Malcolm has some sense of history, especially political history;
He has just spent a fortnight in the daily company of the Wall Street Journal(frequently bonkers far-Right and always Murdoch) and the New York Times(decently balanced, bourgeois, civilised and stimulating).
What amazes, on a daily basis, is a simple truism:
Apart from the odd Pakistani village madrassa, the mess halls of the Mutaween, and the complementary editorials of Socialist Worker and the Daily Mail, the last bastion of ideological purity is the present Republican Party.
It says too much that the only GOP presidential potential still standing is … Newt Gingrich.
Once left for dead, the former House speaker has suddenly emerged as [Mitt] Romney’s most durable opponent yet — in part because he has performed well in the debates and, unlike the others, he is viewed by many in the Republican Party as a plausible president.
A bit further along there’s a telling observation:
“Is there enough time for Gingrich to self-destruct on his own before Jan. 3, or do you have to help it along? It’s a tough call,” said a GOP strategist who informally advises Romney’s campaign and, like other advisers interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal thinking.
When we look back on the last few months and note the political corpses littering the road to the primaries — Palin, Bachmann, Perry, Paul, Huntsman, Santorum, Cain — that anonymous “strategist” clearly has a shrewd perspective.
There is, incidentally, another political story in today’s Wapo (Dan Balz in The Take) which notes, tellingly, how:
that the most obvious launch-pad for a presidential candidature is the State governorship;
that there are a number of governors looking statesmanlike, sitting on their hands, offending as few as possible, calculating the odds for 2016, and keeping their powder dry (and their finances ticketty-boo);
so that in four years time we may be feeling the fetlocks of Christie of Noo Joisey, Daniels of Indiana and Scott of Florida, anyone of whom is more papabile than most of the current contenders.
And yet …
The Republican Party was once the party of Lincoln, of Teddy Roosevelt, of Dwight Eisenhower. More recently Jim Leach served Iowa’s 2nd District in the House of Representatives for twenty years, and was Obama’s worthy nominee to chair the National Endowment for the Humanities. Sherry Boehlert, nearly “liberal” as Leach, was upstate New York 23rd’s Representative for a quarter of a century: when he stood down in 2006 he put it simply:
People say to me: ‘Why are you the kind of Republican you are?’ Because in my formative political years, when I was coming up in New York, my governor was Nelson A. Rockefeller and my senator was Jacob K. Javits.
What went wrong?
That was the question Malcolm put to a chance acquaintance, nearer the kernel than himself. It didn’t get a comprehensive reply, but provoked a mused, and even disjointed reflection, which went something like:
The “liberal Republicans” you talk about were Easterners, intellectuals. America and the Republican heartland moved West post-World War II. Even went down-market.
Barry Goldwater was misrepresented, misunderstood — as his later years and record testify. Both ’60 and ’64 were dirty elections, don’t believe otherwise. And the Dems were setting the pace in dirt. It takes two to tango.
Perhaps the real sickness set in with Dick Nixon and the Californification that came with him. The hurt of the resignation took a generation to pass.
Reagan was always happy to be represented as more conservative than he actually was.
When Bush was steamrollered by Clinton in ’92, it was a reminder of previous pain. His son was driven by that, by the “all hat and no cattle” insults, while he was played, manipulated by Cheney and Halliburton. Dubya had been tailor-made by Rove — well, remember Karl Rove came into politics as James Baker’s henchman. Then Rove brought the Christian Coalition lot to the table … and now they control the menu.
It was Malcolm’s turn to order the next round: Sam Adams Seasonal in Malcolm’s case.
Malcolm knew the late Michael Ward in the late ’60s, early ’70s, on Havering Borough Council. Ward had a framed “pull” of the Peterborough Evening Telegraph, from the 1966 General Election, announcing that he had been won the seat on the umpteenth recount.
Alas! In that 1966 General Election Michael lost to Harmar Nicholls by three votes on the eighth recount.
The Evening Telegraph, running against a deadline, had prudently prepared two front pages. And, along with Ward’s, the paper’s dignity and decency were preserved..
An unlikely story
One or two screen-hoggers (notably Malcolm Coles) watched as the Daily Mail jumped the gun on the Amanda Knox acquittal.
Were we being generous — but let us remember this is the Daily Mail — someone misinterpreted the initial judicial ruling that Knox was guilty of libel. That earned Knox a sentence of three years, a convenient upgrade from the earlier one-year sentence, and conveniently expired. After all, it goes some way to covering the blushes of the whole Italian crime-and-punishment industry.
A cock-and-bull story
So: this went up on the Mail web-site:
Whoops!
Where it becomes unforgiveable is what followed:
As Knox realized the enormity of what judge Hellman was saying she sank into her chair sobbing uncontrollably while her family and friends hugged each other in tears.
A few feet away Meredith’s mother Arline, her sister Stephanie and brother Lyle, who had flown in especially for the verdict remained expressionless, staring straight ahead, glancing over just once at the distraught Knox family.
Prosecutors were delighted with the verdict and said that ‘justice has been done’ although they said on a ‘human factor it was sad two young people would be spending years in jail’.
Following the verdict Knox and Sollecito were taken out of court escorted by prison guards and into a waiting van which took her back to her cell at Capanne jail near Perugia and him to Terni jail, 60 miles away.
Both will be put on a suicide watch for the next few days as psychological assessments are made on each of them but this is usual practice for long term prisoners.
All of which is sheer invention, invented quotation, the full fiction of “colour” details.
Malcolm Coles adds that The Sun, Sky News and The Guardian all went down the same wrong turn: only the Mail, though, produced the full fictive farrago.
There’s a personal spat going on between Nick Pisa (the by-lined writer of that Mail piece) and Tim Ireland. Pisa, who it seems is not a Mail staffer, has form on this one: he was the onlie true begetter of the whole “Foxy Knoxy” meme. The official Mail line retailed to Ireland there is informative:
The quotes were obtained from various parties in the event of either a guilty or not guilty verdict.
Presumably the Mail also has a crystal ball to foretell facial expressions.
An up-dated story
Look for any of this in today’s London press, and you will be severely disappointed. Dog does not nip at dog.
THE DAILY Mail fabricated a news report on the end of the Amanda Knox trial.
Within seconds of the judge starting to announce the verdict, broadcast live on satellite television, the newspaper’s website, dailymail.co.uk, published a report headlined “Guilty: Amanda Knox looks stunned as appeal against murder conviction is rejected”.
But the newspaper went further than just having two reports ready to hand, each based on one of two possible outcomes – Knox’s appeal being rejected or upheld – and publishing the wrong one in error.
By opting for the appeal being rejected, the paper published a wholly invented account of what happened next.
… a few British publications made the error of publishing the news that Knox was guilty moments before she was set free.
The Daily Mail declared her guilt in a story complete with descriptions of how Knox appeared when she heard the verdict: “Amanda Knox looked stunned this evening after she dramatically lost her prison appeal against her murder conviction.”
Joel Gunter, at jouralism.co.uk, is able to finish his account of the shambles with another most telling and shaming one-liner:
Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mail, had not responded to a request for comment at the time of writing.
As a poll shows Cameron istaking a hammeringover this crisis, the Downing Street fall-out from the arrest of Coulson is leaking out. Steve Hilton is blaming Ed Lewellyn, the PM’s chief of staff, for not passing on warnings to Cameron from the Guardian about Coulson. The most neuralgic issue is that there was one degree of separation between the PM and an axe-murderer. The Guardian told Steve Hilton, who in turn told Ed Lewellyn, that Andy Coulson had hired knowingly hired a criminal, Jonathan Rees, after he got released from a seven-year sentence for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice by planting cocaine on an innocent woman even though he was on remand for conspiracy in an axe murder. Rees had been charged with conspiracy to murder Daniel Morgan, a former business associate, who was found dead in a pub car park with an axe in his head.Nice.
Ed didn’t pass on the warning to Cameron. Hilton says he is at fault for not doing so. Ed counters that if Hilton thought it so important, why didn’t he tell Dave himself? The image of the PM employing people who employ people who associate with axe murderers is not a good one…
Short, but not sweet, and quite comprehensive.
But some of us have been saying much the same for some time, while Paul “Booze Hound” Staines and his understrapper, Harry “Tory Bear” Cole, have been sneering at the Guardian, getting their steer from Tory Central,and running interference for News International.
So, let’s grant them two degrees of separation.
* Reverse ferret
Good to see the verbal export trade is prospering.
Jack Shafer at Slate (a web wing of the Washington Post) explains the closure of the News of the World to his American readers by using just this term:
When legendary editor Kelvin MacKenzie ran Rupert Murdoch’s London Sun in the 1980s and early 1990s, he would incite his reporters into tabloid action by ordering them to “put a ferret” up the trousers of the powers that be. As Neil Chenoweth writes in Rupert Murdoch: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Media Wizard:
[MacKenzie] would do this until the moment it became clear that in the course of making up stories, inventing quotes, invading people’s privacy, and stepping on toes, the Sun had committed some truly hideous solecism—like running the wrong lottery numbers—when he would rush back to the newsroom shouting, “Reverse ferret!” This is the survival moment, when a tabloid changes course in a blink without any reduction in speed, volume, or moral outrage. In the midst of a disaster of its own making, it pulls a ferret out of a hat and sails on.
Shafer completes his metaphor:
Like all reverse-ferret maneuvers, the closing of News of the World is designed to scatter and confuse the audience. It looks like the sacrifice of something very special to him, seeing as it was his first U.K. newspaper acquisition in 1968. But it’s not. It looks like atonement, but it’s not. It’s supposed to change the subject, but it’s too late for that. The most shocking thing to me about the paper’s closure is what an empty gesture it is. I expected much better from the genocidal tyrant.
The tricky thing about the reverse ferret is that unless you nab the beast the moment it bursts out of a pant leg, it can be impossible to apprehend. From the way News Corp. is acting, it looks to me as if the Murdochs have lost control of their precious ferret. If I were Rupert Murdoch, I’d start wearing my socks over my cuffs. Ferrets will eat anything that looks and smells like meat.
We in the UK have a small (and justified, and on-going) kerfuffle over the teaching of history.
After a very good evening out (with the Lady in his Life and the Pert Young Piece), Malcolm returned to find (this being the “celebration” of the start of the American Civil War/War between the States) the Washington Post putting up a detailed post on
Five myths about why the South seceded
The minor premiss
It’s by James W. Loewen, not a historian (significantly), but primarily a sociologist. He is best known for a glorious debunking of the norm for pedagogics, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. What Loewen says about US “approved” history-teaching is as nothing to the “authorised” English curricula (which work by selective omission).
Anyway, for the benefit of a few intelligent readers, here’s what Loewen write, in full:
One hundred fifty years after the Civil War began, we’re still fighting it — or at least fighting over its history. I’ve polled thousands of high school history teachers and spoken about the war to audiences across the country, and there is little agreement even about why the South seceded. Was it over slavery? States’ rights? Tariffs and taxes?
As the nation begins to commemorate the anniversaries of the war’s various battles — from Fort Sumter to Appomattox — let’s first dispense with some of the more prevalent myths about why it all began.
1. The South seceded over states’ rights.
Confederate states did claim the right to secede, but no state claimed to be seceding for that right. In fact, Confederates opposed states’ rights — that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery.
On Dec. 24, 1860, delegates at South Carolina’s secession convention adopted a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” It noted “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” and protested that Northern states had failed to “fulfill their constitutional obligations” by interfering with the return of fugitive slaves to bondage. Slavery, not states’ rights, birthed the Civil War.
South Carolina was further upset that New York no longer allowed “slavery transit.” In the past, if Charleston gentry wanted to spend August in the Hamptons, they could bring their cook along. No longer — and South Carolina’s delegates were outraged. In addition, they objected that New England states let black men vote and tolerated abolitionist societies. According to South Carolina, states should not have the right to let their citizens assemble and speak freely when what they said threatened slavery.
Other seceding states echoed South Carolina. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world,” proclaimed Mississippi in its own secession declaration, passed Jan. 9, 1861. “Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth. . . . A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”The South’s opposition to states’ rights is not surprising. Until the Civil War, Southern presidents and lawmakers had dominated the federal government. The people in power in Washington always oppose states’ rights. Doing so preserves their own.
2. Secession was about tariffs and taxes.
During the nadir of post-civil-war race relations — the terrible years after 1890 when town after town across the North became all-white “sundown towns” and state after state across the South prevented African Americans from voting — “anything but slavery” explanations of the Civil War gained traction. To this day Confederate sympathizers successfully float this false claim, along with their preferred name for the conflict: the War Between the States. At the infamous Secession Ball in South Carolina, hosted in December by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, “the main reasons for secession were portrayed as high tariffs and Northern states using Southern tax money to build their own infrastructure,” The Washington Post reported.
These explanations are flatly wrong. High tariffs had prompted the Nullification Controversy in 1831-33, when, after South Carolina demanded the right to nullify federal laws or secede in protest, President Andrew Jackson threatened force. No state joined the movement, and South Carolina backed down. Tariffs were not an issue in 1860, and Southern states said nothing about them. Why would they? Southerners had written the tariff of 1857, under which the nation was functioning. Its rates were lower than at any point since 1816.
3. Most white Southerners didn’t own slaves, so they wouldn’t secede for slavery.
Indeed, most white Southern families had no slaves. Less than half of white Mississippi households owned one or more slaves, for example, and that proportion was smaller still in whiter states such as Virginia and Tennessee. It is also true that, in areas with few slaves, most white Southerners did not support secession. West Virginia seceded from Virginia to stay with the Union, and Confederate troops had to occupy parts of eastern Tennessee and northern Alabama to hold them in line.
However, two ideological factors caused most Southern whites, including those who were not slave-owners, to defend slavery. First, Americans are wondrous optimists, looking to the upper class and expecting to join it someday. In 1860, many subsistence farmers aspired to become large slave-owners. So poor white Southerners supported slavery then, just as many low-income people support the extension of George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy now.
Second and more important, belief in white supremacy provided a rationale for slavery. As the French political theorist Montesquieu observed wryly in 1748: “It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures [enslaved Africans] to be men; because allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians.” Given this belief, most white Southerners — and many Northerners, too — could not envision life in black-majority states such as South Carolina and Mississippi unless blacks were in chains. Georgia Supreme Court Justice Henry Benning, trying to persuade the Virginia Legislature to leave the Union, predicted race war if slavery was not protected. “The consequence will be that our men will be all exterminated or expelled to wander as vagabonds over a hostile earth, and as for our women, their fate will be too horrible to contemplate even in fancy.” Thus, secession would maintain not only slavery but the prevailing ideology of white supremacy as well.
4. Abraham Lincoln went to war to end slavery.
Since the Civil War did end slavery, many Americans think abolition was the Union’s goal. But the North initially went to war to hold the nation together. Abolition came later.
On Aug. 22, 1862, President Lincoln wrote a letter to the New York Tribune that included the following passage: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”
However, Lincoln’s own anti-slavery sentiment was widely known at the time. In the same letter, he went on: “I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.” A month later, Lincoln combined official duty and private wish in his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
White Northerners’ fear of freed slaves moving north then caused Republicans to lose the Midwest in the congressional elections of November 1862.
Gradually, as Union soldiers found help from black civilians in the South and black recruits impressed white units with their bravery, many soldiers — and those they wrote home to — became abolitionists. By 1864, when Maryland voted to end slavery, soldiers’ and sailors’ votes made the difference.
5. The South couldn’t have made it long as a slave society.
Slavery was hardly on its last legs in 1860. That year, the South produced almost 75 percent of all U.S. exports. Slaves were worth more than all the manufacturing companies and railroads in the nation. No elite class in history has ever given up such an immense interest voluntarily. Moreover, Confederates eyed territorial expansion into Mexico and Cuba. Short of war, who would have stopped them — or forced them to abandon slavery?
To claim that slavery would have ended of its own accord by the mid-20th century is impossible to disprove but difficult to accept. In 1860, slavery was growing more entrenched in the South. Unpaid labor makes for big profits, and the Southern elite was growing ever richer. Freeing slaves was becoming more and more difficult for their owners, as was the position of free blacks in the United States, North as well as South. For the foreseeable future, slavery looked secure. Perhaps a civil war was required to end it.
As we commemorate the sesquicentennial of that war, let us take pride this time — as we did not during the centennial — that secession on slavery’s behalf failed.
The synthesis:
Now: when will UK media (apart from the BBC) do anything as well?
Why is Michael Gove at the Department of Education not encouraging similar efforts in the British media? He was (and his wife is) well paid by the Murdoch Empire to produce bijou essayettes. Gove has the resources, and the clout, to use the big media combines to produce and publicise similar efforts.
Years gone by there was an excellent series of Jackdaw folders of primary materials, with a small booklet giving an overview. Malcolm used to possess a couple of dozen. The one on Agincourt was an essential adjunct to the teaching of Shakespeare’s Henry V. There was an excellent one on Shakespeare himself, another on Dickens, the one on Caxton gave insights into the printing revolution (far more accessible than McLuhan).
There are several similar folders still available through the Irish and Northern Irish official publications (those on the Ulster Plantations and the Ulster-Scots emigration are indispensable for anyone trying to comprehend the Unionist psychology).
Conclusion:
Give (intelligent — and many are, but singularly undervalued) teachers the materials, and they’ll finish the job.
Malcolm is neither a lawyer, nor an American, though he has daughters who are the one, and grandchildren the other. He admires much of American society immensely. And yet …
A nearly unanimous Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the First Amendment protects even hurtful speech about public issues and upheld the right of a fringe church to protest near military funerals.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that the Topeka, Kan.-based Westboro Baptist Church’s picketing “is certainly hurtful and its contribution to public discourse may be negligible.” But he said government “cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker.”
“As a nation we have chosen a different course – to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate,” Roberts said.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. was the lone dissenter.
… there are limits.
Three points:
Is a funeral, which is invariably a moment of personal suffering and private emotion, a place for the self-promoting and profoundly unReverend Fred W Phelps and his family to perform their amateur dramatics?
Is there not some social obligation on officialdom to protect the bereaved (and the context here is the close family of soldiers killed in the service of their country) from “hurtful … public discourse” and unnecessary “pain”?
Why, writ small but as a comparison, in a land which treasures the Right to Bear Arms and shoot each other, is it acceptable for parents to have circulated official school “permission slips”, so that, before little Joe can play with little Willie, Mom has to assert there is no hard liquor in the house?
The wisdom of Oliver Wendell Holmes
There is a previous First Amendment case which deserves to be remembered.
In the First World War, the Socialist Charles Schrenck campaigned against the draft. The Supreme Court held his conviction under the Espionage Act correct and constitutional. Justice Holmes delivered the magisterial opinion:
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. … The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is question of proximity and degree.
On the rare occasions Malcolm posts on this topic, invariably he receives posts using four-letter obscene terms for the female pudenda. Nice. Psycho gun-freaks are so loquacious and unstinting in their pursuit of critics.
He has researched that one, just one, gunshop, Realco in Forestville, is the source of supply for a third of the weapons used criminally and confiscated by Washington DC police, and which can be sourced by to a Maryland dealer:
Outside a baby shower in Landover three years ago, Erik Kenneth Dixon snapped. As he argued with his sister and her boyfriend in a parking lot, the 25-year-old man whipped out a .45-caliber Glock and shot her in the leg. Then he chased down her boyfriend, firing between cars and at the running man’s feet until he slipped on wet grass. As the prone man held his hands up in futile defense, Dixon executed him, firing seven times.
By law, Dixon was prohibited from owning a gun. He had spent almost three years in prison for shooting at a man. But three months before the baby-shower killing, he gave his girlfriend $335 and took her to an old brick house on a commercial strip just beyond the District line in Forestville, home to a gun shop called Realco.
“He knew which one he wanted and picked it out,” the woman would later tell police.
Dixon’s Glock was one of 86 guns sold by Realco that have been linked to homicide cases during the past 18 years, far outstripping the total from any other store in the region, a Washington Post investigation has found. Over that period, police have recovered more than 2,500 guns sold by the shop, including over 300 used in non-fatal shootings, assaults and robberies.
Fallis tells a blood-curdling, nerve-shattering, teeth-grindlingly awful story. It is cold, clear, factual and wholly convincing. And it is magnificent journalism.
Many will read it: the story is tenth of the ten on today’s WaPo “Most viewed articles list”. All civilised folk will nod in approval. No action will ensue.
And then there’s this:
The Post compiled its own databases of more than 35,000 gun traces by mining unpublicized state databases and local police evidence logs.
The Post investigation found that a small percentage of gun stores sells most of the weapons recovered by police in crimes – re-confirming the major finding of studies that came out before federal gun-tracing data were removed from public view by an act of Congress in 2003.
“Removed from public view”? Why?
Other complicit parties, in the matter of District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S, are Justice Scalia, who wrote the majority decision, along with Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas (the silent groper), and Samuel A. Alito Jr. of the US Supreme Court.
The word currently in use by pretty-well every UK commentator is “gamble”.
Well, “gamble” is what one might do with a couple of quid and a lottery ticket. It’s trifling, nugatory, ephemeral. It softens and trivialises the whole business.
It’s also a description of a few getting obscenely rich and the rest being taken to the cleaners.
O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae mony a blunder free us, An’ foolish notion: What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us, An’ ev’n devotion!
Britain unveiled on Wednesday a campaign to dig itself out from under a mountain of public debt, setting up a globalexperiment: Can a major nation drastically slash government spending without derailing its economic recovery?
So, fellow Brits, how should we take to our new-found rôle as lab rats?
A Harvard economist said to me recently that the coalition government’s fiscal deficit reduction programme is the biggest macroeconomic experiment in an advanced country in any of our lifetimes – and this was before the Comprehensive Spending Review on 20 October. He argued that no government, unless forced to, would be dumb enough to take such unnecessary risks with the well-being of the nation.
Every other country will be watching, he said, to ensure they don’t repeat the same mistake as George Osborne’s wildly unnecessary, misguided, doctrinaire and potentially dangerous spending cuts. They’ve let the Chancellor jump off the cliff first.
It is, to be honest, not a problem that had occurred to Malcolm, in his innocence:
Cynthia Painter, a Chevy Chase housewife who recently relocated from Atlanta, had taken Senator ["a six-pound, 5-month-old toy poodle"]for a walk around her well-appointed building with his best friend, a neighborhood Shih Tzu. Senator picked up what looked like a cigarette butt, which Painter immediately wrested away. “I’m not afraid to stick my hands in there,” she confides. “I’ve had kids.”
But the tobacky, it seems, was wacky.
“It’s actually pretty frequent,” says Ashley Hughes, another veterinarian at the hospital. “Pot, I would say maybe every three months. And medications — we get a lot of dogs in here for Adderall toxicity.” On rare occasions, they’ll get a dog on cocaine, or one on crack, or one that drank a whole sea of vodka. (The owner kept it in water bottles around the house.)
If that’s not enough, here comes iTunes chiming in with moo-sick-al ack-ump-knee-meant:
It may only be a computer application, but iTunes is uncannily psychic. It’s too often for coincidence.
Still, juxtaposing two stories helps to maintain some sense of proportion.
Next: the importance of high fashion in days of mass unemployment (passim in all broadsheets).
Malcolm notices the Pert Young Piece depart Redfellow Hovel on her way to Court. “Court”, that is, in the legal sense. She scrubs up well.
Manner-of-dress is a major sociological theme. We clothe ourselves to fit our part. That, and speech, are the two prime determinants of prestige across human cultures.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy; For the apparel oft proclaims the man …
That itself owes to Quintillian. Even Quinitillian (and he was a first-century Spaniard, so … think on) was unoriginal. At the very dawn of Western literature Homer has Nausicaa recognising Odysseus’ status once he has been dressed (an episode full of wry Homeric ribaldry: Odysseus first meets Nausicaa when he is ship-wrecked filthy and stark naked, with only a leafy bough for decency).
Thankfully, the newest member of the Supreme Court, Justice Elena Kagan, declined to mar her elegant black robe with a lace scarf, lady’s tie or any other doilylike frippery for the high court’s annual class portrait.
When the justices gathered for their historical snapshot Friday, the majority arrived in nearly indistinguishable robes, which is as it should be. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the lone voice of dissent. She wore — as is her wont — a white lace frill that flopped down the front of her chest like a hankie she’d tucked into her collar. Her judicial flourish echoed that of retired justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who also was inclined toward a distinctive neckline, although hers, on many occasions, resembled nothing more closely than a crisply pleated lobster bib.
Kagan wisely went with a discreet hint of delicate white fabric peeking out from the top of her robe, as did Justice Sonia Sotomayor. (They need a little something at their necks so they don’t appear to be naked under their judicial uniforms.) The men, including Chief Justice John Roberts, wore basic black. None of them even went so far as to pair a bow tie with his dress shirt.
Malcolm has to admit he had never conceived that women justices had that problem about seeming-nudity: even the mention is somewhat disturbing. Leaving that queasiness aside, all is right and proper: the majesty of the law should need no fancy dress. In this the Americans are well in advance of Brits. Even now, the UK Supreme Court cannot wholly forgo its love of ornament and public display:
In actual session, though, the norm is lounge suits.
Malcolm once had a Headteacher whose parade-outfit was a red-silk doctoral gown. When obliged to wear this gear, the man referred to it as his “Grand Vizier costume”.
This uses as its hat-peg an (apparent) interview with Doug Liman:
whose credits include “The Bourne Identity” and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” makes his first foray into fact-based drama this fall with a new film, “Fair Game” — the story of former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson; his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson; and the events of 2003, when her identity as a CIA operative was leaked after her husband wrote an op-ed criticizing the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Political (melo)drama?
If the Valerie Plame saga was not good enough (and it certainly should be), then Hornaday notes that the Abramoff (gross sleaze) and John Edwards (private life and public lies) side-shows are also due to provide bases for films. That latter is an Aaron Sorkin vehicle, providing further scope to consider topics he has already lightly touched in The American President and The West Wing. No way, though, can even Sorkin’s sorcery change the base metal of Johnny Reid Edwards (better believe it), and his passing exchanges of bodily fluids with Lisa Jo Druck/Rielle Hunter (equally so), into the noble gold of an “Andrew Shepherd” or “Josiah Bartlet”. According to the early puffs, The Politician will be coming down the tracks around 2013, and Sorkin will not only write the screenplay (from Andrew Young’s book), but also direct.
Inevitably, with any political drama, one looks for the meeting of the factual and the fictive. Hornaday has a particular “Inside the Beltway” view:
Washington audiences charge up their BlackBerrys and prepare to truth-squad the movie’s tiniest details…
As dramatizations of Washington stories, these projects join a special subset of politically oriented movies — including “Breach,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “Thirteen Days” and Stone’s “Nixon” and “W.” — that are received with a combination of relish and apprehension by local filmgoers, many of whom are likely to have witnessed the events onscreen firsthand …, political insiders see movies about true events in Washington as twofold entertainments, first in the theaters and later during the parlor game of spot-the-error (or hear-the-ax-grinding).
You know the results of the latest Gallup Poll? Half the country never even heard of the word Watergate. Nobody gives a shit. You guys are probably pretty tired, right? Well, you should be. Go on home, get a nice hot bath. Rest up… 15 minutes. Then get your asses back in gear. We’re under a lot of pressure, you know, and you put us there. Nothing’s riding on this except the, uh, first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters, but if you guys fuck up again, I’m going to get mad. Goodnight.
Thus, we then have Hornaday animadverting to the grand-daddy of all Washington insider movies:
“All the President’s Men,” which since its release in 1976 has held up not only as a taut, well-made thriller but as the record itself of the Watergate scandal that transpired four years earlier. Among filmmakers, “All the President’s Men” is considered the ur-text of fact-based political drama; Peter Morgan, who wrote “The Queen” and “Frost/Nixon,” calls it “a masterpiece.”
It barely matters that the film’s most iconic piece of dialogue — “Follow the money” — was never spoken in real life. According to Bob Woodward, whose source Deep Throat utters the deathless line in the film, the quote aptly captures everything his source, FBI associate director W. Mark Felt, was telling him at the time. “It all condensed down to that,” Woodward says. Even the most scrupulously footnoted book, he adds, can’t be 100 percent accurate. “No matter how well reported or carefully done, it’s not an engineer’s drawing of what happened.”
Woodward there is very telling. First he reminds us that any account, fictional or factual, text or film, is a construct. It involves reflection, and so distortion. Then he emphasises that any successful “version” needs a focus, which must differ between an extended prose text and a film (even one running 2hr 18min).
A literary genre in which fictional narrative is developed from a basis of real events or characters; documentary fiction; similarly, in film-making, etc.; an instance of this.
In which context, Hornaday has had dealings with Sorkin:
Sorkin … called nonfiction drama “a tricky needle to thread” in an e-mail. “When an audience sits in a theater having been told that ‘The Following is a True Story,’ ” he said, “they should look at it the way they’d look at a painting and not a photograph. Picasso’s subjects probably didn’t have three eyes. There was no one named Falstaff in the court of Henry IV.”
… ”When you’re writing nonfiction drama, you’ve got two important things in your hands — history and somebody’s life,” he says. “So . . . first do no harm. I would never want to unfairly defame anyone (either the moral or the legal definition) and while sometimes I’m willing to conflate time, create composite characters or have a scene take place in an office when it really took place in a living room, I wouldn’t change or invent a fact that I felt fundamentally lied about something significant.”
Malcolm reflects:
Which seems valid enough. And even if there wasn’t a “Falstaff”, there was a Sir John Oldcastle: the clue is the broken metre of I Henry IV, when the name occurs. Clearly the two-syllables were, in the 1596 stage production, three; and equally clearly the Elizabethan audience got the reference (a barely disguised squib lobbed at Oldcastle’s descendant, William Brooke, Lord Cobham), to the extent that the epilogue to II Henry IV makes a non-apology:
Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless already a’ be killed with your hard opinions; for Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man.
Political drama, its need to entertain and its risks have not changed that much over four hundred years.
The main event
Hornaway concludes (in the Washington Post, even a benign ramble through popular culture needs a “conclusion”):
… movies about Washington that get the right stuff right — or get some stuff wrong but in the right way — become their own form of consensus history. “Follow the money,” then, assumes its own totemic truth. Ratified through repeated viewings in theaters, on Netflix and beyond, these films become a mutual exercise in creating a usable past. We watch them to be entertained, surely, and maybe educated. But we keep watching them in order to remember.
More Malcolmian musing:
That reminds Malcolm of a moment from 1978. The examination board set a question on the Abdication Crisis of 1936. Suddenly all the weaker candidates were scribbling madly. Between the paper being set, and the actual date of examination, Thames Television had made a mini-series, Edward & Mrs Simpson.
At that juncture only four of the seven episodes had been transmitted. The result was anyone marking those scripts would have half a comprehensive answer appended by variations on “and so they lived happily ever after”.
Let’s move swiftly on, to what Sergio Leone called:
The only film where [John Ford] learned about something called pessimism
[James Stewart as] Ransom Stoddart: You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?
[Carleton Young as] Maxwell Scott: No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
A Malcolmian aside:
From 1962. An enduring morality. It took 45 years for the Library of Congress to recognise it as culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. The Bacharach-Hal David song’s not too dusty, either; but stick to the Gene Pitney version, please.
Back on track:
For most of us, for much of the time, the legends presented by visual images have become, at least partially, the fact. Should we deny Guy Hamilton’s Battle of Britain or, even more deservedly, Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day, put on the screen by Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton and Bernhard Wicki, their due place in the culture, and therefore as valid “histories”? After all, pretty well every concept of “nationalism”, that most potent, intoxicating and toxic of “isms”, relies on such myth-making.
Thank you, Sir Sean: don’t call us, we’ll call you.
Since films and television are inextricably involved in marketing, we are being sold (and buying) simplifications of and “improvements” on the “truth”. Hornaday, in her penultimate paragraph, implies just this:
As long as dramatists seek to make protagonists out of mere humans — to reduce their tangled webs of contradictions, complexities and banalities to a set of single-minded motivations and fatal flaws — audiences will need to approach these narratives with a blend of sophistication and skepticism.
Or else, as those kids answering that exam paper did, we may choose to wallow in the emotional impact. It’s not irrelevant, and should not be wholly absent, except in the driest, most academic histories. Not for nothing does Dickens top and tail his satire on “utilitarianism” with a symbolic opposition of Mr Gradgrind:
‘… what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’
andMr Sleary, who lisps the last word in the debate on Thelf-interetht:
‘People mutht be amuthed. They can’t be alwayth a learning, nor yet they can’t be alwayth a working, they an’t made for it.’
The need for a narrative
One essential difference between “politics” and the history it eventually becomes is the need for a narrative. In stringing together a kaleidoscope of (often dissociated and even random) events, the writer of history seeks patterns and direction, which may not be there for the finding. Hence, a creative element is involved. A politician similarly requires a narrative thread. The current myth being spun by the UK ConDem coalition is the Great British Financial Crisis. We await the counter-narrative which must evolve and necessarily be deployed by the Labour Opposition: its particulars will be drawn from the popular mood. Neither version could claim to be more honest or “truthful” than Doug Liman’s, or Aaron Sorkin’s, or Oliver Stone’s or Peter Morgan’s glozings. And certainly, as Hornaday says, less intensely memorable.
In that spirit, then, we should continue to be amuthed and need to print the legend.
