Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Armistice Day

  I’ve seen a few war movies lately, stuff like George Clooney’s Monuments Men. (I knew that the Nazis had stolen a lot of important art, but not that they’d destroyed so much—though I wasn’t surprised.) While westerns tend to celebrate the individual man of action, war movies are about teamwork.  I was thinking that the Star Wars movie Rogue One was like a war movie, but to explain this fully I’d have to spoil the ending!


Of course the war movie genre has its notorious cliches.  Like the unit who say “The hell we retreat!,” then they stay and fight and achieve a stunning victory. (Just once I’d like to seem stay and fight and instantly get wiped out…) Or the tough sergeant who pleads to the wounded soldier “Don’t die on me!” Or the soldier who says just before the big attack, “Who wants to live forever?” (Sounds good to me.) Or the POW telling the Japanese torturers, “All you’re getting from me is my name, rank and serial number!”


In her historical novel The King Must Die, Mary Renault mentions that November is the traditional month for human sacrifice.  I know this because William Manchester cited her at the end of The Death of a President, his 1967 history about Kennedy’s assassination.  He suggested that November 22 was one of several famous deaths that happened in that month.


Why do I mention this?  It occurred to me that November is an appropriate month for Armistice Day, considering that what we’re remembering is people being sent off to risk and often sacrifice their lives to serve the interests of their community.  That isn’t so different from ancient times, though now they’re sent to defeat other nations rather than to appease pagan gods.


Of course it’s important for a nation’s citizens to recognize the difficulties and sacrifices of their soldiers, even when they’re sent into the wrong wars. (Perhaps especially then!) But we do them no favour by pretending that a wrong war was actually right, that the criminal aggression they were ordered to carry out was actually a “just war.” In the USA, since the Vietnam War in the 1960s, there's been a tendency by the politicians at the top of the pyramid—I’m including the top generals—to hide behind the same soldiers they’ve put in harm’s way! “If you’re against our war, you’re against the boys fighting it!”  The truth is that most antiwar dissidents felt nothing but sympathy for the millions of GIs sent into ‘Nam, and many were motivated by wanting to bring them home while they were still in one piece.  One antiwar poster said “Support our troops—bring them home!”


American naval hero Stephen Decatur said, “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!” This was the start of the slogan “My country, right or wrong.” Yet Decatur did implicitly recognize that the USA could be in the wrong, and it shouldn’t be considered “anti-American” to point this out when it happens. (On the contrary, surely it’s in a nation’s true interest to recognize its fallibility.)  Too many people are implicitly saying “My country is never in the wrong, and if you say it is you’re unpatriotic!”


After 9/11 some Americans talked about moral clarity, but took it to mean “We’re the Good Guys, and our enemies are the Bad Guys!” Such “moral clarity” is just self-serving group loyalty based in doublethink, as George Orwell would surely recognize.  It leads society into the dangerous rationale, “We’re right and they’re wrong, therefore everything we do to fight them is automatically right.” That’s putting the cart before the horse:  it’s only when we do the right things—or at least avoid doing wrong things—that we can consider ourselves to be in the right.


My idea of true moral clarity is in Martin Luther King’s quote, “Every morning before we’ve finished breakfast, we are in debt to the farmer.” It should be about recognizing your own responsibilities and failings, not rationalizing your aggressions.

Tuesday, November 5, 2024

Predictable vs. Unpredictable

 


It’s funny about sex appeal.  Ever see this Italian actress Asia Argento? (Daughter of horror movie director Dario Argento…) She isn’t the most beautiful of actresses, but there’s something dynamite about her—the feeling she gives off that you don’t know what she’ll do next!  And that’s sexy. 


I’m not an expert on male sex appeal, but I suppose that young Marlon Brando in the 1950s must have exuded that feeling too. (Women, am I right?)


On the other hand, some actors are predictable.  Like Tom Bosley, who played Richie’s father on the Garry Marshall sitcom Happy Days.  He wasn’t a particularly bad actor, but you knew exactly how he’d act every time you saw him!  And in the TV sausage factory that produces 23 episodes per year of every prime-time show, such consistency is what producers often want.


Of course, TV shows are often predictable.  I was watching the World War II miniseries The Winds of War online just for Robert Mitchum. (He was too old for his role, but his performance grew on me.) There’s a scene in it where he’s playing chess with a German general.  I said to myself, “The German will put Mitchum in check, but Mitchum will end up pulling off a checkmate,” which (spoiler) is exactly what happens!


I saw the first part of an episode of Welcome Back, Kotter once—like Happy Days, it’s one of those shows featuring high-school students played by actors who are obviously over 21.  In this episode one of the Sweathogs got an after-school job in an antique shop handling precious Tiffany lamps.  Though I only saw that first part, I somehow knew that some Tiffany lamps were going to get smashed! (The audience would be disappointed otherwise.) If anyone’s seen that episode, tell me if I was wrong…


Movies can be predictable too.  I mentioned that Garry Marshall was the creative force behind Happy Days, and he went on to direct movie features.  He started out making sitcoms, but he never really stopped.  Consider his sequel to The Princess Diaries.  Ann Hathaway’s mother is a queen who wants to marry her off because she’s concerned about a pretender to her throne, who happens to be young, handsome and single.  I think we all know how the problem will be solved in the end….  It’s a case of the “idiot plot” where characters stumble around for the whole movie trying to figure out things that were perfectly obvious to the audience from the start.  Otherwise, the plot’s central problem would get solved too soon for a feature-length film!


The Eagles song “Hotel California” has incredibly predictable rhymes:


How they dance in the courtyard

Sweet summer sweat

Some dance to remember

Some dance to…


…preset?  …abet?  …offset?  …sublet?  …beget? (That one almost makes sense.)  …regret?  …upset?  …pirouette?


And people can be predictable, especially the young.  When I was fourteen I joined a swim team.  When I bicycled down to the swimming pool for practice, I’d pass by this group of boys, and the second they saw me they’d always stop what they were doing and jeer at me. (If it had just been one guy, he probably wouldn’t have bothered, but in a group together they felt empowered.)  What bothered me was that they were so predictable:  this didn’t happen most of the time but every single time!  It was like running a gauntlet.  There were guys like that in school—the moment they saw me that would remind them to start talking about me in a particularly unflattering way, as if I weren’t there!  Of course, they were making a point of dissing me in my presence:  status in school, like prison and the military, is often a zero-sum game where people can’t think of any way to raise theirs except at the expense of someone else’s.  And they really seemed to be enjoying it.


All this did get to me.  It bugs me when grownups say to kids, “Don’t let it bother you.” In my view, what they’re really saying is, “Your feelings are the weak link here.  It would be so nice if you just didn’t care…” Even worse is “You’re too sensitive!” It’s true that in my youth I was unusually thin-skinned.  But to me, that’s saying, “We can’t expect other things to be different, but we can expect you to force yourself to be less sensitive, or to keep your feelings to yourself!” But I’d better stop before I go an all day about it…