As seen from Just Above Sunset

Wednesday, 21 April 2004

Topic: The Culture

Is it time to eschew Roland Barthes for the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin?

I have mentioned before - and Ric added visuals too - the fellow who reviews news cars in The Los Angeles Times, Dan Neil, who recently won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, the first automotive writer to ever win that. See What would Roland Barthes drive? from Volume 2, Number 8 of Just Above Sunset Magazine, Monday, February 23, 2004 - where he was introduced.

Well, Dan Neil is at it again.

Today in The Los Angeles Times he eschews Roland Barthes for the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin. Really. He does.

The item, once you get past the extensive registration, is this:

One is unique, two is too many
Concept cars such as the Chevy SSR are defined by individuality, a quality lost on the assembly line.
Dan Neil, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, April 21, 2004

Neil is reviewing the new Chevrolet SSR - which is a imitation hot rod pickup truck, with a folding metal convertible roof and "retro" styling and fat tires, a sort of cartoon car, the kind of thing boys draw in the eighth grade when they're bored. It's quite odd. It started out as a "concept car" and the Chevy people actually decided to build the thing.

But who cares? The fun is in the ironic cultural warps Neil goes through - like this:

The most lucid thing the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin ever wrote is the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," written in 1936, during an apparent dry spell in Berlin's hashish supply.

Benjamin's famous essay, a staple of film-lit classes, puts a dope-scented finger on a central issue in aesthetics: If the art object is special -- if it has an authenticity, an "aura," Benjamin calls it -- what is the status of the duplicate, the mechanically reproduced copy?

"That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art," says Benjamin. Reproduction "substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence."

In other words: The first David by Michelangelo is art, the second is a lawn ornament.

Which brings us to the Chevrolet SSR. The SSR -- Super Sport Roadster, if you must know -- began life as one of those impossibly cool concept cars at the 2000 Detroit Auto Show, a pickup truck gene-spliced with a hot-rod roadster and incubated in gorgeous '50s heritage, with brand cues skimmed from the noses of Chevy trucks circa 1947-'53.

Roadster? Pickup? Retro? PoMo? No one knew quite what to call it -- and resorted to calling it everything at once -- and GM didn't have a very good idea how to build it....

Well, no point in discussing the car (truck) here. It's heavy and sluggish and crude, and quite expensive. Neil covers all that.

In doing so he does get off some good lines. In discussing the folly of mass producing cars folks loved as "concepts" at the auto shows, Neil points out one might do better not to, and the manufacturers sometimes know it:

Just about every carmaker I can think of has been burned by this phenomenon at one time or another. They display a show-stopping prototype -- for example, the Plymouth Prowler -- and the car-loving public begs the automaker to bring the car to market; but by the time the finished product rolls off the assembly line, the vehicle isn't so cool anymore. Art has become commodity. Elvis has left the building.

Nobody understands the risks better than the carmakers themselves. GM's Cadillac Sixteen was the darling of last year's autoramas -- a huge, rakish and evocative 16-cylinder saloon car, as sumptuous a slice of autocratic hauteur as ever ran over a peasant. Build it and they will come, chorused the automotive press. Yeah, sure, right, said GM.

And they didn't build it. Perhaps they anticipated the lawsuits from the families of recently flattened peasants.

But they built this SSR thing. And it's just silly. And as Neil says -

It's also too expensive. Our test model, in crime-scene-tape yellow, was priced at $44,260, a price point that limits its appeal to -- if I may be so indelicate -- rich old guys who want yet another weekend toy.

And a toy is just what it looks like, something the Revell model company might require you to glue together over a weekend. It's the sort of vehicle that will stop preschoolers in their tracks, but the older the observer -- if one can judge from the looks on their faces -- the more mixed the reactions. There is a lack of seriousness with the SSR -- a lack, Benjamin would say, of authenticity. And I felt kind of ridiculous behind the wheel.

Yes, corporations can't build hot rods.

And that circles back to the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin -

By definition, hot rods are one of a kind. And when we see them on the street we light up because we are in the presence of something special, art qua art. Also, hot rods are built from the inside out. They are old cars with their guts ripped out so they can get as much performance as possible under the hood. Pouring a racy enamel over a truck chassis just isn't the same.

The concept-car SSR was as close to the real thing as it will ever get. When I look at an SSR on the street now I see only a copy of an original. It's as if it were forever and futilely swimming upstream toward its spawning grounds, the auto show floor, to the time and place where it was unique.

The SSR's greatest failing is not that it's a novelty but that it's not novel enough.

Yep, it's not the real thing. It will not do, as it is not the thing in and of itself. It may have been designed out here at the GM design center in Pomona, just east of Los Angeles, but it's not the real deal, just a corporate marketing object, a brick on wheels.

Here's a real California hot rod, on Sunset Boulevard, at the appropriate business.

Posted by Alan at 17:56 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Topic: Photos

The Evil Twin

I did not realize that Harriet-the-Surly-Housecat had an evil twin. I poked my head out the window early this morning to see if I could get a sense of how soon the marine-layer fog might lift, and starting at me, from a deck chair at the edge of the pool next door, was this.

A cat not to be trifled with....

Posted by Alan at 11:36 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Tuesday, 20 April 2004

Topic: Election Notes

Playing dumb - C'est affreux of course - but necessary.

The necessary caveat: Language is something I've been curious about since the sixties.

And one thing that interests me is each specific language and how it shapes thought. As I've mentioned, my graduate work was on Swift, or more specifically on his ironic language. How can you say one thing and your readers know you actually mean something else entirely, but not exactly the opposite? There are seven or ten levels of other things you mean but you're not saying. They're clear anyway. Most everyone gets them just fine. They laugh.

But how did that happen? This calls for careful examination of the workings of language itself. So in high school I was reading the "New Critics" - Brooks and Warren - and then later it was off into the madness of semiotics and the deconstructionists - Derrida and that crew. And don't get me started on Chomsky - or even Benjamin Lee Whorf and the harmless Otto Jesperson.

Anyway, I got hooked on the idea that if thought only occurs through the use of language, then what does any single syntax and grammar allow you to think? What does it let you think? What does it keep you from thinking?

French is cool, for example. Joseph, an expatriate American living in France, brought up the political implications of this in something he posted in January to a bunch of folks with whom I correspond.

A topic that I have been intending to bring up, but have not had the time to develop, concerns a peculiarity of the French language. Now all but dead in English, the "subjunctive" mode is still going strong in French. For those unfamiliar, one could reasonably say that the French have an entire tense dedicated to doubt. I can't help but see a connection between this and issues of national character and the impact that this has on political life.

Does not the requirement that one use this mode after all kinds of expressions, which in English do not appear to contain any doubt, have an impact on discourse, forcing both speaker and listener to recognize the presence of doubt?

Good question, and my friends kicked that about for a bit.

I think now John Kerry worried about this. Joshua Kurlantzick in the current New Yorker points out that in private settings Kerry has chatted in excellent French with Alain de Chalvron, Washington bureau chief for the French radio service France 2. So? It seems also that now, when asked a question in French at an open press conference, Kerry pretends not to be able to understand it, and doesn't give an answer at all. Curious.

The Kurlantzick item is here:

THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
PARDON?
Joshua Kurlantzick, The New Yorker Issue of 2004-04-19 and 26 - Posted 2004-04-12

Here's some detail:

Alain de Chalvron, the Washington bureau chief for France 2, the French equivalent of the BBC, hasn't had an easy time since he came to America, last fall. He has had to endure a predictable barrage of remarks regarding freedom fries, Old Europe, and the "Axis of Weasel," along with a reticent White House, which has made it hard for foreign journalists to get briefings. So when John Kerry became the front-runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination de Chalvron and other French journalists in Washington were understandably excited. They knew about Kerry: he went to a Swiss boarding school, he has a cousin who ran for the French Presidency, and he supposedly wooed Teresa Heinz by impressing her with his fluent French.

For a time, Kerry seemed equally enthusiastic about the French reporters covering his campaign. "He was quite accessible in Iowa and New Hampshire," de Chalvron said the other day, in his office in Washington. "He understands French very well. His words are correct and sometimes even sophisticated. I asked him, `How can you have this life? It must be terrible, crisscrossing the country.' Kerry answered, `C'est affreux'--`It's awful.'" De Chalvron's voice rose with admiration. "Affreux, it's not a very usual word. It's something a French person can use easily, but Kerry could have said, `Yes, it's terrible,' instead of going to pick a more difficult word."

Well, that's no more than amusing language trivial.

Except for the months that followed. Kurlantzick notes that Republicans have long suggested Kerry is too... continental? And I have mentioned that in his daily Wall Street Journal column James Taranto always refers to Kerry as the "haughty French-looking senator, who, by the way, served in Vietnam." This did all start when Commerce Secretary Donald Evans told reporters that Kerry "looks French." That stuck. And Kurlantzick reminds us that conservatives complained about Kerry talking about endorsements of him from foreign leaders, and how right-wing talk-show hosts now refer to Kerry as "Monsieur Kerry" and "Jean Cheri."

Kurlantzick adds there was a final straw, and a sudden shift:

A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post reported that G. Clotaire Rapaille, a French anthropologist known for identifying the subconscious associations that people from various cultures make in the "reptilian" part of their brains, had offered to become the Senator's Gallic Naomi Wolf, devising ways for him to rid his speaking style of French influences.

Suddenly, Kerry appeared to develop linguistic amnesia. "During a press conference, I asked Kerry a question, on Iraq," de Chalvron recalled. "He didn't answer. In front of the American journalists, he didn't want to take a question that was not in English." Lo?ck Berrou, the United States bureau chief for de Chalvron's competitor, TF1, has been having similar problems. Berrou chatted in French with Kerry on a commercial flight last year; the Senator reminisced about his family's country house in Saint-Briac-sur-Mer, a village in Brittany, where Kerry's cousin is the mayor. "We've pushed hard to get an interview with him, and no answer," Berrou says.

Family members have apparently been put on a leash as well. Kerry's wife, Berrou says, "speaks with us in French with no problem, and her press attach? has to pull her by the shirt to get her away from us."

Ah well.

Kurlantzick lets us know this English-only rule doesn't seem to hold when Kerry is speaking off the record. In fact, he says on his campaign plane recently, Kerry carried on a lively conversation with de Chalvron in French.

The other day, in his office, de Chalvron showed footage of Kerry bringing hot towels to foreign journalists in the back of the plane and bantering with Parisian reporters about his chances. De Chalvron was perplexed. "For us, to speak any other language and have an open view of the world, for a President, should be a plus," he said.

Mais, non! Kerry knows better.

And this:

As for an on-the-record interview, de Chalvron is still trying, but Kerry's campaign has not responded. He did, however, recently land an interview with Pat Robertson, who told him, "Jean Fran?ois Kerry will never be elected."

You don't mess with Pat Robertson. Pat tells many people how to vote, and they do. That has something to do with jesus but I'm not sure what.

Geoffrey K. Pullum over at the site Language Log (University of Pennsylvania) has a few comments on all this -

... The last thing you want in American politics, apparently, is to be captured on camera understanding French, let alone speaking it. Rush Limbaugh would start portraying you as hardly American at all (he already does this with Kerry, in fact, having heard about these suspicious francophone abilities on the grapevine).

Geoff Nunberg pointed out to me that in Nebraska they once passed a law making it illegal to teach foreign languages in the schools, period. Foreign language learning is now, like sodomy, legal in all states; but these are not freedoms that a politician should brag about taking advantage of. Such is the determined linguistic isolationism of the USA. I would have thought that to have a US president (for once) who could argue fluently and convincingly in the native language of some other head of state would be a fantastic asset. But instead it is perceived as a kind of disloyalty, evidence of being an untrustworthy egghead, and you would lose millions of votes over it. It's both depressing and amazing.

Yes, but I think it circles back to the comment from Joseph I cited up top.

Learning another language can be dangerous. I can have you thinking is ways that could be disturbing. As I said, if thought only occurs through the use of language, then what does any single syntax and grammar allow you to think? What does it let you think? What does it keep you from thinking?

I suspect someone knows if you learn French you might find yourself slipping into the subjunctive mode, as it were. You might think new thoughts. You might start doubting things. And we cannot have that, can we? Doubting is so very... French.

The word nuance is French, and as Bush says, he doesn't do nuance. Most Americans don't. The language we use doesn't as easily allow it. Tant pis.

Posted by Alan at 21:50 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Topic: World View

On delusion, mercenaries, Steubenville, Ohio and DeKalb, Georgia. Two friends from France comment on privatization.

My American friend in France, Joseph, glanced through my weekly "magazine" site Just Above Sunset and noted the discussion of why "Lawrence of Arabia" is an appropriate film to consider these days (here) - and the item on George Bush's odd sense of reality (here). He was particularly amused by William Saletan's take on Bush I cited -

See Trust, Don't Verify
Bush's incredible definition of credibility.
William Saletan - SLATE.COM - Posted Wednesday, April 14, 2004, at 3:27 AM PT

Joseph said he was struck with a question - "If we tend to view history through the prism of popular movies, does that make Bush the 'Momento' president?"

Ah yes, the movie we need to pay attention to is "Lawrence of Arabia" -- but the move we actually get is "Memento." I dozed off on the sofa this afternoon and woke up to some political talk show on the television - or was it Abbott and Costello doing that "Who's On First?" routine? Heck, if we're going to be stuck in some movie I was hoping for something better - Peter Sellers in "A Shot in the Dark" or something.

Joseph further commented -

By the way, now that this thing has turned into the fiasco that most of us said it would, I wonder what your "unnamed friend" is saying these days... Hey, the mistake is understandable. We're a nation that admires CEOs, we wanted a CEO president. Now that the nation and the armed services are being run efficiently, like a proper corporation (just forget how far we're in the red) I hope that we're all happy with the result.

I told Joseph I shall see my "unnamed friend" in a week or two - my conservative buddy is off at a trade show in Vegas this week and one somewhere else after that. I suspect he will be silent on these matters. Bush said he'd run the country as a CEO would, and Bush does have an MBA of course - but every company he was involved with went under. There are CEO's - then there are CEO's.

What I find curious, and something I find troubling, is that in addition to our 130,000 troops in Iraq, we also have more than 20,000 "private contract" troops we pay quite handsomely. They've just this week been "tasked" with providing protection for the "Green Zone" - the only safe place in Baghdad, with all the palaces and fancy hotels and former government edifices, where Viceroy Bremer works. This is to free up our "public" troops to go out and fix the larger country in whatever way they can. This is a one hundred million dollar contract.

These "private contract troops" do pretty much what our soldiers do - but get paid much more and operate under no Geneva Convention crap at all. And, in a CEO kind of way, you see the future. The war is becoming "privatized" - we're paying companies like Blackwater Security (it was their guys who got strung from the bridge in Fallujah) to do the dirty work - and that would be the wet work (targeted assassinations) and collective punishment (snipers taking out ambulances and children for maximum psychological effect). We can say "our forces" don't do such things, and that is perfectly true. Pretty clever. The mistake France made in Algeria in the late fifties is that they used the regular army for torture and such things. The truth finally came out and there was no deniability. We've learned a few things since then.

Who are these guys? Some are former members of the South African Defense Force and South African Police. Hired guns. Guy who took out politicians who didn't much like apartheid. Try this regarding one of the four killed in Fallujah:

Gray Branfield, 55, admitted to being part of a death squad which gunned down Joe Gqabi, the ANC's chief representative and Umkhonto weSizwe operational head in Zimbabwe on July 31 1981. Gqabi was shot 19 times when three assassins ambushed him as he reversed down the driveway of his Harare home.

Nice guy! Well, he had marketable skills.

As another fiend in Paris, Ric Erickson, commented,

In normal, not CEO, English - these 'private contract troops' are mercenaries.

MERCENARIES.

The Romans used them effectively for longer than the USA has existed; and the Nazis used them - forced them - but when the steam or money ran out, the mercenaries couldn't save the ballgame. They saved they own asses.

Maybe so.

But we have used them before. They helped us become what we are. Remember the Hessians we paid to help us win the war against England, our own revolution? We paid Germans - von Steuben and de Kalb and their troops - to fight the redcoats for us. And we honored Baron von Steuben by naming one of our cities after him - Steubenville, Ohio. Not much of an honor, for those of you who have been there - Dean Martin's hometown, rusting and dead on the river west of Pittsburgh. But it was a nice gesture. And then there is DeKalb, Georgia. Well, maybe we didn't like these guys.

Anyway, for more background on our current pseudo-Hessian assassins, the New York Times gives enormous detail here and you will find a comment at American Prospect here.

These guys represent the second largest force in Iraq right now. There are more of them than there are Brits in Basra.

We've privatized the war a bit. I'm not sure where that will take us.

Regarding privatization, I see the government over there is France is working hard at privatizing all these large industries - more efficient and all that. Ric and Joseph will have holy hell to pay for that this year with demonstrations and strikes.

But have Chirac's ministers considered privatizing the army? We're working on that over here. Remember your Bonaparte - L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace !

Ric Erickson gives details:

It's pretty neat. On the state-owned radio, state-owned EDF (electricity supplier) is advertising itself in preparation for being sold via the stock market. France wants to sell a less than controlling interest in EDF - to conform to EU regulations that state enterprises allow competition. Who, besides EDF, owns and operates the electricity generators and the transmission lines in France? How will it be possible for a home owner to buy electrictity from 'Electros de Espana' for example? Does the state intend to reimburse the current stockholders - the taxpayers?

Well, out here in California we dealt with this when we deregulated the electric markets two years ago. Anyone anywhere - from as far away as Texas and Canada - could feed the grid and get paid for it. So they all got together and withheld power to force up the prices - and we had blackouts and the price of electricity went up three and four hundred percent for a bit. The state was forced into long-term contracts at fixed high prices and went billions into debt just to keep the lights on. Thus the free market works - many people made quite a lot of money. France is next.

But Ric points out the privatization business in France is getting folks worked up.

Former law-and-order interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, now head of finance at Bercy, has just frozen 7 billion euros of planned state expenditure. Unemployment figures have been revised upward. Meanwhile, 650,000 unemployed cut from benefits on January 1st have won a court case, reinstating their benefits.

The 'new' government that resulted from the recent massive slap in the face from voters seems to be more hapless than the one it replaced. The government, now facing coming EU elections, is worried but seems incapable of veering from its course to total disaster. Yesterday, Chirac's recycled prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, had the disagreeable task of meeting with all of the recently elected regional presidents - some 20 out of 21 who are members of parties other than the government's. C'est ? dire - Socialists, Greens, Communists and other lefties.

I don't sense that there is a huge swell of support for the parties of the left. Rather, it seems like a total rejection of the last right-wing government's policies, and of the recycled new right-wing government's policies. All so-called 'reforms' have either been abandoned or are on hold. The emperor has no new clothes.

Not only has Chirac seemed to have lost his political 'touch,' but the so-called new UMP party created to keep him in office is losing its cools -- blowing them. Popularity polls show only 30-40 percent approval for Chirac and Raffarin, with the latter getting worse notes than his boss. The percentage of 'don't-knows' polled is very small.

The mayor of Paris is not waiting patiently until Chirac is out of office and loses his immunity from prosecution, to charge him with embezzling city funds. Maybe not so grave; maybe only a court order forcing restitution... But it gives Chirac a strong incentive to re-run for President. He only needs a miracle.

These days, 'l'audace' is nowhere in evidence.

Indeed. Privatizing everything in France to make it look more like America seems to be meeting resistance. There's little resistance here, but we're not French, and proud of it.

Is Chirac as detached from reality as Bush (see above)? Ric comments on Bush - "At least he is consistently deluded, instead of only randomly."

Cold comfort.

Posted by Alan at 15:14 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Tuesday, 20 April 2004 15:31 PDT home

Topic: The Media

What gets reported: CNN slams Al Jazeera for being narrowly accurate but not responsible because they do not exclude certain facts and images...

First of all, the CNN news anchor Daryn Kagan is a stunning woman - you will find biographical notes and a picture here if you want to check that out. But last week CNN had her interview Al Jazeera editor-in-chief Ahmed Al-Sheik regarding how Al Jazeera covers things in Iraq that CNN covers quite differently. So the gorgeous Kagan woman faced off against the scruffy Al Jazeera fellow - for a discussion of press ethics. It was amusing.

On the site Electronic Iraq you will find a discussion of the dialog.

See CNN to Al Jazeera: Why Report Civilian Deaths?
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 19 April 2004

This antiwar site thinks Daryn Kagan has her head up her ass - as does CNN. They cover her interview on the 12th where she commented to this Al Jazeera guy that Al Jazeera only makes things worse by doing stories on civilian causalities - when that hurts everything the world thinks is good and all that. Don't show that stuff? It's not the "real" story? This particular form of accuracy is bad news reporting? I guess.

Well, she may be right. But she's not terribly coherent. I did watch this when it was broadcast.

Except (whole thing is pretty detailed) --

Acting as the substitute anchor on CNN's Wolf Blitzer Reports, Kagan began the interview by asking Al-Sheik to respond to those accusations, citing U.S. officials "saying the pictures and the reporting that Al Jazeera put on the air only adds to the sense of frustration and anger and adds to the problems in Iraq, rather than helping to solve them." After Al-Sheik defended Al Jazeera's work as "accurate" and the images as representative of "what takes place on the ground," Kagan pressed on: "Isn't the story, though, bigger than just the simple numbers, with all due respect to the Iraqi civilians who have lost their lives-- the story bigger than just the numbers of people who were killed or the fact that they might have been killed by the U.S. military, that the insurgents, the people trying to cause problems within Fallujah, are mixing in among the civilians, making it actually possibly that even more civilians would be killed, that the story is what the Iraqi insurgents are doing, in addition to what is the response from the U.S. military?"

CNN's argument that a bigger story than civilian deaths is "what the Iraqi insurgents are doing" to provoke a U.S. "response" is startling. Especially in light of official U.S. denials of civilian deaths, video footage of women and children killed by the U.S. military is evidence that needs to be seen.

And Al Jazeera is not alone in reporting a reality very different from the one U.S. officials describe. ... But independent journalists reporting from Fallujah have described a scene consistent with the one broadcast by Al Jazeera.

You see the problem here. CNN is covering the story of how these insurgents are using civilians as human shields to provoke American forces into killing civilians, which we do, and are forced to do - so CNN won't show images of these dead civilians because folks might get the wrong story. The real story actually is these insurgents killed these people, making the American forces seem to be the bad guys, because they were the ones who pulled the trigger or dropped the cluster bomb. They made us do it. Al Jazeera is reporting that civilians are getting killed, and will show the images, because it is actually happening. They don't report the "back story" CNN contends is the real truth.

Or another way to see it, CNN proposes the view of our government on civilian deaths is might be the right view.

But either way, do you show the pictures? CNN could show them too, and argue that this is what the insurgents - these dusky devils with the odd religion - are forcing our troops to do.

The larger issue is, I suppose, either way, do you show the pictures to give a visceral sense of what is happening to actual people? Or do you assume people really do know what is happening and don't need gruesome reminders of what the bad guys - you choose which side represents the bad guys - are causing to happen to women and children.

No answer here.

Posted by Alan at 13:51 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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