Starring Ross Douthat.
Rated R for nudity and sexual content. (Kidding... or am I?)
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Hollywood's Vietnam Moment
21 Mar 2008 03:22 pm
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Minor, but loved the quick pic of Ronnie & Gorby where Gorby is wearing a SU flag pin on his suit and Ronnie is not. Gorby is more patriotic than Ronnie. QED.
I hate to be relentlessly negative, but can anyone watch this an note notice how Mr. Douthat's managed to waste 9 minutes of my life with his banal and essentially contentless analysis (sic)? It was hard to concentrate, but to the extent that he said anything it was to complain that Hollywood did not seem to take the reality of Islamic terror as seriously as it did the cold war, and that alternate choices of villain implied a reflexive mush-headedness on the part of Hollywood elites.
Two things: first he missed what most vets I talk to think of as the definitive Middle East war movie, Three Kings. In order to preserve his "no-jingoism allowed" meme, he completely forgot Jarhead, clearly a movie that treats Americans at war with an Arab enemy. He dismisses films that are not the ones he thinks ought to have been made without assessing them on the degree of artistic or intellectual success as the films they set out to be. (IE his dismissal fo the Valley of Elah as too focused on a purely American tragedy is the same kind of criticism that might complain that a remake of Othello was insufficiently feminist.)
And so on. Go on. I dare you. Name one actualy memorable point made in the video above that actually gives you insight into how Hollywood treats hard current events.
One thing's clear; Douthat has never actually tried to make a movie himself. Another thought seems pretty obvious too: what on earth does he have on the Atlantic's owners that keeps him in his job? It's not that his politics are bad, though I think they are. It's that he commits the one true sin of media. Boy, is he dull.
Ross Douthat is basically the new David Brooks. Stupid analysis conveyed in a prissy manner that fools know-nothing owners/editors into hiring him. He is consistently wrong, or poorly informed, but like Brooks, Kristol, et al., his career prospects look great.
The critics of Douthat posting here seem to have missed what he was saying.
To paraphrase Douthat: Hollywood, since Iraq, has produced solely anti-war movies bereft of any acknowledgement that America faces a merciless and real overseas enemy and that have been commercial disasters.
(Three Kings was not a "war movie" at all -- the backdrop of the film is the Persian Gulf war, but the theme was neither pro- or anti-war. And Jarhead's focus was decidely not on "an Arab enemy" but on the way that war makes solders crazy, the same theme of In the Valley of Elah. Even Oliver Stone's 9/11 essentially sanitized the Islamic character of that attack -- the film played not much different than a disaster movie with genuinely heroic individuals saving victims of some miscellaneous cataclysm.)
So what we can conclude from Douthat's point is that Hollywood isn't treating the Iraq War/terrorism seriously, namely, it isn't posing an honest moral dilemma: what is a course of action that upholds American values but at the same time deals with a very real external enemy of America? In other words, Hollywood is only interested in war movies that appeal to people who are done thinking about Iraq and the war on terror, if they ever thought about them at all.
In other words, Hollywood is only interested in war movies that appeal to people who are done thinking about Iraq and the war on terror, if they ever thought about them at all.
Actually, it is Douthat who is interested only in movies that support his point of view. In his world, Hollywood should merely be a bigger, more special effects-littered version of Fox News, and popular culture should ignore the experience of the American people these past five years.
Paranoia implies irrational fear. Americans are not irrationally fearful about their country or about their freedoms. They have every reason to be not only afraid but outraged. Their President lied them into an unnecessary war that has driven the military -- and sole defense from any external dangers -- to the brink of disaster. Their FBI has been illegally spying on them. Their Justice Department has become another arm of the Republican party. Their executive branch does not uphold the law but rather subverts it with signing statements and obstruction of investigations. Their Congress cares more about giving Telecom companies immunity than making sure that the Constitution isn't reduced to toilet paper. Their wealth is disappearing into war-driven debt and their future is being mortgaged to the Chinese. Under these circumstances, it is the people who aren't feeling paranoid about the way our country is being driven towards disaster whose sanity needs to be questioned.
Hollywood isn't having a "Vietnam Moment." Hollywood is merely reflecting the anger, disbelief, and frustration many Americans are feeling that a national tragedy and an external threat have been used as an excuse to destroy our nation from within.
Hollywood is merely reflecting the anger, disbelief, and frustration many Americans are feeling that a national tragedy and an external threat have been used as an excuse to destroy our nation from within.
Well, you're proving my point. You (and Hollywood) don't see any particular external enemy at all. Islamic terror is at best over-rated, and at worst a myth used to take-away liberties.
This sentiment is unreasonable in that it has no expanation for the thousands of Islamic terror attacks worldwide since 9/11, and irresponsible in that it assumes no defense against them is needed.
He comes off like Frank Luntz's cousin who flunked out of film school and blames the "libruls" for his lack of talent.
ProfNickD:
"[T]housands of Islamic terror attacks worldwide since 9/11"? Can you give me some sources on those actual numbers? Not some line about "If you don't agree with me, you aren't paying attention," but an actual honest-to-goodness aggregate count of the number of "Islamic" terror attacks.
The only way I can see that claim in any way working out to be true is if you count every suicide bombing in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has political/nationalistic motivations beyond "Islamic terror," and every attack made against our troops in Iraq, attacks that wouldn't have been possible if we hadn't invaded a country totally removed from the particular batch of Islamic fundamentalists that attacked us on 9/11.
To equate Islamic fundamentalism with the Soviet Union, as Ross does and as you do, gives Islamic fundamentalists far too much credit. The Soviet Union was strong enough to be awarded the term "superpower" by the world community. I don't see anybody claiming that the aggregate of groups motivated by a fundamentalist reading of Islam is a world superpower. So, yes, "Islamic terror" is over-rated, and I don't find that a particularly unreasonable sentiment.
As for a defense against the threat that does exist (over-rated does not equal non-existent), the solution there, as shown in the British success in stopping the planned hijackings during the summer of 2006, is in intelligence work, not military action against countries like Iraq that are unrelated to the few groups that do try to lash out against us.
LOL from Tim Egan in the NY Times -
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/22/opinion/22egan.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Any content with Ross in it is always a LITTLE sexual.
Mercutio42,
The website religionofpeace.com is a good start for looking at the numbers of attacks, injuries, and deaths worldwide.
Other sources: Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations at length discusses the preponderance of not only terror attacks but of armed conflict in general undertaken by the Islamic world vs. other civilizations (Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, African tribal, etc.) since the end of the Cold War, as does Walter Laqueur's The New Terrorism. (Book-length discussions by Andrew Bostom, Bat Ye'or, Ibn Warrag, Serge Trifkovic, Efraim Karsh and Walid Phares delve into the Islamic theology giving justification and support for this mayhem.)
Simply put: there is no such thing as non-Islamic terrorism in the modern world. Every beheading, every school bombing, every marketplace slaughter -- all of it is Islamic in character and the numbers are, well, terrifying.
ProfNickD,
Perhaps I'm being dense or not looking hard enough, but I'm having trouble finding the numbers you spoke of on religionofpeace.com Can you help me out a bit further?
I must confess to not having read Huntington, Laqueur, etc. However, anybody who conflates (a) groups using a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam to justify terror with (b) "the Islamic world," could stand to entertain a little more variety in their thinking.
And your final claim that "there is no such thing as non-Islamic terrorism in the modern world" seems to reflect, I must confess, a rather surprisingly absolute statement which is also quite false. I don't know how you define "the modern world," but surely we can place various terrorist actions of the IRA in the N Ireland conflict, the Oklahoma City bombings, perhaps even the Columbine or Virginia Tech shootings (depending on your particular definition of "terrorism"; certainly they fall under mine) as acts of terrorism in the modern world, completely devoid of Islamic motivation.
ProfNickD,
How can you say "... there is no such thing as non-islamic terrorism in the modern world" ?!?
Iraq war, for example, was (is!) an act of terrorism. Committed by a State (US), wearing a mask of "legacy". Done, as Mr. Bush himself said, "in name of god".
The result: a whole nation was entirely destroyed. Well, if it is not terrorism, I don't know what ever could be.
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gross.
Posted by Anonymous | March 21, 2008 3:55 PM