Tendentious

I had a long Ratzinger post that was eaten by a computer crash, so I'll just do a little one on the John Bolton nomination:

The meme that the Democrats and their allies have gotten out on Bolton is how he's a "bully," a "serial abuser" of subordinates.

In 2005 or any other year, the nation's capital does not need another bully in a position of power...Character, or the lack thereof, is revealed in how someone with power treats someone without power and without the capacity to retaliate. (Mark Shields)

Bolton was ''disloyal to his subordinates.'' (Peter Beinart)

"I think Mr. Bolton needs anger management at a minimum and he does not deserve to be promoted" to the U.N. post. (Senator Barbara Boxer)

Anytime a senior official calls in a lower-level one "and reams him a new one,
that's just not acceptable." (Senator Joseph Biden, from the above link. Biden, of course, is well-known for his gentle, respectful treatment of Scott "that's above your pay grade" Ritter when his testimony wasn't what he wanted to hear).

This is all nonsense, of course. What this is about is the Left's horror at the idea of a UN skeptic like Bolton as American representative to that body. The Left worships the UN like a deity, so Bolton cannot be allowed to get the job. But with lots of Americans--especially since the Iraq war--being highly UN-skeptic themselves, we've got this ridiculous feigned outrage over Bolton's "bullying." Mark Steyn makes the point that the UN is such a nest of thugs and murderers that sending a "bully" there would hardly be offensive to anyone willing to admit the truth.

Because, really, Democrats don't mind bullies at all. Let's recall the person who seems destined to receive their 2008 Presidential nomination by voice vote: Hillary Rodham Clinton. It was just a few years ago...

Hillary Throws Book at Secret Service Agent. First lady hit her limo driver in back
for allegedly 'eavesdropping' on chat.

Chris Matthews: "I was on the New York shuttle a couple of weeks ago, and I saw something interesting. Hillary Clinton (was) up in that little bankhead -- bulkhead seat they reserve for VIPs in the corner, nobody around her; Secret Service guys all around with those little earphones and one large guy, rather embarrassed, rather sheepish, walking along with his own earphones carrying her bags . . . Who -- who in the Senate gets a Sherpa to carry their bags for them? . . . I've never heard of a senator getting a bag carrier. Who pays for the airfare for this guy? Who pays for his lifestyle? Who pays his salary to walk around carrying her bags, so she can walk around light-handed, with nothing in her hands?

From Gary Aldrich's book Unlimited Access:

Another close source, this one in the Secret Service, told me that Hillary had ordered her Secret Service protective detail to
"stay the f--k away from me!" and to keep at least ten yards of distance between her and them at all times.
The Secret Service agent told me that it was much harder to protect her from a distance of ten yards, and she was told this, but she didn't seem to care what the Secret Service said. He also told me that it was obvious that she had a clear dislike for the agents, bordering on hatred, in his opinion.

Along those same lines, another source reports that two Secret Service agents heard Hillary's daughter Chelsea refer to them as "personal, trained pigs" to some of her friends. When the friends had gone, the senior agent on the detail tried to scold Chelsea for such disrespect. He told her that he was willing to put his life on the line to save hers, and he believed that her father, the president, would be shocked if he heard what she had just said to her friends. Chelsea's response?

"I don't think so. That's what my parents call you."

Dick Sprowl, Air Force Chaplain:
Hillary Clinton was arrogant and orally abusive to her security detail. She forbade her daughter, Chelsea, from exchanging pleasantries with them....Hillary patently refused to allow her picture to be taken with her security detail.

"Character, or the lack thereof, is revealed in how someone with power treats someone without power and without the capacity to retaliate."

# posted by Edwin @ 1:01 AM

This is everything that I hate about modern liberalism, encapsulated into one irritating little press release. Observations to follow after...

Codey Signs Bill Requiring Fire Extinguishers in Homes

(TRENTON) – Acting Governor Richard J. Codey today signed S-1294 / A-3432, a bill requiring that single-, double- or triple-occupancy homes be equipped with a fire extinguisher upon sale, lease or transfer.

State Senator Joseph Coniglio first drafted the bill two years ago, when a fifth-grade student at Cliffside Park School #6 suggested the idea. Senator Coniglio was visiting Mrs. Donna Spoto’s fifth-grade class when the student, Christopher Keethe, raised his hand and asked why every home in New Jersey is not required to have a fire extinguisher.

“He went on to say that he believed everyone would be safer and lives would be saved if we all had access to fire extinguishers. I couldn’t have agreed more, so I went to work on broadening our existing fire safety laws,” Senator Coniglio said.

The Senator joined Acting Governor Codey for the public bill signing during a school assembly at Cliffside Park School #6 – which Christopher still attends as a seventh-grader. The bill’s other primary sponsors are Assemblyman Frederick Scalera, Assemblyman Gordon M. Johnson and Assemblyman Brian P. Stack.

“I’m sure most of you have heard a lot about politics and government from adults, the newspapers or television. You’ve heard how complicated the political system is and how it often feels as if it is impossible to get anything done,” Codey told the assembled students before signing the bill.

“Today the work of one student proves that, if you have an idea, if you get involved and if you advocate for your idea, you can make a difference. There are many ways to advocate. You can call or send letters to your Legislator’s office. You can work with a group of people to make sure your ideas are heard. Or you can run for office, like we did,” Codey continued.

Senator Coniglio said: “Each year there are thousands of fires in New Jersey homes. A good portion of those fires are kitchen fires or caused by candles or cigarettes – the type of fires that can be put out with a fire extinguisher before major damage can occur. By making sure homeowners and tenants are equipped with the fire extinguishers necessary to fight these small fires, we can help prevent millions of dollars in damage and countless deaths each year.”

“Fire extinguishers are a cost-effective tool to help residents safely leave a burning building while waiting for firefighters to answer the alarm,” said Assemblyman Scalera, who also is deputy fire chief in Nutley. “By providing all new homeowner and tenants with a working fire extinguisher, we can ensure that these residents are prepared to protect themselves from the moment they step into their new home.”

“Single- and two-family homes are not required to have sprinkler systems like high-rise apartments,” said Assemblyman Johnson. “Requiring a fire extinguisher be part of a home transfer will close this gap that leaves many residents unprotected from fire.”

“Homeowners and tenants often are overwhelmed with a litany of tasks when they move into a new house,” said Assemblyman Stack. “This law will ensure that being able to protect themselves from a fire is not lost in the shuffle.”

The bill’s text can be found online by visiting the Legislature’s website, www.njleg.state.nj.us/, and conducting a “Bill Search” for S1294.

1. Emotion masquerades as logic. Not surprisingly, since it's the product of the mind of a child, the bill is the expression of a simple emotional state--Fires are bad. People shouldn't die in them. There's no point in making the issue more complex than this. It's like arguing with a child.

2. Symbolism is more important than reality. The text of the bill doesn't show any mechanism for ensuring that the fire extinguishers have up-to-date certifications, or that they are filled, or that they are in working order, or that they identify which kinds of fires they're able to put out. There's no requirement that the extinguisher be where it's most needed--the kitchen, say, or a bedroom. It can go in the bathroom, or the basement, or the attic, for all that this legislation cares. There's no requirement for building brackets or storage for the extinguisher, so for all the oversight that this bill supplies, the thing can just sit in a cabinet. In other words, for most people, the fire extinguisher will end up being a paperweight. But none of this matters, because the purpose of the bill is to make us feel better about ourselves. Which, for the liberal, is what all legislation is for, anyway.

3. It's an unfunded mandate on the private sector. It's an extra expense for builders and landlords that will of course be passed on to consumers. Liberals love unfunded mandates, except when--as with the No Child Left Behind Act--they're made on government--in which case they are the spawn of the devil.

4. It's yet another petty intrusion into our lives. Liberals can only discuss the abortion issue while holding a club labelled "choice" over their opponents' heads. You're against choice! At the same time, of course, they permit absolutely no choice on any thousand other increasingly miniscule issues, from how much water your toilet should hold, to whether you want a fire extinguisher in your house.

Two new pieces for ATO. First, my regular column:

Crusader Rabbits

There are three ways we look at history:

As nonfiction, where the historian, at least in theory, strives to describe past events as they happened.

As fiction, where the novelist or artist reimagines past events in dramatic form.

And, in military history, as simulation gaming, where, as closely as possible, the designer re-creates the exact circumstances of the event—personnel, weaponry, supply, terrain, weather, and so on—in order to be able to run strategic or tactical variants of the original actions. Gaming is sort of both fiction and nonfiction at the same time, which puts it in a different category

The problem with the first two categories above is that bias and subjectivity are inevitable in history, and necessary in art. We expect it. Everyone has a point of view. V.S. Naipaul says that nonfiction writers always lie, while fiction writers always tell the truth because they invariably reveal their own prejudices.

But on the other hand, one of the best things about simulation gaming is that a good design must be intensely faithful to the actual historical details. A game designer, one would think, has very little incentive to lie.

And this again is unlike the situation of the historian or the novelist, who are subject to pressures—psychological, ideological, commercial—to make the past conform to certain templates. Pressures can be anything from an academic’s desire for tenure all the way to—under certain governments—wanting to stay alive. And when a government wants its own version of history, it can bring enormous resources to bear: My favorite example is when Stalin had real units of the Soviet Army attack parts of Berlin in 1949 using live ammunition—because he wanted to add realism to the movie The Battle of Berlin.

This is all a bit of a preface to talking about another movie, namely the Crusades film by Ridley Scott, Kingdom of Heaven. Unfortunately, since 9/11, it’s impossible to depoliticize the Crusades. (“Imagine, then, my surprise when within days of the September 11 attacks, the Middle Ages suddenly became relevant,” said medievalist Thomas Madden, author of two books on the Crusades). There was already a sizable and growing controversy over the Crusades, which wasn’t helped when Bill Clinton semi-apologized for them in November of 2001:

Indeed, in the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple mound. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the Temple mound, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees.

Thomas Madden has pointed out cheekily that “the amount of blood necessary to fill the streets to a continuous and running three-inch depth would require many more people than lived in the region, let alone the city,” but let’s let that one go. The very idea of singling out one sack of one city in the Middle East in the Middle Ages as particularly barbaric, in a time and a region where putting a city to the sword was the rule, not the exception, is a veritable thermonuclear detonation of anachronism.

And, sadly, this particularly shameless anachronism seems to inform the shooting script of Kingdom of Heaven. For the film, the slaughter of innocents is a grotesque anomaly brought about not by tradition, or by human nature, but by religion itself. I’ll quote a New York Times article about the film which had me humming John Lennon’s “Imagine” as background music for the stirring dialogue repeated below:

In its many scenes of devastation, the script shows intransigence on both sides. "Will you yield the city?" the victorious Saladin asks Balian. He replies: "Before I lose it, I will burn it to the ground. Your holy places. Ours. Every last thing in Jerusalem that drives men mad.”…For a movie about holy war, "Kingdom of Heaven" has surprisingly little religious oratory, or even religious content. The only overtly religious figures are extremists: marauding Knights Templar on the Christian side and murderous Saracen knights on the Muslim side.

Nothing to kill or die for. And no religion too. Or, to quote an internet comment on the script, "Didn’t you know the Middle East was one big hippie commune until the Crusaders arrived?"

Not surprisingly, the script managed to tick nearly everyone off. The Telegraph quoted Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University, said the plot was "complete and utter nonsense…" It sounds absolute balls. It's rubbish. It's not historically accurate at all. They refer to [Sir Walter Scott’s 1825 romanticized Crusades novel] The Talisman, which depicts the Muslims as sophisticated and civilised, and the Crusaders are all brutes and barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality."

Predictably, the Muslim pressure groups, who are trying hard to shape the current historical templates for this issue, weren’t palliated by the film’s portrayal of pre-Crusades Jerusalem as the ultimate idyllic utopia ever in the history of idyllic utopias. "I believe this movie teaches people to hate Muslims," says another history professor in an American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee press release, "In this climate how are people going to react to these images of Muslims attacking churches and tearing down the cross and mocking it?” The purpose of pressure groups like the AAADC is simply to exert pressure. They exist to influence the debate in a decisive way, to change the way we look at the past; arriving at the truth isn’t on the agenda.

The best comment I’ve heard on the whole Crusades mess is, again, from Thomas Madden: "The Muslim world remembers the Crusades about as well as the West–in other words, incorrectly." Which is why—if I can attempt to tie the various unconnected thoughts in this column together—we’d do better trying to dig up a copy of Richard Berg’s old SPI game on the Crusades than expecting objectivity anywhere else.

And then I wrote this commissioned article comparing two different pre-World War II American volunteer groups, the Flying Tigers and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade:

In the last few years, the John Walker Lindh story has brought the question of American volunteers serving in foreign militaries back to public attention. How—Lindh’s defenders ask—do we condemn Lindh for fighting with the Taleban while applauding past American volunteers like the Abraham Lincoln Brigade or the Flying Tigers?

The question on its surface is fairly easily disposed of by adding even the slightest moral dimension to it: To mince as few words as possible, Lindh was fighting for the bad guys.

But without that moral dimension—and we live in an age that requires us to pretend that there is no such thing—we’d have to look at the most obvious thing about earlier American volunteer movements: Namely, that there were hundreds of Americans who served in the Tigers, and thousands with the Lincolns, compared to a tiny handful who went to fight for the Islamic fundamentalists. That so many Americans volunteered to serve under foreign flags is significant, and worth examining. The Lincolns and the Tigers were the two largest single examples of overseas volunteer efforts by Americans, and a comparison of the two might be instructive.

That said, it’s almost unfair to compare the Tigers and the Lincolns, since their situations were so different. The Flying Tigers, officially known as the American Volunteer Group or AVG, were part of a tradition of unofficial American assistance to friendly governments at war, as with the Lafayette Escadrille pilots attached to the French forces in the First World War. And Tiger pilots traveled to Asia with more than just the blessing of the U.S. government, according to one dramatic contemporary report:

The men swore that as their ship plowed its way through the well-patrolled sea lanes of Japan, the dark shape of an American cruiser loomed up close beside them each night and fell away to the far distance just before morning.

By contrast, because the Roosevelt administration withheld recognition from the Loyalist Spanish forces, the Lincoln volunteers had to pile onto cheap steamers to LeHavre, France as tourists and take buses over the Pyrenees. There were a lot of them: All told, about 32,000 foreigners served in the International Brigades, about 2,000 of them Americans. They eventually ended up at the International Brigades’ training camp at Albacete where they received little to no training. Alvah Bessie’s Men in Battle describes the Lincolns’ attempts at drilling: "One squad would march off to the right, the second to the left, the third stand still, uncertain. We all laughed."

Of the Lincolns’ many problems, poor leadership was probably the most decisive, and most disastrous. Very few of the volunteers had any military training or experience: When they began operations, the highest ranking former serviceman was…a sergeant. There were Lincolns from all over the country (including 95 African-Americans), but a solid plurality of the Lincolns were Jewish New Yorkers with no military experience at all. Other Internationals had a larger proportion of war veterans (nearly all the Germans fought in the First World War, and they "marched like the Reichswehr," according to Ernest Hemingway.) But the Internationals, and the Spanish rebels as a whole, suffered from an extremely weak officer corps.

This translated into debacles like the Jarama offensive, where the Lincolns took heavy losses in a frontal assault on fortified trench lines without air or artillery support. On their first day at the front, they dug trenches against the skyline, making themselves easy targets for the Franco forces. They watched oncoming Italian bombers with no concern at all, expecting to be leafleted.

Symptomatic of the leadership problems was the man elevated to command of the Lincolns, Robert Merriman. Though his total military qualifications consisted of four years of ROTC courses in college, this graduate student in economics was named "chief of staff" for the Lincolns; ultimately, Hemingway used the photogenic Merriman as a basis for the Robert Jordan character in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Many Lincoln Brigade hagiographers swoon over his looks ("Merriman…was the focus of propaganda because he was tall and good-looking, not because he was a capable officer" says an unsympathetic observer but his troops soon took to calling him "Murderman" after Jarama.

It’s even more unfair, for any number of reasons, to compare Merriman to Claire Chennault, who led the AVG in China and Burma. It’s not just that Chennault was a real military officer and Merriman wasn’t. It’s that Chennault was a military genius, a man who anticipated Japan’s strategic planning and who, arguably, ruined the Japanese advance in continental Asia. "At no time in China," he wrote flatly in 1942, "At no time in China have I had as many as fifty fighting planes in operation to meet the full fighting air force of Japan…I have never lost an air battle against the Japanese." "At the end of four weeks of war," went a contemporary account, "The three squadrons had achieved one of the most extraordinary of all wartime records, destroying more than two hundred Japanese planes with losses of six men in combat." While the R.A.F., flying the superior Spitfire against the same forces in Burma and Australia, was breaking even, the AVG was killing Japanese planes in a 15 to 1 ratio. In essence, the Tigers popped fully formed out of the mind of one man: A brilliant pilot himself who had memorized Japanese fighter patterns, Chennault demonstrated the exact moves his men could expect to encounter; this was all in addition to his years of lobbying in Washington for the creation of the AVG.

The Lincolns, by contrast, were subject to that worst thing of all for the military man: Overbearing political considerations. These were the first Americans to have to fight under political commissars (predictably Americanized to "comic stars" by the men). The problem with commissars isn’t their combat usefulness or lack of same--the record of the Lincolns’ commissars is mixed, with at least two of them whom the men considered worthless--it’s that their primary concern isn’t victory over the enemy, it’s the maintenance of a proper political attitude. While the use of political commissars in the military is debatable in general, there is not a single doubt that in Spain the commissars were destructive to the war effort.

Research in the Soviet archives shows that it’s at least questionable whether the Comintern, which controlled the International Brigades in Spain, had any serious commitment to winning the war. Both archival records and contemporary statements from Comintern representatives show at least as much concern with the enormous propaganda value of the Internationals as symbols, as for the war itself. Friendly writers like Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, and Herbert Matthews had virtually unrestricted access to the Lincoln trenches. Celebrities like Errol Flynn got chauffeured cars with precious gasoline.

The other concern for the Comintern was ideology. The war in Spain coincided with the massive purges in the USSR against Trotskyists and other political opponents, purges that were largely repeated in Spain. Figures are unclear, but perhaps dozens of Americans were executed by the security services ("Chekists"—some of whom were Americans themselves) for various offenses, not just ideological ones but for things as simple as wanting to leave Spain at the end of one’s contract. One author quotes Merriman as asking his reconnaissance teams to execute men who wouldn’t make a charge.

Not surprisingly, morale was a big problem for the Lincolns. The first night on the line at Jarama, two Lincolns shot off their own toes on purpose, and another deserted. Desertion rates were extremely high (at least 100 and possibly more, about 4%)

This, again, makes for a huge contrast with the swaggering pilots of the AVG. Unlike the proletarian poverty that the Lincolns endured in Spain, the Tigers lived what for wartime was an impossibly good life:

I went shopping [in Rangoon] Saturday morning for a few essentials and had lunch at the Savoy. The races in the afternoon were not too good as they were all flat races and not as interesting as a steeplechase would be…In the evening we listened to the gay, brittle banter of the smart set at the Silver Grill, and retired eventually to the May Marine Club for the night.

The Tigers could live like this because of their generous wages paid by Chaing Kai-Shek: $600 a month, plus $500 for each Japanese plane shot down. They were, observed Newsweek sharply, "frankly mercenaries."

But they were effective ones. The Tigers cleared the northern part of the Burma Road of Japanese air assets. Nearly alone they kept the enemy out of Rangoon while many thousands of tons of strategic war materials went up the Road to China. They kept the skies above Chungking empty of Japanese planes for the first time in four years. Most impressively, they broke the Japanese offensive in the Salween Gorge, where AVG planes destroyed a pontoon bridge and the columns attempting to cross it in one of the greatest examples of air power dominating ground forces up to that time.

Of course, by the time of the Salween Gorge action in May 1942, the Tigers had been subsumed back into the U.S. Army Air Force, and the days of $500 bonuses were over.

Because of politics, or perhaps because they were such a sad-sack underdog army, the Lincolns have been written about far, far more than the Tigers. Death in the Olive Groves, Arthur Landis‘s 1989 revision of his 1969 book The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, notes that at the time of writing over 25,000 books had been published in all languages on the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. By contrast, there have been only a few monographs on the Flying Tigers. A 1983 Hoover Institution select scholarly bibliography on Claire Chennault contained exactly 12 items, including a Lou Zocchi article from S&T # 24. There was the one now-forgotten John Wayne movie Flying Tigers, but the Lincolns’—and the Spanish Civil War’s—cultural footprints are much, much deeper. That war became, particularly for the Left, a romantic, almost mythic paradigm, most recently parodied in one of the songs from the recent Christopher Guest movie A Mighty Wind ("I know that somehow, in the world /The workers must be free /
The toil and sweat, and tyranny /the fascist jeu d’esprit /Will only serve to keep us down, and make the bourgeoisie")

The comparison between the Tigers and the Lincolns is, simply, the difference between night and day. It’s the difference between success and failure, the difference between real soldiers and amateurs, the difference between seriousness and pretense.


NOTES
American cruiser. Straight, p. 289.
Attempts at drilling. Bessie, p. 34.
32,000 foreigners, 2,000 Americans. Jackson, pp. 73, 75.
95 African-Americans. Cullum, pp. 63-98.
Jewish New Yorkers. Jackson, p. 83.
Hemingway and the Germans. Regler, p. viii.
Jarama offensive details. Eby pp. 57-67, Jackson p. 102.
Merriman details. Jackson, pp. 102-03, Eby pp. 30-34, Carroll p. 95.
"I have never lost an air battle…" Hessen, p. 17.
"One of the most extraordinary of wartime records…" Straight, p. 290.
15 to 1 ratio. Information from the Flying Tigers homepage, flyingtigersavg.com.
at least two of them whom the men considered worthless. Sam Stember and Harry Haywood. See Eby, p. 67, and Carroll, pp. 98-100.
Archival records. See Radosh, et al., throughout.
Executions. Richardson pp.166-67, Eby, p. 59.
Desertions. Eby, p. 45, Carroll, pp. 147-51.
"I went shopping in Rangoon…" Bright, p. 44.
Summary of AVG activity. Wolfe, p. 11.
25,000 books. Landis, Olive Groves, p. 6.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES

The Abraham Lincoln Brigade
Beevor, Antony, The Spanish Civil War. London: Orbis Publishing 1982.
Bessie, Alvah, Men in Battle: A Story of Americans in Spain. San Francisco: Chandler & Short, 1975.
Carroll, Peter N., The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994.
Cullum, Danny Duncan, ed., African Americans in the Spanish Civil War: "This Ain’t Ethiopia, but It’ll Do." New York: G.K. Hall, 1992.
Eby, Cecil, Between the Bullet and the Lie: American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969.
Jackson, Michael, Fallen Sparrows: The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. Phildelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1994.
Landis, Arthur, The Abraham Lincoln Brigade. New York: Citadel Press, 1967.
----------------, Death in the Olive Groves: American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. New York: Paragon House, 1989.
Radosh Ronald, Habeck, Mary, and Sevostianov Grigory, Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
Regler, Gustav, The Great Crusade. New York: Longmans, Green, 1940.
Richardson, R. Dan, Comintern Army: The International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1982.

The Flying Tigers
Bright, J. Gilpin, "From a Flying Tiger," Atlantic Monthly, 170, October 1942, pp. 42-48.
Hessen, Robert, ed., General Claire Lee Chennault: A Guide to His Papers in the Hoover Institution Archives. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983.
Straight, Michael, "Claire Chennault: American Hero," The New Republic, 106, March 2, 1942, pp. 288-290.
Whelan, Russell, "Chennault: Tiger of the Skies," American Mercury, 58, 404-410.
Wolfe, Henry C., "Louisianan in Chungking," Saturday Review of Literature, 27, January 22, 1944, p. 11.
Unbylined, "Tigers Over Burma." Time, 39, February 9, 1942, pp. 25-26.
Unbylined, "Flying Tigers." Newsweek, 18, April 6, 1942, pp. 20-21.
Unbylined, "Tigers’ Last Leaps." Time, 39, May 11, 1942, p. 28.
Unbylined, "Magic from Waterproof." Time, 39, June 8, 1942, p. 30.

Recently saw two HBO documentaries for the first time, one gut-wrenching, the other unintentionally hilarious.

The first was the one about Chernobyl today, almost 20 years later. I was expecting a depressing little version of an A&E travel documentary, with radiation. But there was surprisingly little travellogue--only about a third of the program, which consisted of uninteresting scenery of one decaying Soviet-era Ukrainian or Belarussian village after another, all filled with befuddled-looking people telling the camera that they have nowhere to go and that they feel fine, until the narrator tells them that the cesium-137 from the 1986 accident remains in their body and will be passed on to their children, at which time they get a very odd, not quite sad, very Slavic look of resignation on their faces.

The documentary is completely objective--it doesn't have any agenda at all, which is both good and unfortunate. It's unfortunate because too many people--probably a majority of those who see it--will look at it and think, "Damn, nuclear power is so horrible." Instead of "Damn, Communism is so horrible." Because the latter is the real lesson of Chernobyl. There are nuclear plants in dozens of countries, but the only one that's ever killed people--let alone produced a worldwide disaster that killed dozens and irradiated millions--was in the Soviet Union. And this is not a coincidence. But explaining why that is takes a bit of a lecture about the nature of collectivism and individual responsibility that many people won't get. Hence it's much easier to blame nuclear power.

But the other two-thirds of the documentary was the gut-wrenching part, with scene after scene from hospitals in Minsk of deformed kids, the worst of many being the girl with an empty skull, her brain having grown outside the skull cavity and connected to the head by a thin membrane of skin. Just one horribly ruined child after another. After about five minutes of this I was in tears. This was immediately after the Terri Schiavo mess, and I could very easily see some kindly doctor from the Netherlands coming in and euthanizing the whole population "for their own good," and many people approving.

But the very end of the documentary was what made the thing remarkable. That was when the American doctors arrived. I will never forget the look on the faces of the parents when the Americans tell them, in translation, that the holes in their childrens' hearts, which had been diagnosed "irreparable" locally (meaning death within a few months) will be repaired in what for them is a relatively simple operation. You can sense a bit of pride among the Americans when they talk about it later, but hell, they earned it. As Dizzy Dean said, it ain't bragging if you can do it. If a documentary about horribly deformed kids can be said to have a happy ending, this one does.

And the funny documentary was the one about Air America. My favorite scene was where the AA general manager explains to all the employees whose paychecks aren't clearing, "Let's not dwell on the past. The important thing for all of us is to focus on the future." Because, you know, the future is important cuz they're progressives and all.

One of the things I like to do when I see a film that I love is read the most negative reviews I can find of it, to try to divine how someone could hate it. I did this with Sin City, which I thought was a great film.

I was expecting people to hate the movie for its nihilism and its horrific violence--from the right, as it were. It has the standard Hollywood Christians-are-corrupt message right up front, like every other Hollywood movie. But at least this one is a noir, and in a noir everyone is corrupt, so I could suspend my hatred for the cliche.

But then I found this lovely hissyfit from the famously lefty Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Sitting through the thing, watching scene after scene in which I was being asked to be entertained by the spectacle of helpless people being tortured, I kept thinking of those clean-cut young American guards at Abu Ghraib. That is exactly the mentality Rodriguez is celebrating here. "Sin City" is their movie.

That one left me speechless.