Confrontation at the LA Times Book Festival (etc.)

I got an excellent email from a friend of mine out in LA, which touches on issues of interest to our readers, which he has permitted me to share with you.

Over the weekend, I went to the LA Times Book Festival-a huge event with authors shilling books in lectures, panels, and readings. It’s not as good as the Chicago Humanities Festival, but not bad. I avoided some panels on current events and attended others, with mixed results. On one panel I heard Andrew Bacevich, Stephen Cohen, and Ross Terrill. These were well-informed and thoughtful people, and as a result they spoke in reasoned and measured ways, yet with clear ideas. Bacevich was particularly impressive. His view is that America is over reliant on military power as the central element in its foreign policy. There are several reasons why this came about: it is widely believed that the Soviet Union collapsed because of US military advances and pressures; and in the immediate wake of that collapse, the Gulf War led Americans to believe that we had such overwhelming military power that we could now meet any threat. Our dominance in the world, he argues, is no accident thrust upon us by the collapse of rivals and the emergence of external dangers; it is a deliberate process to protect our way of life. The core of that way of life is freedom, but each individual is left to define freedom for himself. In practice, this means that our common ground is material abundance, and we elect our leaders to assure a dominance in the world that will preserve and increase our material abundance. In pursuit of this policy, however, we have come to be excessively reliant on military power. Bacevich is a former military man, and his analysis is not intended as a liberal diatribe but as a sober conservative estimate.

Ross Terrill had excellent and nuanced things to say about China, including that it is not a real threat. The Chinese are an empire in a fairly traditional mold patterned on their history. This includes the subjugation of western regions of China that are not Chinese. In the world, they are pursuing a mainly defensive strategy, making sure that nothing happens that is inimical to their interests. Their huge trade surplus with the United States is not a real worry, because it is in their interests to continue it, not to use it as an instrument of a more or less pointless confrontation. He actually foresees a lengthy period in which the United States and China are likely to have rather cooperative relations. Cohen paints a hair-raising picture of instability in the former Soviet Union and argues forcefully that American policy has made all the wrong moves, increasing instability and dangers in that area. It is a mistake to think the Russians have no options; they have many opportunities to cause mischief and are increasingly in a situation that encourages them to do so. In this brief compass, I can’t do justice to the speakers, but they certainly made compelling points.

A later panel was the usual left / right setup on the question, “Is the World Safer for Democracy?” The audience is overwhelmingly extremely liberal, not to say outright leftist. Hence, the man you know who is the editor of the Claremont Review didn’t get much of a hearing, though he made some good points. David Rieff argued that we’re too willing to use war as a solution to problems. He conceded that as a reporter in Sarajevo, he had supported the use of force and he still insists that both neo-conservatives and human rights activists are in a strange alliance to use force for lofty motives. But he’s increasingly skeptical about it. Otherwise, we got some clichéd positions.

The highlight, however, was a question from a Marine sergeant who asked the most left member of the panel what her qualifications were for saying the Iraq venture was a failure. She prudently responded by asking him what his experience was, and in concise and articulate terms he said that most of the people-and he had been in the Falloujah fight-appreciated what the US forces were doing. She then asked him how he responded to the numbers of troops who were objecting to the war. If she thought she had him, she was quite mistaken. He commented that most of them were not combat or front-line troops. As a result, they suffered all the problems of a tour of duty-separation from family, home, jobs, etc.-but didn’t get close enough to the situation to receive the thanks and appreciation of the people they were helping. His comments posed a serious dilemma for the crowd. They wanted to applaud him to show that they really supported the troops and it was that monster Bush who was putting them in harm’s way (“Support our troops-bring them home” line) but he was a distressingly articulate and directly informed advocate of the current policy. The crowd contented themselves with shouting down the conservative from Claremont.

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Quote of the Day

“She’s a phony. But she’s a real phony. You know why? Because she honestly believes all this phony junk she believes in.”

(Quiz: Who was this said about? –No fair to use Google or the equivalent, either!)

2005 Pulitzers

The Pulitzers included two works that we have posted about this year. The history choice is an old favorite; Lexington’s first mention of David Hackett Fischer appears to be in 2003 and he appears in twelve more of Lexington’s posts. (Isn’t the new search engine great?) This year, Washington’s Crossing won; Fischer told the New York Times,“My Washington was a figure who took me very much by surprise,” he said. “What he did was bring together the values of the American Revolution with the conducting of the war.” Lexington’s summing up essay this January of books read noted it was a “Superb book about Washington and his army, the crossing of the Delaware and the Battle of Trenton.” He then notes that Fischer’s Liberty and Freedom is on his “to do” list.

The Poetry prize went to Ted Kooser, for Delights and Shadows. The New York Times noted: “Clarity is the hallmark of Mr. Kooser’s style, with deceptively modest metaphors grounded in the Nebraska landscape.” I put a note up when Kooser was named Poet Laureate last year.

Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow was a major University of Chicago presence for many, many years and any blog with our name should mention his death. But life is short and the stack of unread books is stratospherically high. I have not read one word by Saul Bellow. I know I should read something, but other books have called more loudly or more seductively or more imploringly. But, though the man is gone the books remain and I hope to get to him. Someday.

Rest in peace.

(Good rundown of obituaries and tributes on Arts and Letters Daily. Other good links from Metafilter. UPDATE: Richard Brookhiser weighs in.)

Untergang

The Third Reich was hammered into the dirt once and for all sixty years ago this month. To celebrate this most fortunate turn of events, I went to see the movie Downfall. (Incidentally the Amazon reviews are very good and worth looking at if you want to know more about the movie.) My short version: It is a 4.5 star movie. Brilliant acting, sets, costumes — impeccable. Bruno Ganz is a very convincing Hitler. The films is shown mainly from the point of view of Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge, played by a talented and beautiful actress Alexandra Maria Lara, which is an effective way to tell the tale. It loses half a star because the battle scenes, raved about by other reviewers, struck me as inadequate. Mostly people running across rubble-strewn streets and diving to the ground as shells come down. We get only one T-34/85 tank? And we see Hitler pinning an Iron Cross on a kid for killing two Soviet tanks with a panzerfaust, but we don’t see him do it. This is just not sufficient. The capture of Berlin was the crescendo of the Soviet war effort, and this movie conveys nothing of the vastness of what was going on. The people who made this movie should have spent the money to have at least one scene with swarms of Soviet tanks, or a duel between tanks and anti-tank guns, or something. Film-makers used to know how to make massive war movies that were appropriate in scale to their grand themes. They don’t want to spend the money anymore, alas. These are decadent times we are living in. (Where are Lord Lew Grade or Darryl F. Zanuck when you need them?) But this quibble aside, this is far and away the best of the three Hitler-in-the-Bunker movies. You must go see it.

(I had an email exchange with Jonathan about the movie. What follows is the “enhanced DVD” version of that exchange.)

I saw Downfall last night, the new movie about Hitler in the bunker. “My generals are all cowards! They should all be shot! I should have shot them all, like Stalin did!” “The German people were unworthy of my vision!” “I am proud of one thing: I stood up to the Jews!” “Albert, such opportunities! The world was in our grasp!” “We must retake the oil-fields!” All the great one-liners. The generals all just looking at each other nervously, while he goes off on one of his tirades. In true German fashion, they routinely update the situation maps, which once showed Kliest’s panzer columns barreling toward the Caucuses, and Guderian at the gates of Moscow, now showing which neighborhoods of Berlin have been captured in the last few hours. “Mein Fuhrer, the Russian front line is now only about 200 meters from here.” In the background, Soviet shells are constantly going off, shaking the whole place and making the electricity flicker on and off. Toward the end, a bunch of these military gentlemen take the Fuhrer’s route and shoot themselves — a guy in a uniform goes around the corner with a pistol: Bang! Thump.

It is a story I am very familiar with.

Jonathan responded astutely that it is a story that is familiar not just from Germany, but it seems to be repeated somewhere every few years.

Agreed that Hitler’s closing hours were simply a supremely grotesque version of similar scenes which play out all the time. The increasingly detached and deranged leaders, trying to pretend the inevitable is avoidable, the “yes men” who’d lived parasitically off the regime still toadying, the scurrying around, the maneuvering and backstabbing going on even as the noose tightens, the support staff taking smoking breaks and doing the typing barely grasping that the whole thing is about to go down the toilet. I bet Enron at the end was pretty similar.

Jonathan balked at the comparison to Enron, but suggested Michael Jackson as analogous, which is true (Hitler = tragedy, Michael Jackson = farce). I stuck to my guns:

Hitler-in-the-bunker scenarios happen to businesses, too. So Enron for sure. I’ve read about it. Delusional b*stards. And the megalomania of some of the corporate chieftains in these places rise to near-Hitlerian proportions. They are just not in a position to do nearly as much damage. And, yeah, Michael Jackson, too. And Nixon. And the scene amongst the stupid commies when Yeltsin was taking over, ditto, I’m sure. It is a constant challenge to any leader not to end up surrounded by sycophants, to demand and get the truth from his subordinates. There is a great line in the Count de Marenches book which I wrote about recently. He talks about visiting the Shah of Iran, and being aware that the whole regime was about to slide off the edge any day. He complained to some senior Iranian that the Shah was way too detached, that he did not appear to understand what was going on. The Iranian guy told him, “The father, the old Shah, you didn’t dare lie to him. The son, you don’t dare tell him the truth.” We know which one died in his own bed.

We are fortunate we have Constitutional government here in the good old USA. The Germans had no monopoly on malice, megalomania, stupidity, moral cowardice. Our leaders are constrained, in most ways, most of the time, so the kind of people who would want be like Hitler don’t go into politics, and if they do, they never get the chance to turn into Hitler because we have no provision for a “fuehrer” in our Constitution. And Hitlerian managers have a way of being taken out by ambitious subordinates, or their competitors, or shareholders or, in the last resort, by the Department of Justice. Nonetheless, the seductions and corruption of power are perennial threats in all walks of life.

The most troubling thing about Hitler is not that he was superhumanly diabolical, and hence totally freakish and “nothing like us”. Rather, he was quite possibly the most extreme case of a bunch of bad things that happens all too often — a charismatic bullshit artist with bad ideas and no morals, a sociopath who tells people what they want to hear so he can use them, a seducer who gets them to buy into his evil plans and be complicit in them and who enables them to live out their own worst vices, a huckster who tells people all their problems are someone else’s fault –a perenially popular brand of snake oil, a thug who succeeds initially because he breaks all the rules and people at first can’t believe he is actually serious about what he is doing. Hitler was all of this rolled into one. Bad guys of these sorts often do well for a while, or seem to, but nearly always end up badly.

Ganz’s depiction of Hitler is brilliant because he allows us to see that Hitler was evil, but also human, not a cartoon of evil or a symbol of evil, just a very, very bad man.