Presidential assassination movies are pretty routine in film history. One recent one – In the Line of Fire – is darn good. But assassination flicks about real living Presidents are rare indeed. In fact, I can’t think of a single other one beside the new British docudrama Death of a President to be premiered at the Toronto Festival next month. Peter Dale, the head of More4, which is televising the work, has this to say:
“I’m sure that there will be people who will be upset by it but when you watch it you realise what a sophisticated piece of work it is.”
Oh, really? I guess, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, that depends on what your definition of “sophisticated” is. I haven’t seen the film, of course, but at first glance this seems a kind of upmarket political porn. I would ask Messrs. Dale and Range (the filmmaker) how they would feel about viewing a “sophisticated” docudrama of themselves being assassinated in 2007? Horrifed, perhaps? Maybe scared out of their knickers that someone would be encouraged to follow the film’s example? In the UK, where such things are subject to much more stringent legislation, they might even be advised to sue the filmmakers. Bush has no such luck in this country.
Meanwhile, Dale and Range will go on to get the pats on the back from le tout London, maybe even a rave review in the Guardian (or respectful if the film is aesthetically mediocre). Nice work, fellas. Good career move.
Iranian ex-president Mohammed Khatami is coming to the US on a two-week private visit that includes a possible reconciliation meeting with Jimmy Carter and speaking invitations at Harvard and the National Cathedral. Is this trip by the supposed reformer the harbinger of some kind of reconciliation between the US and Iran? Maybe we should ask Richard Armitage – he seems to be on the inside of everything these days. or better yet, why don’t we do a little research and find out where Mr. Khatami has been lately?
Well, turns out he’s been to Kyoto for an ecumenical event called the 2006 World Conference of Religions for Peace (WCRP). Sounds promising, doesn’t it? But wait… what was the great representative of Iranian reform doing at the conference when the Israeli chief rabbi was speaking? That’s a little more troublesome. According to Israel National News…
When the chief rabbi began speaking at the closing ceremony, held on Tuesday, the Iranian delegation, led by former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, stormed out of the hall. In his remarks, Rabbi Metzger expressed his disappointment that he could not talk with some religious leaders because he was Jewish.
Not to worry, Reb Metzger. Mr. Khatami is a reformer. We all know that. After all, he’s been invited to an ecumenical event at our National Cathedral by Rev. Canon John L. Peterson, director of the National Cathedral’s Center for Global Justice and Reconciliation. Kofi Annan helped arrange it.
After the now-revealed absurdity of the Plame Affair, you would think the gang at the NYT would be exhibiting a little humility … but nooooo! Their oh-so-predictable Jerusalem correspondent Steven Erlanger is inveighing against the IDF for not allowing enough war access to him and his colleagues and for a lack of … ready for this?…. “proportionality.” (Wonder how Erlanger would have dealt with the fire-bombing of Dresden. Hope his father wasn’t involved.) Thank the Goddess we’re in the post-Jason Blair/Internet era when most of us know the NYT is just another dead-tree publication with its stock heading into the toilet and not the “Newspaper of Record,” a concept so inherently totalitarian it’s amazing a democratic society could have ever countenanced such a thing in the first place. It’s also particularly ironic that all this jejune bullshit by Erlanger and his colleagues was being shoveled at a conference held in Jerusalem itself. Imagine them arranging a similar event in South Lebanon or Gaza to criticize the locals. [Which group of jihadists would kidnap them first?-ed. The Anti-Boredom Society.]
UPDATE: In the old days I would just have laughed about the Photoshopping of Katie Couric by CBS News. But somehow things have gotten a little more serious and this seems oddly all of a piece with those corrupt slime buckets who brought us Dan Rather’s lies. I’m not laughing.
One of the great pleasures of my job at Pajamas Media is to create new opportunities for writers I admire. You could easily say Claudia Rosett and Ron Rosenbaum – two of the best mainstream journos around – are doing us a favor by starting new blogs at Pajamas Media Politics Central. And indeed they honor us with their presence. But this is also yet another sign that media times are a-changing. We will be adding others to the FrontBurner soon. But first, welcome Claudia and Ron. What an amazing way to start.
Just giving a quick head’s up to those of you who may have overlooked my colleague Richard Fernandez’s essay – A Reason to Believe – over on PJM Politics Central. You won’t want to miss it.
Also extremely interesting today, I think, is the latest podcast from the Sanity Squad on the Stockholm Syndrome and the Steve Centanni kidnapping.
David Corn works overtime (as well he might) to point out that even though Richard Armitage had already leaked – for no apparent reason – Valerie Plame’s CIA affiliation, the other subsequent leakers (Rove and Libby) remain culpable. Perhaps so, in a technical sense (assuming they did it). And that’s not good. But I would have to say finally – so what? They didn’t end up adding anything to the story and the cat was already out of the bag. Way out. Armitage didn’t leak to the Sandusky Tribune. He leaked to Robert Novak who, although few would mistake him for G. K. Chesterton or E. M. Forster as a master of English prose, is one the major players in the Beltway journalism scene. Everyone reads him. The rest, as they say, is commentary.
Meanwhile, as we all know, anyone seriously interested in Ms. Plame’s provenance could have found out long before with only slight effort. With her name in her husband’s Who’s Who listing, she was no Eli Cohen when it came to clandestine activity, assuming she still engaged in it. (Although perhaps I’m not giving her enough credt…. Cohen wound up hanged in Damascus’ Martyr’s Square while Plame, as again we all know, ended up on the cover of Vanity Fair.) Still, there are other aspects of this case that perplex me more than the putative leaking. As a very minor student of intelligence matters, I am curious why the CIA would send someone (Wilson) to Niger for a week to drink tea with officials and expect a definitive (or even relatively) analysis of something as controversial and secretive as yellowcake uranium. Now I admit my direct background in intelligence (for weird reasons of personal history) is more with friends in the onetime KGB than in the CIA, but I don’t really understand why Langley would decide to do something of that nature in this kind of flat-footed and obvious manner. The only thing that makes any sense is that they were trying to fire a salvo at the administration by getting a predictable response, which they succeeded at. The administration may then have fired back. The whole thing seems like a pretty dismal partisan entreprise. As one who declines any longer to identify as a Republican or a Democrat, I find this gamesmanship particularly dangerous in these times. But it is the CIA that worries me more than the administration. Administrations come and go, subject to the vote. The CIA, whose track record would have put a normal corporation into bankruptcy several times over, remains, although now under the supervision of another developing bureaucracy, with its personnel, more or less like mediocre tenured professors, essentially intact. There must be a better way.
UPDATE: In case you missed, Hitchens has weighed in on The End of the Affair. Amusing, of course.
I don’t intend to read Andrew Sullivan’s new book. I have too much on my end table at the moment. But I must say that I found myself sympathizing with Sullivan when I read John Derbyshire’s opinion of his work on The Corner this morning. In his remarks on homosexuality, Derbyshire reflects a religious orthodoxy which I find painfully close to bigotry. It also shows someone whose knowledge of gay people seems, to put it mildly, proscribed. His assertion that gays are hedonistic and have no interest in the future (”The perennial present-centeredness of those who don’t intend to reproduce…”) does not square with my experience at all. Derbyshire ought to get out a bit. Gay parents are everywhere in our big cities and, knowing several of them, they have, more or less, the same pros and cons as other parents with many of the same nesting instincts. Derbyshire’s vision of homosexuality ignores advances in modern science (fetal baths) etc. and comes from the era most people thought the world was flat.
Some years back (okay, 33), when The Big Fix was first published, some people congratulated me on my humor. “You wrote a very funny book, y’know,” they said. I didn’t (know, that is). In fact, I was totally surprised. I hadn’t, for the most part, been trying to be humorous at all. Of course, I didn’t let that on. I was smart enough just to nod and say thanks. I parlayed that into a couple of more books in which I was trying (although perhaps not succeeding) to be a little funnier and into a career writing comedies in Hollywood for some pretty funny people, Richard Pryor and Lili Tomlin. What’s interesting is that neither of these comics was very in funny in private. Pryor especially could be quite dour, a depressed sort taken, as everyone knows, to medicating himself heavily. On stage, however, he was the funniest I ever saw because he was ruthlessly honest about himself and others. I learned from him that that was the essence of the best comedy, just being true to yourself, calling things as you geniunely see them.
In that sense, Bill Maher is the exact opposite of Pryor. I always feel that Maher is lying about what he really thinks and playing to the audience. In fact, he works so hard at it he seems to be convincing himself of his lies in the process, which makes him come across as one of the smarmier figures on television. And not funny at all to me. I can’t bear to watch him, so I missed his recent dust up with Christopher Hitchens, but the transcript says it all. Surely Maher can’t believe Bush and Ahmadinejad are even roughly equivalent in their religious messianism, but Maher’s language, his pandering for a laugh, creates that illusion. He is like the worst sort of Borscht Belt comic, scanning the crowd with a knowing “How do you like those Mets?” or “Take my wife…” (apologies to Shecky Greene – correction, Henny Youngman – who is or was vastly more funny than Maher – in either case), only this time the crowd is a group of wannabe bien pensants bent on applauding themselves for agreeing with this reactionary idiocy. No wonder Hitchens gave them the finger – not that that probably made any difference. One of the salient features of our times is how much noise there is and how few people are actually listening. This is what makes performers like Maher particularly dangerous, taking the most conventional of conventional wisdom and reinforcing it for their docile fandom – liberal pabulum for the new bourgeoisie.
UPDATE: Another comic (exponentially funnier than Maher) is having his problems.
I am sitting here in the Calgary Airport on the brink of ending my vacation. In fact, my vacation is over, unless you consider a plane ride home to be en vacance, which the sane man or woman does not. My time away wasn’t long but I think I connected (briefly) with the capacity to enjoy myself. But the world intervenes, as it does for the neurosurgeon protagonist Dr. Perowne of Ian McEwan’s Saturday, a novel I am half way through and will undoutedly finish on the plane.
McEwan certainly gets right the inability of modern man to disconnect. Events keep intruding. I am sitting in this dull terminal staring at a television screen with the words ISRAEL INVESTIGATED blasting across a muted CBC announcer who seems to be devoting an overly-long period to this subject, which would, at first glance, not appear to be of considerable interest of the citizens of Alberta. What’s going on here? Clicking over to the NYT coverage I find (to no surprise whatsoever) that it is our State Department behind this investigation. Why not the Defense Department, under whose purview the subject, the use or misuse of cluster bombs, would normally fall? Well, we all know the answer to that, don’t we? The US State Deparment has legendarily felt a “certain way about a certain group” ever since I have been alive – and as we also all know I wasn’t born last week. I have to smile, through my heartburn, to find State oddly lining up with Senor Chavez on the Israeli use of American weaponry. Of course, the folks at State would wince and cry I am being unfair or even irrational. But am I? In the depths of many of their hearts something simultaneously sinister and self-deceiving beats away. As I have said before, their policies are often doubly racist, toward Jews and Arabs both. But I won’t go over that again. The argument is plain for anyone who wants to think about it. That Israel was fighting a foe that was doing nothing but attack civilians (the object of this supposed use of cluster bombs) means nothing to them. And the reason this argument means nothing (and that their objections are being raised now) is politics of an extremely vicious sort, a kind of subtle ethnic cleansing at long range. Only the people being cleansed are people like me. Welcome home, Simon.
No, I haven’t seen a caribou yet (though I have eaten one : tenderloin, quite tasty), but I have seen the following – elk (several), mountain goat (single male sitting on a ledge), big horn sheep (a group of females with their young) and one black bear heading into the forest. No photographs, alas. For the most part the wildlife was too fleeting or far away or my camera was buried in my pack or something. Well, I did get a few shots of the mountain goat on my not-long-enough lens, so perhaps with some Photoshopping… But so what? If anyone wants to see what these animals look like (and almost everybody knows anyway) they can do a five-second Google search. I assume they can find photographs better than mine of the Columbia Icefield – where we went glacier walking yesterday – easily as well.
So why do we take these pictures? There are many reasons that many (Sontag notably) have written about and I’m not going to bore you with them here or with the photos (yet). But part of it is the instinct to document that we have been far away – or at least pretended to be. Because nothing is very far nowadays – and not just because of the internet. Just last night, here in the lobby of Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge where I am staying was a huge party of what seemed to be several hundred members of the local Oilmen’s Association, playing pari-mutual games and dining on a lavish spread. Alberta, besides being spectacularly beautiful and bountiful, is rich, rich in oil or, rather, oil-rich sand . A battle is going on here between enviros trying to preserve the glaciers and the scenery and business-folk trying to fill up our gas pumps and their pocket books. Last night, they, not the enviros, were running the show at the Lodge here, itself a naturaly gorgeous lakeside spot and, sad to say, now owned by the Saudis who have bought the luxe Fairmont chain. We live in a strange world indeed and it is a great challenge for us to balance competing needs. For now, however, I am increasingly happy to be here – a “little bit” far away. Maybe I’ll even see a caribou before I return home Friday night. And if not, I’ll still have some in my stomach.
