how to dismantle an atomic bear
19 January 2006
Editors are supposed to make your articles better. It's a very frustrating thing when they only make them worse. I'm a better editor than any of my editors. They deleted the beginning quote in my column and the concluding sentence so that the last paragraph (two sentences) doesn't make a shred of sense now. I'll probably just stop writing for this paper. It makes me so angry. Anyway, here's the full version:
"In all nineteen countries formally protested [against German rearmament in violation of the Treaty of Versailles]. But how vain was all their voting without the readiness of any single Power or any group of Powers to contemplate the use of FORCE..."
--The Gathering Storm, Sir Winston Churchill, pp. 120-121 (emphasis in original)
Donald Rumsfeld may be a coarse and undiplomatic individual, but there are times when blunt threats are warranted. If ever there was a time to shut Secretary Rice in a Foggy Bottom basement and loose Secretary Rumsfeld on every media outlet, this is it.
The difficult idea that Western experts and diplomats cannot seem to wrap their heads around is that all their cool-headed rationalizing, understanding, openness, and deference in the course of the diplomatic process simply does not impress maniacal dictators determined to acquire nuclear weapons.
The great virtue of President Bush's approach to Iraq was that it brazenly bypassed a good deal of this diplomatic nonsense and achieved substantive results. It may have been done crudely, but the point is that it got done, and today, Saddam Hussein sits in a cold prison cell.
In 2005, however, President Bush abandoned this results-oriented approach and largely paid homage to fruitless diplomatic processes. He placed Secretary Rice in the lead, giving her a free hand to engage Iran on the issue of its nuclear programs in a multilateral show of unity with Europe. The predictable result has been an unqualified foreign policy disaster as negotiations collapsed last week.
Iran has engaged in a systematic campaign of deception of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors for more than two decades. Iranian proclamations of peaceful intentions must be repeatedly juxtaposed against the fact that Iran is so rich in oil that it has no feasible need for nuclear power.
Having evident aspirations of becoming the regional hegemon, the mullahs in Teheran have made the acquisition of atomic weapons the vital centerpiece of their foreign policy. With nuclear missiles pointed at Tel Aviv, Iran would be able to threaten America's most vital Middle East ally, and gradually bend American policy to its liking through intimidation and blackmail. They will not give up their pursuit of nuclear weapons for anything. They said as much back in September, claiming that they had an "inalienable right to produce nuclear fuel" in the course of rejecting yet more ridiculous European incentives.
Yet, throughout the course of negotiations, British foreign secretary Jack Straw has repeatedly emphasized that military action against Iran is "inconceivable," and "not on the agenda," but has occasionally admitted that Iran could be referred to the U.N. Security Council if it fails to cooperate.
Of course, no one is really sure what good that would do. The U.N. Security Council is the quintessential diplomatic forum for glorified inaction, and this instance would be no exception. China and Russia are unlikely to allow U.N. sanctions to pass the Security Council, and even if they did, Teheran's behavior would not change.
But this is only the next cautious step in the all-important diplomatic process. Since the process must be respected and Western unity maintained, God forbid we do anything undiplomatic or unilateral. There are many hopelessly ineffective options to explore first.
Not surprisingly, all of the good faith and good will with which the West has sought to engage Iran has earned for them only the most searing contempt of the mullahs in Teheran. Thus, it is that Iran's President speaks openly and comfortably of wiping Israel off the map while Western diplomats pat themselves on the back for their unity, register their sternest indignation at Iranian intransigence, and discuss among themselves which worthless diplomatic ploy to try next.
Before the Western democracies began to treat Nazi Germany as a problem that would not just go away, the Rhineland and Austria had been absorbed, Czechoslovakia dismantled, and Poland overrun.
Will it be before or after Tel Aviv is incinerated that the West begins to take Iran seriously?
06 January 2006
If USC did have "the better team," as Matt Leinart claimed shortly after losing to Texas on the only day that mattered, he must be using some measure other than the numbers on the scoreboard at the end of the night.
December was very good to Matt. He got to pose with Reggie on the cover of a Sports Illustrated. He got to revel in the daily comparisons by the national media of USC's 2005 team to the greatest teams in NCAA history. It may or may not have been warranted (hindsight suggests not). After all, Matt already had a 34-game winning streak, a Heisman Trophy, and two national championships on his resume, and in the interim, his team had only gotten better. And so December was, fittingly or not, the "coronation of King Trojan" in the national sports media.
It might be that Matt still did actually have something to prove, but no one was asking him to prove it. There seemed to be a widespread national consensus that his performance hitherto had been more than sufficient, and so no one really doubted that Matt would beat Texas. The national champion was decided in December and USC had won hands down.
The tragedy of it all (oh, it just breaks my heart) is that Matt came out and proved it anyway -- or at least, he did as much as he could in trying to prove what was not true -- at least, not on the night it mattered. He is the overlooked part of USC's stellar, but ultimately insufficient drive to win a third straight national title.
Of course, USC was supposed to win, and this didn't happen, and so now, the only thing that the dejected collection of USC fanboys and sports writers -- who spent most of December blowing USC's victory trumpet -- can do is focus on USC's mistakes and impotently wonder, "if only..."
But this is missing the story. USC was not the better team that just ran into some bad fortune. They were given a good deal of hype, owing primarily to their big-name star power, but they ultimately they were not the steady, balanced team that Texas was. Suppose for a moment that the situation were reversed and rather than playing in their own hometown, USC had had to travel all the way to the heart of Texas country, say, San Antonio to play against Texas in the Alamo Dome. In that case, it goes without saying that this game would have been much less close. Not a route, perhaps, but a very comfortable Texas win.
While the Trojans certainly did occasionally execute poorly in the first half, the story is not that USC made an inordinate number of mistakes. Rather, it is that they played a stellar second half, and perhaps ultimately the best game they've played this year, but still lost.
Matt Leinart did everything that anyone could ask. USC's first four drives coming out of halftime resulted in a prompt 28 points. They mercilessly ripped and slashed the Texas until it seemed to be in total collapse. On the fourth drive of the second half, Leinart and Lendale White took just four plays to negotiate the 80 yards to the end zone. Leinart had thrown down the gauntlet. "You can't stop me," he seemed to be saying to the Texas defense. Completing 16-of-19 passes for 218 yards, Leinart did as much as any reasonable USC fan could have hoped.
USC fans and the many media writers who are also USC fans, in their despondent bitterness, are more prone to notice all that went wrong -- Reggie Bush fumbled, Vince Young should have been called down before he lateral resulting in a TD (as though he wouldn't have danced into the end zone on the very next play), and perhaps Coach Carrol ought to have punted on that infamous fifth and final USC drive; but all of this is to overlook what went right.
The USC gameplan was to make the game into a track meet -- an offensive contest to see who could score the most or to see if anyone could stop anyone. They did not intend to stop Texas. They simply planned to outscore them. If they did not execute it so well in the first half, they did so flawlessly in the second. It turned out to be their night after all. In crunch time, their guys delivered.
But the other half of this story -- and the media got this part right -- is that Vince Young simply would not let them win. USC played perhaps the best they've played this year, and it was almost enough to beat a better football team, but not quite.
Vince Young delivered -- and, not just a loss to USC, but also a stern rebuke to Heisman voters and to a national media that, for the entire month of December, got everything so very wrong.
Sorry, Matt. You're not #1.
Gotta wear orange to come to the party this year.
01 January 2006
Thomas Friedman, back when I didn't have to pay to read him anyway, would occasionally write a letter to some famous political leader, using it as a nice literary device to reach his readers with his ideas.
I do it from time to time too. It's fun to write that way.
Dear Peter Jackson,
You are a very skilled director. George Lucas could learn a thing or two or three or four from you. I will forever wish he had done so before ruining Star Wars with the latest trilogy.
But with that said, I still do not know why you made King Kong. Don't get me wrong: the characters were well developed, the actors were convincing, and the script writing was first class. After watching Episode III, my foremost impression was that I had just been told a very moving story by a very bad storyteller. But with King Kong, I came away thinking that a wonderful storyteller had just told a really dumb story.
In the end, it seems that the underlying plot of King Kong revolving around a bizarre woman-giant ape relationship is just so ridiculous that not even you could make it work. Ann Darrow was a perfectly believable character until when trying to escape from an island inhabited by giant dinosaurs, bats, insects, and other apocaplytic monsters of death, she frantically and inexplicably forbade her rescuers to act in self-defense against a giant ape that was mercilessly trying to kill them. Ann's sudden affection for this killer monster was a rather bewildering turn of events.
At this moment, I suddenly found myself wondering, "Did she go crazy? Is she out of her mind? Is she on drugs?" I can remember instinctively wishing that one of the more sober characters would grab her by the shoulders, give her a little shake, and demand that she get a grip.
Nor is it terribly clear why Crazy Ann sought out the giant ape after it had gone on a rampage of death and destruction through New York City. Animals tend to have short memories, and few sane individuals would seek out a violent, angry gorilla no matter how salient and meaningful the relationship with it might have previously been.
Other characters also seem far from rational. With Kong on the loose in NYC, what exactly did Jack Driscoll expect to do by confronting it and then running from it? What was he thinking when he went up into the Empire State Building? Yes, that's where Ann was, but that's also where a giant monkey was who wanted to kill him. Exactly what he was trying to do was never very clear.
But it was a good movie until about halfway through it when several of the characters seemed to go insane. However, all of the adventure scenes involving dinosaurs and other monsters would have made for great fun if it had not all been done several times before by Steven Spielberg. Much has been made of the scene in which your giant ape violently kills several large carnosaurs that look straight out of Jurassic Park. But if you were trying to send the resounding message that Spielberg now has competition in the big budget movie arena, then taking your audience somewhere that Mr. Spielberg took them twelve years ago is a rather pathetic way of doing it. Been there, done that.
Your T-Rex vs. Kong showdown was a boring, shallow special FX show that failed to draw the audience in, primarily because no one cared about your stupid monkey. Your ape did not attach itself to the audience at all. Not even close. In fact, I kept hoping someone would finally kill it. Nor did the audience ever fully comprehend this bizarre and inexplicable connection the ape was supposed to have with Ann.
The story of your giant ape was not tragic. It was not profound. It was not moving. It was not a tear-jerker. It was just stupid.
In the end, it seems like a sorry excuse for you to show off your prowess with special FX. It was little else. A shame, really. King Kong had so much else going for it: a first-rate cast, good writing, an excellent recreation of Depression-era NYC, and much more. Never have I seen such professionalism and attention to detail put into making what turned out to be such a dumb movie.
At the end, when Carl Denham uttered the memorable final verdict of the movie, I was ready to throw up. "It wasn't the airplanes. It was beauty that killed the beast," he said. At this moment, I very much wanted a smart-alek character blessed with an abundance of common sense to say something like, "No, seriously man, it was the airplanes."
Mr. Jackson, by all means go out and round up Ian McKellan, Andy Serkis, a good Bilbo Baggins, and give us "The Hobbit." But please, no more of this crap.
