May 24, 2007
The Return of the Otter Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:05 PM EST In 1993 I wrote an article for American Heritage on the history of the American environment, which you can find here. I pointed out, 14 years ago, that while the environment has had its ups and downs, it had been mostly—and strongly—up since the first Earth Day in 1970. This trend has continued, indeed accelerated, since then. Just today there is an article in The New York Times on four peregrine falcon chicks who are doing fine in a nest box high atop the Throgs Neck Bridge, where the East River gives way to Long Island Sound. Peregrine falcons nest elsewhere in the city these days as well, including on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, thriving on New York’s inexhaustible supply of pigeons, one of their favorite foods. Nearly exterminated by the 1950s because DDT caused their eggshells to thin, the species was removed from the endangered species list in 1999. Although the environmental news has been increasingly good for the last four decades, the average person might not know it because (a) the media prefers bad news and (b) the environmental organizations depend on bad news to raise money. That’s why global warming has been a godsend for the environmental Chicken Little crowd as the water, land, and air have gotten cleaner and cleaner, as many species that were doing poorly are now doing well and many that had been extirpated from areas have been successfully reintroduced (such as wolves to Yellowstone and the California Condor to the High Sierras). As a sidebar to the environmental story, I wrote a piece on the environmental history of North Salem, the small town in northern Westchester County where I live. (Just scroll down past the main article to see it.) I noted, in 1993, that a bald eagle had recently been sighted in town for the first time in decades. Today they are sighted often, and I even saw one land next to the Croton River as I was boarding the train at the nearby railroad station. Yesterday morning my tenant knocked on my office door and said, “Guess what!” An avid fisherman, she had been out in her rowboat the previous evening on Titicus Reservoir to enjoy the glorious late spring weather and, hopefully, to rustle up a little supper. Suddenly she noted, quite close, fish jumping out of the water, not in the way they occasionally do in pursuit of a bug (rustling up a little supper of their own), but in the way fish do to elude predators. As she watched, a furry head appeared and looked around for a few seconds before plunging back in pursuit of his own supper. Its short, rounded ears, large size, and long, tapering tail gave it away. It was an otter. These immensely beguiling creatures have fur that was especially valued by the early Dutch traders in Nieuw Amsterdam, and they paid the Indians handsomely to hunt them. They were soon very rare. With the increasing pollution of local streams in the first half of the nineteenth century, the otter was gone from this area long before the twentieth century dawned. Now they are back, another piece of the infinitely complex web of life returning to an area only 44 miles from Grand Central Terminal. I hope the Sierra Club, et al., will forgive me for spreading the good news.
May 23, 2007
Should America Ignore the Middle East? Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:50 PM EST Edward Luttwak, a very lively polemicist with a taste for intellectual heresy (I interviewed him for American Heritage back in 1989) has published an essay in Prospect Magazine arguing that we pay far too much attention to the Middle East. In the face of the conventional wisdom about Middle Eastern oil becoming more and more important with the industrialization of China and India, Luttwak argues that on the contrary, Middle Eastern oil is becoming steadily less important: “Between 1981 and 1999—a period when a fundamentalist regime consolidated power in Iran, Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war within view of oil and gas installations, the Gulf war came and went and the first Palestinian intifada raged—oil prices, adjusted for inflation, actually fell. And global dependence on middle eastern oil is declining: today the region produces under 30 per cent of the world’s crude oil, compared to almost 40 per cent in 1974-75. In 2005 17 per cent of American oil imports came from the Gulf, compared to 28 per cent in 1975.” He notes that oil producers with burgeoning populations who can produce nothing else cannot readily employ oil embargos. They must either sell the oil, or starve. There are probably some fallacies lurking in that—oil is fungible, and demand rising, etc.—but for now, let us ignore them. Similarly, Luttwak thinks that commentators on the Middle East regularly fall victim to what he calls the Mussolini syndrome, which he defines as credulity sufficient to take a militarily contemptible adversary at his own very inflated self-valuation (which is how other European powers regarded Italy until they actually fought her or were allied to her). Luttwak thinks that the conventional military power of Middle Eastern states (other than Israel) is derisory, and notes that Western states have twice crushed what was almost certainly the most formidable Middle Eastern Muslim state, Iraq, with almost no Western casualties. He thinks Iran is even more militarily hopeless than Iraq was, and he seems to imply that destroying Iranian nuclear facilities will not produce any devastating increase in terrorism, because Iran is already employing terrorists, whom we have handily survived and against whose employer we can cheaply and effectively retaliate. He thinks Iran is a crumbling multinational empire with a regime loathed by many, perhaps most, of its subjects, and he has a case. As for the cultural creativity of the Middle East, and hence its long-run economic power, Luttwak notes that it has the second lowest literacy rate of any region in the world, one more reason that “we devote far too much attention to the middle east, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts—excluding Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the middle east is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa.” There is a lot more, all of it provocative, and while I think the conclusion—that we can and should ignore Middle Eas—is close to ridiculous, the notion that experts can mistakenly assume the crucial importance of a power or region is almost certainly right. Post-World War II France fought hard for its empire, lost, and got steadily richer, while the crimes it has committed to maintain neo-colonial influence in Africa have secured it amazingly small if any advantage in the world of nations. At the end of the nineteenth century, European states regularly contemplated war for generally valueless African colonies. In the mid-nineteenth century, energy resources (of wood) seemed to be running out, and in the eighteenth, access to the hi-tech naval construction material oak also seemed worth fighting for. Stalin won a pyrrhic victory against Finland for some useless buffer territory around Leningrad. At the end of the nineteenth century, the apparently vast wealth of Argentina, the looming economic giant of the New World, mesmerized some economic strategists. Not only Mussolini wasted the time of most strategic analysts who thought about him; Napoleon III produced a lot of useless anxiety too. Cases of geopolitical-analyst tribes who agreed on the crucial importance of something and were ludicrously wrong would repay close study. It seems too much to hope that Luttwak is right about the Middle East, but the larger question is fascinating.
May 23, 2007
That’s So Last Year Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:45 AM EST That barely perceptible laughter you hear is the staff of American Heritage expressing very restrained amusement over that fact that after spending decades covering history, we are about to become history ourselves. You’ll understand, I’m sure, if the irony is lost on us, though I have to admit it is a hell of a gag. In fact, you know who would think it’s really funny? Javier Solana. Solana’s job title is European Union High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, and if you think he’s stealing money because the EU doesn’t have a common foreign and security policy, don’t worry; he has half a dozen other titles, all equally Ruritanian. Anyway, last October, in a bilingual speech dealing mainly with the Middle East and Africa, Solana couldn’t resist throwing in the obligatory anti-American cheap shot (this is the one area where Europe really does have a common policy): “When Americans say ‘That is history,’ they often mean it is no longer relevant. When Europeans say ‘That is history,’ they usually mean the opposite.” Charlemagne, the Economist’s Europe columnist, called Solano’s remark a “neat turn of phrase,” which suggests that Charlemagne does not get out much. Ever since “____ is history” became a catch phrase—in the early 1980s, as I recall—history teachers, academics, convention orators, and editorial writers have been lamenting that its use signals Americans’ contempt for the past, a regrettable trait to which just about any supposed ill, as viewed from the left or the right, can be attributed. There was a time not so long ago when half the articles we got in the mail began with that phrase (the other half began with William Faulkner’s quote “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past”). In real life, however, calling something history does not signify disdain, nor does it imply that the object of the epithet is irrelevant. All it means is that it’s finished. (Peter Morance, our old art director, once suggested that we run an obituary column called “You’re History.”) It’s a pointless word substitution that’s meant to sound snappy, the way sportswriters will say the Brewers “own” a 28-18 record instead of “have.” It can also be used in a menacing way, as in yesterday’s paper, when Amy Fisher said of her lover Joey Buttafuoco’s wife, from whom Joey was supposed to be estranged but isn’t: “She’s messing up my life. She’s history.” This is probably just a rhetorical threat, though with Amy you never know. Most often, when somebody says that something is history, they simply mean that it’s over and done with and can’t be changed. Consider, for example, this quote from Javier Solana himself, in a speech at Belgrade in December 2004: “Nine years ago, almost to the day, IFOR deployed its first contingency to Bosnia-Herzegovina in order to implement the Dayton Agreement. A day very difficult to forget for the citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina. A day very difficult to forget for me. But all that is history. Today we gather here to look to the future.” Or this one, again from Javier Solana, in an interview conducted in late 2005: “Those leaders are obliged to convince their people that history is history, and, if they want a future, that they have to take decisions that are sometimes difficult, but, no doubt, far better for generations to come.” So let’s get something straight. When anybody, American or not, says that something is history, it isn’t necessarily meant to be derogatory or dismissive. All it means is that the speaker has a weakness for phrases gleaned from talk radio. Despite their unaccountable failure to embrace our magazine, Americans are not any less appreciative of history than Europeans; if they were, why would every home-run record for switch-hitting catchers and every election of the first Croatian-American highway superintendent be described as “historic”? But don’t expect the Europeans to pay any attention; they never do. In fact, I’m sure that at this very moment, somewhere in Europe, some scholar with a doctorate from the Sorbonne is writing a treatise analyzing the hermeneutical implications of “Gag me with a spoon” and “Where’s the beef?”
May 22, 2007
That Curious New Yorker Cover Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:30 PM EST Some disconcerting cover art made me reconsider the Star Wars blog I posted last night, which deprecated the power of visual over verbal material. The May 28 New Yorker arrived yesterday, its cover (which you can see here) a painted cartoon of U.S. soldiers hoisting an American flag over what seems to be the chassis of a burnt-out vehicle; I puzzled over this image a bit, and then decided that the flag was being raised over the remains of an Iraqi car bomb, or perhaps a U.S. soft-skinned vehicle destroyed by an IED. The flag is at half staff, which is the symbol of respect for (and mourning of) the dead. The image recalls the famous Rosenthal photo of the flag being hoisted atop Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima, the iconic image of American sacrifice and victory in war. The painting is titled “Half Staff.” What does it mean? My first thought was that it is about the use and abuse of history. The image of sacrifice and triumph in war had been here redeployed to create a context in which there has been much sacrifice but no triumph, so as to argue that perhaps there can be no triumph in Iraq. The memory of the Second World War is sometimes deployed to justify or make sense of the war in Iraq, but this art disputes such a use of memory. Troops can take an almost impregnable mountain if they are prepared to pay the price; in the Second World War, we commonly understand our experience to mean that enough sacrifice took enough mountains, metaphorical and otherwise, and we won. In Iraq the burnt-out car, if Iraqi, may suggest psychological and not physical territory is being contested, i.e., territory that cannot be subdued in similar fashion. The cartoon may argue that we are making a category mistake; this is not a war like that other one, and it cannot come out the same way, which is to say, successfully. The cartoon may mean this without it being true, but the compression the cartoon achieves is remarkable. Millions of words have been deployed to argue that this war is in some fundamental way not at all like that other one, which the cartoon does wordlessly and with greater power. On the other hand, the cartoon may be referencing the recent loss of some American soldiers in a particular ambush, some of whom have disappeared, and who are very probably dead. So the painted flag is at half staff, and real flags should be. The cartoon may be arguing that we have not sufficiently attended to the deaths of our young men, who deserve to be as present to our grieving minds as past soldiers are, around this coming Memorial Day weekend. This is a common trope among both opponents and defenders of the war, for different reasons. The New Yorker, first a cautious defender of the war in Iraq, latterly an opponent, could intend a number of things on that score. As noted above, the cartoon’s possible arguments may be false—for example, the discipline and sacrifice of British soldiers in Northern Ireland eventually defeated a terrorist insurgency there (most terrorist insurgencies waged by ethnic or sectarian minorities in the long run fail, although few fail to enemies as disciplined as the postwar British army, and thus as relatively disinclined to reprisal by atrocity). But in this case, anyway, I have never seen a false verbal argument as quietly powerful and impressive as this possibly false non-verbal argument. I am not sure why that is. Perhaps it is because the argument, while compressed, is also stripped down; its strongest visual element honors and mourns the dead, whereas some verbal argument equivalents do not do that sufficiently persuasively. If a category mistake is here implied, it is done without gloating. In any case, it may be worth remembering that despite the sort of memory the Suribachi flag-raising evokes, the war against Japan did not end in victory because of U.S. sacrifice. It ended because when Japan sought to break its enemies’ will by creating fear via deployment of a weapon even more high tech than the suicide-driven car bomb—the Japanese went in for suicide-piloted plane bombs—the United States decided to inflict exponentially greater terror, which broke Japanese will. In the case of Iraq, this is extremely unlikely to be done by the U.S. What is more likely is that the Shiite majority the Sunni Arab minority seeks to terrify into submission will inflict that crushing counter terror. So if discipline and sacrifice fail in Iraq, and it may, counter terror will again prevail, rather than the terror of our current adversaries. Which doesn’t make that New Yorker cover any less powerful a work of art.
May 21, 2007
Star Wars Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:40 PM EST The homepage of this website notes that this is the anniversary of the 1980 release of The Empire Strikes Back, the first Star Wars sequel. It wasn’t much, and by my standards, things got steadily and rapidly worse; I stopped watching after the beginning of the second trilogy. Too bad. The first installment of Star Wars, in 1977, was in its own way thrilling. What happened? In part, someone apparently made the decision to drop the mental age of the intended audience by a few decades with each successive episode. Maybe family movies were the best business to be in, or maybe someone only thought that was the case, but the effect was dispiriting. Another possibility is that nothing had ever before looked like the first installment, which was thus visually thrilling. I have a vague sense that the first one was very early CGI, so maybe nothing could have ever looked like that before—the trick photography of earlier film was suddenly measured against new technical possibilities, and found wanting. There was also some visual wit, and an intriguing pseudo-realism about the way that movie looked. Before 1977, I am pretty sure that all TV and move spaceships were gleaming and spanking new, the very essence of visual hypermodernity. In Star Wars, old spaceships looked rusty and dented, in some cases clearly obsolete. When I looked at the movie seven years on, preparing to debate it with some minor academic luminary at a seminar on recent cultural history, I was startled to see how dreadfully it had aged. What had looked startling in 1977 looked very dreary, decidedly old hat, by 1984. Seen a second time, Star Wars was filled with very little homages, visual and otherwise, to incompatible genres of film—World War II bomber movies, epics of the British Raj, tramp steamers in the South Seas, and so forth down the line, but those genres were mostly invoked only with petty visual tropes: a 1940s-style pilot’s leather jacket, something two-barreled that moved like a pom pom gun (but was set in a ball turret), or a solar topee. Some of the characters were savagely indebted to older movie personae, and those, too, were oddly melded. Someone obviously knew the history of the movies but didn’t sufficiently value the thematic conventions of the genres that were being pillaged, at least not enough to do them any real justice. Star Wars had looked wonderful, but it seemed to have economized on aspects of the writing, which didn’t matter when irony and wit were allowed to dominate the tone but suddenly mattered all too much when irony and wit were pared away. One of the oldest jokes about the movies turns on an actress allegedly so dumb she slept with the writer, a joke that has an oddly sharp point when pondered in the light of the Star Wars sequels. And it turns out that nothing, absolutely nothing, ages so fast as the look of the new. Perhaps the movies, as a very learned screenwriter I used to know long insisted, are not really a visual art.
May 20, 2007
Whatever Happened to the Aviators? II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:10 PM EST John Steele Gordon titled a blog entry on Charles Lindbergh with the question “Whatever happened to the aviators?” The question is answered in the piece itself, which notes that within something like half a century an extremely rare experience—heavier than air flight—became a very common one, and correspondingly a more difficult experience to romanticize. The (sometimes black) magic of flight is not quite gone; most movie footage of helicopters (I recently rented Blood Diamond, where this was still true) or fighter bombers (any episode of 24 where the USAF is attempting to shoot down a terrorist cruise missile, on the evidence of that show a curiously ubiquitous weapon in the terrorist arsenal) still assumes the romance of aviation, at least of military aviation. But in general, I concede the point; flying now seems humdrum to a lot of people. If our species is unlucky, this very fact may make our age impossibly glamorous to posterity. We’ll be the ones who mastered the heavens, and then fell, Icarus-like, in some catastrophe; we’ll probably be simultaneously thought justly punished for our hubris and almost inconceivably magnificent. If, on the other hand, the species is lucky, people will rather marvel that we ate imperfectly thawed garbage while packed together like sardines, merely to fly very slowly in machines efficient only at depleting the ozone. This will be a little like the way I cannot quite credit the astonishing dangerousness of early steam trains, and the fact that people boarded them other than at gunpoint. Early aviation was hazardous and achieved an ancient and for millennia apparently hopeless ambition, so early aviators were justly famous. I think Charles Lindbergh, at least, was romantic for additional reasons. He was American, in a decade when that generally meant hope and hypermodernity to Europeans (and to most other peoples who’d heard of us), and he did what he did quite alone, in an age when merely collective endeavors in both war and economic life seemed the common fate. So Lindbergh’s feat was both atavistically heroic and forward-looking. There is a nice essay on Lindbergh and the imagination of modernity in Modris Eksteins’s Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, part of a large, ambitious, and interesting (if not entirely persuasive) argument. In any event, while the romance that gilded First World War fighter pilots was probably the result of an attempt to preserve the ethos of The Iliad in an age of industrialized slaughter, Lindbergh’s feat was dangerous without being murderous; he was a distinctly postwar hero, and at first blush an appealingly modest and taciturn one. He came a cropper only when he took the Luftwaffe at its leaders’ boastful valuation and in consequence developed some eventually ugly politics. Subsequent events took the shine off Lindbergh, but not off all pilots, because the Luftwaffe, too, came a cropper, at the hands of a smallish number of other pilots. That last bunch remain, for those who remember them, the most romantic heroes of all time. Aviator now sounds not only period, but camp; Spitfire, on the other hand, sounds period, but it is not yet camp, and I am not sure it ever will be. Back in 1981 I remember eating my lunch at a pub opposite the British Library, idly watching some other patrons, lean, silver-haired men in beautiful suits. One of their number was talking, with slightly unusual animation for someone who looked like that, about something he’d done that weekend. His arm waved, and the blade of his hand described an arc, which the arms and hands of speaking middle-class Englishmen rarely did, and I realized he was describing having recently flown a small airplane. With a sudden thrill, and perhaps a little too much imagination, I told myself that they were all old enough. It was suddenly like seeing Odysseus and Ajax talk about old times, except insofar as it wasn’t, for it was more morally satisfying than that first sight would have been. Perhaps the glory of aviators is not entirely dead.
May 20, 2007
Whatever Happened to the Aviators? Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:00 PM EST It was on May 20, 1927, that Charles Lindbergh, invariably referred to as an “aviator” in the press of the day, took off from Roosevelt Field in Long Island in a single-engine plane, headed for Paris. He was so laden with fuel that he barely cleared the phone wires at the end of the runway. But 33 hours later he landed safely at Le Bourget airfield just outside Paris. To put it simply, the world went nuts. Overnight, the unassuming 25-year-old aviator became as famous as anyone on earth. Thousands greeted him at Le Bourget, even though it was 10:30 at night. The next day tens of thousands mobbed the U.S. Embassy in Paris in hopes of getting a glimpse of him. Awarded the Légion d’Honneur by the president of France, when he returned to the United States (like a conquering hero, aboard the cruiser USS Memphis, escorted by other warships), he received the Distinguished Flying Cross from President Coolidge. New York gave him one of the largest ticker-tape parades in its history, and Mayor James J. Walker gave him the city’s Medal of Valor. The following year he was given the country’s highest award, the Medal of Honor, by act of Congress, becoming one of the very few to receive it for actions not involving combat. (It is given only to members of the armed forces, and Lindbergh was eligible because he was a captain in the U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve.) Today, 80 years later, it is a little hard for us to understand what all the fuss was about. Writing this in the late afternoon, I’m confident that, should I take a mind to, I could easily be in Paris tomorrow in time for lunch. (And if anyone would care to finance the venture, I’d be happy to prove it.) Indeed, it was only 12 years to the day after Lindbergh’s flight, May 20, 1939, that Pan-American initiated trans-Atlantic air service, from Port Washington, N.Y., and anyone (with enough money—for it was very expensive) could do what Lindbergh had won world acclaim for, fly nonstop to Europe. The word aviator—a word of magical, romantic power in the 1920s—began to disappear from the everyday vocabulary. To paraphrase Richard Nixon, we are all aviators now. A family story, if I may. My great aunt Mabel Stebbins (she was actually my great aunt’s sister-in-law, but she was Aunt Mabel to me, and I was very fond of her) flew just twice in her life. Married to an army officer, in 1910 she was living in the Panama Canal Zone when someone in the army’s infant air corps (it was called the Aeronautical Division of the Signal Corps then) showed up in a Wright Flyer and offered to take people, including, apparently, wives, up for a spin in the wondrous new technology. Aunt Mabel decided to do exactly that. I see her taking the hat pins out of her vast picture hat and handing it to a friend, tying a stout piece of twine around the hem of her long white summer frock, and climbing aboard. Off she went, becoming, probably, one of the hundred first women ever to fly. The next time she flew was 48 years later, in the fall of 1958. Eighty-eight years old and in failing health by then, she was too frail to make her usual three-day drive to her winter home in Florida, or even to take the train. Instead, she flew down and died peacefully there a few months later. Having flown for the first time in a Wright Flyer, Aunt Mabel’s second and last flight was in a Boeing 707.
May 19, 2007
Cheaper by the Dozen Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:15 PM EST I read with great interest Ellen Feldman’s post on Cheaper by the Dozen. I am not sure I’ve seen the movie, but I did read the book, because it was one of the volumes my elementary school’s librarians pushed on schoolchildren. In those days, some of the books I read came to my attention in that fashion, and the same books were also given as presents by well-meaning if unimaginative adults. Many were published in series—I remember the Landmark books (biographies), general science-ish things that were collectively called the About books, and some slim Prussian-blue volumes that seemed to be older and shorter accounts of the sorts of people covered in the Landmark series. All of these seemed inferior to the books you found on your own, because they were tainted by the approval of the school authorities and could be guaranteed to lack the erotic charge that came your way when you accidentally pulled Balzac’s Droll Stories off a top shelf at home. But among this inferior class of book recommended by school librarians, books not published in series or published too recently somehow seemed more legit, more like real books. I was suspicious of Cheaper by the Dozen because the goody-two-shoes types who accepted librarians’ suggestions without any evident skepticism had all read it before I had, but in the event, Cheaper by the Dozen was readable enough. As it happens, I also remember—very vaguely—something like the scene Ellen Feldman quotes from the film—the deadpan joke played on the Planned Parenthood visitor. At the time it puzzled me. This would have been the late 1950s, almost everyone in our school was part of a family with three children, and while a family with a dozen children seemed engagingly old-timey, even gently mocking someone who wanted people to have families more like the ones I knew about seemed an off note, not malevolent but strange. Years later, in a grad school labor history course, I “learned” that Frank Gilbreth’s time-and-motion studies were a villainous attempt to intensify the rate of surplus value extraction (I paraphrase here, although perhaps not as much as the reader may think). In this little demonology, Gilbreth was conflated with his rival Frederick Winslow Taylor, from whom he in fact differed a bit, but the point of the lesson was that the apparently innocent texts of a childhood in the Eisenhower years concealed vicious ideological indoctrination. My guess, half a century on, is that this was not the whole of the truth of Cheaper by the Dozen, and that the scene Ellen Feldman quotes from the movie version is nastier than the alleged Taylorism of the text. Later in grad school we learned that Lenin and Stalin had admired Taylorism; that really set the cat among the pigeons, although most of the pigeons soon learned to forget the presence of the cat. In the case of the film’s pro-natalism—its ideological commitment to large families, and hostility to birth control—I do not remember quite how much of that was in the book. The book was published in 1946, around the time the families I grew up with were starting, which points to one of the great truths about propaganda for pro-natalism: It is a hard sell. Hitler made it work, but not too many others have. My guess is that middle-class people in the West may well begin to have larger families than are now the case in the currently rich countries, but not because of ideological attacks on birth control. As for the sexual politics of 1950s American film, I remember the odd experience of sitting through an afternoon double feature at a revival house in the late 1970s, where I had gone to recover from the rigors of grad school, possibly from a labor history seminar. The bill was Topper (1937) followed by Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948, from a book published in 1946, the same year as Cheaper by the Dozen). Most of the members of the audience were retired couples, who could date a film within a year from the characters’ dresses, and did. My memory is that the female characters in Topper were sexier, less kittenish, more grown-up, and that there was something off-puttingly pro-natalist about the later film. And I remember thinking that the history of sexual liberation, like many other histories, does not always move in straight lines.
May 17, 2007
The Stark Incident Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:45 PM EST Jack Kelly’s lead piece on this website, “Iraq Attacks America (Accidentally?), 1987,” commemorates an Iraqi attack on an American frigate, the USS Stark, in which 37 American sailors were killed. The Stark was part of an operation aimed at protecting commerce in the Persian Gulf, more specifically one that would eventually protect neutral merchantmen from Iranian attacks, in a war started in 1980 by Iraq with a full-scale invasion of Iran, and subsequently escalated by Iraq into a naval war marked by attacks on oil tankers, which provoked Iranian reprisals. Why was the United States siding with Iraq? In part because the Islamic Republic of Iran had kidnapped American diplomats during the hostage crisis of 1979–1981, thus violating one of the more sacred principles of international law, and thereby had made itself into an outlaw state in a pretty literal way: Having so foully broken the laws of nations, Iran was refused the protection of the law. That phrase is more than a little bombastic; more pertinently and usefully, Iran was deprived of significant U.S. military assistance, which might otherwise have been afforded her in the face of naked aggression. There were other reasons for American support of Iraq—for example, protecting the weaker oil-rich Sunni Arab Gulf states from a radical Shiite Iranian regime, which made the Iraqi Baathists look like a lesser evil, and stopping any single power from controlling the oil reserves of both Iraq and Iran. But had the Iranians not seized our diplomats, it seems almost inconceivable that the United States would have repeatedly and fairly openly intervened on the side of the very obvious and in many ways despicable aggressor. American policy was at times confused, at other times inept, and sometimes contradictory, but we won our end, which was to ensure the (temporary) survival of Iraq as an independent state, no matter what that state’s crimes. The Iraqis lost their initial territorial gains pretty quickly; after a year or so, Saddam Hussein was fighting only for survival, which he managed (for a while) to secure. Over the course of the war Iraq inflicted something like a million casualties on Iran, which means that the earlier pleasures of humiliating and enraging the Americans, which were very sweet at the time, and the political intricacies of which may have created the Islamic Republic, turned out to be very expensive. To the extent that the price of those pleasures was belatedly understood, they may have turned from sweet to bitter, but it is not clear that many if any Iranian Islamists thought (or think) a million casualties were too high a price for seizing and maintaining power. That means it is not clear that any lesson was learned about not paying too much for your whistle, to recall a phrase from Poor Richard’s Almanack, one my maternal grandfather tended to quote with some frequency. Are there any other lessons from the policy that claimed 37 dead aboard the Stark? Fewer, I think, than once seemed to be the case. At the time, it seemed clear that we had no idea what we were doing during the Iran-Iraq War, semi-covertly aiding first one side, then the other, unless we were absolutely pure and at every moment brilliantly effective Machiavels, which seems unlikely, given all other available evidence about the people who devise and administer American foreign policy. In retrospect, though, the worst outcomes—the annexation of Iran’s oil provinces by Iraq, or of all of Iraq by Iran—were avoided. Having learned that the price of naked aggression is not always war with the United States, and that it is often a bad idea to pick on anyone remotely your own size, let alone bigger, Saddam invaded Kuwait, from which he was not-too-expensively expelled, at least in terms of American lives and treasure. So the Reagan and Bush Administrations muddled through, and as far as the Iraq-Iran War goes, it is not clear what a better and clearly attainable outcome would have looked like. The United States winked at one great evil to punish and ward off another; we were ham-handed, dishonest, and at times cowardly; many of the people who devised and executed our policy were fools or worse. But pointing this out is more damning if an obviously superior alternate policy can be sketched out. And a quarter century on, I am less sure than I used to be that it can be.
May 17, 2007
Cheaper by the Dozen Cheap Shot Posted by Ellen Feldman at 05:10 PM EST I am addicted to the Turner Classic Movies channel, both for the gems it revives and for the lesser movies that nonetheless tell us who we were and what we espoused, or what the people who made the movies thought we ought to espouse. I recently caught a snippet of the original Cheaper by the Dozen, with Clifton Webb. The movie is based on the best-selling book about Frank Gilbreth, a renowned efficiency expert, his wife, and their 12 children. Though Gilbreth died in 1924, the book, written by his son and daughter, was not published until 1948, and the movie didn’t come out until 1950. The dates are important for what they tell us about postwar America. It is no secret that as the country demobilized militarily it mobilized to get women out of the workplace and back into the home. An army of pink slips gave the orders. Long full skirts ensured that their wearers were not going to set foot in a factory, cinched waists constricted breathing, and heaven only knows what purpose pointy bras served, beyond feeding male fantasies. During the war, women’s magazines ran features on how to whip up a nutritious dinner in 15 minutes. After it, they printed recipes for Americanized versions of French cuisine that were designed to keep a woman in the kitchen for hours if not the entire day. Despite my knowledge of this backward march, forced in some cases, voluntary in others, the scene in Cheaper by the Dozen, which also appears in the book, still shocked me. A woman played by Mildred Natwick turns up to ask Mrs. Gilbreth, a ravishing, flat-stomached Myrna Loy, to head the Montclair chapter of Planned Parenthood. Mrs. Gilbreth calls her husband, who pretends to support the cause. (There is a considerable amount of mean-spirited elbowing in the ribs in the scene.) Then Mr. Gilbreth blows his whistle, and 12 children come streaking in from every corner of the house and property. The woman leaves in a huff, and Mr. and Mrs. Gilbreth, and presumably the audience, get a good laugh at outwitting this wrongheaded reformer. Four decades after Margaret Sanger went to jail for trying to give birth-control information to poor women, who did not have the same access to worldly private doctors as their more fortunate sisters, birth control had become not a flaming controversy but a bad joke. After all, what better way to bar women from the work place than by keeping them pregnant? Margaret Sanger knew this, but her crusade sought more than self-realization for women. She was fighting for the lives and health of children and their mothers. On a countrywide speaking tour after her arrest, she quoted statistics showing that the likelihood of infant death increased not only as the father’s income went down but also as the time between births shrank. The relative position in the family also affected mortality rates. Thirty-two percent of second children died annually. The rate progressed with each child born to the family, until for the twelfth child, that mystical number Mr. Gilbreth had set his heart on, sixty out of a hundred died each year. Sanger also spoke of the horror of self-induced and back-alley abortions, not by “girls in trouble” but by poor women who could not afford to feed another mouth. And the toll was not only on poor women. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that for the first decade of her marriage she was either always having a child or just getting over having had a child. Perhaps I am a curmudgeon. I did not watch the entire movie. Work called. I’m sure much of it is amusing. But more than half a century later, this mindless glorification of large families as somehow intrinsically virtuous still offends. The ridicule and dismissal of the work of generations who struggled to better the lives of women and children and men infuriates. The fact that the movie has been remade twice in the twenty-first century simply puzzles.
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