From Independence Day to July 4 to 14 Juillet: Two brief comments
A friend I have not seen for years posted on FB a note on a book discussion she had had on a biography of the Marquis de Lafayette with a subtitle of something like the idealistic General. I posted the following:
Lafayette was indeed an idealist--rather dangerous in practical affairs--and a dodgy customer who betrayed his king, his country, and his duty as an officer and, as a reward for treason, barely escaped death at the hands of his revolutionary allies. The French Kerensky. His career was a kind of synopsis of Classical Liberalism, whose crusade for individual liberty for gentlemen always ends in a dictatorship of the Proletariat. A charming man by all accounts and loyal, at least, to his Freemason creed. His wife sewed the Masonic apron Washington wore at the Masonic dedication of the national capitol laid out on an idealistic Masonic plan. In short, he symbolizes how the good intentions of the American founding paved the American Hell.
Another friend not unknown to our readers (Josh Dogrell) posted a sensible and patriotic statement about honoring the brave and honorable men of 1776 but not the rulers of the nationalist empire that has destroyed the old republic. I added this further bit of skepticism:
I wonder if they did not make a mistake. Josiah Quincy, the sly Yankee, was visiting Charleston in the early 1770s when he attended a party given at the home of Miles Brewton. In a letter he recounts with amused disgust what an English visitor told the guests, which was in essence that if Carolinians and Virginians made the mistake of joining the Yankees in rebellion, the only result would be to place themselves under the boot heel of Massachusetts. The abuses alleged against Britain were directed against New England and were designed to repress treason and rebellion. David Hackett Fisher, in his fine book on Paul Revere, confirms what the royal governor of Massachusetts had been saying, namely, that the Yankees were plotting revolution. Some of my ancestors, highland Scots, left North Carolina rather than violate the oath they had taken never again to fight the King. While I honor the memory of the great men who risked everything to maintain the liberties they had long enjoyed, I also respect the decision made by my people. My heroes in the revolution were the reluctant Charlestonians like Henry Laurens, who thought the rebellion was a mistake but still, out of loyalty to the people of his homeland, devoted his talents and authority to the cause. One cannot help thinking of General Lee.
A great note with which to start Independence Day. In recent years, I’ve thought that, if alive during the Revolutionary War, it’s probably a toss-up which side I would have taken. Sometimes, when I stop to consider the fruits of taxation WITH representation, I could almost wish more had chosen the loyalist side. But then I hear the sound of that old patriotic song in my head:
My country tis of thee,
Land of free masonry..,
See y’all in Rockford.
It makes me think of the one line from Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot” (the one where Mel Gibson in true super hero fashion won the Revolutionary War by using tomahawks) – at one point they’re pressuring his character to join the movement for Independence and he replies with, “Why would I want to exchange one tyrant 1,000 miles away for 100 tyrants here at my front door?” (or something like that). Similar to Caiaphas, even a Hollywood blockbuster can unwittingly speak a truth worth hearing.
But, given the state of the UK today, I’m grateful to have our Independence, flawed as it may be.
As a schoolboy, I could not stand to hear the tawdry sentimentality and cheap verse of what I took to be “America tis, of thee,” though for the life of me I could not figure out what a “tis” was. While “God Save the King” is a straightforward and dignified lyric: The words of the National Anthem are as follows:
God save our gracious King!
Long live our noble King!
God save the King!
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the King.
Of course I did not know then it was first performed to celebrate the German usurpation of the British throne after the defeat of the Stuart cause at Prestonpans. In any event, the American trash reveals how low Americans had sung by the 1830’s. Land of the Pilgrims’ pride, indeed!
That is a good anecdote, Tom, about Josiah Quincy. I’d never heard that story. Here’s another: When Spain joined the war, the great founder of California, Junipero Serra, was instructed to tax his missions for the war effort, which he did, though it seems under some protest. He did instruct all to pray for the victory of the colonies against Britain, “the enemies of true religion!” And how did the Yankees thank the good padre for all that Divine assistance? A century later they fomented a war with Spain to sell newspapers. I think the American bishops should have made much publicity about how the prayers of Catholics won the war by dispensing the Friday abstinence today.
Here is the prayer, Serra included in the liturgies on behalf of the colonies: “That Thou wouldst be pleased to humiliate the enemies of our Holy Church.” Let’s bring this back!
All is not lost on the cultural front! It’s a good day to remember that Trump did appoint Lee Greenwood to the Kennedy Center Board of Directors!
“. . . and I proudly STAND UP next to you . . . “
That is almost as stunning as choice as Mrs Vince McMahon for Education Secretary.
Vince, I was going to google that to see if you were pulling my leg but then Tom reminded me about Linda McMahon. Kid Rock, too?
“…Trump did appoint Lee Greenwood to the Kennedy Center Board of Directors!”
“That is almost as stunning as choice as Mrs Vince McMahon for Education Secretary.”
Or choosing the world’s second biggest welfare recipient (after Warren Buffet) to fight wasteful spending in the Federal government.
Michael, should we have a contest for most absurd presidential appointments? We have a good start.
Michael, should we have a contest for most absurd presidential appointments? We have a good start.
Michael, did you mean to say Elon, instead of Warren “Margaritaville” Buffet?
It seems that I have been thinking a lot like Laurens lately. Yes, once the redcoats arrived in South Carolina I would have to fight, but, though I still think the cause just, was it wise to declare independence?
I remember, as a child, watching old news reels covering events in territories of the empire and feeling a sense of estrangement from being separated from the rest of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Lately I have been wondering if Southerners of that time would have fought at all if they knew what the new government would do to their grandchildren eighty years later.
For that matter, would the redcoats at Waterloo have held the thin red line had they known what their own government would do to their Rhodesian descendants? Would the soldiers under Montgomery and Patton have fought knowing what they would live to see done to their countries after the war ended?
By their fruits ye shall know them, and we have seen what the allied rulers did with their victory after 1945. They destroyed their own civilization and their ethnos. VE day was not such a great victory after all. It was the beginning of the end.
July 4th is nothing more than an excuse to gorge and drink, and celebrate an imperial government and it’s absurd myths. We went from being part of an empire that had it’s good side despite it’s flaws to being an empire of lies.
One may well wonder if British civilization wasn’t already in decline when the colonies were founded.
Dr. Fleming, if we extended it back to the beginning of the Republic we could have a lot of fun for a good long while. Ya hafta laugh to keep from cryin’.
Ken, yes Elon, but my implication is that he is in competition with Buffet for world’s biggest welfare queen. At least Buffet is quieter about it leaving him less open to ridicule. Many still think of him as some kind of great financial sage rather than the scheming under-handed thief that he is. Musk is a clown. He likes the attention, positive or negative. If people ignored him he would either wither up and die or he would hatch some kind of outlandish Flemingian (Ian that is) plot to enslave the world. Actually he and his pals in and out of DARPA are doing exactly that but…shhh! We’re not supposed to understand that they mean to enslave us utterly, or kill us. In this Musk and Buffet are very much on the same side, but different departments; each to his own strength.
You may recall that for some time I have been referring to Ernst Stavro Musk. What is said about Buffet is that his father Warren was a pretty decent anti-imperial politician of the old Midwestern type, much admired by my friend Murry Rothbard, who knew him.
I have read the same about the elder Buffet, maybe written by Rothbard, but he seems to have been widely admired. I hope he is at peace rather than spinning in his grave. Insatiable greed does terrible things to people, even from good families. Buffet the younger also seems to be something of a miser, with his whole hokey hamburger and Coke routine. Both St. John Chrysostom and St. Maximos the Confessor give a lot of lee-way to open-handed rich people. Their spending allows many others a decent living and, I would add, is responsible for much of the great artwork of the world. Buffet only forks over for causes like supporting the death cult of which he is a card-carrying member.
On Independence Day, Jackie and I watched a picture neither of us had seen, Clint Eastwood’s (director) FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS about the exploitation of the (surviving) men in the (second) Mt. Suribachi flag raising to hawk war bonds. As a film it’s not especially great. The combat scenes double down on brutality and gore as all war pictures do now since SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, in which Spielberg (dude should have stopped at JAWS) showed restraint, at least, in his use of CGI. FLAGS makes use of CGI to the point of distraction, even annoyance. Nonetheless, I think Clint did a good job presenting, if not altogether unpacking, two realities bound up in war: the thoroughgoing cynicism of politicians and (some, not all) general- and fleet-grade officers, and the staggering capacity for self-sacrifice by men under fire. I give it a B or B minus. Watching it I was reminded of a movie I stumbled across as a kid on late-night TV called THE OUTSIDER, in which none other than Tony Curtis plays the Pima Indian. HA! (At least Tony did serve in the Navy.)
Much of what Allen says resonates with me, though in the past five years or so I have decided that America is really just the British Empire 2.0. My latest deep dive has been into Le Grand Dérangement—the ethnic/religious “cleansing” of the Acadians from Nova Scotia. That was a joint British/Massachusetts effort. General Charles Lawrence, architect of the cruelty, today, rests (I doubt it!) in the crypt of St. Paul’s Anglican Church. The British have a funny thing about burying people responsible for so much killing in their churches. It was on my second visit to St. Paul’s in London when I ran into Lord Kitchener and everything about the British Empire came into relief for me. Today in the National Cathedral in DC you can find Woodrow Wilson. All that said, having worn that particular uniform long ago, there is so much extraordinary heroism in the Iwo Jima story that it has, in my mind, been justifiably elevated to myth, even if the circumstances surrounding the photograph and eventual monument in Northern Virginia are marred by cynicism. I visit the Iwo Jima War Memorial every time I am in DC.
Ugh–dangling participle in the penultimate sentence. When are we going to have edit functionality on his great website?
Chris, excellent points, though I would suggest that the British did a better job of running an Empire for-profit than we have. Yes, they–like the Dual Monarchy–stirred up and even created ethnic conflicts on the principle of divide et impera, and, yes, they could be quite ruthless, but they differed in two ways from our own imperial project: First, the spread of empire was perceived–and was in fact–as a source of benefits for ordinary English and Scottish people of all classes; second, they attempted with some success to confer the benefits of sanitation, medicine, constitutional order, etc. on their subjects. Of course the ruling class was hypocritical but that is a given. And for every Robert Clive or Warren Hastings there were dozens of soldiers and colonial officials–including Sir Henry Sumner Maine, Fitzjames Stephen, and the novelist Joyce Cary (to name only three) who did their job conscientiously. Finally, the Brits in those days did not tear down their traditions and exalt the alien and savage. My conclusion is that in our wildest dreams we have not come close to the everyday reality of Imperial Britain.
Chris Check: “… Spielberg (dude should have stopped at JAWS)…”
Mr Check, I just wanted to single you out for praise for this snippet from your recent comment. Precisely my position for half a century.
There are several ways to look at the work of an artist or, in the case of film, an artistically inclined technologue. Philodemus, whose name has been in the news as more of his works are rescued from Herculaneum, discusses the division into poietes, poiema, and poiesis, namely, the poet/maker, the poem/work, and the art of poetry/making. Please bear with me. A director’s work includes the story or content of the film, his success in choosing and working with actors who are mostly as vain as they are stupid, and his handling of the technology of film, especially camera work. In Spielberg’s case, people assure me that his handling of technology is good, and that is a large part of his success. A young Spielberg directed an early episode of Columbo, and Peter Falk, who by then knew the stage and film and was himself as good as a tv actor ever gets in the USA, was impressed. Falk in that episode does a good job–though he will improve as time goes on–and Jack Cassidy hams it up almost brilliantly, but then he always does that, but beyond that all a viewer would note is that it is a pretty good story with good performances. Anyone can direct such actors and anyone could direct Robert Shaw in Jaws, but it would take a genius director to squeeze anything out of Richard Dreyfus and Spielberg did not seem, even to try.
This leaves story or narrative. Some directors started out as writers–John Huston is a good example–and he knew how to pick terrific vehicles such as The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, and The Man Who would be King, and how to film them credibly. Spielberg’s stories are, with the exception of Peter Benchley’s “Jaws,” stinkers. SS will take up an hour and a half creating an eery mood with Richard Dreyfus looking like the survival of a unintended lobotomy. He picks bad stories, does not improve them, and plays dated avant-garde tricks.
I used to publish a not very good poet because he was a friend of George Garret. He wrote film reviews I did not like, but when he said some piece of SS schlock made Spielberg the equal of John Ford and Federico Fellini, I told David Slavitt not only would I not publish that piece but I would not publish any piece of his.
I remember that. Slavitt was a Tarantino enthusiast too, and I watched Reservoir Dogs because it came recommended in Chronicles. This was before I worked for TRI. It’s a brutal picture. I was young and found parts of it funny at the time, but I’m certain I’m never going to watch it again. Honestly I don’t know what to make of Tarantino, but I heard him interviewed by Little Steven one time, and he described how he he wanted to use a Carol King song on the soundtrack for Reservoir Dogs and she told him yes, as long as no one was going to be cut to pieces while the song was playing. Turns out this is exactly how he intended to use the song, so she told him no. Good for her.
I think I am going to give Dreyfus, whom I do not like at all, more credit for his performance in Jaws than Tom does, to for sure Robert Shaw steals the picture. He was a serious actor. It’s not a great film, but it’s fun enough. The mayor in the film is completely unbelievable for insisting the beaches stay open after two shark attacks, but the film leaves out his mob connections that are in the Benchley novel. Fun cameo by Benchley as the news reporter.
I seem to recall a year ago admitting in a conversation that there was another Spielberg picture I liked, but now I can’t recall what it is. It’s not the one that cost David Slavitt his gig. That picture I have never seen and have no plans to.
I thank Chris Check for mentioning Flags of Our Fathers in which Barry Pepper (poorly) acts the part of my grandfather’s cousin, Michael Strank (a spelling anomaly introduced in immigration (there is another theory not worth mentioning put forth by another relative who was the same age as Mike and also saw hard service in the Pacific, but had an axe to grind, having grown up next door to his family with whom there was a constant running battle between and amongst them and their respective brothers.)) I should have lit a candle for him yesterday, but shamefully forgot. Speaking of sacrifice, Mike was the sergeant who was given the second flag and the order to raise it, passed down from an admiral who wanted a bigger flag aloft. He didn’t have to be there. He was a skilled and highly valued drill-sergeant who joined the Marines well before the war (’36 I think) because there was no work in the steel mills and the CCC was largely worthless busy work. He bullied his way into taking his boys to action and saw plenty at Bougainville where he received the Bronze Star for pulling his lieutenant out from under a felled tree under fire. He was sent home for R&R. They wanted him to stay stateside to continue training, but he insisted on going back in action, bringing him to Iwo Jima. After the flag raising he and his men found themselves back at the base of Suribachi, which was still far from secured. Putting a rock formation between them and an enemy position in the mountain, while drawing up a plan of action in the sand the U.S. Navy dropped a shell in the middle of the group killing Mike and two others. I grew up with stories of Mike lovingly told by older men than himself who admired him and among women of his age and younger, many of whom were in love with him. It was not his destiny to marry or have a family of his own.
Vičnaja jemu pamjat.
Ben Stein once called Tarantino a bed-wetter. I think that about sums him up. I’ve only seen Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and found them both, and every utterance that I have heard from the director himself, to be repellent.
I never liked Ben Stein’s pieces in TAS, but I once had breakfast with him and he was much pleasanter and brighter than I had expected. It was his smug tone I had resented but, then, I have to confess that until I read him regularly in the Spectator and got to know him fairly well, I had not been a fan of Taki, either. Tarantino is the perfect specimen of the high school nerd who shoots up the girls in his class to prove his virility. As a kid he probably talked dirty in Sunday School and flashed on little old ladies.
Slavitt and Tarantino were a good fit. I reviewed on of his books–a translation of a Latin poet–in the Chicago Tribune and pointed out that all of his translations sounded like David himself, a postmodern hipster. He was clever in his way, and, when he and his wife invited me to dinner, I quite liked the wife who was a leading pain specialist. We had a good chat about why it was impossible to measure pain with any accuracy and the futility of pain scores. I should not be so cruel to David, who, I just learned, died two months ago.
David R. Slavitt, R.I.P. I liked some of his poetry and several of his translations. It’s saddening to hear that he liked Spielberg. I never have, from Jaws onward, though he did make one great movie, A. I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001). As virtually everyone who wrote about it pointed out, A. I. was a project Spielberg assumed from Stanley Kubrick (whose work I generally dislike because of his subject choices), who in turn based it on a story and ideas of Arthur C. Clarke’s (I find Clarke’s writing quite dull). Yet A. I. is may be the greatest cautionary tale in all cinema,
I don’t like Clint Eastwood much more than I like Spielberg. The Outlaw Josey Wales is good, however. though the novels it’s based on are quite a bit better. I may watch another Eastwood effort, but it’ll take powerful persuasion and firm self-suppression of my gorge.
Ray, we shall have to agree to disagree on Slavitt’s non-prose–I can scarcely call it poetry. Eastwood could never act and although he learned the basics from Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, his movies, unless they are based on a good story, like Josey Wales, don’t work very well. I tried to like them and did figure out early on that his heroes were all broken men without family or community, like Eastwood himself. In some ways the best one I have seen is “Bronco Billy,” which exemplifies several themes in his work and life. On a plane back from Italy, back in May, I saw a film in which he as old man goes to Mexico to find the son of a rancher who had hired him. It was pleasant but in the same old groove–the old man returns in the end to Mexico to a small town where people have accepted him. In a way, that is also the them of Gran Torino, which offended some conservatives because the community he found was Southeast Asian.
I remember that Slavitt review extolling Reservoir Dogs and Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (& he truly was an awful lieutenant). Both films featured Harvey Keitel as the lead. Impressionable youth that I was at the time (this was during my years in LA, land of perpetual adolescence), I hastened to go see both, loved them, loved Harvey Keitel.
Now, I’m not sure I could bear watching either film again. At the time, I just assumed that if Dr Fleming had seen fit to print the review, surely he liked the movies himself. And if he liked them, then they were surely the type of entertainment to which any right winger should want to expose himself. And now, to paraphrase Paul Harvey, I know the rest of the story.
I saw Slavitt’s obituary just the other day, and happened to think, “Hey, wasn’t he the one that…”
Michael, thank you for sharing that moving story. I will light a candle for Michael next time I’m in a church that actually has candles.
Too often I have had the experience Tom describes: expecting to dislike a person and then finding the man or woman altogether likable. I was doubtful that I would like Kirk Sale, but he was great fun at dinner as Tom will recall. Is he still alive, I wonder? I have not overcome this defect of judging people before I meet them, but I atone for it every time I’m proven wrong by telling my staff about it. I met so-and-so at this event; turns out he’s actually a lovely guy who shares my interest in such-and-such. Somehow it still hasn’t occurred to me that many people may think in advance of meeting me that I am a jerk. I hope a few are pleasantly surprised!
Kirk is very much alive, still preaching the good gospel of secession, God bless him. I wish I would have asked him about Thomas Pynchon, when I had the chance. A charming fellow.
I haven’t seen Kirk since he left Mt Pleasant and returned to Vermont (?). Good fellow if a bit one-sided. He is rather clever sometimes. I once heard him give a speech making a diametrically opposite interpretation of a set of events to what he had said in a speech a few years earlier. When I, who was the only one in the group who got it, tried to needle him, he handed out a line that came straight out of a situational ethics textbook–different circumstances require different interpretations etc. All with that big grin of his.
Speaking of Pynchon….I used to know Theodore Rosengarten, a National Book Award winner for a rather poor book. Ted didn’t drive, or at least did not have a car, though he had just picked up a MaArthur Genius Award of something, so I a few times gave him a lift into Charleston. On one occasion, he told me that he attended, as a former winner, the annual National Book Awards Dinner. One year, Thomas Pynchon–famous as a recluse whom no one knew–was announced as a surprise speaker. A shabby dressed old man in worn academic robes shuffled onto the stage and went on and on speaking mindless academic drivel. The audience hung onto his every precious word, not knowing what Ted knew, because he grew up as a neighbor of the sublime comedian, Professor Irwin Corey, “the world’s foremost authority. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJIvBeVKoQA
I think that most of us share Chris’ tendency to prejudge people. I hope that I don’t show it when I do come in personal contact with the person. For some reason I expected to like Kirkpatrick Sale if I met him at the D.C. convivium and was more than correct in my expectation when I did. I spent some time talking and drinking with him after the debate and found him to be very interesting and open-hearted. I remember him talking about his trip down from Vermont by train with an enormous suitcase full of his books that he brought to hawk. I helped lightened his load and looked forward to reading them. Unfortunately I am still looking forward to that pleasure.