Fumbling of International Affairs Ahead
My roommate Rose has a subscription to Time, which she uses either for its international reporting on the AIDS epidemic or to gawk at hot male models. Last week's issue had Steven Spielberg's mug on the cover, so naturally I preserved it in a clear plastic sleeve (placing it next to my A.I. Gigolo Joe plush toy and Tom Hanks Terminal ethnic-talking head), but not before I read the fantastic article on Munich, the new Spielberg movie about the Black September terrorist attacks on Israeli atheletes at the '72 Olympic games.
The film comes out this month, although you wouldn't know it from the lack of hype, which could have been way easily spun and exploited a la Passion of the Christ. Still, there's gotta be a palpable curiousity over how the players in the true life story are going to be portrayed (the better part of the movie is devoted not to the Black September attacks, but the subsequent assassinations of the architects by a hit squad dispatched in secret by the Israeli government). In the article, Spielberg makes a big (predictable) point about how he tries not to come down on one side too hard or too soft on either Israel or Palestine. Instead, he says, he wants to focus on each Mossad agent and the toll that killing takes on their individual psyches.
I think all that sounds very good on paper; in fact, if someone approached me to direct this story, I would probably choose to take Spielberg's angle based on my own history of handling tricky opinions on topics like this. The angle, that is, of focusing in on the individual experience to somehow illuminate or subvert the group experience. This is actually a well-worn trope of fiction. You might say that it's used for an effect in the Iliad by narrowing the scope of the Trojan War to the experience of Achilles; however, the modern version of this trope has much more to do with the psychology of the individual than Homer was interested in. This trope is justified in modern storytelling--especially cinema--because it gives the story an "interest," what the studio execs call "a way in" to the story. Every single historical epic we've been served in the last 10 years has had the little story of a individual to offset the bigger historical sweep of events outside his power. However, this trope is more than just a trope; it can also be used as a rhetorical device. In a sense, it is making an argument on its own about the importance of the individual in history; often, the argument is that a blow to the human psyche--in addition to a blow to honor, material possessions, character--is a significant cost of a historical event like war.
I want to call this a device of rhetoric because people arguing for peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict often argue their point with the rhetoric of the individual. Americans, myself included, have the opinion that if individual Israelis could meet and greet with individual Palestinians, they would find that the other shares the same human interests (family, God, business), and then the conflict would just dissolve and flake away. Perhaps this is because we hold such a modern distrust of group or national mentality. Most of us liberal democrats believe that nationalism (Israeli, Palestinian, American or otherwise) will only lead to isolationsim, war, or even internal genocide in extreme cases. I think Americans, even the ones that we would identify as rabble-rousing nationalists, still believe in the inevitability of the individual to transcend identities of nation in favor of personal or familial self-determination. That's just democracy, with a good helping of free market capitalism. And as a liberal, liberal democrat raised by neoclassical economics, I have always been inclined to ask Israelis or Palestinians, "Why is the issue of land so important to you, 'you' on a personal level? Isn't living your own life more important than what your nation wants?" I think there are other people like me (and maybe Steven Spielberg) who choose not to make a verdict on which side is in the right, and to urge other people to pay attention to the people and not the policies.
I can't help but distrust my own ideology, though, because I know it's so portable. This is how I expect to solve all the world's problems. And maybe it's also lazy thinking. It's easy to say, "let's all get to know one another a little better," because I can make that statement without reading the international news every day and reading the histories of the conflict and understanding the growth and complexity of the problem. On the other hand, the more you know about the history of the conflict and the deeper you get into it, it gets harder to step away from it. Everyone strives to get disinterested infomation; but is it possible to achieve informed disinterest? I think the way we try and get it is by using this rhetoric of discovering the individual within the mania of the group in the hopes that he'll turn out to be a regular Joe caught up in a conflict he doesn't understand or desire--the cliche of the hot dog salesman just trying to run his business in the middle of a street war (From Beirut to Jerusalem, incidentally, is full of these cliches). The problem is that many if not most individuals we find are not so moderate, economically-motivated, and disinterested as we like them to be. For spectators like me without a vested interest or opinion (besides an admitted Christian, democratic bias for Israel), I find that I just can't escape the inevitability of coming down pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. The dream of disinterested enlightenment is only just that.
Anyhow, Munich. I already worship it because it's Spielberg, even if it's not going to change anything.
I'm back in Cincy after a long, final drive here from St. Louis via Louisville. Sure the American West is big, but it turns out that the Southeast/Middle West is a lot bigger than you expect it to be when you're traveling on the ground. Look out for Illinois, man, that state is an ocean.
And I got into the Playwrighting class with Neo-Futurists dude. Now I have to decide between this unabashedly elective course and actually finishing up my English major with the American Revolution class (or sacking St. Augustine?...).
My roommate Rose has a subscription to Time, which she uses either for its international reporting on the AIDS epidemic or to gawk at hot male models. Last week's issue had Steven Spielberg's mug on the cover, so naturally I preserved it in a clear plastic sleeve (placing it next to my A.I. Gigolo Joe plush toy and Tom Hanks Terminal ethnic-talking head), but not before I read the fantastic article on Munich, the new Spielberg movie about the Black September terrorist attacks on Israeli atheletes at the '72 Olympic games.
The film comes out this month, although you wouldn't know it from the lack of hype, which could have been way easily spun and exploited a la Passion of the Christ. Still, there's gotta be a palpable curiousity over how the players in the true life story are going to be portrayed (the better part of the movie is devoted not to the Black September attacks, but the subsequent assassinations of the architects by a hit squad dispatched in secret by the Israeli government). In the article, Spielberg makes a big (predictable) point about how he tries not to come down on one side too hard or too soft on either Israel or Palestine. Instead, he says, he wants to focus on each Mossad agent and the toll that killing takes on their individual psyches.
I think all that sounds very good on paper; in fact, if someone approached me to direct this story, I would probably choose to take Spielberg's angle based on my own history of handling tricky opinions on topics like this. The angle, that is, of focusing in on the individual experience to somehow illuminate or subvert the group experience. This is actually a well-worn trope of fiction. You might say that it's used for an effect in the Iliad by narrowing the scope of the Trojan War to the experience of Achilles; however, the modern version of this trope has much more to do with the psychology of the individual than Homer was interested in. This trope is justified in modern storytelling--especially cinema--because it gives the story an "interest," what the studio execs call "a way in" to the story. Every single historical epic we've been served in the last 10 years has had the little story of a individual to offset the bigger historical sweep of events outside his power. However, this trope is more than just a trope; it can also be used as a rhetorical device. In a sense, it is making an argument on its own about the importance of the individual in history; often, the argument is that a blow to the human psyche--in addition to a blow to honor, material possessions, character--is a significant cost of a historical event like war.
I want to call this a device of rhetoric because people arguing for peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict often argue their point with the rhetoric of the individual. Americans, myself included, have the opinion that if individual Israelis could meet and greet with individual Palestinians, they would find that the other shares the same human interests (family, God, business), and then the conflict would just dissolve and flake away. Perhaps this is because we hold such a modern distrust of group or national mentality. Most of us liberal democrats believe that nationalism (Israeli, Palestinian, American or otherwise) will only lead to isolationsim, war, or even internal genocide in extreme cases. I think Americans, even the ones that we would identify as rabble-rousing nationalists, still believe in the inevitability of the individual to transcend identities of nation in favor of personal or familial self-determination. That's just democracy, with a good helping of free market capitalism. And as a liberal, liberal democrat raised by neoclassical economics, I have always been inclined to ask Israelis or Palestinians, "Why is the issue of land so important to you, 'you' on a personal level? Isn't living your own life more important than what your nation wants?" I think there are other people like me (and maybe Steven Spielberg) who choose not to make a verdict on which side is in the right, and to urge other people to pay attention to the people and not the policies.
I can't help but distrust my own ideology, though, because I know it's so portable. This is how I expect to solve all the world's problems. And maybe it's also lazy thinking. It's easy to say, "let's all get to know one another a little better," because I can make that statement without reading the international news every day and reading the histories of the conflict and understanding the growth and complexity of the problem. On the other hand, the more you know about the history of the conflict and the deeper you get into it, it gets harder to step away from it. Everyone strives to get disinterested infomation; but is it possible to achieve informed disinterest? I think the way we try and get it is by using this rhetoric of discovering the individual within the mania of the group in the hopes that he'll turn out to be a regular Joe caught up in a conflict he doesn't understand or desire--the cliche of the hot dog salesman just trying to run his business in the middle of a street war (From Beirut to Jerusalem, incidentally, is full of these cliches). The problem is that many if not most individuals we find are not so moderate, economically-motivated, and disinterested as we like them to be. For spectators like me without a vested interest or opinion (besides an admitted Christian, democratic bias for Israel), I find that I just can't escape the inevitability of coming down pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. The dream of disinterested enlightenment is only just that.
Anyhow, Munich. I already worship it because it's Spielberg, even if it's not going to change anything.
I'm back in Cincy after a long, final drive here from St. Louis via Louisville. Sure the American West is big, but it turns out that the Southeast/Middle West is a lot bigger than you expect it to be when you're traveling on the ground. Look out for Illinois, man, that state is an ocean.
And I got into the Playwrighting class with Neo-Futurists dude. Now I have to decide between this unabashedly elective course and actually finishing up my English major with the American Revolution class (or sacking St. Augustine?...).
8 Comments:
Up here there's a lot of ads for Munich. Also there have been a number of articles on it. There have been so many advance screenings for real world people (not Hollywood types) that it feels like the producers are trying to defuse it, like they're leaking it out one bit at a time so that it won't spill over. I find it very strange that the foreign press nominated Spielberg and the screenplay but not the picture. Very strange. It only leads to me think the picture will for many be love it or hate it based on their preexisting notions. I kind of think it's going to pass by without much controversy, but maybe a lot of praise. I'm personally fascinated to see it.
That makes sense, since I just saw that David Brooks wrote a whole column about it yesterday.
I can't wait to see it either, but terrorism and political assassinations are going to be a hard sell for the annual Dir Family Christmas Day Movie.
Ugh, Drew! Everyone always beats me with my blog topics!
1. http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20051219&s=diarist121905
2. I don't think you're right about the American relationship to the state. We are not nationalists in the sense that we feel some sort of sacred blood tie to our countrymen, but that doesn't mean that we're all so inward-directed that all we care about is our personal security and self-determination, which is actually a nationalistic idea. That would make the state purposeless. We are attached to our political principles--liberty, individual rights, government by consent, etc--instead of each other or the land. But what other country in the world was founded on explicit political principles? You might not like nationalism, but you probably can't solve nationalist problems in a way that doesn't take into account the difference in political constitution between the US and Israel.
Drew, your Dad was watching "Fargo" right before going to church one Christmas. It won't be that hard of a sell.
Rita: I believe you're right, and I think I could have found a better word than "nationalism" for what I was trying to describe. And the fact that the US may be the only country founded on explicit political principles (in the context of some seriously wealthy Protestant business dudes) makes us (or maybe just me) all the more inept at understanding the nationalism of another country like Israel, which may look deceptively similar to ours but which has a nationalism made up of a radically different history than our own. Is that what you mean to say? One simple difference between the US and Israel is that our nationalism is really less "hands-on" than Israel's; our idea of exercising nationalism is almost just exercising democracy, which is doing the bare minimum of voting and then practicing our freedom, plus a short military service every 50 years.
Thomas: Yes yes, but Christmas EVE is devoted to movies LIKE Fargo. Christmas DAY is when we atone for our bloodlust.
No, I mean, you're right, America is not a nation-state. You know that nationalism is European idea which spread to its colonies and spheres of influence. We are federalists or democrats, if anything. But I don't think nationalism is too hard to understand, just something extra to consider when thinking about the problems of nation-states. Even if you don't think it's the ideal basis for a state, it is now the basis of the majority of states. And, to be fair, it has certain benefits.
France's banning of the hijab last winter, for example, stirred all this ruckus here about religious freedom and pluralism, but that overlooks the fact that France is not a pluralistic state. It's a French state, and if you want to be a real citizen, you have to become ethnically French (which might lead one to wonder how Europe is so convinced that a "Jewish state" is a racist idea...). It's had five different constitutions since 1792, yet it has remained France and its people have remained French. When Germany was fascist, it was still Germany. If America turned fascist, I'm pretty sure we'd just divest ourselves from it. The benefit of nationalism is that it's impervious to constitutional shifts and your state lasts longer. But what value is there to a long-lived fascism? From what I understand, Lilla is a nationalist, so maybe you should ask him for a defense next quarter. Also, you should read his article in the NYTimes about how he used to be an evangelical Christian.
that's all well and good but when will you be back in georgia?
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