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Homeland (2011)
Basic Flaws Affect Public Perceptions
I.
I missed this Showtime series the first time around, but viewed a re-run of its first two seasons in January 2018. While the acting and filming is pretty good, the story line has glaring basic flaws that simply defy logic. I gather that the series was quite popular and generated a lot of discussion, but, for me, watching the first two seasons was just painful, especially since such drama greatly affects public perceptions. (The drama gets too distant from the mostly boring truth. For example, the series "24", with its silly rapid-fire video-game format, had the same difficulty staying in touch with reality - but a major portion of the public still bought in to its ridiculous story line.) Furthermore, the Showtime series purports to be a terrorist thriller, but is actually much more a sociological commentary on contemporary American culture. And the picture it paints isn't pretty.
Its makers tried to reflect "authenticity", even showing scenes filmed in the main CIA foyer and lots of black SUVs with smoked windows and sneaky people with wires coming out of their ears. But its major problems involve its premises. One of its most unsettling aspects is watching an American foreign intelligence collection agency shamefully operate like thugs and crooks with impunity and arrogance inside the United States exactly like the old Soviet Communist KGB and similar organizations in all Warsaw Pact countries did throughout the long "Cold" War (which I experienced first-hand for years). Since what is shown is textbook KGB, but with far more advanced and pervasive surveillance capabilities, the CIA seemingly has become and surpassed its former enemy. (Why did we even bother waging that "Cold" War?) America never stooped this low to trash its constitutional principles even when another twisted ideology had the very real capability to rain nuclear bombs down on every American city in the next thirty minutes. Where would these people today be without all those high tech surveillance tools and supercomputers and cellphones and facial recognition and drones and GPS tracking and hired contractors to do 95% of the work for them? Makes you wonder how the nation managed to survive the Warsaw Pact through much of the last century with many tens of thousands fewer people. What kind of audience did the series creators think would find this despicable behavior somehow admirable, even acceptable? America is not tiny Israel, and the possibility of a few crazies with home-made bombs running around loose is not the same kind of very real threat as tens of thousands of dedicated agents of a gigantic enemy ideological alliance woven throughout every part of American society, including its government.
Another premise is that a body of very wise American thinkers has carefully thought through what we are now doing, so it's "all for the good". This, of course, is just absurd. No one has thought this stuff through. In "Homeland" we get so caught up in the micro-drama of the moment that we lose sight of the larger issues that are taking place on the macro level. Part of the problem is that the terrorist construct is based on the premise that "authorities" must stop acts before they are actually committed, as if terrorism has not visited America routinely throughout its entire history. So now you can be tossed in prison for something you plan to do, for your intentions, not only for something you did, your acts. But, in pursuit of this objective, how do "authorities" prove in a public American courtroom that apparently innocent and mostly mental behavior would lead irrevocably to some evil result, and not to some entirely innocent result, or to no result at all? Is it now a crime to plan to do something? Who gets to decide such things? Who interprets the intentions of others? How much collateral damage to American society are "authorities" allowed to inflict in pursuit of their almost impossible objectives? Since the American justice system is based on the premise that people are subsequently held accountable for illegal acts they actually committed in the past, the terrorist "anticipatory preemption" construct requires a shredding of countless American constitutional rights and principles. "You're guilty if his majesty the king says you're guilty!" And, once "authorities" have been allowed to venture down that path with "terrorism", they can also wander down similar other paths with other "criminal" activity, too. But terrorism is orchestrated mainly by foreign masters, while crimes are domestic activity. Very quickly a long list of American constitutional rights become just popular delusions, and the "servants" have become the rulers, lurking around in our own shadows - not in foreign war zones or enemy states, but right across the street in "free" America. This was the very reason why the United States waged the 45-year-long "Cold" War against Soviet communism and its various "security" organizations -- used by "authorities" against their own people.
It was an actually wise Benjamin Franklin who observed, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty or safety."
The first two seasons portrayed a story about a good Marine (Brody) who was captured, put in a cage and tortured like a bug by everyone he met, on both sides, before and after being freed, at work and at home, for the next dozen years, for as long as it takes someone to start in the first grade and eventually graduate from high school. And yet everyone consciously refuses to even consider the blatantly obvious implications of that simple basic fact. When you watch the creeps who come into his life all along the way, including the demanding and needy women, it's like watching child sociopaths who have nothing better to do than stick a needle in a bug to see how long it takes him to die -- all while whining about how despicable the BUG is. The C-Y-A government officials are all far more concerned about protecting and furthering their own "careers" with lies and crimes than anything else. These unaccountable bureaucrats and politicians, theoretical "public servants", high on their power trip over the citizens they rule, are very safe in the knowledge that no one is ever going to do to them what they routinely do to others with impunity, that all they have to do to stay in business is confiscate the necessary billions from the people who employ them theoretically on their behalf. And the people employ the CIA to collect and analyze foreign intelligence, not to run around playing covert paramilitary operations. They employ the FBI and the military to do such things legally, constitutionally. They do not give weapons of war to civilians operating outside the accountability of military, federal and international law.
And their "Manchurian Candidate" wannabe from the very beginning never did anything that was not dictated or programmed or manipulated by others with their own self-serving agendas, at home and abroad, and all while he's under constant extreme threat. Imagine a women who's supposed to be a trained and experienced professional whining about her TARGET "not returning her love" - after she secretly watched the guy interact with his family via multiple spy cameras planted in every corner of his own home for two whole months like some really slimy KGB or Stasi voyeur. That's enough to tell you that she belongs in her own cage convicted of multiple crimes, that the only thing that keeps this psychopath running is her obsession to solve a puzzle wrecking havoc in her own mind. Then there's the Marine captain who's been sleeping with the POW's faithless wife for years while the sergeant husband was busy being trapped in a torture hole. And SHE'S indignant? The captain even keeps lurking in the wings as her "more ideal replacement" monkey (who can't grow up and make his own life)? It's all downhill from this pathetic depth. I could not find one single person I in his place since 2003 would ever have trusted for a second, including his own wife and daughter. (To American women, trust apparently is inexplicably a one-way street.) Any one of these people could have used their own interpretations to easily send me right back to the first day in that torture hole. Americans are just terrible at viewing the board from the other side's vantage.
Given the first eight years of the POW's odyssey, a normal man faced with the lunacy of this story would have gone postal long before the series reached the end of the first season. Instead, all we have is someone's twisted version of a mechanical toy soldier doing whatever is needed to keep the story going and the women looking somehow grotesquely "admirable". (Danes' character actually makes my skin crawl; I would never consent to work with such a person, especially on matters of national security.) If the CIA with all its whiz bang toys can find and kill suspected terrorists in the middle of teeming cities on the other side of the planet and watch their annihilation on "live TV", why couldn't they find two US Marines held by those terrorists for eight long years? Did they even try? How inept in your job is it possible to get? Just what good are all those trillion dollar tools? (It's like the incredible ten long years it took for them to find the world's most famous public terrorist-of-the-century. Ten years! And yet targets for remote control assassination with "acceptable levels of collateral damage" can be located in minutes, from the comfort of the DC office.) Anyone with an actually functioning brain would have dozens of such questions about this story, which obviously suffers under too many bosses and too many ulterior agendas.
(This review is posted in two parts.)
Homeland (2011)
Basic Flaws Affect Public Perceptions
I.
I missed this Showtime series the first time around, but viewed a re-run of its first two seasons in January 2018. While the acting and filming is pretty good, the story line has glaring basic flaws that simply defy logic. I gather that the series was quite popular and generated a lot of discussion, but, for me, watching the first two seasons was just painful, especially since such drama greatly affects public perceptions. (The drama gets too distant from the mostly boring truth. For example, the series "24", with its silly rapid-fire video-game format, had the same difficulty staying in touch with reality - but a major portion of the public still bought in to its ridiculous story line.) Furthermore, the Showtime series purports to be a terrorist thriller, but is actually much more a sociological commentary on contemporary American culture. And the picture it paints isn't pretty.
Its makers tried to reflect "authenticity", even showing scenes filmed in the main CIA foyer and lots of black SUVs with smoked windows and sneaky people with wires coming out of their ears. But its major problems involve its premises. One of its most unsettling aspects is watching an American foreign intelligence collection agency shamefully operate like thugs and crooks with impunity and arrogance inside the United States exactly like the old Soviet Communist KGB and similar organizations in all Warsaw Pact countries did throughout the long "Cold" War (which I experienced first-hand for years). Since what is shown is textbook KGB, but with far more advanced and pervasive surveillance capabilities, the CIA seemingly has become and surpassed its former enemy. (Why did we even bother waging that "Cold" War?) America never stooped this low to trash its constitutional principles even when another twisted ideology had the very real capability to rain nuclear bombs down on every American city in the next thirty minutes. Where would these people today be without all those high tech surveillance tools and supercomputers and cellphones and facial recognition and drones and GPS tracking and hired contractors to do 95% of the work for them? Makes you wonder how the nation managed to survive the Warsaw Pact through much of the last century with many tens of thousands fewer people. What kind of audience did the series creators think would find this despicable behavior somehow admirable, even acceptable? America is not tiny Israel, and the possibility of a few crazies with home-made bombs running around loose is not the same kind of very real threat as tens of thousands of dedicated agents of a gigantic enemy ideological alliance woven throughout every part of American society, including its government.
Another premise is that a body of very wise American thinkers has carefully thought through what we are now doing, so it's "all for the good". This, of course, is just absurd. No one has thought this stuff through. In "Homeland" we get so caught up in the micro-drama of the moment that we lose sight of the larger issues that are taking place on the macro level. Part of the problem is that the terrorist construct is based on the premise that "authorities" must stop acts before they are actually committed, as if terrorism has not visited America routinely throughout its entire history. So now you can be tossed in prison for something you plan to do, for your intentions, not only for something you did, your acts. But, in pursuit of this objective, how do "authorities" prove in a public American courtroom that apparently innocent and mostly mental behavior would lead irrevocably to some evil result, and not to some entirely innocent result, or to no result at all? Is it now a crime to plan to do something? Who gets to decide such things? Who interprets the intentions of others? How much collateral damage to American society are "authorities" allowed to inflict in pursuit of their almost impossible objectives? Since the American justice system is based on the premise that people are subsequently held accountable for illegal acts they actually committed in the past, the terrorist "anticipatory preemption" construct requires a shredding of countless American constitutional rights and principles. "You're guilty if his majesty the king says you're guilty!" And, once "authorities" have been allowed to venture down that path with "terrorism", they can also wander down similar other paths with other "criminal" activity, too. But terrorism is orchestrated mainly by foreign masters, while crimes are domestic activity. Very quickly a long list of American constitutional rights become just popular delusions, and the "servants" have become the rulers, lurking around in our own shadows - not in foreign war zones or enemy states, but right across the street in "free" America. This was the very reason why the United States waged the 45-year-long "Cold" War against Soviet communism and its various "security" organizations -- used by "authorities" against their own people.
It was an actually wise Benjamin Franklin who observed, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty or safety."
The first two seasons portrayed a story about a good Marine (Brody) who was captured, put in a cage and tortured like a bug by everyone he met, on both sides, before and after being freed, at work and at home, for the next dozen years, for as long as it takes someone to start in the first grade and eventually graduate from high school. And yet everyone consciously refuses to even consider the blatantly obvious implications of that simple basic fact. When you watch the creeps who come into his life all along the way, including the demanding and needy women, it's like watching child sociopaths who have nothing better to do than stick a needle in a bug to see how long it takes him to die -- all while whining about how despicable the BUG is. The C-Y-A government officials are all far more concerned about protecting and furthering their own "careers" with lies and crimes than anything else. These unaccountable bureaucrats and politicians, theoretical "public servants", high on their power trip over the citizens they rule, are very safe in the knowledge that no one is ever going to do to them what they routinely do to others with impunity, that all they have to do to stay in business is confiscate the necessary billions from the people who employ them theoretically on their behalf. And the people employ the CIA to collect and analyze foreign intelligence, not to run around playing covert paramilitary operations. They employ the FBI and the military to do such things legally, constitutionally. They do not give weapons of war to civilians operating outside the accountability of military, federal and international law.
And their "Manchurian Candidate" wannabe from the very beginning never did anything that was not dictated or programmed or manipulated by others with their own self-serving agendas, at home and abroad, and all while he's under constant extreme threat. Imagine a women who's supposed to be a trained and experienced professional whining about her TARGET "not returning her love" - after she secretly watched the guy interact with his family via multiple spy cameras planted in every corner of his own home for two whole months like some really slimy KGB or Stasi voyeur. That's enough to tell you that she belongs in her own cage convicted of multiple crimes, that the only thing that keeps this psychopath running is her obsession to solve a puzzle wrecking havoc in her own mind. Then there's the Marine captain who's been sleeping with the POW's faithless wife for years while the sergeant husband was busy being trapped in a torture hole. And SHE'S indignant? The captain even keeps lurking in the wings as her "more ideal replacement" monkey (who can't grow up and make his own life)? It's all downhill from this pathetic depth. I could not find one single person I in his place since 2003 would ever have trusted for a second, including his own wife and daughter. (To American women, trust apparently is inexplicably a one-way street.) Any one of these people could have used their own interpretations to easily send me right back to the first day in that torture hole. Americans are just terrible at viewing the board from the other side's vantage.
Given the first eight years of the POW's odyssey, a normal man faced with the lunacy of this story would have gone postal long before the series reached the end of the first season. Instead, all we have is someone's twisted version of a mechanical toy soldier doing whatever is needed to keep the story going and the women looking somehow grotesquely "admirable". (Danes' character actually makes my skin crawl; I would never consent to work with such a person, especially on matters of national security.) If the CIA with all its whiz bang toys can find and kill suspected terrorists in the middle of teeming cities on the other side of the planet and watch their annihilation on "live TV", why couldn't they find two US Marines held by those terrorists for eight long years? Did they even try? How inept in your job is it possible to get? Just what good are all those trillion dollar tools? (It's like the incredible ten long years it took for them to find the world's most famous public terrorist-of-the-century. Ten years! And yet targets for remote control assassination with "acceptable levels of collateral damage" can be located in minutes, from the comfort of the DC office.) Anyone with an actually functioning brain would have dozens of such questions about this story, which obviously suffers under too many bosses and too many ulterior agendas.
(This review is posted in two parts.)
SEAL Team (2017)
Needs Help
The show could use some US military advisers more experienced in theater-level ground combat operations. As it is, the show sometimes comes off as rather egocentric. The old "The Unit", about the US Army's Delta, was better.
For example, in the "Seal Team" episode titled "Other Lives", supposedly taking place in an active and exceedingly difficult Syrian war zone under command of a separate multi-national joint US military command, the Seal Team lies about their true situation on the ground in order to get Special Forces people diverted to them on a dime from their own mission elsewhere. So the Seal's lie also endangered the lives of the Special Forces personnel without giving them a say in the matter.
The primary structure of deployed US Army Special Forces is a team of twelve or fewer men. Their people ("green berets") go in for the long haul to live and work with the local people they are advising and training, usually while engaged in prolonged active combat operations against enemy forces, so when they responded to the Seal's call they would also have bought some of those locals with them, too - endangering even more lives for a lie.
This is not good military thinking - thankfully only alluded to in the episode. This is not to say that the SF would not have responded given the full truth, but they would have decided and planned based on that full truth (and, even better, if provided the opportunity, planned for the contingency in advance of the Seal insertion). It's not surprising that Special Forces still won't subject themselves to being portrayed in Hollywood fiction.
The Devil's Own (1997)
A Good Story Could Have Been Better
Many of those who have rated the film seem to focus on the politics involved, including one "Scot" reviewer who brands the Irish as common criminals. Please. Some of us in America who suffered through generations of white Southerners' self-serving propaganda and lies concerning Black Americans and their struggles for freedom are well aware of generations of British self-serving propaganda and lies concerning the Irish and their struggles for freedom. And at the heart of both is a self-anointed "superior" group from its position of power relentlessly imposing its will and "plantations" on an "inferior" group, and thereby creating the very things it ridicules. As an Irish-American, I see in the Orangemen the same rabid hatred espoused by the Ku Klux Klan, and both were the consequence of British church-state colonialism. (And Scots were among those "planted" in Ireland to supplant the natives while the Brits were providing humanity the terror blueprint for today's Islamic extremists.) After over 400 years, you'd think enough would be enough. For those who know history, it definitely is.
This particular movie, while not great, does present an interesting story of a young Irish member of the IRA on a weapon-buying mission in New York City confronted by a seasoned Irish-American member of the New York City police - during the 1990s. Unlike in Belfast, in New York the Irish ARE the police; there are centuries of history and family in both men's stories. Each now has their own mission objectives, and they are diametrically opposed. Thanks to centuries of British propaganda, the IRA man is a "terrorist" in America, and the New York cop must therefore regard him as a dangerous threat. Each man remains true to his character, his culture, his heritage and his sense of responsibility. One wins, and one loses, but there is no victory for either. Men of integrity do their jobs, do what is expected of them, for a higher purpose.
Both men pay the price; generations and environments and politics have taken their toll. Such has pretty much been the fate of Irishmen everywhere. (The Irish have been quite over-represented in America's police, fire, emergency, military and foreign intelligence services for well over 150 years, since the American Civil War. And, yes, Irish soldiers have often stood with British soldiers in common missions for the greater good.) As a very well educated life-long professional Irish-American soldier steeped in his own heritage and history with a half century of experience throughout the modern world, up close and personal, I know. Such things are never nearly as black and white as pontificating sideline sitters would prefer to imagine. Both men of character in the movie would have earned Melissa Etheridge's dead soldier dirge at the end, hearkening all the way back to Rome's Centurions. While the movie could have presented things better, I salute both men. "The Devil's Own", and its ironies, are worth the experience, especially if you're a student of history.
Stand Up and Fight (1939)
Knowing Some History Helps
Perhaps a little historical perspective might assist some of today's viewers of this film. (Those viewing the film in 1939 would have been naturally much more knowledgeable of that history than most viewers today.)
The film "Stand Up And Fight" (USA, 1939) depicts a fictional story within a complex and multi-faceted historical background. The story is set in 1844 Cumberland Maryland, which became a key east-west point along the westward settler route through the Appalachian Mountains, and a key north-south point along the underground railroad assisting escaped slaves -- when the B&O Railroad opened in 1842, the nation's first Telegraph lines went operational, and the C&O Canal opened in 1850 -- all using rights of way along the same Potomac River that flows past Cumberland and on down past Washington DC.
Within this context the story concerns a pre-Civil War racket involving the capture and reselling of fugitive slaves in a key border location between abolitionist North and slavery South just as the railroad was beginning to compete hard against the stagecoach and wagon trains, and the canal was about to move huge quantities of coal out of the mountains. Most of the laborers building the railroad, the canal, the telegraph and the coal mines were uneducated and impoverished recent escapees from the British-oppressed serf plantation of Ireland.
Mid-way along that 120-mile Potomac River route between Cumberland and Washington is strategic Harper's Ferry, where the Shenandoah river meets the Potomac and where John Brown's Raid on an armory in 1859 began to galvanize large portions of the nation's public opinion on each side of the slavery/secession issue. At the time of Brown's raid, Harper's Ferry was in the big slavery (Confederate) state of Virginia, which was also the state just across the river in Cumberland in the abolitionist (Union) state of Maryland.
The American Civil War began in April 1961. West Virginia became a state a few months later following the Wheeling Conventions of 1861, in which abolitionist delegates from 30 northwestern Virginia counties decided to break away from Virginia. West Virginia immediately became a key Civil War border state and was formally admitted to the Union in June 1863. West Virginia was the only state to form by separating from a Confederate state, the first to separate from any state since Maine separated from Massachusetts in 1820.
The north-south terrain of the Appalachian Mountains is what enabled General Lee to move a huge Confederate army through the Shenandoah all the way north into Pennsylvania to meet a similar huge Union army at Gettysburg – far behind Northern "lines" – during the first three days of July in 1863.
I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. (1951)
Context, Context
This film was released in the United States in May 1951, when I was a teenager. This was just five short years after World War II ended, and while nearly destroyed Europe and Asia were still being repaired and rebuilt under America's massive Marshall Plan. As a boy I had watched all the men in my extended family go off to war against nazism/fascism, and then saw only some of them return home. Now I was watching more young American men go off to war against communism.
The first of the many armed conflicts after World War II which became known as the 45-year-long East-West "Cold" War began already a year earlier in June 1950 when Communist North Korean forces, backed by Communist Russian forces occupying the north, drove south across the 38th parallel into US-military occupied South Korea. That aggression started the bloody Korean War, which still raged with high US military casualties when this film was being shown in American theaters. Both Communist China under Mao Zedong and Soviet Communist Russia under Stalin, along with the very ominously growing communist Warsaw Pact military alliance, represented very real threats to the United States and Western Europe - when this film was released. While it is true that the movie is a bit "over the top" by today's dramatic standards, it did have both a context and a purpose that definitely was not laughable.
Most responsible people in 1950 fully recognized that the Communist Party, along with its clandestine intelligence operators, was very active in the United States and benefited from considerable Chinese and Russian clandestine government support. That no one was certain of the degree of influence of the secretive Communist Party in the United States gave rise to much public, academic and media speculation, as well as the need for public education plus secret domestic intelligence and counter-intelligence operations to get a better fix on reality.
It is easy for Americans today who have lived their entire lives in historic safety and comfort to assume that it was all some sort of "unjustified scare" since the communists never succeeded in their objective of subjugating the United States. In 1950 I remember an America that was no more concerned with communist subversives than Americans today are concerned with extremist Muslim militants who might be engineering another 9/11. Threats can be real, but still not engender panic - if the people have faith in their government. But I also remember that in 1950 the United States was the only country of any significance that had been left still largely intact and undamaged after the Second World War. This made the US the last best hope against any further deterioration of freedom in the world, and thus the Number One Target of Communist expansionism.
Due in no small part to very active domestic vigilance, communism never had much success inside the United States. But communism was very successful in employing a wide range of deceptive and duplicitous tactics, including exploiting social discontent and infiltrating key political and social movements, to undermine many other countries.
Communism did succeed in thoroughly disrupting life for much of the planet and killing tens of millions of people over a very long period. Most of the atrocities which we today associate with right-wing extremism under Hitler's Nazism were in fact preceded by equal or greater left-wing extremist atrocities under Stalin's Communism. Those were indeed very dangerous times, and Americans in the 1950s who had spent their entire lives under extremely depressing and deadly times, from 1915-45, were naturally suspicious of and opposed to any extremist ideology that might send them, and their children, back into the abyss.
The Member of the Wedding (1952)
Nearly Perfect Depiction Of The McCullers' Classic
It's usually helpful to place things in context. Carson McCullers was born in 1917 in Columbus, Georgia, and left home during the Great Depression in 1934 at age 17 to study piano in New York, but instead was drawn into writing by several New York women university writers. This career choice soon proved fortuitous. Already famous with her "The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter", McCullers wrote "The Member Of The Wedding" over five years while her nation was fully engaged with the colossally deadly Second World War in both Europe and Asia. The book was published shortly after the war in 1946 when the gifted writer was 29 and living well in post-war Paris, then being reconstructed with the help of the American Marshall Plan. ("Member" is thus a little reminiscent of "Little Women", oblivious as it was of the massively deadly Civil War in the back yard.)
"The Member Of The Wedding", like most of her best work, draws very heavily on McCullers' own childhood experiences in the poverty-ridden American Depression-era South. While the film moves the time period slightly forward, the story is about the mixed and tumultuous emotions of a self-involved young 12-year old girl ("tomboy") faced with the marriage of her older brother, a soldier. The daughter of a hard-working widowed father, she uses a black maid as her sounding board.
The book's universal appeal derives from the fact that the story is concerned with an adolescent experiencing the normal difficulty of growing up and struggling to become aware of one's self -- always a major problem for pubescent children of both genders. Since the central character here is a girl (Frankie), some critics have emphasized the importance of the sexual identity theme. In the book, Frankie, for example, wishes people could 'change back and forth from boys to girls', while her younger cousin, John Henry, wants them to be 'half boy and half girl'. The play and film reduces all this conflict to little more than mention of a cat that answers to either "Charlie" or "Charlene". This is a shame, since this psycho-social sexual identity theme has been aggressively pursued by American women over the past quarter of a century, including in public schools and education research, mainly by superimposing such a view on boys in a very wide-ranging campaign to re-engineer American males.
The racial theme is secondary in "Wedding" inasmuch as it simply reflects everyday reality in the South when McCullers (Frankie) was a young girl - almost a century ago. This movie is much more noteworthy because of the great American actresses Ethel Waters and Julie Harris (and supporting actor James Edwards), who could always be counted on for perfect performances -- including while performing on LIVE national TV broadcasts of great classics during the 1950s' "Golden Age Of Television". (It is indeed unfortunate that few of those great live TV performances, based on works by Williams, Faulkner, O. Henry, Chekov, Ibsen, etc., were preserved on permanent media. All I have now are wonderful memories of fascinating experiences that introduced me to the world of classic literature as a young teen - in my living room.)
For a much better examination of the racial theme in the American South, see "To Kill A Mockingbird", also written by a young American women writer (Harper Lee) who drew heavily on her own childhood ("tomboy") experiences during the Depression-era and pre-war South (Alabama). Many, myself included, regard her book's central character, Atticus Finch, as America's best fictional male hero. In stark contrast to today's popular view of fathers, Lee used her own widowed dad to help craft an outstanding and ageless role model, a man of true substance.
McCullers' widowed father, on the other hand, also struggling to earn a living while raising children with the help of a black maid, becomes mostly absent to her Frankie – an apparently insensitive man of no consequence. Carson McCullers married the same ex-soldier twice; he eventually committed suicide in Paris. McCullers herself suffered with alcoholism and strokes that left her left side paralyzed by age 31. She died in New York at age 50.
Interestingly, both McCullers and Lee became close friends of Truman Capote. These were two American women contemporaries - McCullers and Lee - from very similar background circumstances, who each produced great works of semi-autobiographical fiction -- of a completely different nature. Harper Lee, who never married, was awarded the Presidential Medal Of Freedom at the age of 81 in 2007, some say largely because of the solid character she created, not in herself, but in her dad, Atticus Finch – the Last True American Hero.
The Andromeda Strain (2008)
The Usual Hollywood Misinformation
Can't say I disagree with most of mark-4401's and similar reviewers' comments about a very mediocre B-movie intended for the usual lowest common denominator American mass TV audience -- with the exception of some of the comments about four-star generals and certain of today's military practices, such as with regard to homeland security forces and the National Guard (air and ground).
As a life-long career Regular Army officer myself, I can say that active duty four-star generals (O-10) in the Regular forces today are not many, but do include the Army Chief of Staff, Chief of Naval Operations, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, the Air Force Chief of Staff, and the Commandant of the Coast Guard. Army General Colin Powell, for example, wore four stars when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; in that position he ran 24-7 the largest, most sophisticated and most complex international high-tech organization on Earth, and beyond. (There are no five-star US generals ("General of the Army") unless certain very major wartime situations demand one, such as with Generals of the Army George C. Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Omar Bradley during WW II, and, once so designated, they remain on active duty for life, regardless of subsequent endeavors.) A more appropriate rank for this movie's character "Gen Mancheck" would be a one-star (Brigadier General).
Also, the enormous equipment demands in recent years of US military efforts in the CENTCOM area of responsibility (Iraq and Afghanistan), while also maintaining major and minor American military commitments in every other corner of the globe, have dictated a tremendous amount of shuffling throughout US military forces, including the use of camouflaged aircraft where you normally would not expect them to be. (You use whatever equipment is available, and try to hang on to stuff that works best, regardless of what color it is.) Furthermore, under the new command structure for Stateside homeland security forces, highly technical military response forces can be mobilized and on-site anywhere in the US in extremely short order, but the process does require national and state political decision-makers who are both knowledgeable and involved to activate. A great deal of coordination (before, during and after) among a wide range of military and civilian agencies is required for such endeavors.
There are many other errors in this movie, such as the fact that any scientist or similar highly advanced technical expert serving on active duty (such as the 'major') would be in proper uniform at all times, etc.. (Yes, the US military does have highly respected scientists of almost all stripe serving in uniform.) But, overall, such mistakes are common to Hollywood's very out-dated and always distorted view of the US military and its people a view which then gets naively adopted by the public at large. Note that the movie even contains a number of common-sense procedural errors that a real US ground force would never make such as allowing a civilian to wander around unescorted on a high security forward base, if only for that civilian's personal safety; US military activities and equipment are inherently quite dangerous.
Hollywood does often employ military advisers on movie sets, but these experts always take a back seat to the "creative" intent of the movie director. It's a shame that more younger Americans today do not have first-hand experience with their highly advanced military forces and are therefore so dependent on Hollywood, video games and other silly misinformation in the popular media for their "military facts". One-in-4,000 Americans (less than one-half of one percent of the US population) with credible military experience is hardly sufficient to maintain accurate knowledge and understanding among American citizens -- or among their popular media entities who broadcast such misinformation around the globe to America's friends and potential adversaries alike. And it certainly doesn't help when the products of these "creative" efforts have at their root a malicious undermining political intent. Everyone everywhere, it seems, loves to deride US soldiers -- until they need them to save their skin.
The Red Danube (1949)
What Propaganda?
Just what is the propaganda in the movie?
The following comments by "choosy" (from Seattle WA US) are, for the most part, accurate: "The other comments miss the point completely--the focus in the novel was not Cold War propaganda but the facts of the insane policies of the US and British in their respective zones of occupation in Germany and Austria to forcibly remove or return Eastern Europeans, not just Soviet citizens, even including ethnic Germans, most of whom had endured untold horrors trying to escape to the west, safety, and 'freedom' at the end of the war. That was the bemused Walter Pigeon's problem, not 'war guilt' but having to 'obey orders.' " (...AFTER the war.) "Most expellees were anti-Soviet, which is why they had escaped to the west to begin with, and thus went back to a certain death. It wasn't a small part of history--it was one of the biggest Allied mistakes and betrayals, and there were many, of the Occupation."
Here "choosey" has a reasonably solid handle on events, regardless of the novel or the movie. But the following of "choosy's" comments are off-base, primarily because he does not consider the whole picture. "The fact that this forceful expulsion was done because the Allies a. did not want to feed and care for refugees, and b. did want to curry favor with the Soviets at that pre-Berlin Blockade period makes the history even more poignant." The US Army (including the British Army) at that time was actually TWO armies in transition, as the combat forces who had fought their way across Europe to war's end gradually turned their functions and responsibilities over to a fresh Occupation Army - fully prepared to address whatever was needed in the immediate post-war period in their respective zones of responsibility. Not wanting to feed or care for the refugees or concern about currying favor with the Soviets simply did not enter the equation, nor was there any need to; this is pure revisionism. There were diplomatic protocols signed by the highest levels of all involved governments before the war ended; it was the duty of the soldiers of those respective governments to comply with those protocols, most of which at the time they were signed had solid rationale.
The policies mentioned in "chosey's" comments above were, in fact, in full agreement with procedures to which the Allies (US, GB, France and Russia) had worked out prior to the end of the war. Similar procedures were required of the Russians in repatriating "displaced citizens" to their proper homes in the west. Russia was seen during the war as a co-equal partner in the overall war effort on the European continent, and US combat forces (Patton's army), in fact, actually withdrew from forward positions they had reached in Austria and Czechoslovakia so that those regions could be turned over to Russian forces as per previous agreement concerning post-war occupation. (The US and UK could not have won the war in Europe without Russian participation, but all nations always exact a price for their cooperation. Russia under Stalin was no different.)
It rapidly became apparent, however, that Russia and its military, if not its political leadership, had very deep-seated scores to settle with those population groups who were seen as having fought against Russian forces, and thus had caused such horrendous spilling of Russian blood. (Probably the most confusing group was the Ukrainians - who had repeatedly been forced to turn and fight their previous "partners", back and forth, and even each other, during the ever shifting circumstances of the war in the Ukraine.) Russian rule in the zones over which they had control after the war very rapidly became quite ruthless, and it quickly became apparent to everyone that the KGB was, in fact, calling all the shots. There is also considerable evidence that the KGB was executing policies dictated by Stalin himself. Still, US and British military personnel stationed adjacent to the Russian zones or as liaison personnel were required to assist with the "resettlement" or "repatriation" procedures - which caused considerable internal turmoil among those men that lasts to this day.
On the other hand, there were also (fewer) numbers of people we were trying to repatriate from the Russian zones in the East to their proper homes in the West, including those warehoused in concentration camps and prisoner of war stockades. In order to accomplish that, we had to demonstrate some degree of reciprocity.
These things were, and remain, simple facts of history. War, and its aftermath, is rarely as neat and tidy as after-the-fact armchair generals would prefer. War is always, at best, a series of compromises and constantly changing circumstances. The procedures depicted in the movie had nothing at all to do with "feeding the red scare, the rise of McCarthyism, or as propaganda" to use somewhere else in the world. These days we ALL seem to use events for our own particular agendas, simply by putting some twisted ignorant spin on them, or by creating asinine cause-and-effect scenarios to best suit our own purposes. No one stops to consider that any two-bit twit can throw cheap stones from the very safe sidelines, and what is safer than the distance of a half century? But, in the end, facts are facts. The major events shown in the movie happened. Do with them what you will, but I prefer to keep them as they actually were - simple reality, facts of life, consequences of war.
As a life-long intelligence/liaison/diplomatic ground force professional, veteran of several wars, student of military history, who also served in Occupied West Berlin for five years watching good people die trying to get over The Wall to the West, I am .... Old Soldier
Dragon Seed (1944)
Place The Movie In Its Context
While trying hard not to be too condescending to Americans of today who somehow think the world was always as they now see it around them -- this movie was made in 1943, in the darkest midst of the horrific World War II, when America was engaged in a global struggle of epic proportions against the mighty Japanese Empire (and other very powerful allied nations all over the world), and when Manchuria, China and most of Asia were occupied by the very brutal Japanese invaders. The film was released to the public more than a year before that terrible war began to reach a conclusion.
In 1944 America's victory in the Second World War was by no means assured, yet the US was trying to do whatever it could to assist the Chinese against the Japanese while the main US military forces fought the Japanese directly island by island westward across the Pacific. Of particular note is the fact that Japan had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937, and that both suffered under merciless Japanese occupation for years before America formally entered the war following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The Japanese forces committed brutal atrocities against Chinese civilians and prisoners of war in the Rape of Nanking, slaughtering as many as 300,000 civilians within a month. Before it was over more than 10 million Chinese were mobilized by the Japanese army and enslaved for slave labor and at least 2,700,000 Chinese died. Japanese occupation atrocities against the Chinese included mass killings by airborne gasses on hundreds of separate occasions.
The film, which was being made while all this was going on, but before most of the details were fully known, therefore reflects the American (and western) thinking at the time, as depicted through the keen expert eyes of the great China observer, American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Pearl S. Buck. It also reflects what was available to Hollywood film-makers at that desperate moment. Given the time and the circumstances, the movie does quite an adequate job - all of which undoubtedly explains the involvement in it of the great American actress Katharine Hepburn. The film helped Americans at that time to understand China's desperate situation, why the Chinese were worth assisting, and why the US military, and most Americans at home, were trying hard to do just that at truly great cost. Hepburn's name on theater marquees also ensured that many more people would see the film than otherwise.
Americans in 1944 didn't care one bit that the Chinese characters were being played by Americans; audiences could easily imagine, empathize and understand. Very many of them had already read Buck's novel with the same title, published in 1942, and knew that the famous author, who had written many novels about China, had been a very vocal proponent of American understanding and support of China in her struggle with the Japanese. Pearl S. Buck had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938, mainly on the basis of her great China trilogy "The House Of Earth", including its first part, "The Good Earth".
The Japanese surrendered unconditionally to the US on August 14, 1945, and Japanese troops in China formally surrendered to the Chinese a month later, but by then most of Manchuria and China had been destroyed. The people portrayed in the film had seen what the Japanese had done in Manchuria over the previous six years, and then experienced Japanese brutality directly for another eight years. The 14 years of China's monumental struggles in World War II were a pivotal point in China's history. Before the Japanese invasion, China had suffered nearly a century of humiliation at the hands of various imperialist powers and was relegated to a semi-colonial status. However, the war greatly enhanced China's resolve, strength and international status. After the war, the Republic of China became a founding member of the United Nations and a permanent member in the Security Council. China also reclaimed Manchuria.
The movie therefore helps Americans today to understand a most critical moment in China's, and their own, common history, and why it all was, and remains, important.
Old American Soldier
Why We Fight (2005)
Part of the story, to advance a particular view.
Part of the problem with this documentary is that it uses selective information to support its pre-existing intent. There were even several times when I thought the film was produced by duplicitous Frenchmen. For example, the film does not adequately explain the role of the United States, and most especially that of the US military, in providing the lion's share of the defense of Old Europe over the past half century under NATO cover. This very long and colossal American commitment, which inexplicably continues today, fifteen years after it should have ended, allowed Old Europeans the freedom to evolve a very different view of military matters than did Americans -- sort of like children don't begin to comprehend all the sacrifices made by their parents on their behalf. I myself spent a total of fifteen years of my life in Old Europe, including West Berlin during its darkest days, as a professional American soldier, and I very rarely enjoyed any of it. On the contrary, while the Old Europeans were soaking up boatloads of American tourist dollars, I, with two university degrees and four language fluencies, was usually considered a paid servant of the privileged Old Europeans. The fifteen years I spent in other regions of the world were immeasurably more rewarding and worthwhile, both to me and to my nation. Almost all of the problems I encountered elsewhere in the world had direct Old European roots.
Furthermore, it is today well known among American military circles that one of the largest defense contractors in the world doing major business inside the United States today, with an astounding 23 different major facilities, is a German-French consortium that seeks to make up in the United States what profits cannot be made from stingy Old European governments. The French government, which did not have to place anything on the line in Cold War NATO when it was needed most, is today a major shareholder in that Continental defense consortium, which also sells major advanced military hardware to countries like China -- sort of like the free-riding French and the Germans playing both ends against the middle, as usual to their enormous benefit. Such little known matters have long been facts of life for knowledgeable Americans, facts which make the overall picture about "American militarism" enormously more complicated than the average observer might imagine.
The net result is that Old Europeans do, in fact, want a very powerful US military, but only one on their tight leash, using weapons they manufacture and sell, and only to defend Old European interests - as their free lackey that keeps on giving and giving. Everything else the US does as a fleeting temporary single superpower on the world stage can be routinely condemned, safe in the knowledge that their citizens do not know the whole story, nor do they care to know the whole story as long as they are safe and secure and with the knowledge that a responsible adult America never returns their criticism. (For cowardly Old Europeans, the US is the safest whipping boy in human history.) A major Old European political task since 1990 has been to somehow create situations and/or fears which require the US to continue carrying the burden of conventional Continental defense long after the Old Europeans should have assumed all of that requirement alone, plus finally stepping up to their just responsibilities in the Third World and most especially in the Africa they so ruthlessly exploited.
American military leaders know that Old European and American self-interests began diverging dramatically as soon as the Warsaw Pact imploded in 1989, and that they can no longer count on continental Old Europeans to make an equitable contribution to their mutual defenses, regardless of that anachronism still inexplicably called "NATO", other than just enough embarrassing tokenism to earn them a seat at the American military command table in a tail-wagging-the dog tragicomedy mainly to impress their citizens back home. Due to very different and evolving self-interests, such a "mutual" concept has become for the US solely a one-way street, with everyone else except the British playing silly little vote-getting games for their individual domestic consumption.
However, major internal demographic changes rapidly taking place in the United States, plus external political changes rapidly evolving in Asia, will inevitably wean the Americans away from a knee-jerk commitment to defend Old Europe and force their government to view other regions of the world as justifiably of much greater importance in the coming century. Old European and American interests are gradually and inexorably diverging, and will inevitably continue to diverge at ever greater speed. Old Europe was the last century's story; to knowledgeable Americans the Continent is rapidly becoming ancient history no longer germane in today's world. It is long past the time for the Europeans to begin standing on their own feet, without the "permanent" American crutch, and whipping boy.
Most naive Americans still think they have "allies", but this is mostly a political illusion. Everyone loves the underdog fighting his way up, but everyone always loves to hate, and blame, the Top Dog - and most especially one that never bites back. As long as America remains the Top Dog, she must always be fully prepared to go it alone, wherever and whenever necessary. A rising China, not Old Europe or America, will irreversibly alter global dynamics, and soon, while Old Europe continues its long, slow, inevitable, self-made decline. Until the US relinquishes its title as single superpower, it must responsibly assume that it has no friends, and that literally everyone is a potential enemy. Such natural human stories have been repeated a thousand times throughout the history of mankind. And most American military students know well the story of the British Empire.
"Why We Fight" is worth viewing, but only if the viewer knows and keeps the whole in proper perspective and understands the film-maker's intent.