Playing Winter Soldier

The “Winter Soldier II” conference is on, and I’ll have a lot more to say about it later today. For now, let me suggest that you read two things:

Wintersoldiers.com – ‘Busted by the Historians,’ an account of how the original Vietnam-era ‘Winter Soldiers’ claims were pretty thoroughly eviscerated. Which makes one wonder why, exactly, IAVA chose to wave that flag.

Democracy Project – ‘Washington Post Duped Instead of D.U.P.E.S.

I’m certainly not shocked that IAVA is raising the stakes on the war at a time when it might et them political leverage; Move America Forward is doing the same thing. I am more than a little shocked that they would hitch themselves to as discredited an example as the John Kerry/Winter Soldier drama. And I’m deeply shocked that the Washington Post is doing such a piss-poor job of covering it.

More later.

I Totally Forget To Mention…

That Long Beach Opera is doing another performance this weekend – you can still go tonight at 8pm or tomorrow at 4 and see film star Michael York make everyone in the theater cry with his impassioned recital of Tennyson’s Enoch Arden (accompanied on piano by Lisa Sylvester playing Strauss), and then make everyone in the audience laugh uncontrollably (yas, I remember my post from yesterday) playing in a multmedia piece with shadow puppets, a short film starring a Superman doll (and Robin!), real puppets, a small orchestra (with a blogger!) and amazing dancers from the Rogue Artist Ensemble. York even blows up and pops paper bags – that’s not something you’ll see a major star do every day!

Seriously, it’s an amazing performance. LBO (disclosure: I’m on the board) fully did it again. If you’re looking for something to do this weekend and you want to be moved, see something you’ve never seen before … and get to shake a movie star’s hand (I kept seeing him as the Gascon d’Artagnan in Richard Lester’s great Musketeers movies).

Go buy tickets and have a great time.

A Musical Rant

Four years ago today, TG and I were married in the garden at Disney Hall in downtown Los Angeles.

Tonight, we had a marvelous dinner, and then went to the hall for a LA Philharmonic concert (we go about once a month).

It was a great concert; Rachmaninoff and Shostakovitch (his “Leningrad” concerto) immaculately and passionately performed. (Interesting thought about Shostakovitch and morally bent people doing great work – think Heidegger. And Rachmaninoff died about five blocks from where I grew up.)

But I want to take a moment while TG cleans up to rant. About the audience.Look, it’s possible that many people there have never been to a classical concert – or any live performance before. But it’s unlikely.

So it’s obvious that no one showed them the rules.

I’m happy to help.

1) No talking. Ever. I don’t care if your pet ferret leaps out of your handbag and starts gnawing its way to your vitals – sit there and die in silence like a music fan. Tonight some woman started narrating the piano solo in the Rachmaninoff piece. I came as close as I’ve ever been to beating down an old lady. And I wouldn’t have felt bad about it if I had…

2) There is no way it takes you a minute and 45 seconds to unwrap your throat lozenge from the crinkly plastic wrapper. I don’t care if you can only use one hand. Do it quickly and quietly. Better still, here’s a trick – unwrap three or four before the damn performance starts.

3) Don’t tap your ***ing feet. No, you’re not a percussionist, nor are you Savion Glover – and if you were, I’d still be pissed because it wasn’t a Savion Glover concert. It sounded like the freaking Rockettes tapdancing their way through the music tonight.

4) Classical music pieces are often made up of sections, called ‘movements’. Don’t clap between them. If you’re not sure whether to clap or not, don’t until 3/4 of the audience is clapping (in LA, if you set the bar at 1/2, people will clap all the damn time). It’s not that hard; look in the program and see how many movements there are in the work being played. Clap then that number of pauses plus one comes along. Use rubber bands like football refs do if you need to. Just don’t clap between movements, OK?

You paid a lot of money for that seat and the experience of listening to the music. You didn’t pay to do audience participation. And I didn’t pay to listen to you. So sit still and listen, mmmkay?

Why Is This Not Shocking?

A letter published by the NY Times:

Re “To Revive Hunting, States Turn to the Classroom” (front page, March 8):

Shame on West Virginia if it approves a bill that allows hunting education classes in public schools to become law.

We should not use public schools to try to reverse the inexorable decline in the “sport” of hunting.

The killing and maiming of animals for sport is a cruel and violent activity that is the antithesis of what schools should be teaching. Furthermore, in the context of a dramatic increase in school violence in recent years, to teach hunting is ludicrous.

We should be teaching our children how to be better citizens of the community, and that certainly does not include taking up arms against other living beings.

Brad Goldberg
President, Animal Welfare Advocacy
Mamaroneck, N.Y., March 8, 2008

It would be great if, say on their website, they published all the letters they received on the article. Maybe they could even have – comments – on their articles. Meanwhile, we get predictable cant.

Maybe someone can send him a copy of Dirty Hands.

Public Diplomacy: “A Dumb Guy’s Question”

There’s been a whole and interesting discussion on public diplomacy going on at the “smaht kid” blogs, Abu Aardvark, Mountain Runner, et al.

Note that I think that public diplomacy – meaning stepping up and engaging in the war of ideas and the stories and images that express those ideas – is one of the Bush Administration’s greatest failings (and I’m no johnny-come-lately to that bandwagon. Here’s what I wrote in March, 2003:

But Bush has failed to sell this war in three arenas.

He has failed to sell it (as well as it should have been) to the U.S. people. The reality of 9/11 has sold this war, and our atavistic desire for revenge is the engine that drives the support that Bush actually has.

He has failed to sell it diplomatically. Not that he could have ever gotten the support of France or Germany; as noted above, even with an AmEx receipt for the 9/11 plane tickets signed by Saddam himself, France would find a reason to defer this war. But he should never have let them get the moral high ground, which they have somehow managed to claim.

He has failed to sell it to our enemies, who do not believe today that we are serious about achieving our stated goals. This is, to me the most serious one, because the perception that we are not deadly serious is a perception that we are weak; and we will have to fight harder, not because we are too strong, but because we will be perceived as too weak.

I won’t try and summarize the discussion. Just start here, then go here, then go here, then go here,then go here, and finally, here.

Let me add my “dumb guy” spin to the discussion however.

Reading it, one interesting thought popped into my head, which was encapsulated well in this comment on AM’s first post:

McCain appears less interested in public diplomacy than in what we used to call advocacy and is now called strategic communication. His interest is in the “war of ideas” and advancing American objectives in the global information battle-space.

The author, it appears, was Donna Marie Oglesby, a counselor for USIA in the Clinton Administration. Here’s the dumb-guy question:

If the purpose of public diplomacy isn’t to ‘advance American objectives in the global information battle-space’ – what the hell is it?

Here’s the dilemma as I see it.

I’ve been arguing for a long time that modern Leftism (as opposed to, say pre-1968 “Old” Leftism) has roots in the Romantic, anti-Enlightenment “Bad Philosophy” movement. There has been a whole lot of discussion among we “decent” lefties about how much of the Left today – and much intellectual life today – is defined simply by blind opposition to America and Western society and values – which are seen as uniquely dangerous and evil.

Here’s the rub. To the extent that the above is even partially correct, we have this problem: The people who are supposed to be doing the fighting in the realm of ideas on our behalf may not believe much in what we stand for – and instead believe that we are uniquely evil, or that there is no substantive difference between Abu Ghreib as it was run by Saddam and – at an extreme – Guantanamo – are we really sending the right people into battle? And what do we expect to happen when that battle is joined?

In basic, I think we need to resolve some of the core values questions in order to engage in the battle. And since we need to win this battle in order to minimize the other, harder-to-clean-up kinds of battles we may have to fight otherwise (or, more accurately, that my son may have to fight), I think it’s important that we start dealing with these core issues of values right about now.

Update: I put the wrong quote from myself in; fixed it.

Best Spitzer Take To Date…

At a hastily scheduled morning press conference at the headquarters of New York’s exclusive Emperors Club prostitution ring, high priced call girl “Kristen” announced that she would temporarily step aside in the wake of charges that she had engaged in sex with New York Governor Eliot Spitzer.

“I made a serious mistake and betrayed the trust of my co-workers, my many clients, and my pimps,” she said in a quiet voice cracking with emotion. “I will be taking a leave of absence to earn their forgiveness, and redeem myself in the eyes of the entire expensive whore community.”

The embattled prostitute did not mention Spitzer by name, and stopped short of offering an official resignation. But longtime sex industry insiders say that it will be difficult for Kristen to return to her post in light of mounting federal wiretap evidence that she had sexually serviced the Governor on at least two occasions.

It’s Iowahawk, so you know he’s just getting rolling.

National-level politicians can be seen as many negative things – except ridiculous. That’s why Spitzer is toast.

I think it was Warren Beatty who said that he had the choice of bedding lots of women or going into politics…more politicians need to keep that in mind.

Comments Policy

Just as a note – since I did a lot of comment cleanup this morning – if your comment has a commercial url in it (i.e. if the url you give as a part of your identity is a commercial site, not a blog or news site), we automatically consider the comment spam. If there is a commercial url in the body of the content, we’ll decide on a case-by-case basis (are you a long-time commenter, what is the context of the url, etc.).

So if you’re looking to raise the organic SEO rankings of your business site, please don’t try to do it by posting comments here. It just makes for more tidying up that we have to do.

North Carolina

Just on my way back from North Carolina, where TG & I got to spend the weekend with Biggest Guy.

He’s loving training & feeling ready for selection…so I’m crossing fingers and toes that he’s as ready as he feels. He tells me that one of his mates apparently reads this blog – which is a damn funny case of ‘small world’. But boy, as much as I appreciate the audience, if I was there I’ve gotta say that I’d be spending my time running instead!It was a great trip – we started out in Charlotte, where we got to hang out with Mike Hendrix, who comes across as One Of The Good Guys – and is, even if he is far too cool to hang with the likes of late middle-aged me. TG and I got to hang with him and some dear friends of his at his ‘living room away from home’ – “Penguin“. Great burger, great vibe. We enjoyed it enough that the smokers didn’t drive us Californians out – and I think even the children there were smoking…we’ll be back. Mike crushed me though – we share a fondness for writer Larry Brown, and somehow I missed it that he died a few years ago. I’d envisioned him as kicking back on his porch, taking a break from writing and storing up experience for his next books. C**p.

I can’t be in Charlotte without thinking of Tony Early’s great short story of the same name. When I get home I’ll post the opening and closing – two perfect sets of paragraphs.