We Don't Have to Know

Several conservatives have charged that Barack Obama is not merely incompetent and wrongheaded, but rather is actually trying to weaken and damage the United States while consolidating a fascist-corporate power structure in the country. A new movie makes that case in some detail. I do not know if they are right. (My opinion is that he is a committed statist and, whether or not he is anti-American by conscious conviction, he  almost certainly is so by deep emotional inclination.)

There is of course an important sense in which it does not matter if they are right. The man is president of the United States. Citizens and investors need to be able to make at least educated guesses about his future actions and plans. For that it is not necessary to know his motivation. For the purpose of predicting his behavior, it is enough to notice that he consistently and even systematically acts as though the charges were accurate, and he were a power grabbing anti-American   wanting to weaken the United States, ruin many of its industries (energy, farming, and ranching for starters),  punish prosperous non-lawyers for the sin of prosperity, dictate approved lifestyles, create a corporate /nanny state, and restrict or destroy the ways of life of millions of  Americans.  

It is also enough for everyone who loves this country to see clearly how important the coming election is.  

Olympic Spirit?

I enjoy watching the games at the Olympics. Many of the sports and contests are interesting and exciting, and the levels of skill displayed are often admirable or even amazing.  It is a lot of fun.

However I find the hypocritical posturing about the “Olympic spirit and traditions” more than a little hard to take. The games began, quite snootily, not as competitions among  the world’s best athletes, but rather as a playground for well to do Europeans who had never sullied themselves by earning money with their skills.  People from modest backgrounds who needed to earn livings and had used their athletic skills to do so were explicitly excluded. Jim Thorpe, perhaps the most famous of the early Olympic athletes, was stripped of his Olympic medals after it was discovered that he had once or twice turned a few bucks playing semipro baseball.

Nationalism and even jingoism were present in the games from the first.  By 1936, when the Nazis put on their  massive spectacle at the Olympics in Berlin, they were dominant. The Nazis and  later the Soviets and their colonies used the games and their successes in the games  as tools and sources for propaganda and assertions of superiority for their systems. From time to time officials of the Olympic committees claim to regret the excessive nationalism in the games, but  their statements ring about as true as NCAA officials’ bleating about “student athletes”. After all, as various people have asked, if they don’t want nationalism, why do they have national teams and uniforms?

Then there are the obvious bad sportsmanship, hypocrisy,  and out and out cheating that have been so much of the history of the games, the most glaring  being the forty year absurdity of clinging to an “amateurs only” rule while welcoming Soviet bloc athletes who were obviously careerists paid to compete. Right behind might be the systematic ignoring of cheating and doping by those same Soviet bloc teams, with cases of  everything from rigging judging  to changing outcomes of games to (probably) passing men or hermaphrodites off as women.

This year we have seen examples of vulgar political correctness in the organization and management of the games.   Some poor athlete from Greece was sent home for cracking a silly joke about Africans and mosquitoes, while the sanctimonious IOC could not spare a moment for  remembrance of Israeli athletes murdered at the games of 1972, one presumes out of fear of offending Islamic nations and anti-Semites everywhere.  It’s hard to see much in the way of admirable ideals there. So I’ll enjoy the games while realizing that those organizing and running  them are and have been no cleaner or more idealistic  than the people running Penn State  football or professional wrestling.  Indeed the IOC can sometimes make the WWE look pretty good by comparison.

Movies about WWII

World War II has been the subject of a very large number of movies. I’ve seen a lot of the and have a few favorites. There are of course many other good films out there, but these are some that come to mind.

David Lean’s In Which We Serve, Michael Anderson’s The Dam Busters, and Ronald Neame’s The Man Who Never Was are my favorites among the British made movies from the war. I’ve heard The Cruel Sea is also good, but I haven’t seen it.  William Wellman’s Battleground and Raoul Walsh’s Battle Cry are two good depictions, one in the ETO and one in the Pacific, of a war fought by American  citizen soldiers. Some criticize these films for following a clichéd formula by populating their combat units with neatly diverse cross sections of the population, but in fact  the war did throw men from all sorts of backgrounds and origins together, often into units very similar to those depicted in these films. At least the characters in these films are mainly recognizably 1940’s people, and not, as is so often the way these days in “historical” movies, present day people projecting  present day attitudes, mannerisms, clichés,  and prejudices back in time.  I have seen only part of Wellman’s The Story of GI Joe, but it seems to compare well with the other  two. Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity is a pretty good film, but is really more a pre-war movie than a war movie.  Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way  is a very good movie about the naval war in the Pacific from Pearl Harbor  through a fictionalized version of the Solomons campaign. Its only real flaw is a silly soap opera subplot about a son  resenting his father (which is not in the novel the movie is based on). Dick Powell’s The Enemy Below is a good film about the naval war with German submarines in the Atlantic. Mark Sandrich’s So Proudly We Hail, Tay Garnett’s Bataan,  and Edward Dmytryk’s Back to Bataan are good movies about America’s defeat in the Philippines and  its aftermath, with Sandrich’s being my favorite of the group. John Milius’s Farwell to the King is quite odd, but a fairly good movie. Tora! Tora! Tora!  and The Longest Day  are my favorites among the semi-documentary dramatizations of the war’s major events. Finally there are my two favorite movies about the war - John Sturges’ The Great Escape  and John Ford’s They Were Expendable, which is the only really great movie about the war that I have seen. It is a wonderful movie, touching, strong and one of Ford’s best.  Its only really false note is a too generous treatment of Douglas MacArthur, but that flaw is both minor and quite understandable given the times.

I have also seen a number of bad or overrated movies about the war.  Some that come to mind are The Dirty Dozen and its epigones, The Guns of Navarone, which is not awful but is so vulgarly Hollywood hokey compared to the fine novel it is based on, Stalag 17, which is one of the few movies by Billy Wilder that I don’t like, and The Bridge on the River Kwai.  I have not sat through all of Saving Private Ryan, but have seen enough to think that I would see it as being about as overrated as  the other films  by the C. B. DeMille of our time.

Oddly Not News

Ted Cruz won the Republican primary runoff in Texas for a seat in the U.S. Senate last night. Since the only way the Republican nominee will  not win in November would be if Eric Holder canceled the election and declared martial law,  this means that Texas will have its first Hispanic senator. This fact is only incidental information to people who care more about a candidate’s political beliefs and principles (if any) than his ethnic background, but is the sort of thing  that is usually very big news with the race-obsessed traditional media. If Cruz had been a leftist and a Democrat, this would have been a major  bell ringing, leg tingling, news story from coast to coast and border to border. Since he is a conservative and a Republican, we get instead pretty much nothing. What does not get reported often reveals as much about bias and dishonesty  as what does. That is fairly obviously the case here.  Who knows, the traditional media may even label poor old Ted a “white Hispanic”,  a term never used for Democrats of any complexion but put into common usage by the New York Times  to make George Zimmerman an honorary cracker.