, we have not moved to a post-nationalist age, and I cannot see how we ever will. The cosmopolitan order of the great cities - London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris - depends critically on the rule-enforcing capacities of the nation-state ... In this sense, therefore, cosmopolitans like myself are not beyond the nation; and a cosmopolitan, post-nationalist spirit will always depend, in the end, on the capacity of nation-states to provide security and civility for their citizens. In that sense alone, I am a civic nationalist, someone who believes in the necessity of nations and in the duty of citizens to defend the capacity of nations to provide the security and the rights we all need in order to live cosmopolitan lives.

It is in this capacity, my dearest, careless, effortless, innocent, obligation-free cosmopolitan-children, the middle-aged, thickened, contented, sleep-walking academic flower-children of globalization, that Lt. Michael P. Murphy died for your lifestyle and its infinitely insouciant claims to be beyond the values he fought for, but which - collaterally - sustain you in the safe and secure embrace of the thing you disdain and mock, the passe democratic nation-state. Je tenais a ces etres par mille fils confiants dont pas un ne devait se rompre. J'ai aime fourchement mes semblables mette journee-la, bien au-dela du sacrifice. (Char). Even Ignatieff is wiser and more honest than you - and he is a politician and an intellectual. You would, I reckon, have sooner awarded Lt. Murphy your pity, not the Medal of Honor, and been well-pleased to think him the rich beneficiary of that, so highly do you regard your jet-stream lives above those who live merely on planet earth, and in particular and beloved and thereby parochial places upon the earth. But Murphy and those like him look not for your pity, which is based upon ignorance and condescension, but your respect and, dare one say it, honor. In Flanders fields, that is.