Author: Mark Tiedemann

Absurdity

Casting Call

I’m feeling kind of antic this morning, so I thought I’d play a little fantasy game.  Most writers, whether they admit it or not, indulge in a game of imagining who would play what part in films from their books.  This comes almost second nature to me, since from an early age I started reading with a movie playing in my head and I would cast the parts.  (My most successful casting job was Michener’s Hawaii—I got just about every part right but one, that of Rafer Hoxworth.)

So I thought I’d post my choices for casting in movies from some of my books.  What I’d really like is for people to post their choices in comments.

To start with, Compass Reach.  The part of Fargo has changed over the years, from a youngish Daniel Craig to Robert Carlyle to  Ioan Gruffud (all Brits, imagine that) to more recently Jamie Bamber (another Brit) to my current choice of Ryan Phillipe (an American for once).  I still think Daniel Craig would be good.  But Fargo is mercurial that way.

But for Lis, one actress just leapt out at me the moment I saw her and I exclaimed “That is Lis!”  Franke Potente

Haven’t seen anyone yet who’d do better in the role.

Stephen, of course, is another mercurial one, but I finally settled on James Marsters (yeah, Spike of Buffy fame).  He’s it, I think, for the stricken telelog.

Metal of Night is a bit rougher.  For Cira Kalinge I have two actresses in mind.  The first is Indira Varma of Rome fame, but the other would be Nia Long.  I have one actor in mind for the dual role of Alexan and Nicolan Cambion and that is Johnny Depp.  Name dropping perhaps, but there it is.

But for Merrick…ah, yes, my ongoing spymaster/corporate magnate/mover’n’shaker.  Again, just one actor—Tim Roth.

Tim Kang as Tory Shirabe, Ralph Fiennes as Maxwell Cambion, and for the berserker part of Venner…Rufus Sewell

Peace & Memory has a larger cast and more possibilities, but the actress I have in mind for Tamyn Glass…well, bear in mind that I think if this film has a chance in hell of being made, it won’t be for ten years, by which time she’ll have grown into the part.  Eliza Dushku.  Which is a bit of a cheat, because everyone else I have in mind would be cast in a film made, say, tomorrow.  At one time Sigourney Weaver would have been a shoe-in, but in SF she’s too much Ripley, so it would be Ripley playing Tamyn, and that might not be a good fit.  However, as an alternative more in line with what I have in mind, someone like Angela Bassett would be good.  But this is up for grabs, really.  I’ll stick with Eliza as an image.

Joclen would be well played by Amanda Righetti

Kevin McKidd for Benajim Cyanus.  We can stick with Tim Roth for the discorporate Sean Merrick.  Then we come to the pivotal role of the prophylactic, Piper Van.  I have a couple of names in mind for that, one simply because I like her—well, I like them all—but she has demonstrated an ability to do the physical side:  Marley Shelton.   Perhaps a bit too “girlie” for Piper, but as I say, I like her.  Katie Sackhoff  which after Battlestar Galactica and her performance as Starbuck might be a bit obvious, but she’s got the presence to carry off the part.  A less obvious choice would be Thandie Newton.  Piper is supposed to be enhanced and, therefore, deceptive.

Naril Van, Tamyn’s lawyer, would be well played by Mary McDonnell,  but I could also see her played well by Mary Steenburgen.  Don’t know which I’d prefer.

Fisher, the bad guy, I’d cast Jonny Lee Miller.  Not, perhaps, an obvious choice, but thin about it, he’d do marvelously.

Which brings us to Ryan Jones, Bool Nooneus, and Elen ap Marik.  Ryan I think should be played by Robert Conrad of Wild Wild West fame.  Or The Black Sheep.  Or a gazillion tv movies.  But take a look at more recent pics and he looks perfect.  Nooneus, just to be antic, would be Stephen Fry.

Then there is Elen, the woman who falls for Benajim and has such, er, interesting modifications.  She’d have to be someone who could carry it off with one artificial eye.  My choice?   Maybe I’ll leave that one blank for now and see if anyone comes up with someone for the part.

That’s the Secantis Sequence and certainly not all of the parts.  It would be fun to see what people thought of the secondary and tertiary characters, who would be good to play them, but also the alternatives to my list.  There are several characters I skipped in this, but we can revisit the topic later if it’s fun.

Ah, fantasy.  Now, who would I get to direct…?

Home

Blitzen

Another very old image.  Found this, much to my surprise and pleasure, in a box through which I was searching for something else entirely.

This is Blitzen, my first dog.  As a kid, my only dog.  Blitzen was a shepherd-collie mix and we got him as a puppy and I adored this dog.  We were very much a standard-issue boy and dog team.  I used to sleep on the floor with my head on Blitzen’s chest.  Blitzen was a great dog.

blitzen.jpg

Well, we got Blitzen when we lived in our own house on Wyoming, which had a big backyard.  My dad trained him—I was about five when we got him.  Then we moved.  For many reasons I still don’t entirely understand, my parents sold the house and we moved into the first floor apartment below my grandparents on Michigan, still in South St. Louis.

It was not a big apartment.  Not that it mattered to me.  I was vast and contained multitudes, my imagination was more than enough to make up for cramped quarters.

And I had Blitzen.  We were buddies.

Until about fifth grade.  Maybe fourth.  Whatever.  I came home from school and Blitzen was gone.  Mom told me they had seen Blitzen trying to get outside when I was play wrestling with my friends and they thought if he ever did he’d tear someone apart, because he clearly didn’t understand the difference between playing and real.  I wailed.  My dog was gone.  I was utterly inconsolable.

Worse—though it didn’t hurt nearly as much—it was a lie.  One of the few my parents ever told me.  I found out the truth just a few years ago.  Basically, Blitzen terrified my grandmother—who was not a particularly nice lady—and she demanded the dog be gotten rid of.  Her building, her roof, her rules.

Dad never said a word about it.  Mom told me the story, because she didn’t want me resenting my grandmother.  But it made more sense this way.  Blitzen was a good dog and obeyed me.  But he apparently didn’t like my grandmother.  His radar was pretty good.

Since owning my own house now with Donna we’ve had two dogs—Kory and now Coffey—and I loved ’em both.  Coffey especially reminds me a bit of Blitzen, though Kory actually looked like him.

But you never get over your first dog.

Home

On Time and Great Legs

I’m pretty lucky.  No, I don’t believe in luck, unless it’s the ability to recognize the confluence of circumstances that result in specific outcomes, good or bad (hence bad luck), and thus act upon the result.  Luck is a description of things which occur or accrue to one without (seemingly) doing anything to effect them.  So, by that gauge, yeah, I’m pretty lucky.

For example, my companion.  This coming spring will mark 30 years for us.  Unbelievable.  I lucked into this.  But I recognized it, acted upon the recognition, and, with the exception of a few periods of absolute boneheadedness on my part, the normal stresses of a long-term relationship, and all that other stuff, these three decades have been wonderful.

I was going through some old photographs, looking for something to scan and post, and I found this.  It was on the occasion of Donna’s sister’s wedding.  This is about 1990, I think.  I don’t think I need to tell you that I think she is one sexy woman.  I still think so.  No, we don’t quite look like this anymore, but she still has great legs, and as I am, as they say, a Leg Man, that is just fine by me.

donna-and-me-1990.jpg
Like I said, I am a lucky man.  And pretty happy, too.

culture

More Doors

(Robin Trower is jamming on the stereo as I write this.  Just sayin’.)

I feel the urge to write something, but no one topic presents itself with sufficient weight to dominate a whole entry.  What to talk about, that is the question.  That poor guy who got tied to a tree in Kentucky was on my mind last week.

Census takers have, in certain parts of the country, been lumped in with so-called “revenooers” (to use Snuffy Smith jargon) and generally threatened, shot at, occasionally killed by folks exercising their right to be separate.  So they assume.  Appalachia, the Ozarks, parts of Tennessee and Kentucky, Texas…a lot of pockets, populated by people who have, for many reasons, acquired a sense of identity apart from the mainstream, and who feel imposed upon if the gov’ment so much as notices their existence.  They’d have a point if they truly did maintain a separate existence, but they don’t, and hypocrisy is the least amenable vice to reason.  At one time it was bootlegging, today it’s drugs, either marijuana or meth.  They don’t seem to get it that if they contribute to the erosion of the public weal then they forfeit the “right” to be left alone.  I really believe they don’t understand this simple equation.

But do I believe that poor man was killed over some disagreement over politic hegemony?  No.  He knocked on the wrong door at the wrong time and asked the wrong question and some good ol’ boys killed him.  Scrawling “Fed” on his chest was probably an afterthought, and means about as much as had they written “Cop” or “Fag” or “Stranger.”  Whoever did it probably thought he was being cute.

I would point to this and say that anyone who thinks America is free of its terrorists, its fundamentalist jihadists, its unreconstructed semi-literate hate-mongers, its pockets of intolerance where just walking down the street wearing the wrong clothes can get one hurt or killed, then a closer look is necessary.  Like such groups and people in foreign climes, the motivations for these folks are many and varied, from religion and political purity to money or sex or just bitter resentments.  The binding characteristic is that they hate—not with a red-hot, spikey, enraged hate, but with the harsher, tamped-ash, slow-burn deep hatred of constant gauging, you to them, ranking those who belong against those who don’t, an ever-present, seething, low-grade fever of hate that informs every single thought and action.  It’s not so much that something triggers it at the moment, causing an aberrant act of outrage as that they start from a coal-bed of resentment and rejection that they take as “normal.”  That makes them harder to understand for most people.  The default position for these folks is to despise you because you aren’t like them, and may the ‘verse help you if you have any education, erudition, any sense of a larger civic ecology, and grasp that reality is more than the pathetic network of familial connections that hoards sentiment and incubates the drowning phobias of in-group solidarity and guarantees a cyclic affirmation of hopelessness.

From this, though, I would point out one thing that we tend to forget in America, in the West, that open-mindedness is always based on resources.  There must be enough, more than enough, to make people comfortable.  Apocalyptic fiction is frightening not so much because the physical world crumbles, but because everyone accepts in the absence of Enough that the small bits and pieces, an apple, a loaf of bread, a piece of sheeting to cover your from rain, a drink of water, is always sufficient reason to throw Plato on the fire and give up on solving problems.  People, it suggests, lose morality, even love, when they’re hungry and frightened enough.

I have a house-full of books.  I just got a few more yesterday.  The pile of unread tomes grows, and it makes me feel rich.

Many years ago, a cousin of mine had to live upstairs from us, with my grandparents, because his mother and father had moved to a county where this cousin did not meet the local school standards.  He would have entered their high school a grade behind instead of graduating that year.  So he lived upstairs and attended his alma mater so he could graduate.

I ended up having to look out for him.  He was stupid.  Not in that he lacked intelligence, but he had no concept of how to apply it.  He reacted.  He did things without forethought.  He got in trouble.  Consequently, he got me into some trouble.  I was not stupid, so the degree of trouble for me was minimized, confined to the problem of what to do with this kid.  I quickly reached a point of wanting him out of the house.  Which meant that sometimes I did his homework.

I hadn’t had much contact with my cousins for years.  There were many reasons for this I won’t go into, but basically they were strangers to me.  They were cousins.  Fine.  Big deal.  So what?  This is perhaps a blindspot with me, but frankly family as a concept doesn’t mean much to me.  I was raised to earn friendship, regardless, and I expected it to be earned in turn.  The conditions are immaterial and vary wildly, but just laying a claim on one’s affections simply because you happen to be related is not an idea I subscribe to.

So this kid was, while I “knew” him, pretty much a stranger.  One evening we’re conversing about this and that and we got onto the topic of sacrifice.  He proudly declared that he’d risk his life for me.

“Why?” I asked.

“You’re my cousin.  You’re family.”

“So?”  He looked puzzled so I elaborated.  “Okay, say you find out that I’m a drug dealer.  The police get onto me and it looks like I might be arrested or killed by a rival.  You’d fight both for me because we’re family?”

“Yeah!”

“You’d stand between me and the police.”

“Yeah!”

“You’re an idiot,” I said.

He looked hurt.  After a couple minutes, he asked,  “You wouldn’t do it for me?”

“If you were a drug dealer and I found out, I’d turn your ass in.”

“But I’m family!”

“And if I’d never met you before?  You grew up on the east coast and you’ve just come here and looked me up for the first time.  We don’t know each other from Adam.”

“We’d be family.”

“That’s nuts.  You don’t know me.  I could be the worst person on the planet and you’re telling me you’d risk your life for me.  Would you do it for____?”  I named someone we both knew, unrelated.

“No.”

“What if he was the one who’d become the scientist who cured cancer?”

He shrugged.  This was getting beyond his personal calculus.

No, I don’t actually think consanguinity is sufficient reason to extend any more consideration than you would to a casual acquaintance, certainly not to someone who has become a close friend.  One of the reasons, I suppose, I have no children.  Blood is probably an evolutionary trait to guarantee the success of a given DNA, but in society it is often turned to abuse, an excuse to overlook all sorts of shortfalls.  I might have felt different had I had brothers and sisters, but I hope not.

I recently read a novel called Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell.  It’s a harsh, unpleasant story of Ozark backwoods familial tyranny.  I understand it’s about to be released as a film.  It portrays the kind of chains family imposes under the most obscene kind of filial blackmail, the way it is used as an excuse to not only forgive but defend criminality, brutality, ignorance, and the perpetuation of a siege mentality that cannot afford to embrace anything genuinely moral.  It is at core an argument against a concept of family that holds sway over so much of the human race.

But it also shows what I mean when I say all moral behavior rests on resource.  Having enough.  Having, perhaps, more than enough.  The irony, of course, is that the mindset that such entrenched poverty and the oppressive familial code that seems to emerge in its depths pretty much guarantees that those so trapped will never step outside to find a way to cure their condition.  Entropy.  Energy always ebbs in a closed system.  For growth you need outside energy.

Sometimes the best way to help a situation is to leave it.  Perhaps what the world needs are more doors.  Open.  We have, perhaps, enough rooms.  We need more doors.

Art

The Keyboard I Didn’t Buy

I came within a few synapses of buying a keyboard today.  An old Yamaha, double-manual, polyphonic ensemble—portable, with a stand.  No amplifier.  There was a time I would have fallen all over myself to get one of these for under five hundred bucks.  This one—sitting on the grass in someone’s back yard, part of the swag obtainable at the annual neighborhood yard sale we attend—was going for twenty-five bucks.

And I passed.

Couldn’t change my mind, either, a young fellow was right behind us and snatched it up.

Now, I could say that I passed on it because I never buy a keyboard without trying it out, to see if all the notes and pots work, to see, basically, if it both sounds good and feels right.  Feel is very important in these matters.

But that would be waffling, really.  I didn’t buy because…well, why?  I’m going to be 55 in a few weeks and my days of gigging are more than thirty years past.  I do not play well enough anymore to justify having more than the one piano I have—an instrument, by the way, the capacities of which I have yet to max out.

I play at playing music.  Way, way back in the distant past, there was a period of a couple of years when I could sit in with other bands, could do a reasonably good evening of rock-n-roll with some classical stuff thrown in for the oohs and ahhs.  I played every day, usually for three hours, often more.  I wanted to be Keith Emerson.  I could do a couple of the less complex ELP tunes.

But I did not have all the other requisite drives to make it as a professional musician.  I hate dealing with the business side, for one thing, something I confess to still dislike.   I am not constitutionally equipped to make money.  I wanted to play music.

But I also wanted to play the music I wanted to play and the fact is that as in everything else one does to make a living, you don’t really often get to do what you want to do—you have to please the customer.  And I lost patience with the pathetic musical taste of my so-called audience back then.  I—and the guys playing with me—would break our backs learning some really cool piece of choice music (something by Genesis, say, or Yes or, one time I remember, something by Premiata Forneria Marconi—and if you do not know who they were, go check them out, for your musical education is lacking) and put it out there at a gig and receive lukewarm response and a request for something from the Doobie Brothers.  Not that I dislike the Doobies, mind you, but it just wasn’t up there, in my opinion.  Actually the audience just wasn’t up there.

So I walked away.  I sold all my equipment and said to hell with it.  Didn’t play for several years.

We bought a piano in 1989.  The last gig I’d done was about 1977 or 78.  I had forgotten damn near everything.

But I hadn’t bought the thing to relive glory days or revisit tunes I could enjoy easily on the stereo—I’d bought it to do what I wanted to do.  So I wrote a few pieces, played in the mornings just to reset my mood for the day, jammed, really.  Over the years, I have occasionally picked up a piece of sheet music and worked at it, but basically I play a kind of pretend music.  In my mind it is.  It’s kind of like Keith Jarrett, who improvises everything he does.  Of course, Jarrett is marvelously skilled and educated so his improvisations are fascinating, intricate.  Mine are a bit redundant.  I’ve developed a suite of a couple dozen motifs that I can mix and match and then just sit down and rip on them.

People listening, when I’m in a groove, think it’s amazing, and the structure is such that most of them think I’m playing something they just can’t quite recognize.  But it’s a rudimentary form of jazz freeform.  Middle-level musicians enjoy what I’m doing but know it’s more or less fake.

Oddly enough, the few really good musicians I know love listening, because to them it’s just spontaneous composition and they’ve worked very hard to get to a point where they can do the same thing.  As long as I don’t play too long, they’re actually impressed.

About once a month, if I’m not doing anything else, I play at a small church open mic from January to August.  The audience is small, they never have requests, and they think I’m pretty good.  At least, they clearly enjoy themselves when I play.

And that’s enough.  I’m playing.  I’m playing from the heart.  I’m playing what I want.  I don’t really need much more, though sometimes I’d like more.

So why did I pass on the yard sale keyboard?  Because two keyboards means more discipline.  It means I’m getting serious about doing music that I no longer do.  It means—to me, from inside my skull—that I have to knuckle down and practice and prove I deserve to be playing.  It means pressure.

There might come a time I decide, because I really want to, that I need to get my chops back in a serious way.  But not now.  I’m concentrating on my writing.  That’s the work that needs the lion’s share of my attention.  If I start playing music three or four hours a day again, I’ll short-change the important stuff.  So I passed.  I don’t need it.  I’m okay with where I’m at with what I do with the music I make.

Besides…where the hell would I put it?

Art

Some Art

Time for a little art.

Once upon a time, in the distant past, I had ambitions to become a comic book artist.  I wrote and drew my own.  My models…well, I am very much a fan of extreme realism, so some of the less mimetic, more representational comic art leaves me unimpressed.  My idol when I was a kid, trying to do this, was Russ Manning.  He was the ne plus ultra of comics technicians, and not only because of his superb style, but for the substance of the comics he did.  Magnus Robot Fighter 4000 A.D. was just about everything I ever wanted in a comic book, along with its spin-off, The Aliens, which did not last very many issues.

There were others I liked.  Dan Spiegle,  who did Lost In Space (before the lamebrained television series and long after it) among other things.  And of course the wonderful Alex Raymond of Flash Gordon fame.

There was a time, when I was drawing every day, that I got fairly good.  But then photography came along, then I went back to writing, and the rest, as they say….

But I still do art occasionally.  Now I think that rather than doing comics, if I’d stuck with it, I’d do illustrations.  That leads to a whole other pantheon of greats.  In the last couple decades, I sit down to doodle or sketch when I need a break.  It’s fun and relaxing and I feel no pressure to accomplish anything beyond satisfying my desire to create something cool.

Below you’ll find a new drawing.  You may be able to tell from the technique that I’m a Virgil Finlay fan, though nowhere near his legendary abilities. Below the main, finished, illustration are thumbnails of the work-in-progress.  I posted these as they were done on my Facebook page, but I thought I’d put them all up here.  (Click on the thumbnail and you can get a larger view.)

I’m going to hang several pieces this year in the Archon art show.  I don’t have room to keep everything, but I’ve scanned the pieces into the computer and I can print them out later if I want.

Anyway, enjoy.

stage-5-final.bmp

Thumbnails of the process below.
stage-4.jpgstage-3.jpgstage-2.jpgstage-1.jpg

culture

Legacies

Comparisons of the disaster of 9/11 to Pearl Harbor break down in the aftermath.  What I remember is getting a phone call from my wife to turn on the news, any news, and then seeing the images on CNN.  I then called several people, including some on the west coast, early as it was.

It was a binding experience.

Then the silence of the skies for next few days.  All planes grounded.  We don’t pay attention to all that background noise until it disappears.

And I remember wanting to strike back.

But at who?

I am not a reflex pacifist.  I do not believe in turning the other cheek as an automatic gesture.  The world, in aggregate, does not yield to such gestures until much blood is spent, and disgust comes to the aid of the peaceful intent.  Strike at me,  hurt my family and friends, threaten my home, I have no compunction about the use of violence.

But not thoughtless lashing out, flailing, blind retaliation.  That does less good than the habitual use of peaceful surrender.  If we were to find these people, we needed to be smart about it, and move carefully.  When caught, punishment must be determined accordingly.

That was not to be.  I watched our so-called leaders turn this event into a justification for major abuse globally.  The sympathy we had from the entire world evaporated as the United States began stomping around acting like a pissed off child whose lunch money had been taken by a bully.  But we were not small and weak, so embracing the automatic response of schoolyard tactics resulted in calamity.  I was horrified by the unfolding nightmare of the Bush years, all done supposedly in my name as a citizen.

The aftermath of Pearl Harbor was horrible but not cause for self-loathing and shame.  We rose to an occasion that demanded sacrifice and we came to the aid of a  world gone mad.  The enemy was clear, the stakes enormous, the calculations easy enough.  Ugly as WWII was, our response was as close to noble as war can bestow, and we have carried ourselves with pride born out of that period for going on 70 years now.

Not so after 9/11.

We were struck in 1941 by a nation that officially declared war upon us.  We knew who they were, what they stood for, and where to find them.  It was a conflict of clear adversaries fighting as nations.

The 9/11 aggressors were a band of people more like the mafia, with no nation, no formal declaration of war, and no clear face.  We had a few names, a few associations.  We didn’t know how to deal with this, so we pretended it was just like any other war, shoved the awkward details into the box called War, and attacked as if nations could be blamed.

After WWII we could expect and received formal surrenders from nations authorized to sign such instruments.  Rebuilding began, and it could be argued that THAT was the real victory.

Who will sign a surrender in this conflict?  Who can?  What would it look like?  And how do you rebuild something these very same enemies keep knocking down and by so doing make us knock them down as well, along with all the innocent people who just get in the way?

There was a time hatred could not act on its own in such a vast theater—it required nations to enable it and give it reach.  That’s changed.

It seems to me we need to start figuring out how to rid ourselves of hate.  We can’t do that if we keep hurting the very people we need to help.

Our job has been made infinitely harder because of the schoolyard bully mentality of the administration that dragged us into this fray in the aftermath of national tragedy.  We may never regain the credibility needed to address the real issues.  That is the loss I continue to mourn on this day.

The dead cannot be blamed for the acts of the living, and revenge is a cold legacy for the sacrifice of the honorable.

current affairs

Quote of the Day

It cannot have escaped those who have attended with candor to the arguments employed against the extensive powers of the government, that the authors of them have very little considered how far these powers were necessary means of attaining a necessary end. They have chosen rather to dwell on the inconveniences which must be unavoidably blended with all political advantages; and on the possible abuses which must be incident to every power or trust, of which a beneficial use can be made. This method of handling the subject cannot impose on the good sense of the people of America. It may display the subtlety of the writer; it may open a boundless field for rhetoric and declamation; it may inflame the passions of the unthinking, and may confirm the prejudices of the misthinking: but cool and candid people will at once reflect, that the purest of human blessings must have a portion of alloy in them; that the choice must always be made, if not of the lesser evil, at least of the GREATER, not the PERFECT, good; and that in every political institution, a power to advance the public happiness involves a discretion which may be misapplied and abused. They will see, therefore, that in all cases where power is to be conferred, the point first to be decided is, whether such a power be necessary to the public good; as the next will be, in case of an affirmative decision, to guard as effectually as possible against a perversion of the power to the public detriment.

from Federalist # 41, by James Madison

Absurdity

Poor Misunderstood Right Wing Nut Job

Some people seem to dissolve into their worst attributes over time.  There is a seige mentality that develops, it seems, and from within the bastions and barricades the fever dreams of the misunderstood and disillusioned take root and grow into horrible, twisted things.

I don’t care much for people who are constantly running around trying to scare the rest of us with apocalyptic prognostications.  The sky is falling, yes it is, and there’s nothing we can do about it.  Who can hold up the sky or keep the stars from falling?  Not me and it would appear a waste of what life might be left to spend my time fretting over it and ruining other people’s day telling them to not enjoy themselves because the impending catastrophe is of such significance that to ignore it in any way is to cheapen all human history.  Having a good time in the face of Doom is being, somehow, rude to the awesome relevance of said Doom.

Everyone needs a hobby.

Conspiracy theorists have found the X-Box of their desires within the serpentine confines of a world delimited by the constant back-stabbing one-up-manship of imagined black ops, coups, assassinations, and creeping ideological subversion.  I wish them good times playing with their toys.

But occasionally they decide to rewrite history to justify their paranoia and depending on what it is they’re trying to sell by doing so, I get a bit less tolerant.

A grand master of New Spin is Pat Buchanan.  He’s been misinterpreting reality since before his failed bid for the presidency.  In retrospect he is the ideal speech writer for Richard Nixon, for he must have shared Nixon’s conviction that the game is rigged and the Lefties are out to get us all from the beginning.  Do right by all those bleeding heart liberals and all they do is spit on you.  Open up China, establish the EPA, expand health care, and what do you get for all your efforts?  They pillory you for a little wire tap and the construction of a shadow government that could do end runs around Congress.  Ingrates!

Pat has become more strident and marginalized since Reagan took office.  The tough American school of foreign diplomacy combined with the Minute Man ideal of self-sufficiency and rugged independence came to the fore, nurtured by an age that declared that all victims were just whiners and the only difference between a rich man and a poor man is plain hard work.  Pat blossomed.

What fruit has this mutant liberty tree borne?  Well, he’s now ready to revisit Hitler and tell us how Adolph was just misunderstood after all, that he didn’t want world conquest (which is possible—he mainly wanted Europe and Russia) but peace and a strong Germany.  He makes his argument here.

It is one of those things which one reads with  awe at the sheer balls of the premise. Clearly, Pat has taken Mein Kampf to heart as the heart-warming, desperate revelation of a tortured peacemaker who has been maligned and misunderstood by any and all.

He claims in this article that Hitler sued for peace with Britain two years before the first trains rolled toward the concentration camps.  This is a deceptive claim.  But the specifics are less important than the overall argument.  Pat claims Germany invaded Poland in a dispute over Danzig.  One must then ask why one of the first acts after Poland fell was the construction of the camps.

But the actual problem here is a complete and utterly ridiculous misreading of Hitler himself.  Hitler made it clear in many speeches, and in Mein Kampf, that his aims were for a militantly ascendent Germany.  The Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935.  People were already leaving the country because they understood what Hitler was.  Berlin in 1936 had to be “made over” for the Olympics—antisemitic posters taken down, the presence of brown shirts and their ilk removed, and the camps placed off-limits for even official visits.  Oh, yes, there were camps them, around the major cities, but they had not quite yet become the exclusive depository of Jews—gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs of various ethnic backgrounds, and certainly politically questionable types filled them in stinking, horrid conditions that only foretold of what was to come.

Hitler’s Reich in fact violated every single treaty it signed but one: its treaty with Japan that demanded it declare war on the United States in the event of war between the U.S. and Japan.

I don’t follow the logic behind Buchanan’s reinterpretation.  I don’t know what he’s doing here unless there’s a latent holocaust denier lurking beneath all the other reactionary dross he’s acquired over the years.

There is, however, an interesting point brought out in some of the comments appended to Buchanan’s post—that of Stalin’s somewhat “lighter” treatment at the hands of posterity.  As if by claiming that we don’t hold Stalin to the same standard of denunciation of revulsion, that somehow the opprobrium heaped upon Herr Hitler is, well, unfair.

Well.  Stalin was as big a monster, perhaps bigger, than Hitler.  The only thing that makes them different is their nationalist aims.  Stalin seemed content to remain within the borders of the Soviet Union.  He slaughtered his own people, and he played no favorites in that regard—he was an equal opportunity murderer.  He did not invade Poland.  He did not start a world war.  Considering the wall of silence placed around his regime, without that war we might still not know what was going on inside the Soviet Union.  Stalin’s sociopathology was constrained, methodical, even in some sense rational insofar as he recognized limits.  Hitler was different.  Hitler was more than just a sociopath and as the war progressed it became more obvious.  It is appropriate that Hitler’s favorite composer was Wagner, for what do most of Wagner’s operas end with?  Gotterdammerung!  The end of everything.

We’re catching up with regards to Uncle Joe, as Truman called him.  We’re finding out.  His atrocities were on such a scale, though, as to almost dwarf what the Nazis did.  But that’s a deceptive way to look at it as well.  What difference the numbers?  Eleven or eleven million?

Even so, I don’t quite grasp the point of trying to rehabilitate Hitler.  Is Buchanan trying to lay blame on the Brits for jumping the gun?  Is he trying to point out the flaws in systems and networks of treaties that seem to draw us into disaster time and again?  Is he practicing moral relativism?  That would be a first for him.

Whatever is going on, I think it behooves us to pay attention to the Nut Jobbery going on in our midst.

We do live in interesting times.

Art

John Adams and the Efforts of Time

We just watched the last episode of John Adams.  I got the DVD from the library and we went through it in one week, all seven installments.  I have to admit, the last episode brought tears.  The partnership between John and Abigail was well-portrayed and deeply moving.  The older I get, the more I find the strongest story resonance with depictions of deep, deep friendships, especially those that exist between lovers, spouses, life partners.  I cannot imagine losing Donna, who has become exactly that for me, in spite of the fact that I have friends of longer acquaintance, good friends, too.

The casting was incredible, the make-up superb, the writing first class.
What struck me most about this as well was the marvelously-nuanced dramatization of the fundamental differences in political philosophy between Adams and Jefferson.  I can’t help but think that when Adams declared that “the true history of our revolution is lost” he must have been thinking of the initial partnership and later dissolution of like-mindedness between himself and Thomas Jefferson, whom Joseph Ellis depicts an an American Sphinx.

Adams is here portrayed as an idealist who cannot separate his philosophy from his pragmatism.  In the first dozen years of the new republic, there was enormous public sentiment for France and when that country descended into the frenzy of its own revolution gone mad, that sentiment demanded that we support the revolutionaries.  The irony that France supported us when it was still a monarchy and now those very people that had backed us (granted, as a move in their own war with England) were the victims of the mob ascendant was lost on most people, and apparently even Jefferson, who wanted us to embroil ourselves immediately and deeply in support of the revolutionaries.  Washington—how lucky they were to have him—refused.  He was a militaryman by training and he understood how to assess the chances of success and how to go about surviving a conflict in which you are outmatched.  He had seen more than his share of defeat in a long career and knew well that ideology needed a strong hand to keep it in check, lest it carry you over the precipice.  He refused to side with France, believing that neutrality was the only way for the United States to survive.  Adams shared that belief.

Jefferson, and those like him believed that the rightness of the cause would win out.

Neither Jefferson or Adams had served in the military, but it appears that Adams at least had seen a bit of bloodshed.  He grasped an essential reality—that ideals do not win battles.  And yet, politically, he clung to his ideals in the face of an enemy who seemed capable of indulging any tactic in the cause of winning, namely Jefferson.  Almost a complete reversal of roles, at least in appearances.

Or was it?

Adams seems to have had a grasp of the long-term in a way that Jefferson, with his mercurial fixation on posterity, did not.  Adams grasped that the fields in which ideals must be left unsullied by pragmatism are different than those in which an immediate fight for survival is waged.  He would not interject himself where his loyalty to the Constitution said he ought not, even when it might win him another term as president.  Jefferson seemed willing to do work-arounds whenever his vision demanded.

I’m simplifying, of course.  Adams blundered in terms of ideals badly with the Alien and Sedition Act.  He knew he would be remembered more for that—and not well—than for having steered the country through the shoals of potential disaster by refusing to take sides in the squabble between England and France.  And the Alien and Sedition Act is a nasty, unAmerican piece of political offal.  Patently unConstitutional.

And yet Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory was also patently unConstitutional, a violation of due process, and in many ways unleashed nastiness and ugliness by opening up all that land to American incursion, wiping out more Native American nations and people, bringing us into direct conflict with Spain and then Mexico, lent opportunity for future presidents to exercise the worst aspects of imperial ambition all in the name of the United States and in contradiction to the Founding Intent of the republic….and for that he is praised.

The essential element of the American Revolution, as it was happening at the time, is simply a group of talented men scrambling around trying desperately to make something workable out of a deadly situation.  They didn’t want a king anymore, they wanted to run their own affairs, but they were also terrified of their neighbors, so some legal wall had to be built to keep New York or Pennsylvania or Virginia from dictating to the smaller states.  The southern colonies operated as agrarian economies based on slave labor, and they wanted to maintain that, so something had to be done to make sure the abolitionists in the north couldn’t strip them of millions of dollars worth of property and labor.  In the tumult of ongoing war, they were working at a fever pitch to make sure they came out the other side with what they wanted, even at the expense of the unity that was to guarantee a victory, and they had no idea how it was all going to look.  It was bedlam.  It was panic-stricken intellectual jerrymandering.

And somehow out of this a framework evolved that, not then and not for a long time to come, but eventually emerged as a marvelous machine.

But there was little solidarity of invention, little conformity of vision.  They all knew that they had to fight to be severed from Great Britain.  That afterward they needed to erect a coherent government that wouldn’t take from them what they saw Britain trying to take from them.  How they were going to do all this, on that there was little agreement.

It was a mess.

The myth prevails.

But not so much that sound research and a little patient thought can’t recover what might actually have been going on, and sometimes the results are something wonderfully poignant, insightful, and honest as this miniseries.  It ought to be shown in grade school.  It ought to be part of any American history course.

At a book festival a few years ago, I attended a discussion by a historian who had just published a biography of Aaron Burr.  She’d taken the trouble to go back to primary sources and look at the man through the lens of his times rather than our modern, prejudiced view of a murderer and traitor.  She talked about the humanness of these people, who were an amalgam—hero and villain, coward and genius, self-serving and patriotic, publicly strong and privately weak—when someone stood up to condemn her for her scholarship.  His argument was that it wasn’t right to denigrate these people who had given us so much.

“I’m not denigrating anyone, sir,” the historian said.  “I’m simply showing them as they actually were.”

“What good does that do?  I don’t want to know that they were assholes.  I don’t agree with what you’re doing.”

I don’t want to know that they were assholes.

Understandable sentiment, perhaps, but without realizing how utterly human they were we risk deifying them.  And we’ve seen that process at work through most of our history, to greater or lesser degrees.  The temptation to cast the revolutionary era in bronze and hold it up as some ideal age is great because it seems so simple and honest and straight-forward compared to our present age of almost fractal complexity.  We can see the desire for that kind of simplicity and, we believe, dependability in the constant purges against politicians who prove themselves frail or hypocritical or simply too human.  We want paragons, walking talking ideals who never stray from the Philosopher’s Gold of which we think the Founding Fathers were composed.  We sacrifice a lot of talent this way.  Brilliant economists, diplomats, orators, legislators get harried out of office because they slept with someone out of wedlock or smoked pot in college or eschew a religious point-of-view.  The examination of private lives in search of the unstained, pure of heart, consistently noble character drives the best and brightest away from even putting themselves forward to serve.  As if any of these factors relate to competence or civic virtue or ability to lead.

Any examination of the Founding Fathers shows such a catalogue of human frailty that likely none of them today could get elected as small-town councilman much less to the highest offices of the land.  Among them were speculators, slave owners, philanderers, alcoholics, bigots, gamblers, and all manner of personal hypocrisy.

But look at what they managed to build.

I think more such dramatizations ought to be made.  We should know very well how human these people were.  We should know that, really, they weren’t so very different than we were, beyond those differences that time and circumstance inevitably produce.  It would do us good to get the idea that if these—uncertain, petty, churlish, hypocritical, frightened men—could do what they did when the opportunity presented itself, what can we not aspire to accomplish with all the benefits of their histories and our present abilities?  Knowing that we are more like them than not would be a good thing, I think.