Category Archives: Media

2010 Predictions for Korea on the Radio

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Busan e-FM

 

One of my nice new gigs in 2010 in Busan is a role as a ‘foreign affairs expert’ – please don’t laugh too much 🙂 – on a local English radio station. It is kinda flattering to be asked. The show is “Morning Wave” on Busan’s English language radio station. I speak on Monday mornings for about 8 minutes.

Today was my first contribution. I made a couple of quick predictions about Korea in 2010. The transcript is below. But here is the condensed version:

1. Korea will grow well, having sloughed off the Great Recession with little trouble.

Korea is a fairly small economy globally, even regionally. But it is fairly advanced, and it is a top 15 economy in GDP size. It is quite impressive how well Korea moved through the Great Recession. Unemployment did not spike. There was no capital flight, as there was in 1997. The contrast with the US is striking. There was a little nervousness last year, and the currency slipped for about 8 months as everyone sprinted to the dollar haven, but that’s it. Things never really got un-normal, in contrast to the West. There were not huge banking collapses, etc. So in 2009 things rolled along pretty smoothly, and they should in 2010.

2. The Korea-US free trade deal won’t go through.

What a shame. Just about every business and political official I know in Korea, from both countries, want the FTA to go through. But I don’t see any movement at all from the Democrats in Congress. The Great Recession stirred up all the old protectionist impulses of the Democratic Party. Hillary and Obama even competed to undo NAFTA. Amazing! The Democrats still haven’t made their peace with NAFTA 20 years later, so I see no trade deals at all going through this year. This is too bad, as the conservative Korean president could probably push the FTA through the legislature here if US movement was likely. Ironically that hurts us, the South Korean consumer more, because South Korea is a much more protected, and smaller, economy. Price differentials between foreign and domestic products are marked. The deal actually matters more here, but the US Congress cares more.

3. North Korea won’t change a bit.

NK is odd in so many ways. It is a closed to being a failed state, yet extraordinary stable for a stalinist hole. Everyone is terribly desperate to find change in NK. We look ceaselessly for any shred of movement, especially the doves who thought that putting it on the axis of evil was a mistake and that the sunshine policy was a good idea. But 10 years after sunshine, little has changed. NK is still the same awful repressive place it was, only now it is has nukes. We should stop predicting that NK is going to imminently collapse and strategize on those grounds, and we should start accepting that it has learned from the fall of communism in Europe and is going to hang around for awhile.

4. Japan won’t really come around on Korea.

This is probably the biggest disappointment coming to Koreans in 2009. The new, leftish Democratic Party of Japan government has really raised hopes in Korea for a meaningful apology (finally) over Japanese colonialism in Korea (1910-45) and a pro-Korean (naturally) settlement of a territorial issue (the Liancourt Rocks). The Lee government is even trying to finagle a Japanese Imperial visit. But I am with Jennifer Lind on this: the Japanese are just not there yet. The public doesn’t really care much about Korea, although Koreans care a great deal about Japan. Korean opinion is a nuisance most don’t care about; most voters want good relations with the US and China, which would compel Korea to come around anyway. But for the one group in Japan that really does think about Korea, it is firmly against the apology. Korea is ground zero for all the old rightist pretensions in Japan about WWII – that was defending Asia against the whites, that brought modernity to backward places, etc. To admit that Japanese was simply a rapacious colonialist here would definitively strip the Japanese right of a deep prejudice about Japan’s ‘proper’ place in Asia history. It will take more than the election of Hatoyama to get the Japanese to climb down from that one. But at least he is not visiting the Yasukuni shrine. That’s progress.

 

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TRANSCRIPT:

Petra (the host):

Hello everyone and welcome to …..

Today we have a new foreign affairs contributor at Busan e-FM. Dr. Robert Kelly teaches in the Political Science and Diplomacy Department at Pusan National University. He came to Korea about 18 months ago.

So good morning Professor Kelly. Please, tell us a little about yourself.

REK:

Good morning Petra. Let me first start by thanking you and the producers here at e-FM for inviting me. It’s an honor to speak on Busan’s only English radio station.

As for me, I am a professor of international relations at Pusan National University. I grew up in the US. I am originally from the city Cleveland in the state of Ohio. Cleveland lies about midway between New York City and Chicago, on the south coast of Lake Erie.

One of my areas of study is the foreign policy and political economy of northeast Asia, so I am happy to join the Busan e-FM team in that capacity.

Petra:

Well, we’re happy to have you, and we hope are enjoying living in Korea.

REK:

I am indeed. I enjoy Korea very much. And Busan is wonderful place to live; the city is very vibrant and enjoyable.

Petra:

That’s great to hear.

So let’s turn now a bit to the future. It is the first full week in 2010. Would you like to hazard any big predictions about Korea or East Asia in the coming year? We can always check up on them next year to see how you did.

REK:

Sure. Well, first, I would say, looking ahead, that Korea’s economy will almost certainly be a growth leader in Asia in 2010 – after China of course. Korea has done a remarkable job bouncing back from the nasty recession of the last 18 months. Economists are now calling this the ‘Great Recession.’ Korea’s performance through the Great Recession has in fact been extremely instructive, and it has justified many of the Seoul’s policies since the last big economic crisis in 1997-98, the Asian Financial Crisis.

Petra:

That’s reassuring to hear. What did we do right that helped so much this time around?

REK:

Well, first, Korea’s growth is a lot more balanced now than it was a decade ago. In the 1990s, the large chaebol conglomerates like SK or Samsung represented a larger share of Korea’s economy. So when they had trouble, the whole Korean economy got in trouble too. They were, in the language of today’s Great Recession, ‘too big to fail.’ Today, small and medium enterprises are healthier and more diversified in Korea’s economy. This gives Korea some insurance if chaebol exports fall, as they briefly did last year.

Petra:

What else?

REK:

Korea’s economy is also cleaner and more transparent than it was. Before the elections of the 1990s, Korea’s biggest companies had preferential and politicized access to national budget. This helped spur the reckless borrowing of the 1990s that fed the Asian financial crisis. This time around however, Korea’s biggest companies are more exposed to financial accounting standards, so there are no hidden ‘toxic assets,’ as in the US. In fact, it is ironic, that just as Korea learned and implemented good lessons from its 1990s crisis, the US ignored those same lessons, and we are seeing the fallout today. American unemployment is over 10%; Korea’s is somewhere around 4%. That is quite an achievement.

Petra:

Hmm. It sounds like it. So much for Korea’s economy. I like those reassuring words. What about Korean foreign policy? There are a lot of big issues coming up, right? Like the FTA with the US, North Korean nuclear weapons, a reconciliation with Japan…

REK:

Yes, that’s right. 2010 has the potential to be a big year for the Republic of Korea. But here my predictions are gloomier.

First, on the FTA with the US, I must say that I cannot see it passing. The Korean National Assembly could probably be pushed into ratifying it, if the Blue House really thought the US was going to move on the treaty too. But quite honestly, this is unlikely. The American Democrats control both parts of the US Congress, as well as the White House. For several decades, the Democrats have been skeptical of the economic benefits of globalization, and I see no shift in that attitude. It is unlikely the US Congress will ratify the FTA.

Petra:

But I thought the business communities in both Korea and the US really support the deal?

REK:

That’s right. They do. But that is just not enough. Globalization and trade are met with a lot of skepticism in the US right now, even towards close partners in Europe and Asia, like Korea. So I think the probability is low, and that means higher prices for all of us.

Petra:

How about North Korea? Our previous foreign affairs expert, Brian Myers of Dongseo University, was pretty skeptical.

REK:

I am afraid I am too. Brian is right about most things North Korean. I share his pessimism.

Of course, we all hope for change in North Korea, but the regime has remained remarkably impervious to reform or renewal. Despite 20 years of hardship, including a brutal famine and Kim Jong Il’s stroke, the regime continues to hang on. I see no reason to expect that to change. In fact, the North’s nuclear weapons only serve to strengthen the government in this difficult period. So I see meaningful movement on the nuclear question as almost impossible. To me, the government’s repression and its nuclear weapons go hand-in-hand.

Petra:

How unfortunate. How about Japan? President Lee extended an invitation to the Japanese emperor to come to Korea. That would be quite a breakthrough.

REK:

Your third issue – Korea’s relations with Japan – is the most likely for progress, but again I am pretty pessimistic. What Korea really wants from Japan is a sincere, heartfelt apology for the colonial period of 1910-1945, and an admission that Dodko is, in fact, Korean, territory.

I don’t see either as likely. Just in the last two weeks, another round of Japanese textbook reform missed the chance to narrow the distance. The election of the Democratic Party of Japan is a major event. It has promised better relations with Japan’s neighbors, and above all, that means Korea.  But any apology,  much less an imperial visit, will require a major shift in Japanese popular attitudes toward Korea. An election is simply not enough. And right now, the Japanese persist in old attitudes toward Korea, as a dependent or a little brother. Its apologies continue to be mixed and half-hearted. And they seem unable to formally relinquish claims to Dokdo, even though they already have in substance.

Petra:

How gloomy for your first day on our show! Why did we invite you here? Can you at least close out with something positive?

REK:

Sure, I think the biggest under-appreciated international story in Northeast Asia is enduring peace. For all today’s troubles with China’s growth, Japan’s historical ambivalence, and North Korea’s nukes, East Asia is more peaceful now than it has been in centuries, and wealthier and more contented too. This is a huge achievement – bigger even than Yuna Kim. No one wants to jeopardize that, so one happy prediction for 2010 is the continuation of military peace and of economic growth, both in Korea and the region. This is a good time to live in East Asia. Enjoy it.

TV Review: The Best Pop Culture Translation of the War on Terror is… Battlestar Galactica?!

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bsgemblem

It’s Christmas week, so here is something lighter than usual…

And yes, you read that title right.

Lots of people get their beliefs about big issues from pop-culture, a social fact wildly underappreciated in social science. Witness the stunning impact of “24” on US popular attitudes to terrorism. And of all the shows and movies I have seen about the GWoT since 9/11, none of them capture the tensions as well as the new Battlestar Galatica. This is not a replacement for actually reading something, but it was political TV entertainment with brain, and that strikes me as awful rare. I just watched it on DVD. The show really flies off the rails midway through season 3, but the first few seasons are much sharper than I expected regarding the GWoT.

In the show, a human people from a far away planet are being pursued across space by a mechanical race (the Cylons) which they created but who then turned on them. The creators used this plot, which was so bad in the first show in 1978, to build an extended metaphor about the US in the War on Terrorism. I found this remarkably clever, particularly given American science fiction’s preference for silly CGI space alien stories like Avatar. Here are a few good parallels:

1. The humans repeatedly face extreme and realistic trade-offs that result in mass fatalities. Usually GWoT movies and TV soft pedal ethically awkward choices by establishing one character as the bad guy, whose death will wrap up the morality of the story easily (see the bloodthirsty Christian prince in Kingdom of Heaven or the sleazy bad guys of 24). In BSG, some humans are sacrificed for the good of the greater number. Civilians are left behind to die; soldiers shoot civilians; defenseless enemies are butchered. No one leaves the show morally excused or pure and therefore easy for US viewers to identify this.

2. The torture debate runs throughout the show. Cylon prisoners are abused, beaten, even raped. And even more realistically, sometimes torture is shown to work, sometimes not. And in one episode, a prisoner released from torture promptly kills her guard – very believable and very uncomfortable punishment for doign the right thing. The Cylons too torture their prisoners. It’s blood and pain all around, which pretty much sums up the US flirtation with torture as a tool of national policy.

3. The shows nicely demonstrates the tension between civil and military command during wartime. At two points, there are military putsches and martial law – basically Chalmers Johnson’s fear about the direction of the Bush presidency.

4. Lots of decisions are made under conditions of extremely poor information. The show abounds in the moral dilemmas of ‘what if’ scenarios that leave more bodies behind. At one point, the civilian president and military second-in-command decide to assassinate the military first-in-command, because she is promoting torture and military dictatorship.

5. The show also channels the GWoT paranoia about sleeper cells. The Cylons have agents that look exactly look humans. This captures exactly the fear of Muslims in the West who seem just like us until something like the London bombing or Ft. Hood shooting happens. Inevitably after these things happen, neighbors always say, ‘they seemed like such nice young men, so normal.’ The show makes strong use of the paranoia this creates, and it shows the splits and divisions among the humans that such paranoia creates.

6. The most obvious parallel, which is probably overdone by the producers, is to make the Cylons crusading monotheists and the humans polytheists. It is almost too easy to see the Cylons as Islamic jihadis. But again, the show gets good intellectual mileage out of the issue of religious tolerance, and the show has multiple characters who invoke God to justify extreme behavior.

7. The show also displays well the long-term stress that constant war places on democracy. The humans slowly become more regimented. Their democracy is constantly under threat of military intervention justified as wartime necessity. The soldiers are constantly tempted by jingoism and strut. The parallels to barracks democracies like Israel and South Korea are rich, and arguably the show was warning against the drift of the Bush administration.

8. There are lots of subtle digs at the Bush people. One leadership character prefers a standing desk and authorizes torture – nice a Donald Rumsfeld reference. The president of the humans undergoes a religious conversion.

9. The show does have flaws. Like too much science fiction, the core audience is young male, so the show abounds in ridiculously out-of-place sexy women. The CGI is mixed. The show has the same military obsession with people in uniform that so much US TV and film has. Like so many US war films, there is a great deal of macho military posturing, saluting, and barking, but at least there is some critical perspective. But this adulation of the military values also reflects the Bush-era GWoT.

This is vastly superior to 24 and other GWoT junk like Stealth or Lord of the Rings 3. The moral dilemmas are sharply defined, the choices available are usually bad, and the ‘right’ moral choice is rarely clearly apparent. The same kinds of cost-benefit analyses under stress and poor information that characterize political decision-making during war are regularly displayed. I found this a breadth of fresh air after laboring through the action-movie and easy morality idiocy of 24.

Happy Thanksgiving…..and if You don’t Love Charlie Brown, You Should Leave Sarah Palin’s ‘real America’!

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Happy Thanksgiving. I love the holidays, especially the Peanuts’ videos, so enjoy at least the clip.

And if you don’t love these specials, then Sarah Palin is right: you aren’t a real American! You are probably palling around with terrorists in some elite, liberal ivory tower in San Francisco. Hah!

 

Giving Kim Jong-Il the Nobel Peace Prize would have Done more Good

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Greetings%20Earthlings

I agree with just about everybody else in the blogosphere that Obama did not deserve it. As many have noted, he has not done anything really. I also concur with the emerging center and center-left conventional wisdom that he should have declined it. The US Right will certainly pick this up as confirmation that Obama is just a celebrity, more interested in placating Europhilic cosmopolitan elites than defending Sarah Palin’s ‘real America.’ Fox can be counted on to get a week or so out of bashing ‘arugula-eating, latte-sipping, Mapplethorpe-loving bicoastal elites who like to be liked in France.’ You’ve already heard that story from Coulter & Co. for years, but Obama offers them ammunition when he revels in the glow of post-modern euros. He should have ducked this one. More importantly, he should do something.

The other obvious insight is that giving this to Obama does not really promote peace in the future. Maybe the Nobel committee is trying to bind/blackmail him into not bombing Iran or paying the US back dues to the UN. But basically, this is an award for not being George W. Bush. Far more useful to actually improving peace would have been to award it to those struggling to overturn or moderate some of the world’s worst regimes. Andrew Sullivan suggested some of the Iranian dissidents. A friend thought Morgan Tsvangirai. I thought perhaps some of those Russian journalists who get killed for reporting on Chechnya. The point of these choices – besides the obvious fact that they deserve it and O does not – is that the Prize might actually help their causes significantly. These dissidents need resources to press on and international press coverage to make sure they are not killed by the regimes they challenge. Tsvangirai, e.g., is almost certainly only still alive, because he garners so much western attention. The Prize would bring powerful moral credibility to those desperately in need of it.

But you want to know what Kim Jong-Il has to do with it. The Dear Leader’s greatest fear now is execution in post-unification South Korean courts. Survival, not juche, is the real ‘ideology’ of the regime. Kim basically wants to survive to die warm and secure in his bed, like his dad. As Hobbes famously said in the Leviathan, he fears not death, which is inevitable, but a violent death. He does not want to got the way of Mussolini, Ceauşescu, or Saddam Hussein. And before he goes, Kim wants to party for a few more decades. He loves the movies, the booze, and the ‘joy brigades.’

Because of his fear of hanging in a South Korean prison, he holds on to NK as best he can. So why not make a deal with him? The Nobel committee already gave the Peace Prize to Yasir Arafat. How about a secret deal to give it to Kim in exchange for an opening of NK? If Kim had a peace prize in hand, the SK government would certainly never execute him.

If this sounds pretty far-fetched, recall how damaged the Nobel Peace Prize’s credibility already is. If Yasir can get one and Gandhi can’t, who cares if Kim gets one? If it helps convince him he won’t get executed, then so much the better…

TV Review: “24” Season 1 – If “24” is even Close to Accurate, then We are Deservedly Losing the GWoT

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I have been teaching terrorism for about 5 years, but I am not a big fan of serial television. So I had never actually seen an episode of “24.” But my students always reference it in class, and ‘Jack Bauer’ has become synonymous with a no-holds-barred approach to the GWoT. GOP officials occasionally refer to the show, usually in praiseworthy or pseudomethodological terms – as in, ‘we need try to the Jack Bauer-approach to counterterrorism,’ or ‘Jack Bauer wouldn’t let politics stand in the way.’ (It always amazes me how congressmen, who we think have greater access to good or secret government information, nonetheless draw ‘knowledge’ from the same media flim-flam as the rest of us do. Please don’t tell me Congress gets its sense of counterterrorism from movies and TV!) My sense was that such Jack Bauer references meant we need to bend the rules, torture, and otherwise wander into Cheney’s famed ‘dark side.’ And so it was when I watched the show for the first time. I watched season 1 on DVD over the summer, and I was genuinely disturbed and depressed.

1. It is entertaining TV. It watches like a page-turner novel reads. Lots of twists and turns, and plots and counterplots. But this is the first error compared to real life intelligence. If the CIA, FBI, NCTC, etc, had as many moles, rogues, and traitors as the 24’s ‘Counterterrorism Unit’ (CTU) then the agency would be closed and cleansed, and lots of people would wind up in jail.

2. The plot, at least of season 1, bears little resemblance to the actuality of contemporary US counterterrorism (CT). Most of the work of intelligence is bland trolling through information, trying to piece together something useful for policymakers, and providing good, hopefully somewhat predictive analysis – i.e., a lot of reading and writing at a desk. And the cases are far less grandiose and exciting. Actual US CT is a lot more like busting those losers who were supposedly going to blow up the Sears Tower and those Lodi Muslims who were probably entrapped. The show depicts extremely well organized, well-funded, and elaborate plots. Planes blow up, cops get shot with abandon, traitors abound. This unhelpfully feeds the American paranoia of sleeper cells and incipient plots; I see now why the left disliked the show so much during the Bush presidency. It reinforced exactly the kind of hysteria that Bush stoked to get reelected. But actually, it is increasingly likely that 9/11 was an exception and that the domestic terrorist threat is quite minimal.

3. The Bauer character pulls straight from the disturbing Bush, do-whatever-it-takes playbook. So in one episode Bauer says both ‘forget the warrant,’ and ‘ignore the chain of command’ (!). In the real world this should get him disciplined and fired. In another, he shoots a superior with a tranquilizer gun. In the conclusion, he shoots the bad guy terrorist multiple times after he has emptied his gun and raised his hands. All this stuff may feel emotionally fulfilling, but of course, going out of bounds so regularly is exactly what lead to Abu Ghraib and torture. It may look necessary and heroic on TV, but in practice, breaking the rules around violence creates snowball effects, ambiguity, and bad precedents. If US CT staff is acting like Bauer does, with all the gunfighting, hyperventilating, and rule-bending, then our institutions are corroding because of the GWoT, not in order to win it.

4. Somehow the show’s CTU can get whatever doorcodes, email passwords, or other electronic access necessary. Again, this is terribly unhelpful. It suggests that your private life is unsafe before easy and unscrutinized government intrusion (PATRIOT Act, NSA illegal wiretaps). It feeds the paranoia.

5. The office staff seems to acquire and collate huge amounts of information quite quickly. Here is another slip with reality. As the Iraq intel debate showed us, most US intelligence agencies have little hard and secret information, and they struggle a lot to put it together properly. Most of what they use is the same ‘open source’ stuff that the rest of us see. (A friend at the CIA once told me that 95% of what they look at is open-source). The show wildly exaggerates the amount of good and covert information; the staff’s ability to sort it out from all the other noise and chatter that the intel agencies monitor; and perhaps most important of all – as the pre-9/11 investigation of the hijackers showed – how hard it is to connect all and only those dots. In short, the show wildly overrates the effectiveness of intelligence services.

So yes, it does channel the zeitgeist of the Bush-era GWoT well. As a trip down memory lane to the bad old days of torture and intel snafus, it is ‘enjoyable.’ As a teaching device, I suppose it is useful as the illustration of one manner of CT (do-whatever-it-takes), and the one the US (unfortunately) looked the other way on in the wake of 9/11. The show’s violence and law-breaking method feels to me like what Cheney had in mind when he said we must go ‘over to the dark side’ to fight terrorism. All-in-all I was pretty disturbed. If ‘24’ is our approach, then we deserve to lose.

Movie Review: Transfomers 2 – Michael Bay Misses the Cold War

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A traditional review of this film is redundant. By now you already now how ridiculous it is. (If you don’t, read this laugh-out-loud link.) It includes racist, gansta rapper robots reminiscent of Jar-Jar Binks. The women in the film are either idiots (the mother) or supermodels shamelessly exploited by the camera. Its treatment of college life is moronic, even by the standards of a film this bad. And the story is such a convoluted mess, its hard to know what is going on. Instead I want to focus on the politics of the film, especially its outdated understanding of military conflict. If this sounds unnecessary, its worth noting that Bay has better relations with the US military than any other director working. His films frequently showcase US hardware and show its use in ways flattering to, and approved by, the US military. Particularly, his relationship with the Air Force is strong, so you always know his films will treat you to kinetic displays of our coolest tools.

1. Bay fetishizes military hardware, and he has been rewarded with unparalleled access. Transformers 1 was the first movie in which the F-22 Raptor and the Predator drone were shown in a film. The second has even more real-life hardware on loan, including the M1 tank, B-1, F-22, F-117, and Predators. Across Bay’s ouevre (Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, T1 & T2), he has stressed big airforce hardware in such a glorifying way, that they feel like commercials for the military-industrial complex.

2. Bay’s particular interest in the airforce is comic given the slow erosion of the airforce’ actual role in America’s combat operations. Specifically, no power in the world is really ready to take on the US, and in the air least of all. The macho, fighter pilot cult of the airforce makes for cool movies like Top Gun and Stealth, but this does not actually fit what the airforce has done in US conflicts since Korea (the last air war with frequent, serious dogfights). The airforce is a victim of its own success. US air dominance is greater than on the ground or the seas, so the actual use of US airpower against other airpower is minimal. Instead, the US uses the airforce as a part of combined arms for ground support. This irks the AF brass, so Bay’s films are a nice chance to pitch the US public on the continued, but bogus, need for fighter jets. On the actual role of the US airforce in combat try here; compare that with the image you see in film.

3. Another obvious clash between the film and reality is the straightforward, good guy-bad guy action of the film, vs. the reality of US counterinsurgency & third world operations since Vietnam. This is another way in which Bay channels the military’s preferred view of itself. In Bayworld, the airforce is the dominant branch of the military. Also, the bad guys are easy to identify, so difficult questions surrounding the use of American force for the last two generations don’t exist. The Decepticons are just evil so the Autobots can, yes, behead them, and it is ok. There is no sorting between VietCong and local farmers, no accidental killings, no torture, no intercultural misunderstandings.

4. The final delusion of military conflict in Bayworld is the requirement of massive firepower. This is another US preoccupation. Part of the traditional American way of war is to use overwhelming force. The Decepticons are large, metal, hardened, military-only targets – exactly the sort of Cold War-era targets the airforce prefers to attack and which scarcely exist anymore. But the reality of US micro-operations in mixed, combatant/civilian third world environments is quite the opposite. The Decepticons are the Soviets or the Chinese. The Americans need to use all their super-cool advanced firepower to bring them down. This is the way the US military wants to fight wars. But the reality is different, and has been since Korea. We scarcely use huge, indiscriminant firepower anymore (that failed terribly, with awful civilian consequences, under Westmoreland in Vietnam). Instead everything today is geared around micro-bursts of extreme precision – the Kosovo air campaign of 1999 or the Predator strikes in Pakistan since 2008. Our most recent Iraqi dalliance with the Michael Bay, ‘blow-‘em-all-to-hell,’ approach to conflicts ended in a ‘fiasco.’

5. The film includes a cheap shot at the Obama administration. His national security advisor tries to kick the Autobots off earth, and after the Decepticon attack, Obama goes into hiding. I guess this means that Bay is a Republican. I wonder if he believes he is channeling US military discontent about Obama as C-in-C. Either way this was poor taste.

Bay’s film is silly but it tells us some important things nonetheless, as bad US action movies usually do.

A. Bay is clearly the foremost advertising vehicle of the US airforce and the US military in general. When people complain about the socially corrosive effects of the military-industrial compex, movies like this are exactly what they mean. Bay channels the US flirtation with militarism and celebrates jingoism. I find it a pleasing irony, that for all Bay’s military technology porn (long, loving shots of military metal), SecDef Robert Gates recently ended the wasteful and unnecessary F-22. Outside of Bayworld delusions of asteroids and robots from space, real US military needs are far more mundane – more soldiers, more cultural experts, better veterans care, better body armor, etc.

B. Bay also reflects the way the US military wants to fight wars and the way it wants to be perceived by the public. He avoids the messy reality of the small wars that have characterized US military conflict since Korea. The bulk of these costs are carried by the army; they involve small operations and targeted force; they require cultural sensitivity and good intelligence; there is rarely ‘moral clarity.’ Instead Bay presents simplistic good/bad moral clarity and super-sleek airshows. Awful.

Movie Review: Terminator Salvation, or What John Connor Learned in Iraq

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This is how franchises die. What a let down. In my review of T3, I said you would pumped for T4. I was wrong. This beast is heading into the sequelitis of the Matrix, Robocop or (old) Star Trek. What a shame. For a run-down of the ‘plot,’ try here. You don’t really need to see T1-3, as this one doesn’t use the backstory too much. Its basically an action movie, with none of the heart or interesting themes of the earlier ones.

I have always been a fan of the Terminator series as action movies. The first one was pretty clever. It had an offbeat time-travel idea (not the usual Star Trek time-travel silliness, once again on display this summer), and it smartly capitalized on the angst of the 80s about computers and war (Wargames), and postapolcalyptic life (Mad Max). The second one is probably the most intelligent action movie ever (granted, that’s not saying a lot), and continues to be the base of the popularity that eventually catapulted Schwarzenegger to the governorship of California. Even the third one was pretty good. Unfortunately this one walks away from most of the nifty and fun stuff of the series; its basically a mish-mash of every war war movie you’ve seen and videogame you played. A few thoughts:

1. On the up side, the action is pretty intense and serious. There is a grit and edginess to the shoot-outs that feels more battle-realistic than the first trilogy. It was also a nice touch that Linda Hamilton returned at least to provide the voice of John’s mother. I was always disappointed at how lamely her cool character was dispensed with in T3. I also thought the idea of putting the resistance HQ in a sub was a pretty intelligent move that flowed well from the narrative, but it prompts the obvious question (discussed below) about how the resistance to machines was able to get and maintain such fancy equipment when the whole planet was nuked. Finally, I didn’t mind that the film was set in the Skynet future. At some point the franchise had to catch up with that conflict, so I didn’t miss the time-travelling terminators that were becoming pretty repetitive by T3.

2. The acting is passable, and the sets are solid. Nothing looks ‘stagey.’ Thankfully too the CGI is good, although the Blu-ray release will be the real test of that. But wth has happened to C Bale? He was fantastic in American Psycho. The scene were has almost has a heart attack over another yuppie’s superior business card is hysterical. In T4, he basically yells all the time. And what’s up with a bald H B Carter showing up in a Terminator movie? That just didn’t work for me at all.

3. But the bad is, well, pretty bad.

a. the action scenes are so loud (as is the ear-splitting soundtrack) that they overwhelm the narrative. The story of T1 and T2 particularly were pretty compelling, and the action flowed from pretty well from narrative demand. That’s not the case here.

b. The movie pulls from all sorts of war films and video games. So, it doesn’t feel too original, and you aren’t really surprised much. The postwar future looks like – well you already know – Mad Max. The Road Warrior is a great film, and its influence just rolls on and on, even 30 years later. Battle scenes with Huey helicopters are straight from Vietnam pictures. The machines created slithery ‘hydrobots’ ripped straight from, of all possible sources, the videogame Resistance 2. The tall robot that attacks the resistance at the gas station could be a transformer. The penetration of Skynet central at the end feels like a videogame ending when you have to go after the big boss character to end the story.

c. I found the level of sophisticated military hardware and deployment wholly unconvincing after the awfulness of a nuclear exchange. The combat scenes frequently felt like a video game version of the Iraq war. So much of the hardware is taken directly from the contemporary US military that we see regularly on TV in Iraq: body armor, grenade launchers, M-60s, M-16s, A-10s, radar, rocket launchers, humvees. In the first film, the resistance is running around in basements with funky ray-guns. In this one, they have enormous above-ground installations that can support helicopters, subs, and aircraft. So its pretty much the US military versus the machines, and we’ve seen that already in Transformers. Wouldn’t the machines go after such facilities? And how could you possibly maintain such elaborate hardware in the postnuclear future? Where does the fuel come from, the spare parts, the dozens of mechanics necessary to keep the hi-tech, logistics-heavy US military in the field? And someone should tell the director that last Huey was built in 1976 and the last A-10 in 1986. It is unlikely these aging platforms would survive into 2018, through a nuclear war, and still be serviceable.

d. maybe I am too hard about the sophisticated technology, so here is some miscellaneous silliness:

i. The hot fighter pilot babe (how come they’re always super hot, btw?) falls in love with a cyborg after about 2 days. Nobody but reality TV show contestants fall in love in 2 days, and wth falls in love with a robot?! To quote the greatest line from the underappreciated comedy of Robocop 2: ‘ I don’t know anyone who wants to be a robot.’

ii. Two nuclear explosions occur in the film which the main character survives. In both, helicopters are close enough to feel the blast wave. Depending on the yield of course, you might survive the blast, but then there’s fallout too. Too unrealistic.

iii. At the end, John Connor gets a heart transplant in open air from that cyborg. Even more ridiculous, Connor had recently restarted that cyborg heart with – I am not lying – jumper cables. Hah! I am sure its ready for transplant.

iv. Why does Skynet have offices and hallways if it is a robot AI?

e. Finally, the director succumbed the easy patriotism of US action movies. In first two, the resistance was planet-wide and looked futuristic. In the third film, Schwarzenegger needed to get elected to the CA governorship, so suddenly the US military was at the heart of the resistance. And in this fourth installment, its basically the US military versus the Transformers. US military hardware now dominates the resistance; gone are the ray-guns. The resistance leaders are all Americans and the action all takes place in CA. The difference is subtle but clear. James Cameron (the director of the first two) was never a nationalist, but I guess now, after 6 years of the Iraq war, T4 had to look this way for an American audience. Too bad.

CNN International is Awful

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One of the great tragedies of living out of the US is the loss of quality TV news in English, as well as the TiVo system I used to cruise through it. If you want to see how yesterday’s luxuries become today’s needs, try TiVo withdrawal ! After a year in Korea, I still miss it terribly.

I always thought US TV journalism was pretty weak, but I realized when I moved to Korea how much I actually consumed at the end of the day when I relaxed. I miss PBS the most – particularly Lehrer, Frontline, and Charlie Rose. I also miss BBC News and C-Span’s Q & A and book/author shows. I miss less the Sunday talk shows. The greats (Russert and Brinkley) have passed. I always thought Stephanopolus was a free-rider on Clinton who made good afterwards in the worst ‘Washington system’ sorta way: handsome, connected, but somewhat empty and a lightweight, i.e., perfect for network news. I suppose your dork quotient skyrockets when you say that you miss C-Span. Hah!

Anyway, I have been thrown back on CNN International – which is another way of saying that I don’t watch the news much anymore. (I don’t understand Korean enough yet to consume local news.) CNN International has that vapid, shallow feel to it that is perfect for airport lounges when you are bored with your novel and your flight is delayed. But as a regular news source, its pretty awful.

I never consumed a lot of cable news before. CNN struck me as infotainment, Fox as propaganda, and MSNBC as empty. Hence, John’s Stewart’s jokes about cable news seemed right to me, but I never really knew. Now, after being stuck with only CNN for a year, I do know how right his lampoons are. Why is CNN awful?

1. CNNI is terribly repetitive. It not only repeats the same show frequently, but it basically repeats the same story line throughout various broadcasts all day long. 15 minutes with CNN is enough to tell your their basic 5 points for the day. So unless you actually want the fluff side shows like Larry King or the movie shows, its lots of recycling interspersed with non-news like the weather or sports.

2. It is quite trendy and silly. Michael Jackson’s passing became a 24-hour pseudo-news-athon of idiot interviews, overhyped conspiracy theories, and family exploitation for air time. WHO CARES ?! Not only was it all fairly pointless, it also helped save the Iranian regime by taking away the spotlight from that almost revolution. Trading Iran for Jackson was a massive failure of journalistic integrity. No wonder TV news is in delcine. Also noticeable is that awful journalistic habit of extrapolating a trend or wave from a just few cases of something. For about two weeks in May, it was all swine flu, all the time – complete with lots of hyperventilating and lurid counterfactuals, when there was not much actual news to report. So we’d learn about the day’s swine flu events in a few minutes, and then get a burst of bust of commercials with creepy music and shaky images telling me to ‘stay with CNN’ in case it becomes a ‘global epidemic’! I can’t wait for this summer when a few shark attacks off South Africa or California are turned into a global shark bite pandemic! Ahhh!

3. The side shows really are fluff. Larry King strikes me as a pretty talented guy, but he interviews quite a lot of dull, conventional-wisdom-recycling guests. Who picks these people for him? How many more movie stars, preachers, or participants in high-profile court cases do we need to hear? And when did celebrity blather, and paid-for advertising masquerading as journalism like ‘Inside Africa,’ become news?

4. There are a lot of commercials of national or corporate brand promotion, and for soft ‘investigative’ shows. Usually some reporter tells me that if I watch the ‘Middle East Revealed,’ I will learn who the ‘movers and shakers’ of the Gulf are. Really? A series of sanitized interviews with bankers or government media liaisons uncritically citing optimistic FDI and export statistics? Yawn. The commercials are even worse. It all blurs an into undifferentiated fluff of advertising for tourism and investment; apparently I will discover my true heart gambling in Dubai or kayaking in Cambodia.

5. Anderson Cooper and Christiane Amanpour are egomaniacs whose faces are all over the network. Have the PR people at CCN found that viewers care more about seeing them than the actual news they speak of?

6. What is with relentless self-promotion? Most of CNN’s commercials are for the network itself. Its marketing is embarrassingly fluffy multiculturalism, stressing silliness like the ‘continuing human story,’ with trite juxtapositions of suffering children and joyous celebrants somewhere set to mawkish music. Insulting and stupid.

7. Who taught these journalists to speak in such dramatic language? It is never ‘a billion dollars,’ but always ‘a Billion Dollars,’ which great stress on the labial ‘B.’ Jobs are never ‘cut’ on CCNI; they are ‘slashed.’ Economies don’t ‘decline,’ they ‘collapse.’ I think this is the result of Fox News remaking of the news into a Michael Bay action movie.

In short, CCN International seems to pander to those who would like to see themselves as international or cosmopolitan, but not in a particular challenging way. CCNI is like the TV version of the International Herald Tribune – call it IR for undergrads. It makes you feel sorta international and jet-setty to be reading/watching it and be seen reading/watching it. Aren’t you cool when you look up when CCNI tells you the weather in Hong Kong or Bahrain? Preferably this occurs in the airport lounge with your Blackberry on the table so the cute business traveler babe next to you will see how cosmpolitan you are. But you’re probably not going to Hong Kong or Bahrain, because you’re not really a ‘player.’ You’re just in the airport because you are going on a vacation somewhere…

Top 10 Gloriously BAD IR Movies You Still Should See

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So there is a nice little academic dust-up going on over IR film: Walt, then Drezner, then Kaplan, then Drezner again. All mention good movies you should see, but none mention any dumb or silly movies you should see that still tell us a lot about IR. Rambo 2, e.g., can tell you as much about American attitudes toward Vietnam, the Soviets, and the Cold War as the vastly superior Hearts and Minds.

Given the sheer volume of idiot films with a pretense to IR insight, I classify mine by types of paranoia and hysteria bred:

1. World Politics is a Global Conspiracy!

JFK, Nixon

bonus conspirators:

IMF: Battle of Seattle

UN: Left Behind series

Jewish: Valley of the Wolves Iraq

American: The Host

Catholic: The DaVinci Code, Angels & Demons

Japan: Rising Sun

Bankers, Jews, albino priests (wth?), Lyndon Johnson, the US Forces in Korea – everyone gets a shot at global tyranny. How come there are no movies about cliques of sinister college professors plotting global domination?

2. Nurturing your Inner Fascist Superman

Starship Troopers, 300, Triumph of the Will

In case you thought war wasn’t fun, along came ST  and 300 to tell you why you’re a liberal wimp. 300 actually has a scene where the soldiers laugh as arrows rain down on them. Good lord.

ST also contains the greatest Hollywood lines ever about the profession: “This year you learned how the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos. How the veterans took control and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations.” Those limp-wristed egg-heads! Hang ‘em from the lampposts!

3. Kill those Commies!

Red Dawn, Rocky IV, Rambo 3

Back in the 80s, you knew those commies deserved to die. You knew they were plotting to spread the evil empire into America. So forget the Day After, you wanted to kick some russki a—! And Patrick Swayze told you why. They were going to take away your Second Amendment rights!

So laughably ridiculous today, you can’t help but love the Reagan-era action film. I watched Red Dawn with a Russian friend. She exploded into laughter almost immediately and continued for the entire film. Rocky trained to the worst 80s montage ever, while D Lundgren took steroids; but Rocky’s victorious American spirit still came through in the end! Yeah! And don’t miss Stallone taking down a Soviet helicopter with an arrow in Rambo 3.

4. You don’t know much about Africa and you don’t really care

Black Hawk Down, Blood Diamond

bonus Japanese edition: The Last Samurai

If you ever needed an excuse to explain your ignorance of Africa – they’re all just killing each other over there, right? – these films will help you out. God forbid you read a book about the place, just enjoy the on-screen slaughter. At least Blood Diamond will help you sound a little intelligent at the next grad student meeting.

But you say, you don’t really want to read about Asia either. I know, I know. It’s pretty far away, and the Seven Samurai is 3.5 hours long and in black and white for god’s sake. (And you’ve never heard of Ozu.) Well, Tom Cruise is here to help! Didn’t you know that the Japanese needed a white guy to realize they should hold onto their culture? Good thing Americans are around to help balloon-headed foreigners find the important things in life.

5. The GWoT is really just a Misunderstanding

Kingdom of Heaven, The Siege

Is there any movie in the GWoT era more misguided than KoH? You’d never know that deep theological differences divide Islam and the West, that deep-rooted frictions (Bosnia, Spain) have made reconciliation difficult, mutual histories of imperialism created rivers of blood, that language and cultural differences block shared norms, etc.

None of the deep-seated religious frenzy of the Middle Ages is presented in its own terms. Wholly missing is that Christians and Muslims thought it was right to kill each other, as well as internal dissenters, for religious truth. Instead, the presentation is through an anachronistic, can’t-we-all-just-get-along liberal GwoT lens – complete with O Bloom saying at the end that Christians, Jews and Muslims all have claim to Jerusalem. Oh please. Religious pluralism in the 13th century? Are you serious? Despite a 3.5 hour run-time, this obvious medieval characteristic is missing, and KoH degenerates into multicultural pap

The clerics are bloodthirsty or insipid. The Christian princes are mostly brigands, and in a shameless act of currying favor in the modern Middle East, the Muslim princes are a model of tolerance. All-in-all, its political correctness all over the place; it’s possibly the most anachronistic serious film about the Middle Ages ever. If you want to see what people really thought about religion in the Middle Ages, complete with all the superstition, absolutism, and butchery, try The Name of the Rose or Queen Margot.

6. The Cold War was just a Misunderstanding

Star Trek 6, Cold War-era James Bond movies

If there is any lesson to be drawn from Hollywood’s standard treatment of tough topics, it’s that it wants to offend or challenge no one, so as to insure that everyone will buy movie tickets. Hence the multicultural pluralist fluff of KoH or the gentle portrayal of the Japanese military junta in Pearl Harbor.

So god forbid Bond actually battle the KGB. Instead he usually hooks up (literally of course) with some hot Russian agent to battle a rouge financier, industrialist, general, whatever. Even in the Bond film about North Korea – the worst country on earth – the filmmaker didn’t have the guts to make the villain a part of the regime. Yawn. C’mon already. Even the DPRK gets a pass? We think the Bond movies are about the Cold War, but they really aren’t. Usually, the KGB is working with MI6 or the CIA. The real Bond meme is  straight from the antiglobalization movement – megalomaniac corporate leaders who want to take over the planet. Bill Gates as a psychopath, not Brezhnev, is the real enemy. Bleh.

Star Trek 6 follows the same silly pattern. The Cold War was really cooked up by military leaders on both sides who wanted to rise to power! And the Soviet-Klingons were really peace-lovers, defending their culture and loving their children too, just like Sting told us. Whatever…

7. Intelligence Work is Really Cool – Babes, Gadgets, Jumping out of Airplanes

Bond, Jack Ryan, Bourne

My students come to class with some of the most hair-brained ideas about world politics, because spy movies are so ubiquitous and so stupid. Blame Bond of course, but Jack Ryan – with a PhD no less! – has gotten more and more ridiculous too. I stopped reading Clancy novels after Ryan became POTUS. PhDs carrying guns and becoming prez? Gimme a break.

I have a few friends who work at the CIA, and they do a lot of what professors do – reading open source material, trying to draw conclusions, writing product. Certainly the literature on intelligence suggests this too. The most convincing film I saw on the CIA was The Good Shepherd, and the best film ever on intelligence work in the field is The Lives of Others. No one named Agent XXX or Holly Goodhead shows up.

Bonus all-time Bond idiocy: Denise Richardson with a PhD

8. We lost Vietnam because of the Politicians

We Were Soldiers, Rambo 2

So you can’t stand the fact that the US lost in Vietnam. It must be someone else’s fault – Democrats, hippies, freemasons… So why not dredge up the ‘stabbed-in-the-back’ theory of the Weimer German right? Jews sold Germany up the river in WWI. So did the protestors, bureaucrats, and politicians in the 60s and 70s over Vietnam. If the Democrats hadn’t voted against war funding, we might have won! Call it the R Reagan-O North-T Clancy theory of the war’s failure.

I find this so toxic, its frightening. The war was ‘lost,’ because by the early 70s it was clear that South Vietnam would never stand on its own; the cost to the US was threatening other international commitments, as well as the domestic economy and social order; and the South’s collapse, we finally learned, would not result in a massive domino effect in East Asia. In other words, losing had become cheaper than continuing to fight by the early 70s. We decided to give up after a major effort when we realized that the costs now outweighed the benefits. This is why the Republican Nixon administration accepted the Paris peace deal that did not force the North to remove its forces from the South. We just didn’t care that much by 1973.

Yes, we could have slugged it out, perhaps into the 80s, or, risking a wider war, used nuclear weapons, bombed the Red River dykes, or openly invaded the North. But it just wasn’t worth it anymore. As Cronkite said, we did the best we could as an honorable people, and that was pretty good.

If you believe that that is liberal professorial clap-trap, that Americans win, they don’t explain defeat, then Stallone will give you the Reagan era revisionism you crave. The film includes such iconic right-wing delusions as: Rambo’s question, ‘do we get to win this time?,’ his retrieval by force of POWs, his defeat of both Vietnamese and Soviet forces, and his assault on the feckless, lying homefront bureaucrat who wants his mission to fail. So in 90 minutes, the shirtless supersoldier re-fights and wins the Vietnam War, wins the Cold War to boot, and vindicates one of the great right-wing myths – so effective against the left in the years after Vietnam – that the US left soldiers behind and that the North secretly held POWs (for what possible reason?). The movie’s so close to propaganda, it could have been funded by the Army or the Reagan White House.

Gibson gives you Vietnam as World War 2. Strong men with good families doing what is right. Gone are the concerns about imperialism, US behavior in the field, the confusion over ends and means, the blurred lines between the VC and civilians, or the sheer bloody mess of the war in vastly better films like Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, or Apocalypse Now. We Were Soldiers is the celebratory Saving Private Ryan of Vietnam war movies, complete with subtle digs about politicians not committing enough to do the job.

9. America kicks A—!

Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, Stealth, Lord of the Rings 3, Pear Harbor, Armageddon, Behind Enemy Lines, and just about every US war movie ever made

bonus lampoon: Team America: World Police

Americans love to tell their history to themselves in such a way as to lionize the individual US solider, thank the US for saving the world from fanaticisms, and generally vindicate American exceptionalism. The regular diet comes from the History Channel with its ceaseless treatment of US involvement in WWII, the ‘good war.’ Spielberg lays it on awfully thick in Band and Ryan.

Ask a Russian what they think of this treatment of WWII, and you will get either a laugh with a shake of the head, or anger over American ignorance of the real cost of the European war. 20 million Russians died fighting the Nazis. 200k Americans did. We stepped in late (6/’44), after the USSR had essentially stopped and reversed the Nazi tide. We played the offshore balancer – which was good strategy but not especially heroic. We were entirely comfortable allowing red and brown totalitarianisms to destroy each other, before we stepped in to prevent Stalin from marching to Paris. When Patton famously said, ‘we could still lose this war,’ he was lying to himself to exaggerate the importance of the western effort. Ryan wildly overrates the US contribution to the European war. Unfortunately no good movie about the Eastern front exists. Try Enemy at the Gates, Stalingrad, or Cross of Iron, but they aren’t that good.

Every Russian knows this history. Its etched into the very landscape of European Russia, and its deeply humbling when they ask you why the US didn’t intervene earlier as they were being slaughtered. The answer is realpolitik, but that hardly feels sufficient when you are talking about the Nazis. Ryan and many US WWII movies are downright embarrassing when you are confronted by the enormity of Russian suffering and Russian moral anger for our late entry.

As for M Bay, he might as well collect a paycheck from the USAF. Pearl Harbor is so bad, it’s hard to know where to begin. The worst line is probably when A Baldwin points to a group of US pilots and says that is why we are going to win, complete with melodramatic music in the background. As if courage, fortitude, willingness to sacrifice, etc. were some US monopoly. Japanese pilots flew planes into US ships for god’s sake. This is the kind of remark that sends foreigners up the wall. Once you live overseas long enough, you see how much non-Americans resent that sort of over-the-top US self-praise. The reason the US won is a lot more bureaucratic and less romantic – good leadership, a huge industrial advantage, larger population, etc. Using America’s material superiority to achieve decisive military advantage is the “American way of war” (or more recently, the “Powell Doctrine”) and flows right from Sun Tzu’s argument that you should only fight when you have the upper hand (“every battle is won before its fought”). But this does not fit with the John Wayne image Americans cultivate of the US solider or his actions.

Armageddon is the similar. Thank God America is here to save the world, because nobody else could do it. Good heavens. How arrogant are we ?! How many slow-mo shots of US flags and pilots will sate American exceptionalism?

More revisionism is the Balkan pseudo-history Behind Enemy Lines and the USAF commercial that is Stealth. Behind appeals once again to the rugged, macho US solider myth we love, but it wildly misrepresents America’s commitment in the Balkans. The US scarcely did a thing to stop the war until 1996. And we certainly weren’t trying to stop the slaughters, as the movie suggests. If you know the history of the Balkan wars, it’s fairly embarrassing to watch.

Finally, nothing channels the ‘America-will-save-world’ motif of the Bush years like the last LOTR film. A few heroes stand against the armies of darkness to usher in a new world of light in the West. Come on already. They might have just put Hitler, Stalin, or OBL’s head where Sauron’s eye was on top of that tower. Only children and fundamentalists believe that ‘evil’ is some external entity that can be ‘defeated’ by force of arms. If you ever wanted to know what ‘moral clarity’ looks like, this is your movie. In this story, like W’s fantasy of the GWoT, the bad guys are irredeemable, so you can say stuff like ‘no prisoners!’ and butcher them all with no qualms (see point 2 above). But don’t try this in the real world; that’s what leads to Abu Ghraib.

Team America does a great job lampooning all this. The song ‘America, F— Yeah!’ could be the theme song of the W years and should tell you why overseas Americans had to say there were from Canada.

10. Fox News told me the Third World is a Pretty Creepy Place

Gunga Din, Indiana Jones 2, Commando, Turistas, Hostel

Does your inner racist miss Western imperialism? Wasn’t Casablanca a nice place when the French ran it and the Arabs served you drinks at Rick’s? Has Glenn Beck convinced you to fear your organs will be harvested by dark skinned people whose language you can’t understand? Then allow Indy and Arnie to show you how right you really are!

Were Lucas and Spielberg on drugs when they made Indy 2? Human sacrifice and child slavery with white people to stop it all? Or try Gunga Din, where the hero is an Indian solider who loyally dies for his British masters fighting other Indians. It’s basically the movie version of the ‘White Man’s Burden.’ Yikes!

And just in case you were curious how many shady Hispanic paramilitaries Schwarzenegger can machinegun in 85 minutes, now you can find out. Commando, like the Rambo films, is a ‘great’ 80s revenge fantasy – this time about disciplining sleazy drug-dealing Latin dictators like Noriega or those bad guys in Miami Vice episodes.

Like Black Hawk Down or the Last Samurai, these sorts of films use a white character to ‘anchor’ western viewers in the story, but they frequently slip into postcolonial tropes that are downright embarrassing or exploitative.

So enjoy a filmfest of the silly, reactionary, hyperpatriotic, conspiratorial, whatever meets your paranoid fancy!

Finally, let me conclude with the side, but telling, observation that all 4 of us are movie buffs – an eminently academic pasttime. Gee, I wonder why academics’ hobbies never include mountain climbing or marathon running? Like Mozart’s music, we are an indoor art 🙂

Movie Review: “The Mission” – De-culturate Them for their own Good

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Robert DeNiro, Jeremy Irons and Liam Neeson play Jesuits who choose to defend a mission helping Native Americans against Spanish and Portuguese depredation in 18th C South America. It is sad and painful to watch. These are good stories to tell. They help reduce Western arrogance about progress and modernity when we see the terrible costs this inflicted on people who probably just wanted to be left alone. All in all, it is quite depressing. The production values are good, as is the acting and music. Recommended.

1. Perhaps the ‘best’ moment when I watched this, was when my Korean girlfriend turned to me in amazement and said, ‘you white people really did this (to the Native Americans)?” Sigh. I guess it helps to have a cultural alien around to see what you are just ‘used’ to. I realized I was so accustomed to the story of the native extermination that it didn’t shock me as much anymore. (Koreans react the same way when they see images on Google of Jim Crow.) I recently read Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse by Jared Diamond, and am now reading the Birth of the Modern by Paul Johnson. All three document in detail the savagery of whites to indigenous peoples. But Koreans don’t know this stuff the way westerners do, and they get, rightfully, pretty stunned when they hear about it. Korea has the powerful moral argument that they never invaded anyone, but always got invaded. So their shock isn’t a pretense.

2. DeNiro should stick to strong, dynamic characters. His 10 minute turn as the maruader was more fascinating and believable than his role in the rest of the film as a do-gooding Jesuit. I just didn’t believe it. But his ferocious slaver was pretty frightening, especially on horseback, where he seemed to embody the brutal Spanish colonization and rapine of the New World.

3. It was nice to see the Catholic Church portrayed as real, morally mixed institution. I say this not out of personal loyalty, but because filmic portrayals are usually silly (DaVinci Code, End of Days), or wildly ahistorical (Kingdom of Heaven), or mythological (Omen, Exorcist). The usual flim-flam about conspiracies or the end-times are not present, so the Church looks like it probably was – a large, but troubled institution, trying to survive in the world of the rising and powerful nation-state, faced with difficult choices and populated with believers struggling to know what was right. The Jesuits in the film are genuinely concerned about the fate of the locals, at the same time they are tragically erasing their religious traditions. The papal envoy is torn about how the Church will thread its way in this difficult era. The Church wasn’t morally defined from the start of the picture, but filled with the struggle of everyday politics, and you genuinely hope the envoy will make the right decision. Paul Johnson noted how on the frontiers of the New World, it was usually clerics who restrained the worst savageries of the whites. Hopefully they ameliorated the worst, but all in all, it is still a pretty sad showing.

4. The story is disappointingly eurocentric. The natives are foils for the struggle between the Church and the Spanish and Portugese on the frontier. We learn little about them other than their reduction before Western power. I imagine European encroachment was the primary indigenous fear in the centuries after Columbus, so its not the filmmaker’s fault, but still it is sad to see. In this I give credit to Mel Gibson in Apocalypto. I can’t think of any other major film about indigenous peoples that does not involve their interaction with white colonizers. Even intelligent and sympathetic movies like Last of the Mohicans or Dancing with Wolves are filled with white characters – presumably to give western audiences an anchor within the film. But Gibson tried to make a movie about a wholly lost culture on its own terms. You may have hated his vision, but its originality is undeniable.

5. It is also sad to see that the heroes of the film are also destroying the indigenes in their own way – call it ‘culture stripping’ – but never realize it. Every time I read about some tribe in Indonesia or the Amazon that is ‘discovered,’ there is always an adjacent story about some Christian group that has dispatched a missionary to them immediately. Why must we do this? Can’t we leave this people alone? Monotheism seems to have a built-in drive that animists, ‘pagans,’ etc. need the real faith. What if these people don’t really want this? Do we have to bowl over their fragile local culture and stories with the full-intensity of modern theology immediately? I am sure if we encounter extra-terrestrials, some TV preacher will tell us we need to christianize them too. The New World would be a far more interesting cultural space if the pre-columbian peoples had survived with greater integrity