Superpowerdom on the Cheap

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Reasearch Note

A typical notion in the history of hegemonic states is note the roots of their eventual decline in what Paul Kenneday called imperial overstretch. Large powers dissipate their forces in distant peripheral commitments and conflicts. These outstrip available resources. As the domestic economy struggles to create the requisite surplus for the military, investment and technology growth slump. Eventually, the hegemon must either retrench (Britain) or collapse (Soviet Union, Rome).

The United States is therefore an aberration. Far from overstretch, America’s ‘informal empire’ appears underfunded. A wide range of critics have argued that the greatest threat to American foreign policy goals is poor resourcing (Nye, Brzenski). A standard critique of US troubles in Iraq and Afghanistan concern the low commitment of US manpower and reconstruction funding. Before September 11, 2001, the Bush administration toyed with the idea of eliminating one of the ten standing Army divisions (Kurt Campbell and Celeste Ward, “New Battle Stations?” Foreign Affairs September/October 2003). And even today the Bush administration is adamant in its refusal to expand the number of Americans in uniform or raises taxes to close a budget deficit roughly equal to the size of the US defense budget.

Superpowerdom on the cheap is unprecedented. The result is a bizarre, by the standards of past empires, reach for influence without resources. The US appears to be attempting to learn the lessons of history before they are taught. Rather than end in the ‘inevitable’ predicament of imperial overstretch that has bedeviled hegemons from Athens to the Soviet Union (Kelly and Rowe 2003), the US seems to consciously trying to avoid it.

This is therefore an astonishing experiment for international relations. In the 1980s, historians of imperial decline like Walter LaFeber and Paul Kennedy were already writing of American decline. The Vietnam quagmire, the military retrenchment and economic malaise of the 70s suggested the US was going the way of other would be hegemons, only faster. The rise and fall of imperial states seemed like a law (or as close to a law as we can get in IR), and already ‘declinism’ was writing obituaries. Yet the boom of the 1990s suggests the 1970s were a slip dip, but not a serious reduction in American power.

The US’ current effort therefore should fascinate IR theory for two reasons. First, we must evaluate how successfully the US manages its balance sheet of resources vis commitments. This question is particularly relevant as America’s commitments are expanding in the wake of 9/11. Particularly, we must examine how the US strives to meet its commitments with minimal resources.

Second, we must examine whether US policy makers have in fact learned from the social research on imperial decline and are using that as a guide of what to do or to avoid. Professional IR theory and diplomatic history have provided a large body of work on hegemony. Almost all of it ends in generic predictions that hegemony is unsustainable over the long-term. Even Rome fell at some point. In dissecting the causes of imperial decline, important lessons on economic management, resources extension, ideological commitment, and domestic mobilization have been elucidated. It bears investigating then whether the knowledge actually changes the behavior of the current hegemon.

This discussion is particularly important for the philosophy of social science. There are tough debates within IR over the policy relevance of our work and over the learning capacity of statesmen. The (non-)use of the hegemony literature by US decision-makers has important implications for these debates. Were IR debates exploited within decision-circles to improve policy judgments, then this is evidence of IR’s policy-relevance, even if unattended. It would also suggest that learning is real. This is a sharp point of contention between realists and constructivists. Randall Schweller quipped once that learning is when policy makers do what academics want. Ned Lebow responded that is we don’t learn from social science, what is the point. American hegemony and its management is an important case for this argument in IR, as American unipolarity is the dominant feature of international politics today (Kapstein and Mastanduno, Unipolar Politics).

METHODOLOGY

Keynes famously quipped that self-described practical men are usually unconscious disciples of some dead economist. In the same way, evidence that US policy-makers need not be tied directly to a reading of ‘declinist’ historian or hegemony theorists. Abstract theoretical work often filters in larger debates through second and third had treatments in the media or praxis-oriented journals, like Foreign Affairs or Foreign Policy in the United States. So we are looking for tropes and expressions that suggest an awareness of the declinist and hegemonic literatures.

Sources:

2001 National Security Strategy

2001 Quadrennial Defense Review

2002 Nuclear Posture Review

Interviews in the State and Defense Departments

The Prestige Dilemma of States

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Thucydides argued that states fight for glory, gain, and fear. This suggests that scarcity is a driving motive of interstate conflict.

However, gain is not scarce over time. Growth is not zero-sum. Although Grieco has suggested that scarcity competition will apply somewhat in a concern for relative gains, this is disputed.

But the case is clearer for security and prestige. Jervis has famously described a security dilemma in which an improvement for A automatically means a decrease for B. Security is a zero-sum game.

The same should be said of prestige, but there is little literature on this. The role of prestige is undertheorized in IR. Perhaps because it feels too ideational, it does not seems to appeal to the materialist/empirical bent of realism especially.

But the emergence of peace studies, a normative sub-branch of IR, has made this gap problematic. Peace studies frequently asserts that prestige and questions of political will are the driving force behind conflict (Barash and Webel, 166). Peace researchers are posting, implicitly, a prestige dilemma. Not all states may be equally esteemed, so prestige, like security, is zero-sum. Hence states may use compellance and coercion to advance in the status hierarchy.

A turn toward to prestige as a cause of war would serve the field. It emanates from the second image, and this serves the general move by the field away from structural explanations. As Schweller and Priess have noted (1997), Waltz’ work has become something of a straightjacket now on IR. They argue for nuanced explanations that draw from the state level. A focus on prestige answers that call.

Global Pluralism: States, NGOs and MNCs Around International Organizations

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Research Note: Global Governance as Interest Group Pluralism for the World

States, nongovernmental organizations and multinational corporations now circle international organizations and international regimes in pursuit of their interests in reasonably coherent global public policy process. To be sure, that process is still dominated by large and powerful states, but democratization and instantaneous communication have opened the process other actors – small states, as well as private and non-profit actors.

Realism has no account of non-state actors. To do so, would threaten its sense of identity. State-centricity is such fundamental assumption, that it has nothing really to say about my project.

Constructivism overreads NGOs as successful norm entrepreneurs. While they are norm or identitarian entrepreneurs, this does not mean they succeed in that entrepreneurship. It is a major flaw in the literature on NGOs and affiliated social movements, that it focuses so heavily on the conditions necessary for the successful impact on world politics. This selects on the dependent variable and ‘overprivileges’ constructivist readings of NGOs.

A far simpler explanation of NGOs’ role comes from liberal, or more precisely, rationalist institutionalism. Here NGOs are separate discrete actors, pursuing their goals against IGOs, and deploying various resources against them in rather standard bargaining environments and negotiating tactics. So NGOs protest on the street, write op-ed pieces in the press, attend conferences with representatives of the institutions, hire researchers and consultants to generate position papers, etc.

Hence it is far easier to understand NGO activity around IGOs as a global analogue to that of national interest groups around national governments. Much of the literature on NGOs is from a constructivist vein that focuses on them as ideational actors transforming the world order, compelling states, MNCs, and IGOs to ‘re-think’ themselves, or potential democratizers of an elite-dominated global governance. These large order claims are not wrong in that NGOs like to see themselves in these ways, but the empirical evidence to support a successful prosecution of these strategies is thin. In my work, liberal rationalist explanations of inter-organizational conflict and negotiation explain far more NGO-driven change at the BWI, than any expansive, macro-level claim that the NGOs have successful gotten the BWI to ‘re-think’ themselves.

Therefore, liberals need to intervene more here. I want to build a theory of global pluralism that scales up domestic theories of interest group pluralism. As globalization is increasing the need and efficacy of global governance, NGOs and other private actors are following the power. So as the WTO and BWI have gained in influence and authority in recent decades, so they have increasingly attracted NGOs and other private actors to them. In the same way we think of interest groups swirling about state governments in image of moons around a planet, so the same satellite model can explain the clutch of private actors now revolving around instances of GG.

INGOs as Transnational Interest Groups: After Social Movement Theory

INGOs are settling into a comfortable bureaucratic life around IGOs and International Regimes. As Weber noted, movements that began as charismatic, flamboyant, and spontaneous calcify into structures and institutions over time. NGOs are maturing in this vein. They are leaving the realm of social movement and becoming full institutionalized, expected, participants in global governance. Indeed, the regularity and ‘expectedness’ of NGO participation in global governance is strong evidence that GG exists. But the exciting, street-protesting days of social movements are passing. The fringe of dangerous anarchists de-legitimized the AG movement in the eyes of many in the major IOs of global governance, and more mature, cooperative, and better informed NGOs are stepping into the global non-profit space. While this heralds a more expertise-driven dialogue between NGOs, and states and IOs, it also foresees the ‘bureaucratization’ of NGOs into world politics.’ As the free-spiritedness of NGOs at the UN has been drained by the tedium of ECOSOC bureaucracy, so the World Bank, WTO and IMF are doing as well. Gone are the open ended parallel conferences of the 1990s. Now NGO participants at the BWI Annual Meetings register with the BWI to attend proto-typical policy seminars inside the buildings.

Can Global Governance Survive the Resurgence of US Sovereignty?

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Research Note

Thesis: The resurgence of American hegemonic pretensions threatens the GG project. It suggests a return to a strictly power-driven process informing bargaining outcomes. However the US will not wholly reject GG schemes for three reasons. 1. There are high costs to be carried by going it alone. Cooperation, even with NGOs, has real benefits to the US it will not be anxious to forego. 2. The US controls power domestically through process and law. It is proud of this achievement. This creates internal popular pressures for American power to wielded internationally through processes rather than naked or arbitraty displays of force which would be unacceptable in domestic politcs. 3. The US is pluralist. With a strong civil society tradition at home including its access direct to the public policy process, there would be high domestic reputation and ideology costs were we to seek to exclude civil society and NGOs from the international public policy process.

Why are these relevant?

Realism suggests to us that the distribution of military capabilities and economic capacity among states is the pre-eminent measure of power and ‘outcome-determination’ in world politics. By such a measure, we need not examine ‘global get-togethers’ like the UN mega-conferences or the smaller BWI meetings. The important decisions are made in the capitals of the state-system’s poles, and in unipolarity, there is only one capital that is truly relevant for shaping world political outcomes.

GG scholars respond to this critique in 2 ways.

1. GG theory understands the world political system more sociologically. World politics is a community exercise in administration and management. Few would dispute that states are the most relevant actor, however they move in a world of other actors as well as norms. There is a ‘constitutional architecture’ in which World politics is more communal than neorealism admits.

2. These many actors include IGOs, MNCs and GCS/NGOs. States are more powerful, by realism’s hard indicators on military and economic might. However GG suggests that hard power is not wholly efficacious for the outcomes states seek, and that power is more diffuse than states realize. States ability to win contests of national might are simply not relevant in most dealings in IR. It may be the ultima ratio in the high politics of security, but as Graham suggested in his models 2 and 3, much of most of world politics is low politics – bargaining, arranging, coordinating, sharing on mundane or highly technical issues. Issues such as the environment, trafficking (drugs, human, weapons), development, tracking terrorism and others are simply not amenable to national power traditionally conceived. In lieue of world conquest, even hegemons will come to the table anf bargain and deal with other states and other actors.

Global Governance

GG is the large web of rules and institutions that generate outcomes in world politics. It is the “constitutional architecture” (Reus-Smit) of the world political system and the beginnings of an international public policy process (Commission on Global Governance). Traditionally realists IR scholarship speak of global governance as the provision of a hegemon or k-group. Yet we have learned that much of what states seek to achieve is impossible or far more costly without cooperative global governance. To be more precise, global governance could be raw hegemony to the exclusion of other actors, enforced on the world by the unipole. But even in this era of unrivalled American national might, it hasn’t the power to govern by such diktat. In lieu of global conquest, GG is “complex multilateralism” (O’Brien, Goetz, Scholte and Williams) rather the unipolar fiat. We talk of GG rather than hegemony because the architecture includes more than the superpower and the great powers.

There is much that states cannot do for themselves. Many issues, such as trafficking, the environment or terrorism are not amenable to ‘hard power.’ They require cooperation. Power, the ability to achieve one’s desired outcomes, is diffuse in the world political system, not nearly as concentrated as realists would have us believe. Different actors have different capabilities. Even superpowers like the United States has use for NGOs (for information on human rights, treaty monitoring, or development aid delivery) and IGOs (for coordination and lower transaction costs) and private firms (for impartial credit ratings, e.g.) As Rosenau and many others have observed power cascades through the systems where there is social complexity. New centers of authority, specifically, authoritative knowledge arise. This is not the fall of the state, but the rise in the importance of other actors.

These points bear restating in an era of description of the United States as a colossus that bestrides the world (Economist). Despite the unrivalled might of the United States by the realist measures of military capability and economic capacity, unipolarity does not translate into omnipotence. Even the United States will pay attention to the smallest NGOs which have definitive knowledge in some area of interest. This understanding lies behind the continuing international architecture to which the United States belongs and whose conferences it attends.

1. The resurgence of hard power in international politics has once again proven the centrality of the state. Luck was right.

2. The traditional indices of power – military capability and economic capacity – were never irrelevant. Rather so concentrated in one state were they, that seemed to recess in ‘daily IR’ because almost everyone was bandwagoning or hedging. If everyone signs up for the hegemon’s project, unipolarity can be pleasant (Wohlforth, Stability). Because there was no balancing, in the 1990s the topical debates became did not concern national power. Other concerns like GG and NGOs arose, but only in the shadow of Unipolar power.

3. GG only arose because the unipole was liberal, plural and deomcratic. It is premised on liberal unipolarity. Had the SU won the Cold War, or were China to usurp hegeomic leadership, the cooperative, inclusive bargaining of GG would disappear. Because the hegemon is liberal, it would carry high domestic political costs and world reputational costs if it openly sought to exclude NGOs, MNCs and IOs from relevance. Yet illiberal states with no tradition of openness would hardly permit “complex multilateralism.” They would exploit their hard power advantages to leverage outcomes as they saw fit with little regard for non-state and weak state actors.

3a. There is a polict prescriptive element to the liberal hegemonic basis to GG. NGOs particularly should be more forgiving of the US. The only reason the unipole listens to it and forces some changes in the IFA, is because it is a liberal. If poor states think they are getting a bad deal under the US, imagine the other picks – China, Russia. Even liberal France should be expected to its unipolarity more exploitative than the US as it is an ex-imperial power.

4. However, global governance does try to include the role of the state in its ‘constitutional archiecture’ of world politics (Reus-Smit). “Complex multilateralism” does not debunk the state’s role, but rather seeks to accentuate the role of other actors. Hence the question is whether GG can survive in an environment when one of those actors is vastly more powerful than all the others (even combined). Luck has counseled IO elites not try to makes deals with NGOs around the backs of state decision-makers, because such a 2 vs 1 scheme will backfire due to power inequalities. The result will be state elites’ distrust of both NGOs and IOs and greater state supervision of IOs. (And this ultimately runs counter to NGO goals. NGOs endorse neoliberal institutionalism. They want autonomous IOs. They can be lobbied far more easily than greatpowers.)

Literature:

Peter Spiro, “The New Sovereigntists” Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 2000

Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “The Present Danger” The National Interest spring 2000

David Rivkin and Lee Casey, “The Rocky Shoals of International Law” The National Interest winter 2000

Jesse Helms, “American Sovereignty and the UN” The National Interest winter 2000

John Bolton, “Should We Take Global Governance Seriously?” Chicago Journal of International Law, Fall 2000

Kal Rustia, “Trends in Global Governance: Do They Threaten American Sovereignty?” hicago Journal of International Law fall 2000

Commentary January 2000 Symposium on American Power

Stop Obsessing over Campus Academic Freedom

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This was originally written in 2005.

David Horowitz and a state senator in Ohio have pushed hard for an academic bill of rights for students who feel ideologically oppressed by faculty. And they are correct that universities are overrun with lefty faculty.

But I don’t really have the sense that there is an intellectual repression occurring. I know this is an article of faith on the right, but I am a conservative in my (unnamed) department. If there was some conspiracy, I think I would be on the receiving end of it. I just don’t see any evidence of what Horowitz is saying. He writes "The abuse of students and university classrooms for political purposes is widespread both in Ohio and nationally." Widespread? Nationally? I can’t speak for Ohio, but nationally too? Come on. I just don’t see anything to substantiate that.
But I will go one step further and sound openly naive to the right-wing blogosphere-types. I think lefty academics care pretty passionately about freedom of speech. Yes, they may think their rural students are benighted, or that the market is exploitative, or that W is an imperialist. And they are wrong on all 3 counts. But they are liberals mostly, not stalinists. They are more committed to pluralism than indoctrination. You sorta have to be a liberal – skeptical, intellectually open, critical of the status-quo – to be an academic. Conservatives hate that kinda talk. Smart conservatives are also open and self-critical – I try to be one of them – but that is not the general ethos of conservatism, with its trust in established social matrices and institutions.

The real answers to the ideological diversity in academia that conservatives want are:

1. Find a way to make academia more attractive to conservatives as a profession. The problem is not the persecution of conservatives on campus, but their poor interest in academia. I have never felt persecuted for my views, but I do notice how few other ‘righties’ there are around among the grad students and faculty. But when conservatives do come and they are serious, they can be comfortable. Look at the University of Chicago. Strauss and Hayek have lots of disciples there who are respected. The real problem is that conservatives go into the market and make money. They don’t come to campus to research. If I had to guess why, I would say it is the low esteem accorded college professors in the US. The right seems to think we are eggheads; Democrats have been far more welcoming of the professoriate and social science in general.

2. Crack down on politically protected departments/agencies/centers/etc. The snap between Cornel West and Larry Summers is an excellent example of this. I think there is a deep sense among academics that politically correct or ideologically preferred scholarship is protected/assisted/rewarded. Multiculturalism is ensconced in academia more than anywhere else in America, and I think it drives away conservatives who see it, correctly, as soft and politicized. If state legislatures really want to do something useful for America’s universities, they should look at ethnic and women’s studies departments’ scholarship, and the racial re-balkanization of student bodies. The post-modern departments too should deploy method and rigor, produce politically neutral investigations, and be measured by their ability to publish in serious, peer-reviewed journals. Normative ‘calls to justice’ or ‘expressions of rage’ are not what we are to produce. That’s for advocates and interest groups. Scholarship means data collection and dispassionate analysis, not poetry or homilies.

Unfortunately, partisan conservatives, like Horowtiz, and the GOP broadly speaking, loathe experts and social scientists. George Will has been saying for decades that we just dress up out lefty predilections in the language of objectivity. So I imagine there is little interest in my suggestions. O’Reilly would presumably scoff when I say that academic liberals are more committed to professionalism than ideology. But many years of experience with colleagues who reject my opinions say otherwise. And without a rigorous empirical study to demonstrate ‘nationwide’ oppression, I am hesitant to hand students another tool to make my life difficult. It’s already hard enough to get them to come, take the material seriously, be polite to me and each other, accept poor grades without seeing dislike or ill-will, etc. Now we are telling them that I am an ideologue too.

I think the right has won so much within government that they are starting to turn on other institutions where the left is still dominant – universities and public TV.

Katrina May Hurt the Democrats More than Bush

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This was originally written in 2005.

The post-Katrina debate has the potential to politically damage both parties, depending on how the response failure is interpreted. I see 2 possibilities, but its likely worse for the left:

1) Katrina revives a national debate on poverty, and by extension race. It is painfully clear that the suffering of the disaster was disproportionately carried by the poor and black. If this is understood as a failure of social policy, of domestic poverty-alleviation, or even worse, as a civil rights issue, than Bush and the GOP are in real trouble. Bush has no anti-poverty agenda at all. This is less because of any GOP faith in the magic of the market (Bush is pro-business, not pro-market), than W’s surrender on any serious domestic agenda at all. Tax cuts are hardly a proactive policy. Beyond that the administration has No Child Left Behind and the Medicare expansion, but these are scarcely related to the social dislocation and confusion so prominent in the televised images.
But don’t expect the GOP not try. A standard of Rove-ism is to generate 2 or 3 policy proposals as magic bullets to answer all pesky questions in an issue area (just look at W’s Texas gubernatorial bids). So Bush will at some point try to suggest that the tax cuts and NCLB were in fact aimed at alleviating exactly the kind of impoverishment we all witnessed in New Orleans. Something like this happened when Bush shoved through the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts despite 9/11. Tax cuts help growth; we need growth to fight the WoT; ergo, tax cuts help the WoT. But I bet this won’t work this time. Too much urban plight was on display for such slipperiness to work.
So the GOP may be in serious trouble if the dominant question K leaves us is, what is the state doing to help the poor? This would be the first major national discussion on poverty since the Great Society, and the GOP is not ready for it. Proposal in the mode of 1990s welfare reform will look downright stingy.

But I doubt the debate will break that way.

First, I don’t think the country cares that much about poverty alleviation, or wants to revisit racial polarization. And the hyperbolic civil rights leadership will unfortunately accelerate that return of disinterest. There is much attention at the moment. Obama will get some good air time and say some meaningful and promising things; but then Sharpton and Jesse Jackson will start in with overwrought slavery analogies. They will attract the media’s interest with their antics, and Fox will give them generous coverage to hang themselves by their own rope. Liberals like Ted Kennedy will start talking about “Marshall Plans for our cities,” and that will doom the whole thing. The Howard Dean left has been itching for this moment, but they’ll blow it in excessive rhetoric and racially loaded guilt mongering.

Second, and perhaps as a cause of the disinterest above, the right has won the fight on poverty I think. The American economy’s growth in the past 25 years has been astonishing, and it is increasingly difficult for the left to make the ‘structural causes of poverty’ argument so dear to its activists. This cherished notion will be obvious in the left’s policy recommendations. They will show no imagination at all – think ‘Marshall plans for the cities,’ vague job creation proposals, and – always, ALWAYS – more money for schools. Yawn. No one believes this stuff anymore, and suburbanites will not be taken by such language. In the wake of Jim Crow and awful rural and elderly poverty, the New Deal and Great Society seemed like good policy. But today is the age of Walmart, cheap imported goods, and illegal immigrants taking jobs Americans find beneath them. When that last point – that the business case for illegal immigration is that our poor would rather remain jobless than take jobs they cultural/socially reject – becomes common knowledge, this debate will be over for the left. It will set liberals against one another, particularly black and Hispanic leaders. Lots of un-PC remarks will be heard, similar to Vincente Fox’s, and any electoral possibilities for a serious anti-poverty agenda will evaporate as the rhetoric becomes sharper and more racialized. This is unfortunate.

2) Katrina sparks a debate on public sector competence. It is also painfully clear that the bureaucracies of New Orleans and Louisiana don’t function. The photo of dozens of NO school buses underwater will define this debate – and likely cost Nagin his job. And Democrats will be lost – perhaps not the DLC, but the lifers in the House will be downright confused. Public sector bureaucracies in the United States are wildly less efficient than anything in the private sector. We all know this which is why we loathe USPS and BMV, call our congressman rather than the actual correct agency, and avoid townhall meetings, PTAs and the like.

And the Democrats are the most important political force blocking civil service reform of the kind that Schwarzenegger and many other governors want. Out-institutionalized by Rove and W’s massive party-building efforts, the Dems are desperate to hang onto what organizational bases they have left, and public sector unions are the biggie. Hence they will end-up defending changes increasingly recognized as necessary by just about everyone in the private sector – performance-benchmarking, easier ‘hire-and-fire,’ reduced job security, the elimination of seniority advancement, tougher benefits requirements etc. Anyone who has worked in a city, state or federal agency knows of the sloth that is protected by public sector unions like the NEA or AFSCME. If that is connected to the slow movement and corruption of the public agencies in NO/LA, the debate may turn from why didn’t the feds coordinate disaster to relief, to, how do we discipline local government to be responsive to constituents?
I bet the later is a more likely outcome. Poverty is eternal – or at least we perceive to be – so it will hardly grasp us, and decades of growth and cheap imports have pushed the poverty debate toward bad individual choices, and away from societal structures. But the debate on slothful, unresponsive, surly public sector bureaucracies would be pretty new, and it is far more attractive to the middle class which dislikes government unresponsiveness.

Obstacles to Professors in the Classroom

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This was originally written in 2006.

The Market, not the State of Ohio, Incentives Professors in the Classroom

Ohio politicians state that professors at state universities spend too little time in the classroom. But, state action can hardly alter the incentives emanant from structural changes in the economy. Why do professors teach so little, and desire even less?

1. Good research pays much better than good teaching. We live in an information and service economy, which rewards the provision of high-quality, reliable, accurate information. The best of the professoriate has a skill set – in research – that ranks near the top the contemporary economic value chain. Accredited researchers – not just professors, but consultants, lawyers, doctors, and other similar knowledge-generating professionals – are highly prized, and university salaries and benefits packages reflect this. This ‘rock-star model’ of faculty recruitment ensures generous compensation packages to acquire and retain high-quality professors. Part of that is limiting their exposure to undergraduates who, by definition, underexploit their skill set. Places like OSU wish to compete among the top tier of schools and firms for talent. Teaching is simply not a part of the incentive mix.

And there is, of course, a good reason for this. Teaching is easier than research. Most teaching assistants are qualified to teach; very few to write for publication. Most Americans have spent time in school. Most have reasonable interpersonal communication skills and a field of expertise. Yet far fewer are qualified to write a book or serious article on their area of interest.

So the mechanics are simple supply and demand. Prestigious researchers and their product are in very high demand because of the knowledge-based structure of our economy. Part of the price of holding such figures in our universities is a minimal teaching load.

2. Closely related to the financial benefits, are those of stature. Like all communities, scholars seek the affirmation of their peers. A defining book or article, along with the speaking engagements and seminars that accompany it, bring prestige. Excellence in teaching achieves nowhere near this level of recognition. No one speaks before NATO, the World Bank, or on C-SPAN by training undergraduates.

Similarly, prestige affects the ability of universities to exige teaching from their best faculty. OSU, e.g., has a reputation for football and mediocre undergraduates in the middle of a dull farm state. To attract talent from more high profile cities and universities, one must offer congenial packages. Obviously this entails a high salary, but also a reduced load. Higher caliber schools will find it easier to push researchers into the classroom. Ohio does yet have schools to rival the Ivies, and so it must pay – a lot – to recruit and hold talent.

3. Nationally, American universities and their constituent departments too feel the effects of prestige and competition. The internet has fashioned a much more efficient market for research talent. It is much easier to ‘bounce’ in and out schools now, so the competition to retain or lure away high quality faculty – and minimal teaching is always an attraction – is high. Big names – the ‘rock stars’ – expect course releases, or they simply go elsewhere.

And retaining the ‘rock-stars’ has ramifications for the local and regional community. The university system is no sleepy backwater of those who cannot do, and hence teach. Instead, major universities, highly ranked departments, and highly regarded faculty have become emblems of a city or region’s stature, its quality of life, and the dynamism of its economy. There is no doubt, e.g., that Columbus benefits enormously – in both prestige and wealth-creation – from the high concentration of young, dynamic, information age labor clustered around its university. By contrast, cities like Cleveland or Toledo, mired in lower value manufacturing, lack the cachet, infrastructure, and business opportunities necessary to attract and retain higher-end information professionals.

4. Globalization has only accelerated and sharpened these incentives. American universities are the best in the world, because they so focus on research in a global economy that most values information. Knowledge-generation is our area of specialization, and it is at the highest end of the value-chain too. Hence, the international division of labor is increasingly rewarding professors and researchers with American training. This only accelerates the extant trend away from teaching. If high quality researchers were already rewarded far more than good teachers within our national system, professional exposure to the global economy has only accentuated that comparative advantage – and hence the movement of professors into research. In brief, many people can teach, but the serious research training of a major American research school is far more scarce and increasingly rewarded worldwide. All states now face this dilemma, and only huge, and hence unlikely, financial interventions could alter the current market playing field.

Book Review: Buchanan Makes His Way Back from the Wilderness, Sort of

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This was oringally written in 2006.

An incisive critique from the right of Bush 43’s foreign policy is long overdue, and Buchanan manages it without too much unnecessary controversy.

Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency

By Patrick J. Buchanan.

(St. Martin’s Press, 264 pp., $24.95)

A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny

By Patrick J. Buchanan

(Regnery Publishing, 300 pp., $29.95)

In the 1990s, Pat Buchanan seemed to lose his way. A sharp and smart, if avowedly conservative, speechwriter for three presidents in the 1970s and 80s, Buchanan seemed to jump the rails as a polemicist during Bush 41. His social conservatism, perhaps without the binders a White House staff position put on his tongue, boiled over into ethnic and religious controversy. William Buckley acquiesced in calling him an anti-Semite for his controversial remarks on the value to Israel of the first Gulf War. At the 1992 Republican convention he gave his notorious primetime ‘culture war’ speech that probably cost Bush votes to Perot. And his abandonment of free trade early that decade cut his last tie with cosmopolitanism. His political and economic nationalisms melded into a somewhat disturbing American Firstism and flirtation with xenophobia. His 1996 and 2000 presidential bids were flops and his political views increasingly moved away him from respectable discourse. Smart, to be sure, but cranky.

But if the owl of Minerva brings enlightenment at dusk, then the threat Bush 43 represents to traditional conservatism has re-energized Buchanan at this late hour. In his newer work, Buchanan shows – in a way only a conservative who cares for these subtle distinctions can – how the current Bush administration is re-making the GOP and with it American conservativism. A ‘paleoconservative’ who wrote a preface to Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, Buchanan is badly out of step with the conservative activists of the Bush administration. He comes from the capital-C Conservative tradition in the sense of Burke, de Maistre, Disraeli, Metternich, Oakeshott, and in the U.S., Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, and Robert Bork (many of who are named in the book). He combines an aristotelian concern for the possibilities of tyranny arising from state power (think Communism), with an augustinian sense that institutions (Church and Throne, or Church and Republic) are necessary to curb flawed mankind (think the 1960s). A devout Catholic, one imagines he believes in original sin. And while such pessimism may make his positive vision of America disturbingly strict, his deep roots in European Conservativism make him a unique critic of Bush’s big-government conservatism. Not quite the philosopher from the list above, imagine Buchanan as Burke’s bulldog for contemporary America.

The Rosetta stone for Buchanan’s work is American nationalism, the city on the hill – a Jeffersonian-Madisonian paradise of religious, independent-minded, rugged, free Americans. And this drives the three big criticism he poses of the Bush administration across these two books – an expansionist foreign policy which will terrify the rest of the world, while undermining republican freedoms and virtues at home; free-trade multilateralism which will de-industrialized the US and imbricate it in international laws and organizations that trump the Constitution; and big-government conservatism at home which balloons the budget deficit and saps rugged individualism.

Nothing so much as the Bush Doctrine and the Iraq war has ignited Buchanan in recent years. This is the best part of both books. Buchanan’s argument is two-fold. We face, in Chalmers Johnson’s great expression, ‘the sorrows of empire.’ First, terrorism, which Buchanan correctly identifies as a tactic, not an ideology, will be endemic if we seriously pursue global hegemony. This is not far-fetched; academic international relations theory has long expected other states and actors in world politics to balance the massive concentration of US power. Our democratic process and timid foreign policy goals have forestalled this. So terrorism, as the weapon of the weak, represents what little balancing there is. But if the US truly pursues a neo-imperial grand strategy, it is hardly overwrought to expect resistance in the form of more terror from alienated groups, with equally alienated states as sponsors. This is a good and interesting check to the wilsonianism of writers on the left and right speaking of the War on Terror as the first phase of ‘World War IV.’ Such language, and the long, nebulous conflict it entails, should give us all serious pause.

The second argument is more certifiably ‘paleocon.’ Buchanan makes a libertarian argument that American external interventionism undermines its ability to be a free society at home. In this, one truly sees Buchanan’s lineage with the Founding Fathers, and their 20th century exponents Robert Taft and Russell Kirk. He notes, correctly, that the expansion of the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Department, and government spending to fund ‘empire’ threaten domestic liberties. The Economist and human rights NGOs have made similar arguments since the Guantanamo detentions began. And certainly previous wars have tossed up constrictions of freedom we today reject – Japanese internment camps and the House UnAmerican Activities Subcommittee are probably the best known

Surely this argument is correct. But if concerns about domestic liberties feel disingenuous coming from the old right, they are. This is clever, but only because so few conservatives have shown the spine to defend due process against Bush’s imperial presidency. Still, Buchanan is a poor defender. He worked for the presidency synonymous with an imperial White House and was a strong supporter of the Cold War – which spawned a national security state so freedom-encroaching that a Republican president warned of the ‘military-industrial complex.’ Perhaps as a result, Buchanan flags here. He falls back on distant quotes from Madison about the cost of armies and Reagan’s famous ‘city on the hill.’ But it is hard to cast cold warrior Buchanan and the ACLU in the same camp defending us against the encroachments of an imperial executive.

From here it is an odd non-sequitur to the next target – global governance. In the wake of castigating the US government for seeking global hegemony, Buchanan contradicts himself by suggesting we are simultaneously oozing sovereignty to international organizations. This is the biggest logic failure in the books, and marks Buchanan more as a polemicist than philosopher. But it does introduce Buchanan’s most interesting claim in the book – that “free-trade fundamentalism” is eviscerating the industrial capacity necessary to maintain US superpowerdom. This is fascinating political economy; almost no one makes such claims any longer. It is certainly correct that globalization is reducing the competitiveness of American manufacture, but the neoclassical response, of course, is that the division of labor and international specialization improve living standards. Indeed Buchanan avoids mentioning the bonanza for poor American consumers that trade and Walmart have brought.

But unlike the Michael Moore left, Buchanan knows he cannot defend protectionism in the language of economics. Mercifully, Buchanan spares us the shoddy logic and false concern of labor unions and NGOs over the ‘oppression’ foreign investment wreaks in the developing world. To his credit, Buchanan takes a clear neomercantilist stance, supported by a smart argument pulled from historian Paul Kennedy. He rejects the absolute gains reaped by all from free trade, for the relative gains to be achieved, in America’s favor of course, by managed trade. His approach, so derided in the US, is actually not quite different from Asian developmentalist strategies.

Battling the Thomas Friedman approach head-on, Buchanan argues that no great power can hang on without an industrial base. His Kennedy-esque example is 19th century Britain, stumbling before rising German power. In case of conflict, a great power must retain the capacity to produce goods and arms. It must not fritter manufacture away through trade with less developed, cheap labor states, nor indulge in ethereal white collar and service professions that produce nothing tangible. Taking a page from Marx, Buchanan sees industrialism as the highest stage of economic development. An industrial base is the root of national power, and for this claim too, there is a long pedigree in both political economy and practice.

His answer then is to manage trade with the rest of the world to insure that the US gains relative to others in the transaction. Friedman and the globalizers see free trade binding the world together, so if China grows relatively faster, it is not that threatening. We are tying her into modernity and the global economy along the way, and reducing the likelihood of future conflict. Buchanan is more cynical (or perhaps the nationalist in him wants to be). Citing similar interdependence arguments made in Europe before WWI, he prefers relative gains and economic sovereignty. And this dovetails easily with the political nationalist’s resentment at international law and organizations. The WTO, which infringes on both America’s economic and political sovereignty, comes in for special criticism.

The proper answer to this logic is not an economic one, for Buchanan seems to realize he is sacrificing absolute gains. Rather it is historical and political. Historically, Buchanan seems trapped in the Industrial Revolution. Like the late Soviet Union, he seems baffled by Digital Revolution of our generation. He does not see that America’s vast intellectual, service, and financial centers also contain elements of power. If he is correct that Britain could not grow all the food or manufacture all the weapons it needed in WWI and II, it is also true that the City of London gave her the credit to borrow hugely from around the world. Or consider that America’s high innovation economy means our military increasingly uses lasers, satellites, plastics, aluminum and other tech composites. Buchanan, like Kennedy (who predicted that Japan and the Soviet Union would be major 21st century powers) overrates the necessity of an raw coal-and-steel style industrial base. He does not see, as Wesley Clarke has, that the US military is remaking war around our economy’s comparative advantage.

The political answer is more troubling, but more important. Pursuing absolute gains, multilateralism, and cosmopolitanism are political strategies to achieve American security. They signal openness, flexibility, and warmth in an anarchic world. They mitigate anxiety, generate trust, and, today, are the likely reasons so few states balance American power. Yes, they are the reason we suffer surprise attacks like Pearl Harbor and 9/11, but they serve the medium-term interests of American power (as well as align with our values). Buchanan’s cramped, lonely vision of America would reduce these stocks of ‘soft power’ in the same way the Bush’s administration’s truculence has. On the economic merits, Buchanan’s strategic trade is simply wrong, but as a national security strategy, it is flawed at best.

The final major criticism of the Bush 43 neo-cons is the emergence of ‘big government conservatism.’ Liberals will find it comforting to know that someone on the right is still nervous about deficits, pork, and the growth of bureaucracy. As ex-leftists, neoconservatives do not resent government, so they don’t mind the New Deal or the Great Society. Again, Buchanan’s paleocon sympathies return, and for sheer peculiarity, it is fascinating to watch an admirer of Taft and Goldwater elaborate on the halcyon days of the gold standard! But much of the attack on the welfare state is pretty standard Reaganite stuff – end busing/affirmative action, balance the budget, reduce the role of the federal bureaucracy to the advantage of local communities (on education, for instance).

This would be even less remarkable were it to come from the conservatives in power. But it does not, hence it is Buchanan’s strongest claim of the abandonment of principle in the GOP. Even conservative think-tanks like Cato and Heritage, enjoying unprecedented access to power, have raised deep concern over the Bush administration’s predilection to borrow recklessly and fund new programming. Now in power, conservatives are enjoying funding their own pet programs – marriage and abstinence promotion, an FEC crack-down, the re-balancing, rather than abolition, of public television. Buchanan correctly notes the Gingrichian highpoint of small government conservatism, but cannot seem to reconcile himself to its popular failure. Americans want to retain the middle-class entitlements to which they are accustomed, but Bush 43 is unprepared to pay for.

Most of this is not beyond the pale. It is good to see Buchanan return to saner and sharper commentary. But old habits die hard. The books are stuffed with other critiques that sound like a TV pundit cutting loose. Indeed wandering from topic to topic is the major structural flaw of both books. He also indulges a few of the barbed one-liners that pull down his stature and make him so hot to handle. California is “Mexifornia;” America is “Mexamerica;” trade is making the US a “third world country.” And social science this is not. There are no citations; some of the authors he cites as authorities you’ve never heard of, and others (like Joseph Sobran, another Catholic paleocon) are really ideological allies.

That said, the books are entertaining, and designed for a basic reader with some free time. Don’t read with a pen; it is not worth it. But the state of conservative commentary today is terrible. Coulter, Hannity, Limbaugh, even Kristol have all sold their souls to the Bush administration. Fox News reads like RNC talking points. Even the Wall Street Journal and the National Review are not trying too hard anymore. Given the sorry, sycophantic state of conservative punditry, Buchanan’s work is a unique and piquant reminder that the right and the GOP needn’t be the same thing.

Movie Review: Terminator 3 – Ah-nuld Will Be Back…Again…And Again…

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Good news first: The latest installment in this beloved franchise is not lame. In fact, it is a pretty decent flick, if not really good. In the past few years, venerable franchises like Star Wars, Jurassic Park, the Matrix and Star Trek have embarrassed themselves. In returning to another late sequel of another much loved saga, viewers are wise to be cautious. But lovers of T2 won’t be crushed. Now let’s just hope that Mad Max 4 (?) and Indy 4 (2008) won’t be clunkers either.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is the latest installment in the hugely popular Terminator series (T1, 1984; T2, 1991). The film’s very existence, however, is troublesome if you know the first two, because the second wraps up the story rather well. Like Godfather III, viewers may find this installment a bit unnecessary, and both are the ‘worst’ of their respective trilogies. T3 never really gets around the knotty problem of why T2 wasn’t the end of the road. But also like GIII, unfair comparison with its excellent predecessors should not undervalue the current effort.

T3 opens with John Connor (Nick Stahl), head of the future human resistance to the machines, living as an untraceable drifter (albeit one who never leaves southern California). Skynet, mankind’s machine opponent in the future, once more sends back a baddie Terminator to assassinate him (Kristanna Loken’s TX or Terminatrix), and the humans once again send an older model (Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-101) to help him. This plot device, creative in the first movie, feels like a retread by now, so director Jonathan Mostow spruces things up by making the evil terminator ‘female’ (?) and giving her other targets besides Connor himself.

From there things quickly heat up as Schwarzenegger and Loken chase after Connor and one of his closest future lieutenants (Claire Danes’ Kate Brewster). The well-advertised action sequence with the crane truck occurs early in the movie (perhaps learning a lesson from Star Wars and Matrix Reloaded’s long expository tedium), and the action sequences after that are pretty serious stuff. The film purportedly cost $170 M, and as a summer action pic, it does not disappoint. F/X whiz Stan Winston was brought back again and does a great job recycling and reworking James Cameron’s (director of the first two) original visions of the Skynet machines.

The progress of the film’s narrative mirrors (rips off?) the second film. Once again the humans, assisted by Ah-nuld, are off to stop the nuclear armageddon of Judgment Day while under pursuit from a better terminator. The ending, however, is far more pessimistic than expected, (spoiler ahead) finding Connor and Brewster in an underground bunker to ride out the nuclear war. Indeed the most emotionally powerful scene of the film is the concluding image, from space, of ICBMs criss-crossing the atmosphere and the massive mushroom clouds of their impacts. That ending clearly sets up a sequel, and Schwarzenegger himself leaked on the Howard Stern Show last week, that he had agreed to T4 and T5, if he doesn’t run for office. Nonehtless, IMBD list T4 with a 2009 release date.

This is a solid film. As a summer action movie, it makes the grade of popcorn fun. The CGI is used to augment not replace real-life action, and it thankfully demurs from the contemporary trend of filming all action sequences as high-wire karate battles. There are no terminators on strings. In this ‘summer of sequels,’ it is better paced than the stop-start Matrix Reloaded, and the action and story are more ‘believable’ than the ridiculous X2, with its kung fu mutants so powerful that governments long ago would have eradicated them. And do I really need to tell you it is better than Legally Blonde or Charlie’s Angels 2?

As an installment in the franchise, it is also an achievement. It moves the story forward (where Star Wars I or Jurassic III barely do), and it creates tension and anticipation for the next chapter. It also pleasantly maintains the offbeat humor of T2, and clearly Mostow & co. studied the visuals and story of the predecessors to keep the films’ look synchronous. Mostow demonstrates real care, and it shows. I am hopeful however that an expanded DVD cut may improve its tie-in to the previous films.

There are several problems of course, including a plot-hole big enough to blast a terminator through. At the end of T2, the Cyberdyne plant (the company building the first machines) is destroyed, as are the materials of the terminators that warped back through time. In theory then, there should have been nothing left upon which Skynet would be built. But in T3, just 10 years later, Skynet is about to take over, and there is no mention of Cyberdyne. Huh? It is a shame that the military and Skynet scenes are so poorly fleshed out, because the erection of Skynet that T3 presumes radically de-values the action taken by the trio at the end of T2. Here is where a director’s cut may really help the continuing story.

This suggests another major change – in the series’ tone toward, for lack of a better word, predestination. Cameron, for all his love of machinery (Aliens, Titanic, The Abyss), has always had a humanist touch – directed action by committed humans can make a difference in the world. The mantra of the resistance in the earlier Terminator films was ‘there is no fate but what we make.’ In this film, Mostow drops that to stress that Judgment Day is ‘inevitable.’ Schwarzenegger’s robotic character even talks, a la Darth Vader, to John Connor about ‘your destiny.’ While perhaps necessary language to keep the story rolling for more sequels, it is a significant break with the tone and guarded optimism of Cameron’s work. In this one, humans are screwed, and there ain’t much we can do.

Perhaps the biggest issue fans will notice is the lack of Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor, Edward Furlong as John, and Cameron in the director’s chair. There was great controversy over these changes, and many fans were deeply skeptical that without these returnees, the film would be little more than a cash-in on a popular icon or an effort to prop-up Schwarzenegger’s sagging appeal or gubernatorial ambitions. Why Cameron refused the sequel is a mystery. He has spoken not publicly on this. But without him, both Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn (the good guy from T1) refused to return. And Furlong’s absence has been variously ascribed to drug issues and his prickly attitude. Judging by Stahl’s flaccid performance, he was much easier to direct about.

The replacements work relatively well. Hamilton’s character is disposed of with little ado, perhaps too little. Stahl does a passable job as John. He seems genuinely burdened by the weight of the possible future, but his dialogue is flat and unimaginative (“sometimes things happen that just can’t be prevented” – yawn). Danes doesn’t get to do much either besides scream and run, like Hamilton did in T1. So…maybe she’ll come back in the next one as a pumped-up super mom smoking Marlboro Reds? Yeah!

Loken, as the antagonist, gets much more to do, but like Robert Patrick (the bad T-1000 terminator in T2) she doesn’t get to say much. She clearly models her stone-faced performance on his and does well enough. But with so little dialogue and few expressive movements, we notice, perhaps more than is fair, her attractive physical appearance. She is a former fashion model, and it is just hard to find that as menacing as the T-1000.

This issue is perhaps the greatest ‘sell-out’ of T3 to the logic of Hollywood in respect to its predecessors. There is no narrative requirement for a female terminator – or male, to be fair. And the ‘terminatrix’ could have looked like Janet Reno or Oprah Winfrey. Instead it is painfully clear that Mostow chose Loken for her striking good looks. He wisely chose to retain his credibility by avoiding an easy, full frontal nude shot of her, but her selection nonetheless betrays a ‘Seven of Nine’-style sell out to the teenage boy demographic. This continues a disappointing Hollywood trend to recruit female talent from the modeling business rather than acting schools. Instead of skilled actresses, who are perhaps attractive as well, the method now is to recruit models and then hope they can act – think Natasha Henstridge, Denise Richards, Naomi Campbell.

The heart of the film of course is Schwarzenegger. His terminator this time has more to do and say, and the stiff, awkward robot jokes still work. This is clearly Schwarzenegger’s signature role, and it is good to see him back in form after such clunkers as The End of Days or Batman and Robin. And it simply must be said that, at 55, he looks astonishing. Too much of the film, however, rests on him this time around. In the other films, there were meaningful human characters with strong actor performances to supplement the big guy. Sarah could have done a decent job with John on her own, for example, in T2, and Hamilton added that sense in her portrayal. This time around you have the impression Connor and Brewster would die immediately without the governator to guide them. This focus on Schwarzenegger’s terminator character may please those for whom that is the big appeal of the series, but it clearly impoverishes the wider narrative that the humans’ characterizations and arcs are so limpid this time through.

Recommendation: Casual Viewers: If you have seen the other films and thought they were passable fun, you will probably enjoy this one. Just take it as more summer movie entertainment. It will help a lot to have seen the first films though (there is surprisingly little re-cap in this one), so if you need to, rent them before you go back. If you are totally new to the franchise and don’t generally care for the sustained action genre, you will be bored. Die Hard Fans: You will see it no matter what I say, but I think you will like it. Mostow tries hard to capture the spirit of the first two, some 19 years after T1, and he does a better job than we expected. The narrative mostly works, and the action scenes are as big and bold as you want them. And you will be psyched for the next one. 3.5/5 STARS.

Movie Review: 28 Days Later

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This was originally written in 2008.

(Failed) Application Review of a Blu-ray Disc Review requested by http://www.dvdfile.com/

Twentieth Century Fox / 2002 / 113 Minutes / R Street Date: October 9, 2007

Think The Omega Man meets George Romero, but much better than that fusion suggests. Director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Sunshine) and screenwriter Alex Garland (Sunshine) bring a needed infusion of intelligence and genuinely disturbing violence to a genre whose last iteration before 28 Days was the silly Resident Evil.

The story is fairly straightforward. A group of animal rights activist release chimpanzees infected with a ‘rage’ virus. It quickly jumps to humans and then spreads rapidly throughout Britain. The ‘infected’ are extremely violent, and in one of great twists for the genre, they run, even when they are on fire. This makes them far more terrifying than most zombies on film. Kudos to Boyle for this innovation, and as a device it shows up in later zombie films like the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead and the Resident Evil sequels. Jim, the protagonist (Cillian Murphy – Red Eye, Sunshine), awakens in a hospital 28 days after the infection began. He had been in a coma and so survives. He wanders about deserted London bewildered, searching for someone. These are the most potent scenes in the film. Seeing an enormous city like London simply empty is a powerful, frightening image, especially in the wake of 9/11. That Boyle got the municipal government to help him shut down central sections of this huge city is a testament to his commitment to the final product on meager $8 million budget.

Further credit is due for intellectually and emotionally unnerving the viewer. A disease outbreak is a realistic premise. So the emptiness and loneliness of the metropolis is far more effective and upsetting than the ‘gotcha’ and ‘boo!’ sequences with a loud musical cue so common to horror films. This is intelligent horror. Shortly Jim meets the infected, and we see them maniacally chase him for the first time. He is then saved by two other survivors, one of whom is Celina (Naomi Harris, the vodoo witch in the Pirates 2 and 3). Jim then seeks out his parents, who have died. Their home is warm, comfortably middle class and familiar, which significantly ramps up the fright value of the infected’s attack within their home. Again Boyle uses reliably social imagery – a comfortable home – to disturb the viewer more believably than any psychopath carrying an ax. Jim and Celina then discover a father (Brendan Gleeson – Gangs of New York, Troy) and his daughter (Megan Harris).

A signal suggesting a cure for infection sets them on the road to an army base. Along the way, they incipient family enjoys a brief idyll in a green countryside, a nice breather for the audience, and suggestive of hope in the future. Everything falls apart when they arrive at the base. The soldiers are unruly and intend to rape Celina and the daughter in order to begin repopulation. Jim fights back, and the film slides, unfortunately, into an action mode at the end. Normal, bashful Jim too quickly becomes a lethal foe against trained soldiers. Gleeson’s character having died earlier, the trio escapes.

This is a smart film, particularly for a genre noted for stupidities like splitting up without flashlights to search for the killer. The premise is believable, and there is a delicious irony in showing animal rights activists, with which the audience may sympathize, setting off the pandemic. The group reacts in mostly believable ways to the situation. The violence, while severe and bloody, is not gratuitous. The infected are grotesque and highly violent, so the violence necessary to defeat them reflects that. Only the end really disappoints. The soldiers, accustomed to strict discipline, too quickly become rowdy hooligans, and Jim’s rapid mutation into a powerful killer is unbelievable. Boyle’s point is to parallel our own inhumanity to the infected, but honestly, I’d take the soldiers over the infected anyday. This just didn’t work well for me, nor did the rescue happy ending.

Video: How Does the Disc Look?

Yikes! If you own the DVD, you might rather invest in a good-upscaler instead of this disc. The differences will be negligible. The film was shot entirely (but for the last few minutes) on hand-held digital video, and it really shows. Boyle apparently even worsened the already hazy picture in post-production in order to achieve a ‘gritty urban realism,’ as he says in the commentary. This does not move me I must say. Grit, herky jerky camera angles, dropped frames, etc. strike me as gimmicky (Gladiator, Assault on Precinct 13 remake). Why develop better photography if you won’t use? If it this is the director’s intent, then so be it, but quite honestly it shouldn’t be. Image detail is little better than VHS in someplaces. Try to look at Jim’s face at 7:18., for example. Colors are punchier, one of BD’s big advantages over DVD, and high bit rate (37kps) reduces the most glaring artifacts (halos) of the DVD. But depth of perception isn’t much better. The image looks ‘flatter’ than most BDs. The aspect ratio is 1.85.

Audio: How does the disc sound?

The audio is a vast improvement over the video. Fox has included its typical DTS-HD MA track, an improvement over the DVD’s Dolby Digital. It is rich and full. The soundfield is well-used in scenes with gunfire and the rage of the infected, including good use of the LFE. The balance is solid, and dialogue very audible. Most impressive to me was the music by John Murphy. It is creepy, atmospheric, and fits well the film’s gloomy tone. Again, unlike many horror movies it lacks the cheap ‘gotcha’ music cues to make the audience jump. Instead the loneliness and gloom of this post-apocalyptic world is well conveyed in the steady, disturbing music. Spanish and French Dolby 5.1 track are included, as are subtitles in Spanish, Cantonese, and Korean. The commentary is in 2.0 Dolby Digital.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

Fox has finally started included supplements on its BDs, and hopefully, with the conclusion of the format war, these will expand. The supplements are ported over from the DVD, plus an alternate dream sequence ending. They are not rendered in 16×9, 1080p, except for one alternate ending and the trailers. The commentary is quite good. Boyle and Garland provide lots of information, and to their credit, admit to plot holes, cheap effects, moments of bad writing, etc. This is not the usual cheerleading or bland technical commentaries (like the Star Wars commentaries, e.g.), nor was it rambling inanity à la Resident Evil. They are not drunk, bored, or silent for long stretches, and they even provide commentary on the deleted scenes and alternate endings. Well done. The deleted scenes are well presented, but clearly not cleaned up (as on the Star Wars discs). Good explanations for cutting them were provided, and none are really necessary or missed, but for the sequence on the medical train. This would have made a solid edition, and the commentators explain why it was cut. The alternate endings are pretty interesting and bleaker than the theatrical cut. Two include Jim’s death from a gunshot wound included in the theatrical cut. I found that more realistic than the current ‘happy ending,’ but again the directors explain why it was not chosen. Also included is a ‘radical alternate ending,’ that while interesting, is clearly infeasible. The dream ending is simply bizarre.

The other supplements are less useful. A music video (6 min.) by Jacknife Lee is included. A compilation of film scenes set to bland repetitive rock, I found it more promotional than good. Trailers include two for the film, plus the sequel, Sunshine, Alien vs. Predator, and From Hell. The storyboards (2 mins.), production picture gallery (18 mins.), plus an on-set polaroid photogallery (4mins.) are mildly interesting, and again to Boyle’s credit, he narrates them, but they bored me after awhile. Finally comes the requisite making of (24 mins.), a rather bizarre piece. The first half has nothing to do with production but is a collection of scientists and ‘futurists’ telling us how infectious diseases are far more prevalent than we think, and that a pandemic like the one is film is around the corner. Even Boyle, to his discredit, joins in. Not since the Black Death have we seen anything like the scale of death found in this film. I found this exploitative and rather ridiculous. The second half is actually the making of. It is reasonably thorough, although I dislike these because they deconstruct the effects that undermine my willing suspension of disbelief. I’d rather think the zombies were real than watch them get made up.

Final Thoughts

I am not a great fan of the zombie genre, so the running, psychotic zombies was not treason. Genre aficionados will disagree. Rather I found it intelligent, reasonably believable horror, a genuine rarity. The performances are solid, and the low celebrity profile of the actors increases the realism. The music is powerful and fitting. The script is smart; the dialogue and character action believable. The video is hard to recommend, but its poor quality reflects directorial choice, not a BD failure. But the audio is excellent, and the supplements, especially the commentaries, show care. They are not just promo fluff. Recommended for those who don’t already own the DVD.

Buy Guide Video: 5/10 Audio: 8/10 Extras: 3/5 ROM: 0/5 Value: 4/5 for non-owners of the DVD; 2/5 for owners