While his name has become synonymous with limitless hubris in the making of public policy, Robert S. McNamara, who died on Monday at 93, actually embodied what many, maybe most, Americans claim to want in their public servants: the application of disinterested expertise to the task at hand, considerations of partisan advantage or interest-group benefit be damned. And that was at the root of both his notorious failures and the successes they have come to overshadow in the public mind.
Schooled in Taylorism at Berkeley and trained in the most up-to-date application of quantitative methods in his wartime service, McNamara was the archetypal number-cruncher in the high noon of American technocracy. His rise paralleled the faltering of ideology in postwar politics, and the ascendancy of the conceit that if intelligent enough men were placed in the right positions, enough data provided to them, and the process engineered with the requisite skill, then policymaking could be reduced to something approximating a precise science, a matter of mere technique. Government with the politics left out.
But this underestimated the extent to which the political, and indeed the human, permeate any contraption for the wise framing and execution of laws. And it was clear early on that McNamara was at his best where political considerations could be shoved to the margins. One of his early triumphs as a wartime statistician was devising a system for the optimal provision of supplies by air to the China-Burma-India theatre. So many aircraft, so many tons of supplies, the right formulae, and the optimal solution did indeed emerge. The method was inevitably less reliable when applied to the fire-bombing of Japan, where the numbers mattered, but no more than the imponderables of human resolve, on the part of both Japan's civilian population and its military oligarchy. If war, as the most familiar Clausewitzian axiom has it, is policy (politics) by other means, then McNamara's calculus was necessarily incomplete to the degree that it could not compute the political variables of ambition and sacrifice, fear and will.
As an executive at the Ford Company after the war, McNamara famously boasted that he knew next to nothing about cars, only the managerial techniques by which they were designed, built, and marketed. It is a canard that he supported the ill-fated Edsel, but his insistence on top-down decisionmaking, for all the efficiencies it generated in the short term, empowered the generation of executives whose insular self-regard would virtually sink America's auto industry.
On becoming John F. Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, he readily admitted he knew no more about weapons systems and strategy than he had known about cars and trucks. But he was appointed to streamline the financing and administration of America's defenses by gimlet-eyed scrutiny of the defense budget, and to curtail the inter-service rivalries and political logrolling that had marred defense policy in the Eisenhower era. And he did so in large measure. The prerogatives of service chiefs and the whims of Congressional committees did count for less. But there were costs along the way. If the generals and admirals found it harder to give ignorant or self-serving advice, they had a tougher time getting a hearing when they had relevant wisdom to impart.
After Kennedy and McNamara, the Secretary of Defense would be the President's principal adviser on military matters, but it did not follow that his counsel was always sounder than that of the uniformed cicerones to whom earlier Presidents might turn. Different as the two men might be, Donald Rumsfeld was as self-assured and commanding as McNamara ever was, and on the costs and pitfalls of Invading Iraq, he proved less prescient than General Erik Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff he politically neutered when he publicly contradicted Rumsfeld's estimates of what the job would require.
On the making of America's actual strategy, McNamara had one major success to his credit, but a qualified one. At the dawn of the Kennedy administration, American nuclear plans called for a rapid resort to nuclear hostilities in the event of a Soviet thrust into Western Europe. McNamara knew such threats were losing the plausibility successful deterrence required in the face of America's own vulnerability in the coming age of the ICBM, and he sought credible conventional options for defending the Continent. If he was arguably right on the merits of pushing for stronger conventional defenses, his public insistence on the folly of small national deterrents as wasteful and ineffective complicated relations with all three of Britain, France, and West Germany. But as far as he was concerned, the task of educating America's allies in the realities of the nuclear age had been too long postponed, and could not await the politic moment.
Early on, he advocated a "no cities-counterforce" strategy, in which Soviet forces, not population centres, would be targeted, in the hope of producing similar restraint on the part of the enemy, and "bargaining pauses" in which one might step back from Armageddon. But he ultimately acknowledged that controlling the escalation of hostilities would prove harder in practice, and that the proposed strategy would not materially reduce American losses in a nuclear exchange. (To be sure, he was never a true believer in so-called "flexible response", which was mainly a rationale for strong central control of NATO's nuclear weapons in American hands; I explore this and related questions in the salient chapters of my doctoral dissertation, as yet unpublished.) From 1967 on, he openly espoused the doctrine of "mutual assured destruction" under which nuclear weapons were useful only for deterring each other, with their employment tantamount to mutual suicide. The world, as Peter Scoblic has argued, became modestly safer with the triumph of McNamara's assumptions about the ultimate unwinnability of a nuclear war.
What mattered, he argued, was not so much the numbers on each side as the survivability of one's forces in the face of a preemptive attack that they could deter, so that an uneasy equilibrium would replace ungoverned arms racing as the central trope of nuclear strategy. But if he was broadly right, McNamara characteristically erred in assuming that the Soviet leadership shared his views of what was rational; he did not anticipate the desire of at least some factions in the Kremlin, following the apparent climbdown that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis,
never to be caught in a position of nuclear inferiority again, or the subsequent growth in Soviet strategic forces not just up to, but beyond, rough parity.
At the outbreak of the Cuban crisis itself, he correctly observed that the Soviet missiles affected the strategic balance only at the margins; the only problem the United States faced, he confronted, was the modest political one of having been outfaced and defied in its own sphere of influence. But this was to understate the problem; if relative (and calculable )numbers of nuclear weapons mattered less, as he argued, then subjective judgments of resolve were the primary determinants of the credibility of security guarantees to allies, and so mattered more. Thus a great deal of the architecture of nuclear stability was at issue in the Caribbean, more than McNamara seems to have understood. His sense that escalation control might fail and events elude control did serve him well; he rightly argued that the course of early resort to bombing or invading Cuba, as some in the military proposed, was fraught with incalculable peril, and threw his weight behind a quarantine of Cuba as the initial response. After that October he resiled violently from his previous position that nuclear hostilities could be micromanaged. His intensified awareness that in a nuclear crisis events might prove resistant to rational direction, whoever was in charge, seems to have haunted him; thereafter he became more pessimistic about the chances of man's surviving to the end of the century, and his visceral horror of nuclear arms caused some of his subordinates to doubt whether his views were compatible with the dictates of his job.
It is not true that Vietnam was "McNamara's war." The most careful study of the decisions that put American troops on the ground and thus irrevocably staked American prestige on the outcome, that by Fredrik Logevall, notes that they were the personal choices of Lyndon Johnson, who feared as much for his personal reputation as that of his party or country. McNamara sought to ensure a diplomatic track was opened up, even though he was insistent that negotiations on terms other than those of thinly disguised Communist surrender had to await some improvement of fortunes on the battlefield, an improvement he could never contrive to bring about. At least from early 1965, he seems to have doubted that victory was likely, though he proved ingenious in devising quantitative measures by which it might be possible to conclude that the situation had ceased to deteriorate, or at least that the other side was losing more men. (If the precise calibration of military means to geopolitical end might not be possible with nuclear weapons, he seems to have thought it worth the trying at lower levels of violence.)
Here his reliance on data and intelligence served him worst of all; the inescapable ruler of events was that the North Vietnamese and their South Vietnamese allies were simply prepared to bear far higher losses than their adversaries in order to attain ultimate victory. When McNamara finally issued a hedged mea culpa in his 1995 memoir In Retrospect, he united in condemnation foes of the war and right-wingers who saw it as a winnable cause undone by political missteps. The former seized on his admission that he had never rated the odds of success as high as validating their claim the war should never have been fought, the latter concluded McNamara had never had the confidence in victory that might have led to its energetic prosecution. But as former Senator Eugene McCarthy (who almost unhorsed LBJ in the 1968 New Hampshire primary and compelled his retirement from office) observed, it seems unlikely that the American effort would have ended sooner had McCarthy resigned in protest or taken his doubts to the public; LBJ would have marginalized him as he did other in-house dissenters or pressed him to step down sooner than 1968.
And when McNamara resigned, he did so as a haunted man, prone to crying jags in his Pentagon office that caused colleagues to fret for his mental stability, and with his own family divided by the war. It is now the conventional wisdom that his subsequent work as dispenser of alms to the Third World in his role as President of the World Bank was atonement. But in some ways he had changed too little. While loans to developing nations rose from less than $1 billion a year to over $12 billion on his watch, his oft-proclaimed goal of triggering 5% annual growth in the world's poorest countries came to naught.
The preference for large-scale white elephants was all too reminiscent of the theories of economic modernization and nation-building he sought to apply in Vietnam, and too often in the latter case as well the money vanished into the pockets of corrupt dictators and larcenous officials. As ever, he was largely blind to the political, and thus the human, dimension.
There was something in McNamara's manner and appearance, the steel-rimmed glasses, helmet of shiny hair, clipped speech and army of charts (well before the age of the PowerPoint)that invited caricature. But as any viewer of the interviews by Errol Morris for his documentary The Fog of War can attest, he was no passionless calculating machine. Often close to tears of despair or guilt in his later years, he seemed then as much as the prisoner of his passions as he had once been of his delusive rationalism, unforgiving of himself if only because he was part of a world and a species that would not bend to logic's demands.
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Monday, July 06, 2009
Palin Departs
The jumbled metaphors, absent logic, and idiosyncratic syntax of that sequence of digressions piled atop one another that she sputtered forth made it hard to tell precisely what Sarah Palin meant to say. It is more or less clear that she's going, and a good deal of subsequent commentary has been devoted to the question of whether she will be back in some other guise.
Bill Kristol, who helped elevate la pasionaria of Wasilla from well-earned obscurity as the first and most prominent supporter of her selection as John McCain's running mate, made a game try at defending her actions. True, he conceded, she will now enter any subsequent race unable even to claim the experience of a single full term as Alaska Governor. But, he went on, she can now devote her time and abundant energies to swotting up on national issues, raising money and establishing the infrastructure for a presidential run in 2012 (or 2016). If it works, he concluded, what seems now like a crazy gamble will ultimately be judged "crazy like a fox."
Even most other Republican pundits have shown themselves less inclined than Kristol to drink that Alaskan Koolaid. Michael Barone, Fred Barnes, and Mark Steyn have all expressed doubt as to whether she can recover after the farcical display of her farewell, an event that could not have been better-designed to reinforce much of the public's doubts about her temperament, judgment, and intelligence. Barnes, normally a reliable fugleman for the Christianist right, has rejected analogies with Richard Nixon's hiatus from electoral politics from 1962 through 1967, followed by his successful bid for the White House in 1968. Nixon, Barnes pointed out, was a former Congressman, Senator, and Vice-President when he stepped out of the limelight. While much of the public emphatically didn't care for him, his political liabilities did not include the egregious inexperience that Palin has ensured will dog her in any further tries for elective office.
True, "Caribou Barbie" (as Maureen Dowd has dubbed her) has hardly helped herself. But at the end of the day, her appeal to some voters, and the repulsion she elicits in others, has surprisingly little to do with how much experience she has in an executive capacity or how deeply she understands the details of nuclear strategy or international monetary arrangements. And it follows that recasting herself as a more knowledgeable figure (perhaps through a few years in Congress, as Barnes has recommended) will do less for her than it might for other political figures widely judged in need of seasoning.
While many observers were appalled that the ostensibly steady and tested McCain would pick someone with so little experience and gravitas as his understudy, the exceptional intensity of responses to her, pro and con, had more to do with who she was and whom she spoke for. The closest thing I have read to an intellectually respectable case for Palin's political future comes from Ross Douthat of the New York Times, who noticed that her appeal had more to do with class than ideology. Palin, he suggested, is in some ways the natural counterpoint to Barack Obama. Where he incarnates the "meritocratic ideal" that someone of humble roots can, if he has the aptitude, make his way to Columbia, Harvard Law School and the fast track to the White House, she embodies the "democratic ideal" of political success without the benefit of such academic attainments. To some voters, she is the representative of a noble but fading America of small towns, life in the outdoors, and a preference for folk wisdom over fancy book larnin'. To others, she and her loutish brood are one of the weirder sub-species of trailer-trash.
There is something in Douthat's assessment. The clamorous support Palin garnered from downscale voters of limited education and provincial tastes and manners was rooted in just that; so was the often snide mockery by the meritocrats in the press of her academic record, religious views, speaking style and record in office. But if there were occasional exaggerations and distortions in some of the coverage of Palin's history (not least the bizarre conspiracy theories about the parentage of her poor retarded child) there is enough in what has been established beyond plausible dissent to demonstrate that she is not fit to be president. And her unfitness runs deeper than what reading a policy paper here and there can fix.
A healthy skepticism towards the contrivances of academic system-builders is one thing, but an envious antipathy to all that smacks of learning or disinterested expertise is quite another. An attachment to small-town ways that have passed into history almost everywhere in America save for Alaska is one thing; a suspicion of cosmopolitanism and urbanity as next door to treason something altogether different. And it's clear which side of such distinctions Palin stands on, when she casts herself as the voice of "real Americans" and "the pro-American parts of America." It's obvious just how constricted this woman's understanding of her own country is when she boasts to an audience of bawling yokels that her semi-employed, under-achieving, snowmobile-racing hubby is one of those Americans "who knows how to work with his hands"; the tacit implication, I suppose, is that those of us who work mainly with our brains are sissies, subversives, or something equally contemptible. And it's certainly hard to mistake the deep-rooted ignorance of why some familiarity with history or the world beyond one's own shores is indispensable to statesmanship in the unforgettable contention that the visibility of Russia from Alaska gives her a claim to foreign policy expertise.
It is devoutly to be wished that Palin's star fall fast and far; unfortunately, she visibly identifies with and gives voice to a sizeable constituency within the GOP. As I was listening to Palin's remarks, I was reminded of what the brilliant British expat pundit Henry Fairlie, a High Tory, wrote about the legions of provincial social conservatives at the 1980 Republican National Convention, while they were consolidating their power as one of its strongest factions. In a piece reprinted in the new collection of his writings, Bite the Hand that Feeds You, Fairlie describes these Republicans as:
"...narrow minded, book banning, truth censoring, mean spirited; ungenerous, envious, intolerant, afraid; chicken, bullying; trivially moral, falsely patriotic; family cheapening, flag cheapening, God cheapening; the common man, shallow, small, sanctimonious...those who in Germany gave the Nazis their main strength and who in France collaborated with them and sustained Vichy."
That last turn of phrase is somewhat over the top, especially when applied to the GOP of Reagan and Goldwater, even that of George W. Bush. But it is closer to the mark than one would like for at least a large slice of the party which Sarah Palin may still seek to lead. And even if Palin does prove to have damaged her own chances of doing so beyond repair, the blinkered worldview she articulates will find other champions, perhaps all the more dangerously plausible for articulating the same sulfurous resentments in complete sentences.
Bill Kristol, who helped elevate la pasionaria of Wasilla from well-earned obscurity as the first and most prominent supporter of her selection as John McCain's running mate, made a game try at defending her actions. True, he conceded, she will now enter any subsequent race unable even to claim the experience of a single full term as Alaska Governor. But, he went on, she can now devote her time and abundant energies to swotting up on national issues, raising money and establishing the infrastructure for a presidential run in 2012 (or 2016). If it works, he concluded, what seems now like a crazy gamble will ultimately be judged "crazy like a fox."
Even most other Republican pundits have shown themselves less inclined than Kristol to drink that Alaskan Koolaid. Michael Barone, Fred Barnes, and Mark Steyn have all expressed doubt as to whether she can recover after the farcical display of her farewell, an event that could not have been better-designed to reinforce much of the public's doubts about her temperament, judgment, and intelligence. Barnes, normally a reliable fugleman for the Christianist right, has rejected analogies with Richard Nixon's hiatus from electoral politics from 1962 through 1967, followed by his successful bid for the White House in 1968. Nixon, Barnes pointed out, was a former Congressman, Senator, and Vice-President when he stepped out of the limelight. While much of the public emphatically didn't care for him, his political liabilities did not include the egregious inexperience that Palin has ensured will dog her in any further tries for elective office.
True, "Caribou Barbie" (as Maureen Dowd has dubbed her) has hardly helped herself. But at the end of the day, her appeal to some voters, and the repulsion she elicits in others, has surprisingly little to do with how much experience she has in an executive capacity or how deeply she understands the details of nuclear strategy or international monetary arrangements. And it follows that recasting herself as a more knowledgeable figure (perhaps through a few years in Congress, as Barnes has recommended) will do less for her than it might for other political figures widely judged in need of seasoning.
While many observers were appalled that the ostensibly steady and tested McCain would pick someone with so little experience and gravitas as his understudy, the exceptional intensity of responses to her, pro and con, had more to do with who she was and whom she spoke for. The closest thing I have read to an intellectually respectable case for Palin's political future comes from Ross Douthat of the New York Times, who noticed that her appeal had more to do with class than ideology. Palin, he suggested, is in some ways the natural counterpoint to Barack Obama. Where he incarnates the "meritocratic ideal" that someone of humble roots can, if he has the aptitude, make his way to Columbia, Harvard Law School and the fast track to the White House, she embodies the "democratic ideal" of political success without the benefit of such academic attainments. To some voters, she is the representative of a noble but fading America of small towns, life in the outdoors, and a preference for folk wisdom over fancy book larnin'. To others, she and her loutish brood are one of the weirder sub-species of trailer-trash.
There is something in Douthat's assessment. The clamorous support Palin garnered from downscale voters of limited education and provincial tastes and manners was rooted in just that; so was the often snide mockery by the meritocrats in the press of her academic record, religious views, speaking style and record in office. But if there were occasional exaggerations and distortions in some of the coverage of Palin's history (not least the bizarre conspiracy theories about the parentage of her poor retarded child) there is enough in what has been established beyond plausible dissent to demonstrate that she is not fit to be president. And her unfitness runs deeper than what reading a policy paper here and there can fix.
A healthy skepticism towards the contrivances of academic system-builders is one thing, but an envious antipathy to all that smacks of learning or disinterested expertise is quite another. An attachment to small-town ways that have passed into history almost everywhere in America save for Alaska is one thing; a suspicion of cosmopolitanism and urbanity as next door to treason something altogether different. And it's clear which side of such distinctions Palin stands on, when she casts herself as the voice of "real Americans" and "the pro-American parts of America." It's obvious just how constricted this woman's understanding of her own country is when she boasts to an audience of bawling yokels that her semi-employed, under-achieving, snowmobile-racing hubby is one of those Americans "who knows how to work with his hands"; the tacit implication, I suppose, is that those of us who work mainly with our brains are sissies, subversives, or something equally contemptible. And it's certainly hard to mistake the deep-rooted ignorance of why some familiarity with history or the world beyond one's own shores is indispensable to statesmanship in the unforgettable contention that the visibility of Russia from Alaska gives her a claim to foreign policy expertise.
It is devoutly to be wished that Palin's star fall fast and far; unfortunately, she visibly identifies with and gives voice to a sizeable constituency within the GOP. As I was listening to Palin's remarks, I was reminded of what the brilliant British expat pundit Henry Fairlie, a High Tory, wrote about the legions of provincial social conservatives at the 1980 Republican National Convention, while they were consolidating their power as one of its strongest factions. In a piece reprinted in the new collection of his writings, Bite the Hand that Feeds You, Fairlie describes these Republicans as:
"...narrow minded, book banning, truth censoring, mean spirited; ungenerous, envious, intolerant, afraid; chicken, bullying; trivially moral, falsely patriotic; family cheapening, flag cheapening, God cheapening; the common man, shallow, small, sanctimonious...those who in Germany gave the Nazis their main strength and who in France collaborated with them and sustained Vichy."
That last turn of phrase is somewhat over the top, especially when applied to the GOP of Reagan and Goldwater, even that of George W. Bush. But it is closer to the mark than one would like for at least a large slice of the party which Sarah Palin may still seek to lead. And even if Palin does prove to have damaged her own chances of doing so beyond repair, the blinkered worldview she articulates will find other champions, perhaps all the more dangerously plausible for articulating the same sulfurous resentments in complete sentences.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
On the Death of Dave Batters
The onetime Conservative MP Dave Batters killed himself last Tuesday at the appallingly early age of 39, and his youth inevitably means that he left few political footprints, and his public life is condemned to mirror the sad incompleteness of his private one. Batters had declined to pursue reelection in 2008, informing the public that he was struggling with chronic depression, as well as trying to shake off a related prescription drug addiction.
One of the journalistic commonplaces that was trotted out on this occasion as on similar ones is that those who have never suffered from depression cannot really comprehend the nature of Batters's ordeal. I am not even sure that those who do are much better equipped. The term 'depression' obscures at least as it illuminates. In his searing memoir of his own battle with what we might better call (at least for the moment) profound despair, Darkness Visible, William Styron derides the timidity of the word, which in other contexts, he observes, can cover anything from an economic downturn to a declivity in a road. Joshua Wolf Shenk, in his splendid essay "A Melancholy of Mine Own," contends that it is not only too imprecise to be useful, but actually misleads in its attribution of essential similarity to what are often wildly divergent battles with an infinite variety of psychic demons.
A rather banal and obtuse piece by the political columnist for Batters's hometown paper in Regina speculates that public life added to Batters's burdens, and that the politician's trafficking in optimism weighed with particular heaviness on a man who, at his core, found himself so awfully bereft. In fact, those bearing grave wounds in their inner lives often find solace in the
acclaim that public life brings; if you will indulge the clinical jargon, it brings the affect which too often eludes them in the quotidian interactions of private existence.
Among political figures indisputably of the first rank, both Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill would almost certainly be diagnosed today as sufferers from chronic clinical depression. The latter referred to it as his "black dog", and often made a point of keeping some distance from the edge of the platform whenever he found himself in a train station. "I've no desire to quit this world", he remarked, "but sometimes thoughts, desperate thoughts, come into one's head."
Depression does not necessarily ennoble, any more than other afflection. It is more convincing to see adversity of any stripe as making people pretty much what they already are, only more so. But it does seem likely that acquaintance with persistent, intractable sadness and futility schools one in the inescapable tragedy of the human condition. The man who has chosen a political vocation may find that it leaves him better armoured for the emotional demands that public crisis imposes, demands that might crush others.
It is tempting to think that Lincoln and Churchill were able to rise to the awful responsibilities of wartime leadership at least in part because they had lived privately in the terrible night that the conditions of war turned into the national experience. At some level, others may have sensed this and half-consciously turned to them as the indispensable guides when an entire country sought the way out of Dante's "dark wood." A number of scholars have noted Lincoln's remarkable growth as a rhetorician in the years of his wartime leadership; circumstances summoned forth what now seems quite clearly the prose of the tragic poet, if you will, that the day required. As for Churchill, he was dismissed through much of the 1930s as an irredeemable anachronism, his mock-Augustan prose hopelessly out of place in modern Britain. Yet his imperishable speeches of 1939 and 1940, as Orwell perceptively wrote, now seemed to match the hour in their sense of the solemnity and gravity of events. There were, he went on, many Britons who could not necessarily follow Churchill's meaning word by word, but were moved and inspired by his words to meet his conception of their potential fortitude, rooted in his own experience of what one might endure and overcome.
The late Canadian diplomat, scholar and poet Douglas LePan was a friend of mine, a friend who was fortunate enough to lead a long, rich life. He wrote that nothing great in human affairs could be accomplished without courage, but that
Courage shadowed by weakness may be the most precious of all
since it carries sweetness into the heart of the building,
carries it like honey into the hollows of the honeycomb.
I don't know what David Batters endured or what the experience might, under other circumstances, have allowed him to do. Sadly, none of us now will.
One of the journalistic commonplaces that was trotted out on this occasion as on similar ones is that those who have never suffered from depression cannot really comprehend the nature of Batters's ordeal. I am not even sure that those who do are much better equipped. The term 'depression' obscures at least as it illuminates. In his searing memoir of his own battle with what we might better call (at least for the moment) profound despair, Darkness Visible, William Styron derides the timidity of the word, which in other contexts, he observes, can cover anything from an economic downturn to a declivity in a road. Joshua Wolf Shenk, in his splendid essay "A Melancholy of Mine Own," contends that it is not only too imprecise to be useful, but actually misleads in its attribution of essential similarity to what are often wildly divergent battles with an infinite variety of psychic demons.
A rather banal and obtuse piece by the political columnist for Batters's hometown paper in Regina speculates that public life added to Batters's burdens, and that the politician's trafficking in optimism weighed with particular heaviness on a man who, at his core, found himself so awfully bereft. In fact, those bearing grave wounds in their inner lives often find solace in the
acclaim that public life brings; if you will indulge the clinical jargon, it brings the affect which too often eludes them in the quotidian interactions of private existence.
Among political figures indisputably of the first rank, both Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill would almost certainly be diagnosed today as sufferers from chronic clinical depression. The latter referred to it as his "black dog", and often made a point of keeping some distance from the edge of the platform whenever he found himself in a train station. "I've no desire to quit this world", he remarked, "but sometimes thoughts, desperate thoughts, come into one's head."
Depression does not necessarily ennoble, any more than other afflection. It is more convincing to see adversity of any stripe as making people pretty much what they already are, only more so. But it does seem likely that acquaintance with persistent, intractable sadness and futility schools one in the inescapable tragedy of the human condition. The man who has chosen a political vocation may find that it leaves him better armoured for the emotional demands that public crisis imposes, demands that might crush others.
It is tempting to think that Lincoln and Churchill were able to rise to the awful responsibilities of wartime leadership at least in part because they had lived privately in the terrible night that the conditions of war turned into the national experience. At some level, others may have sensed this and half-consciously turned to them as the indispensable guides when an entire country sought the way out of Dante's "dark wood." A number of scholars have noted Lincoln's remarkable growth as a rhetorician in the years of his wartime leadership; circumstances summoned forth what now seems quite clearly the prose of the tragic poet, if you will, that the day required. As for Churchill, he was dismissed through much of the 1930s as an irredeemable anachronism, his mock-Augustan prose hopelessly out of place in modern Britain. Yet his imperishable speeches of 1939 and 1940, as Orwell perceptively wrote, now seemed to match the hour in their sense of the solemnity and gravity of events. There were, he went on, many Britons who could not necessarily follow Churchill's meaning word by word, but were moved and inspired by his words to meet his conception of their potential fortitude, rooted in his own experience of what one might endure and overcome.
The late Canadian diplomat, scholar and poet Douglas LePan was a friend of mine, a friend who was fortunate enough to lead a long, rich life. He wrote that nothing great in human affairs could be accomplished without courage, but that
Courage shadowed by weakness may be the most precious of all
since it carries sweetness into the heart of the building,
carries it like honey into the hollows of the honeycomb.
I don't know what David Batters endured or what the experience might, under other circumstances, have allowed him to do. Sadly, none of us now will.
Tim Hudak: Early Impressions
It's not inconceivable that circumstances could eventually deposit Tim Hudak (whom Ontario Progressive Conservatives chose as their leader a week ago) in the Premier's chair. But they would have to conspire in slightly peculiar ways to do so. Hudak is not altogether devoid of appeal; in his public appearances (I have never met him in person) he seems genial enough, if in a rather calculating manner too obvious even for a politician. While I would not go so far as to pronounce him a stupid man, he appears not be a very reflective or curious one. And in his over-emphatic solicitude for what he styles 'middle-class values' and his ostentatious display of the family that might have emerged from a 1950s sitcom, he fits an older voter's notion of what a young man should be like. Though a dozen years younger than Dalton McGuinty, in his demeanour and discernible attitudes he seems a few years older. One can, without any effort, actually close one's eyes and imagine him addressing a crowd of constituents as 'folks.'
It is, then, no surprise that he goes down better the further one gets from the urban centres of the Province. Nor is it shocking that he would emerge as the favourite of those PCs who attribute John Tory's defeat in the last election to his cautious centrism. Hudak's insistence that his party prospers when it articulates an unabashedly conservative message was nectar to party activists pining for the ideological clarity of the Common Sense Revolution. Yet nostalgia for the glory days of Mike Harris is not so widespread as to look like the foundation of a Conservative restoration at Queen's Park, and current conditions differ in important ways from those that brought Harris to power.
For one thing, the NDP government of Bob Rae was seen, fairly or otherwise, as not only spending recklessly but either to no good effect or to that of worsening the early 1990s recession as far as Ontario was concerned. While plunging revenues and rising unemployment were part of Rae's inheritance, the popular perception was that his government's early measures had forfeited the confidence of the business community that was a prerequisite of recovery.
The McGuinty government, on the other hand, has stepped up spending, but not to a degree that strikes a majority of the electorate as unwarranted; moreover, it has avoided the symbolism-laden missteps that an NDP government deemed obligatory in such fields as labour relations, and which so troubled business. As well, the government's critics have yet to find a convincing case for blaming Ontario's economic woes on McGuinty and his colleagues, so obvious is the principal role of extraneous forces. And if the deficits of the Rae era are a distant memory (and a vague one, insofar as they had little tangible impact on the lives of most voters), the Harris cuts are more vivid ones, and not of a pleasant variety. At the time, Harris and his colleagues could successfully invoke Ontario's deepening indebtedness as justification for reductions in social spending; it is now widely understood that this was essentially an excuse for doing what they already wished to do on ideological grounds. That suspicion is likely to shadow Hudak (whose wife was one of Mike Harris's key advisers, and whose early supporters included the former Premier himself).
As parties out of power often do, Ontario's PCs have become a cranky, eccentric, and arguably extreme bunch in recent years. Either out of conviction or to win the second-preference support of those who backed others (notably the loopy rustic Randy Hillier), Hudak has embraced some decidedly dodgy policies. One of these is a legislated cap on increases in property assessments, along the lines of legislation in California and Florida. Such measures have been plausibly criticized as impairing the efficient operation of the real estate market and effectively subsidizing homeowners, and in California, they have contributed to the structural gridlock that makes mere passage of a budget occasionally impossible. Hudak has also echoed Hiller's call for the abolition of Provincial Human Rights Commissions. There is an unanswerable case for restricting the authority of HRCs, and doing away with their ability to threaten liberty of expression; the indispensable Liberal MP Keith Martin has a Private Member's Bill that would largely do this.
To call for outright abolition, on the other hand, is to align oneself with eccentrics in Hillier's mold and to make a substantial gift to one's political opponents; Liberal apparatchiks have already indicated they will not be timid in warning urban swing voters about the extent to which Hudak has accepted Hillier's platform as his own.
There are, of course, parts of Ontario where this unambiguous shift to the right is likely to prove more palatable than John Tory's uninspiring centrism; the problem for the PCs is that they already hold these seats. So it would seem that at least the short-term impact of Hudak's victory will be to strengthen his party where it has nothing more to gain but to leave it more vulnerable where it is now weak, and needs to recover in order to have any realistic chance of winning the next election.
It is, then, no surprise that he goes down better the further one gets from the urban centres of the Province. Nor is it shocking that he would emerge as the favourite of those PCs who attribute John Tory's defeat in the last election to his cautious centrism. Hudak's insistence that his party prospers when it articulates an unabashedly conservative message was nectar to party activists pining for the ideological clarity of the Common Sense Revolution. Yet nostalgia for the glory days of Mike Harris is not so widespread as to look like the foundation of a Conservative restoration at Queen's Park, and current conditions differ in important ways from those that brought Harris to power.
For one thing, the NDP government of Bob Rae was seen, fairly or otherwise, as not only spending recklessly but either to no good effect or to that of worsening the early 1990s recession as far as Ontario was concerned. While plunging revenues and rising unemployment were part of Rae's inheritance, the popular perception was that his government's early measures had forfeited the confidence of the business community that was a prerequisite of recovery.
The McGuinty government, on the other hand, has stepped up spending, but not to a degree that strikes a majority of the electorate as unwarranted; moreover, it has avoided the symbolism-laden missteps that an NDP government deemed obligatory in such fields as labour relations, and which so troubled business. As well, the government's critics have yet to find a convincing case for blaming Ontario's economic woes on McGuinty and his colleagues, so obvious is the principal role of extraneous forces. And if the deficits of the Rae era are a distant memory (and a vague one, insofar as they had little tangible impact on the lives of most voters), the Harris cuts are more vivid ones, and not of a pleasant variety. At the time, Harris and his colleagues could successfully invoke Ontario's deepening indebtedness as justification for reductions in social spending; it is now widely understood that this was essentially an excuse for doing what they already wished to do on ideological grounds. That suspicion is likely to shadow Hudak (whose wife was one of Mike Harris's key advisers, and whose early supporters included the former Premier himself).
As parties out of power often do, Ontario's PCs have become a cranky, eccentric, and arguably extreme bunch in recent years. Either out of conviction or to win the second-preference support of those who backed others (notably the loopy rustic Randy Hillier), Hudak has embraced some decidedly dodgy policies. One of these is a legislated cap on increases in property assessments, along the lines of legislation in California and Florida. Such measures have been plausibly criticized as impairing the efficient operation of the real estate market and effectively subsidizing homeowners, and in California, they have contributed to the structural gridlock that makes mere passage of a budget occasionally impossible. Hudak has also echoed Hiller's call for the abolition of Provincial Human Rights Commissions. There is an unanswerable case for restricting the authority of HRCs, and doing away with their ability to threaten liberty of expression; the indispensable Liberal MP Keith Martin has a Private Member's Bill that would largely do this.
To call for outright abolition, on the other hand, is to align oneself with eccentrics in Hillier's mold and to make a substantial gift to one's political opponents; Liberal apparatchiks have already indicated they will not be timid in warning urban swing voters about the extent to which Hudak has accepted Hillier's platform as his own.
There are, of course, parts of Ontario where this unambiguous shift to the right is likely to prove more palatable than John Tory's uninspiring centrism; the problem for the PCs is that they already hold these seats. So it would seem that at least the short-term impact of Hudak's victory will be to strengthen his party where it has nothing more to gain but to leave it more vulnerable where it is now weak, and needs to recover in order to have any realistic chance of winning the next election.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Miller's Folly
The current strike by Toronto's garbage collectors and other City workers has usefully clarified the underlying ineptitude of Mayor David Miller's administration. The obstinacy with which the strikers refuse to contemplate even modest 'give-backs' has not gone down at all well with the local public, and their fundamental unreasonableness has a nice synecdoche in their insistence on retaining the privilege of converting as many as 18 sick days a year into paid vacation time (these can be banked over the course of a career such that an employee about to retire can do so six months early if enough of them have accumulated).
As is generally the case with such strikes, their consequent inconveniences fall disproportionately on those who least equipped to shoulder them. Many Torontonians (to be precise, those with money enough) can make alternative arrangements for the removal of their trash or the babysitting of their children. Not all, however, are so lucky. For single mothers working at minimum wage jobs, the child care centres now temporarily shuttered are indispensable, and without them they must either have obliging friends, relatives, or neighbours, or stay home in order to attend to their children themselves, with precious little chance of finding the job still there when the strike is over. If we define essential services so narrowly as to cover only those that protect life and limb (policemen, firefighters, hospital personnel), the strike does not involve them. By a definition that encompasses services whose withdrawal pushes those who depend on them into agonizing choices, it does.
But the strikers can make one point in their own defence. The Mayor, they note, is demanding of them something he has not demanded of other municipal workers up to now. The police, the firefighters, the employees of the Toronto Transit Commission; all emerged from contract negotiations with most of what they wanted and virtually nothing by way of concessions. After first taking office as Mayor, Miller allowed his NDP membership to lapse, presumably on the theory that a partisan affiliation could get in the way of negotiating with other levels of government. But you can tell from his behaviour that he remains at the beck and call of the public sector unions, card-carrying dipper or not. He has not only pandered to this constituency, he has done what he can to enlarge it; the City payroll has swelled briskly under his stewardship, with Toronto adding well over 1,000 new full-time workers this year alone, plummeting revenues and faltering economy notwithstanding.
Efficient management of the municipal fisc has not been the Mayor's overriding priority, symbolic gestures such as the brandishing of an ostentatiously 'new broom' aside. Indeed, the realm of the symbolic seems to be David Miller's natural habitat; his most visible initiatives have taken the form of crusades against minor if not largely notional irritants to public wellbeing such as plastic grocery bags, styrofoam coffee cups, and insufficiently nutritious hot dogs. When it comes to the financial picture, he prefers to blame others. That Toronto's budgetary woes are entirely the result of Harris-era downloading and McGuinty-era service mandates is for him an article of faith, and he has gone so far as to sue the Province rather than improve the efficiency with which municipal services are delivered.
Miller has defended his openhanded handling of labour questions by suggesting that those who perform the City's work should be able to afford living here. A reasonable enough point, but he pushes it too far. Toronto trash collectors and many of their colleagues performing other tasks that are not, to put it kindly, particularly demanding, are compensated at rates of well over $20 an hour. They also enjoy far greater job security than the overwhelming majority of private sector employees. That they should make modest sacrifices in a climate of economic difficulty is hardly unreasonable and it is a mark of Miller's indulgent way with the public sector workforce that it took something like our current economic difficulties to compel what feeble resistance to union intransigence he has yet mustered. He has yet to ask the Ontario Government to enact back-to-work legislation, despite palpably rising public impatience.
The trash collectors and their colleagues presumably calculated that strike action on the eve of the tourist season would maximize their leverage (so far, the management of Pride Week events has been complicated and some Canada Day events have been canceled altogether or scaled back). But it's hardly maximized public sympathy for them, or for the Mayor. Miller's popularity was less than it had been a year ago, according to recent polls, even before the strike. Now at least one survey has him losing the next election to his onetime opponent, former provincial PC leader John Tory. It would be premature to conclude that his best days are behind him politically, but it's not too early to point out that the central weakness of his leadership has been exposed, and to an electorate that seems less indulgent of him than he is of City unions.
As is generally the case with such strikes, their consequent inconveniences fall disproportionately on those who least equipped to shoulder them. Many Torontonians (to be precise, those with money enough) can make alternative arrangements for the removal of their trash or the babysitting of their children. Not all, however, are so lucky. For single mothers working at minimum wage jobs, the child care centres now temporarily shuttered are indispensable, and without them they must either have obliging friends, relatives, or neighbours, or stay home in order to attend to their children themselves, with precious little chance of finding the job still there when the strike is over. If we define essential services so narrowly as to cover only those that protect life and limb (policemen, firefighters, hospital personnel), the strike does not involve them. By a definition that encompasses services whose withdrawal pushes those who depend on them into agonizing choices, it does.
But the strikers can make one point in their own defence. The Mayor, they note, is demanding of them something he has not demanded of other municipal workers up to now. The police, the firefighters, the employees of the Toronto Transit Commission; all emerged from contract negotiations with most of what they wanted and virtually nothing by way of concessions. After first taking office as Mayor, Miller allowed his NDP membership to lapse, presumably on the theory that a partisan affiliation could get in the way of negotiating with other levels of government. But you can tell from his behaviour that he remains at the beck and call of the public sector unions, card-carrying dipper or not. He has not only pandered to this constituency, he has done what he can to enlarge it; the City payroll has swelled briskly under his stewardship, with Toronto adding well over 1,000 new full-time workers this year alone, plummeting revenues and faltering economy notwithstanding.
Efficient management of the municipal fisc has not been the Mayor's overriding priority, symbolic gestures such as the brandishing of an ostentatiously 'new broom' aside. Indeed, the realm of the symbolic seems to be David Miller's natural habitat; his most visible initiatives have taken the form of crusades against minor if not largely notional irritants to public wellbeing such as plastic grocery bags, styrofoam coffee cups, and insufficiently nutritious hot dogs. When it comes to the financial picture, he prefers to blame others. That Toronto's budgetary woes are entirely the result of Harris-era downloading and McGuinty-era service mandates is for him an article of faith, and he has gone so far as to sue the Province rather than improve the efficiency with which municipal services are delivered.
Miller has defended his openhanded handling of labour questions by suggesting that those who perform the City's work should be able to afford living here. A reasonable enough point, but he pushes it too far. Toronto trash collectors and many of their colleagues performing other tasks that are not, to put it kindly, particularly demanding, are compensated at rates of well over $20 an hour. They also enjoy far greater job security than the overwhelming majority of private sector employees. That they should make modest sacrifices in a climate of economic difficulty is hardly unreasonable and it is a mark of Miller's indulgent way with the public sector workforce that it took something like our current economic difficulties to compel what feeble resistance to union intransigence he has yet mustered. He has yet to ask the Ontario Government to enact back-to-work legislation, despite palpably rising public impatience.
The trash collectors and their colleagues presumably calculated that strike action on the eve of the tourist season would maximize their leverage (so far, the management of Pride Week events has been complicated and some Canada Day events have been canceled altogether or scaled back). But it's hardly maximized public sympathy for them, or for the Mayor. Miller's popularity was less than it had been a year ago, according to recent polls, even before the strike. Now at least one survey has him losing the next election to his onetime opponent, former provincial PC leader John Tory. It would be premature to conclude that his best days are behind him politically, but it's not too early to point out that the central weakness of his leadership has been exposed, and to an electorate that seems less indulgent of him than he is of City unions.
Saturday, June 06, 2009
Film Review: 'Star Trek'
In some ways, J.J. Abrams's decision to direct the film that would 're-boot' the 'Star Trek' franchise was a thankless undertaking. Too many departures from the conventions of either the original television series or the previous films, and you antagonize the acne-pocked misfits who form the sub-culture, bordering on minor cult, that forms your core audience. Excessive fidelity on the other hand, would forfeit the interest of the wider public that craves something new, and has only dim recollections of the series that inflicted on an unsuspecting world some forty years of an increasingly self-parodic William Shatner.
As Anthony Lane observed in the New Yorker, Abrams (whose previous films are 'Mission Impossible: III' and 'Cloverfield', an intermittently clever pastiche of the monster genre; he is better known for his television creations 'Alias' and 'Lost') possesses that limited, but by no means contemptible, talent better fitted to reworking a pre-existing story than truly original creation. On the whole, he has struck the right balance here, and by sensibly distinguishing what is integral to the original's appeal from that which could be dispensed with or could not be duplicated. It is a commonplace that for the generations who have grown up in a world where at any given time there was a re-run on at least one local tv channel, no matter where you happened to be, 'Star Trek' has the generic resonance of mythology. Abrams and his co-scenarists Bob Orci and Alex Kurtzmann, have understood the mythic core of the original more adeptly than the creators of the previous films, and they have embedded it within the framework of another narrative of mythic simplicity.
One key to understanding 'Star Trek' is that neither Kirk nor Spock is a fully satisfactory hero in his own right. The former is commanding but headstrong, the latter cerebral but tone-deaf to the unpredictability of events and the emotional dynamics of leadership. The division between the two obviously reflects the divide between man's animal and rational facets. And the successful pooling of their talents not only provides an object lesson in overcoming that divide, it shows two flawed individuals forming an integrated hero between them. The device of the 'backstory', used with mixed success in recent efforts to reactivate gasping franchises, is here used to good effect. The emphasis on how Kirk and Spock became their familiar selves, and groped towards mutual comprehension and cooperation allows Abrams to exploit the potential of the relationship more thoroughly than it has been done before.
By taking the story back to Kirk and Spock's early days, Abrams makes of 'Star Trek' a joint bildungsroman, a chronicle of the psychological and social formation of the two young protagonists. In the opening sequence, the starship Kelvin is ambushed and destroyed by a Romulan craft commanded by a Captain Nero (Eric Bana), its captain conducting a delaying action that allows him to send most of the crew (and his own pregnant wife and then infant son)to safety in shuttle craft. The baby becomes James T. Kirk, who is soon stealing antique hot rods as a boy, and then smart-mouthing his way through bar-fights as an Iowa adolescent. A surrogate father, his actual father's colleague Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood), challenges him to enroll in Starfleet, telling him "your father was captain of a starship for twelve minutes. He saved eight hundred lives, including yours. I dare you to do better." The next day Kirk signs up. We meet Spock as a bullied child on Vulcan, picked upon for his half-human ancestry; he deliberately distances himself from his Vulcan half by opting for Starfleet over the Vulcan Science Academy after his having a human mother is described as a disadvantage by a high-ranking Vulcan official.
As formula requires, the two take a visceral dislike to each another, with Kirk re-programming a computer to succeed in the Kobayashi Maru command exercise Spock has designed. The resultant disciplinary hearing is interrupted by the lightning storms around Vulcan that herald Nero's return. What follows hinges upon the familiar devices of time travel and parallel universes, with a much older Spock (incarnated by Leonard Nimoy)coming from the future to instruct the young Kirk through Vulcan mind-meld that he must displace the younger Spock as commander of the Enterprise in order to thwart Nero's plan to destroy Vulcan. Kirk and Spock will enter, the older Vulcan says, "a friendship that will define you both."
To thwart Nero, Kirk and Spock must not only work with each other, but draw upon the talents of the familiar characters from the original series. In each case, the defining mannerisms are present, but with the performances never becoming mere imitation. A delightfully manic Karl Urban reworks Dr. McCoy's familiar irritability, and Zoe Saldana provides a predictably poised (and less predictably sensuous) Uhura. John Cho's Sulu, Simon Pegg's Scotty, and Anton Yelchin's Chekhov are less successful, too often becoming mired in laboured dialect humour. (Though one of the better action sequences, a fight on a drilling platform inserting a destructive 'red matter' in Vulcan, has Sulu engage in a well-choreographed sword fight.) An unexpected treat is Bana's puckish rendition of Nero, proof that an intelligent actor can still make a one-dimensional villain more captivating on the screen than one assumes he was on the page.
Abrams also shows himself attentive to those elements of Gene Roddenberry's original conception that have not worn well. Shatner's Kirk embodied a distinctly American swagger that is less appealing now than in 1966, and his aggressive womanizing no doubt grates on some contemporary sensibilities. As played here by Chris Pine, the smart-alecky and often horny Kirk is as often rebuffed as accepted, and frequently finds himself on the losing end of pick-up banter.
Spock's struggle with his opposing human and Vulcan characteristics is, for the first time, consistently in the foreground of the story, and is embodied by Zachary Quinto with an understated and effective nervosity. That Spock faces reflexive disdain for humanity among Vulcans is one point on which Abrams's conception is less dewy-eyed than Roddenberry's. Where the latter, at the high point of America's civil rights activism, posited a future in which antipathies not only of race but of species are overcome within the Federation, the more realistic sensibility of the latter assumes slower, more partial progress towards quasi-universal fraternity.
Anyone who grew up on 'Star Trek' reruns can certainly remember chortling over the spray-painted styrofoam rocks and rudimentary special effects. Abrams and his colleagues make proficient use of CGI and other current technologies; moreover, the many vivid action scenes are presented without the automatic resort to slo-mo that seems, in the wake of the 'Matrix' trilogy, tiresomely de rigeur. More surprising yet, Abrams reveals a previously unsuspected knack for composition, with a number of memorable images, including the annihilation of the Kelvin, the implosion of Vulcan, and the lovely iconic scene in which Kirk rides his motorbike through the Iowa night to look at the Enterprise under construction. (Equally striking footage of the ship's construction that was included in an early trailer is not, regrettably, in the film itself.)
Perhaps the worst mistake one might make with this material would be to treat it too seriously, and for the most part Abrams avoids that. Indeed, on many an occasion he and his collaborators invite the viewer's amused complicity, quoting familiar lines with an obvious wink, and they sometimes upend familiar motifs, as when Spock enjoys the romantic success with Uhura that Kirk sought, only to be effortlessly rejected. That the partnership of the two leads is closer to an equal one than we have seen before is nicely exemplified by the fact that the one gets the Enterprise, the other the girl.
The adroit use of the backstory here is likely to prove something of a one-off, though it seems that at least one sequel is already in the works. It would seem, then, that in business terms Abrams's 'retcon'(it is more that than a true re-boot)has revived the 'Star Trek' franchise as hoped. Those who predicted the death of the franchise upon the cancellation of Enterprise a few years ago would seem to have been proven wrong. In commercial terms it may yet live long, though I am yet to be convinced that, in artistic ones, it will prosper.
As Anthony Lane observed in the New Yorker, Abrams (whose previous films are 'Mission Impossible: III' and 'Cloverfield', an intermittently clever pastiche of the monster genre; he is better known for his television creations 'Alias' and 'Lost') possesses that limited, but by no means contemptible, talent better fitted to reworking a pre-existing story than truly original creation. On the whole, he has struck the right balance here, and by sensibly distinguishing what is integral to the original's appeal from that which could be dispensed with or could not be duplicated. It is a commonplace that for the generations who have grown up in a world where at any given time there was a re-run on at least one local tv channel, no matter where you happened to be, 'Star Trek' has the generic resonance of mythology. Abrams and his co-scenarists Bob Orci and Alex Kurtzmann, have understood the mythic core of the original more adeptly than the creators of the previous films, and they have embedded it within the framework of another narrative of mythic simplicity.
One key to understanding 'Star Trek' is that neither Kirk nor Spock is a fully satisfactory hero in his own right. The former is commanding but headstrong, the latter cerebral but tone-deaf to the unpredictability of events and the emotional dynamics of leadership. The division between the two obviously reflects the divide between man's animal and rational facets. And the successful pooling of their talents not only provides an object lesson in overcoming that divide, it shows two flawed individuals forming an integrated hero between them. The device of the 'backstory', used with mixed success in recent efforts to reactivate gasping franchises, is here used to good effect. The emphasis on how Kirk and Spock became their familiar selves, and groped towards mutual comprehension and cooperation allows Abrams to exploit the potential of the relationship more thoroughly than it has been done before.
By taking the story back to Kirk and Spock's early days, Abrams makes of 'Star Trek' a joint bildungsroman, a chronicle of the psychological and social formation of the two young protagonists. In the opening sequence, the starship Kelvin is ambushed and destroyed by a Romulan craft commanded by a Captain Nero (Eric Bana), its captain conducting a delaying action that allows him to send most of the crew (and his own pregnant wife and then infant son)to safety in shuttle craft. The baby becomes James T. Kirk, who is soon stealing antique hot rods as a boy, and then smart-mouthing his way through bar-fights as an Iowa adolescent. A surrogate father, his actual father's colleague Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood), challenges him to enroll in Starfleet, telling him "your father was captain of a starship for twelve minutes. He saved eight hundred lives, including yours. I dare you to do better." The next day Kirk signs up. We meet Spock as a bullied child on Vulcan, picked upon for his half-human ancestry; he deliberately distances himself from his Vulcan half by opting for Starfleet over the Vulcan Science Academy after his having a human mother is described as a disadvantage by a high-ranking Vulcan official.
As formula requires, the two take a visceral dislike to each another, with Kirk re-programming a computer to succeed in the Kobayashi Maru command exercise Spock has designed. The resultant disciplinary hearing is interrupted by the lightning storms around Vulcan that herald Nero's return. What follows hinges upon the familiar devices of time travel and parallel universes, with a much older Spock (incarnated by Leonard Nimoy)coming from the future to instruct the young Kirk through Vulcan mind-meld that he must displace the younger Spock as commander of the Enterprise in order to thwart Nero's plan to destroy Vulcan. Kirk and Spock will enter, the older Vulcan says, "a friendship that will define you both."
To thwart Nero, Kirk and Spock must not only work with each other, but draw upon the talents of the familiar characters from the original series. In each case, the defining mannerisms are present, but with the performances never becoming mere imitation. A delightfully manic Karl Urban reworks Dr. McCoy's familiar irritability, and Zoe Saldana provides a predictably poised (and less predictably sensuous) Uhura. John Cho's Sulu, Simon Pegg's Scotty, and Anton Yelchin's Chekhov are less successful, too often becoming mired in laboured dialect humour. (Though one of the better action sequences, a fight on a drilling platform inserting a destructive 'red matter' in Vulcan, has Sulu engage in a well-choreographed sword fight.) An unexpected treat is Bana's puckish rendition of Nero, proof that an intelligent actor can still make a one-dimensional villain more captivating on the screen than one assumes he was on the page.
Abrams also shows himself attentive to those elements of Gene Roddenberry's original conception that have not worn well. Shatner's Kirk embodied a distinctly American swagger that is less appealing now than in 1966, and his aggressive womanizing no doubt grates on some contemporary sensibilities. As played here by Chris Pine, the smart-alecky and often horny Kirk is as often rebuffed as accepted, and frequently finds himself on the losing end of pick-up banter.
Spock's struggle with his opposing human and Vulcan characteristics is, for the first time, consistently in the foreground of the story, and is embodied by Zachary Quinto with an understated and effective nervosity. That Spock faces reflexive disdain for humanity among Vulcans is one point on which Abrams's conception is less dewy-eyed than Roddenberry's. Where the latter, at the high point of America's civil rights activism, posited a future in which antipathies not only of race but of species are overcome within the Federation, the more realistic sensibility of the latter assumes slower, more partial progress towards quasi-universal fraternity.
Anyone who grew up on 'Star Trek' reruns can certainly remember chortling over the spray-painted styrofoam rocks and rudimentary special effects. Abrams and his colleagues make proficient use of CGI and other current technologies; moreover, the many vivid action scenes are presented without the automatic resort to slo-mo that seems, in the wake of the 'Matrix' trilogy, tiresomely de rigeur. More surprising yet, Abrams reveals a previously unsuspected knack for composition, with a number of memorable images, including the annihilation of the Kelvin, the implosion of Vulcan, and the lovely iconic scene in which Kirk rides his motorbike through the Iowa night to look at the Enterprise under construction. (Equally striking footage of the ship's construction that was included in an early trailer is not, regrettably, in the film itself.)
Perhaps the worst mistake one might make with this material would be to treat it too seriously, and for the most part Abrams avoids that. Indeed, on many an occasion he and his collaborators invite the viewer's amused complicity, quoting familiar lines with an obvious wink, and they sometimes upend familiar motifs, as when Spock enjoys the romantic success with Uhura that Kirk sought, only to be effortlessly rejected. That the partnership of the two leads is closer to an equal one than we have seen before is nicely exemplified by the fact that the one gets the Enterprise, the other the girl.
The adroit use of the backstory here is likely to prove something of a one-off, though it seems that at least one sequel is already in the works. It would seem, then, that in business terms Abrams's 'retcon'(it is more that than a true re-boot)has revived the 'Star Trek' franchise as hoped. Those who predicted the death of the franchise upon the cancellation of Enterprise a few years ago would seem to have been proven wrong. In commercial terms it may yet live long, though I am yet to be convinced that, in artistic ones, it will prosper.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Ignatieff's Patriotism
Michael Ignatieff's recent book tour on behalf of True Patriot Love was, unavoidably, a political event as well. The eloquence and articulacy with which Ignatieff evokes the intertwined histories of Canada and his maternal ancestors would suffice to quell any reasonable doubts his years abroad might have created about his attachment to this country. If he were not succeeding on this front, I doubt the Conservatives (faster than you can chant 'Joe McCarthy') would have trotted out the 'just visiting' ads denigrating his patriotism and depicting him as driven solely by ego and vanity.
Even if the attack were less dishonest and demagogic than it is, it would still be an exercise of stupefying irrelevance to an electorate that seems, rightly, more interested in such matters as the present economic situation and the plans for dealing with it of the various parties than in precisely what percentage of Michael Ignatieff's time on earth has been spent in other countries. In light of their economic record, it's understandable that the Conservatives would prefer to change the subject. Their leading figures are also keenly aware that, as Stephen Harper's long-time adviser Tom Flanagan has lamented, Canada is the only major democracy where the Party of the Right does not enjoy an inbuilt advantage as the 'patriotic party.'
In their zeal to redress this vulnerability, Harper and his colleagues display an indifference to occasion as well as a failure to think through the drawbacks for themselves of ginning up such a debate. There is at the very least the appearance of inconsistency in banging the patriotic drum when you are as openly disdainful of central national institutions as Mr. Harper has been on occasion. If the 'autonomists' who seek de facto independence for Quebec are ill-positioned to lecture others about their attachment to Canada, so is an unrepentant signatory to the 'firewall letter' which conceded so much of substance to Alberta separatism while eschewing the formality. Nor is Ignatieff the first politician with a healthy element of ambition in his makeup;you don't become a party leader without it, whether you are Liberal or Conservative. But the charge that nothing else is present in Ignatieff's case comes with ill grace from a leader who shows as much alacrity as Mr. Harper in abandoning principles and changing policies when this is the price of achieving or retaining power.
And of course the Conservative bill of particulars rests on distortion of Ignatieff's record where it is not provably spurious. Even when based in Britain or the United States, he frequently returned to Canada, ruminated and opined on Canadian concerns and figures (look at his 1980s articles for Saturday Night on Pierre Trudeau and Charles Taylor, and in the New Republic about Marshall McLuhan, for instance)and analysed events elsewhere with an unmistakably Canadian sensibility. The archetypal Canadian experience of accommodating multiple ethnocultural identities within one community is clearly a major influence on Ignatieff's analyses of nationalism as a scholar and war correspondent. Indeed, the arc of his public life is most persuasively understood as a series of excursions into concerns at the heart of the Canadian condition, with which he could reckon definitively only by coming home. Recognition of this was not Ignatieff's alone; his speech to the 2005 Liberal convention convinced many that his knowledge of the wider world had shaped a uniquely fresh perspective on the Canadian situation, and led them to see him as a potentially inspiring leader of both party and country.
It was not that long ago that Conservatives urged Canadians to embrace global markets, confident in our ability to compete beyond our own borders. Yet Stephen Harper contradicts this healthy optimism about our capacities by presenting Ignatieff's record of success at institutions like the BBC and Harvard not as an exemplary success story but as the abandonment of Canadian roots. In this new variant of conservatism, it seems, you must choose between your Canadian identity and achievement elsewhere. While they attack him, Ignatieff rightly observed, the Conservatives also insult the many Canadians who in any given year are living and working abroad. Just how many consecutive days, I wonder, can you be outside Canada before your affection for it falls into question? Are there special exemptions for our foreign service officers or the soldiers the Conservatives seem to think they alone among parties respect? These are the absurd calculations in which you are soon entangled once you reduce patriotism to a question of mailing address rather than of heart and mind. "The world needs more Canada", said one of the more successful ad campaigns of recent years. But if we are to take Mr. Harper at his word, any Canadians with something to share should get it done with and hurry home before their welcome expires.
And there's a nasty streak of anti-intellectualism in the sneers at Ignatieff as an "elitist" or an "academic";at what sad moment in recent Canadian politics did a well-stocked and disciplined mind become an object of reproach? I doubt it was an accident that one of the very few of Stockwell Day's innumerable gaffes that was actually feigned saw him refer in Parliament to Ignatieff not as the Member for Etobicoke-Lakeshore, or even for London or Cambridge, Mass., but as "the Member for Harvard." A hard-earned association with a great university is just a cheap punch-line for a Conservative Party whose stance towards the realms of art and intellect often seems like a variant of "let's beat up the kid with the glasses." Extensive travel and considerable learning are, to be sure, neither guarantees nor prerequisites of patriotism; but it is the most insular know-nothingism to imply that they're somehow incompatible with it.
The Conservative web site that says of Ignatieff "it's all about him" also recycles his observation that if his electors chose to reject him "I hope Harvard will let me back." Hell, if I were giving up the leadership of a research centre at the Kennedy School for something as chancy as a political career, I'd hope like Hell Harvard would take me back if it didn't work out, as would anyone with a groat's worth of sense. Overlooked in the chortling of the superannuated frat-boys running the Conservative ad campaign is the fact that for all the potential rewards Ignatieff courted in changing careers, there were risks and sacrifices as well. And there is an element of perversity in suspecting that because his presence here is the result of conscious choice and not geographical happenstance it is somehow discreditable.
Precisely because he has spent so much of his adult life elsewhere, it must have been an act of will for Ignatieff to nourish ties to Canada beyond nostalgia for the setting of youthful happiness. In its depth of understanding for the history and culture of this country, Ignatieff's patriotism is an achievement, not simple habit or sentiment. And like any praiseworthy attribute it is all the more admirable insofar as it is rooted in effort rather than that fortune which owes nothing to merit or dessert.
It would be a degrading diversion from more pressing matters for the leaders of our two major parties to fall into a protracted squabble over which has a stronger attachment to Canada. But it is not inappropriate to note how each man's version of patriotism is reflected in his rhetoric or program. A nation, Ernest Renan wrote, is a group of people who have done great things together and wish to do more. As his recent book shows, Ignatieff is taken by the unfinished nature of Canada and thus the possibility of great projects yet to be commenced. If the recent attacks on Ignatieff are indicative, Stephen Harper sees a smaller Canada, timid, inward-looking, defensive. This Canada excludes those whose horizons don't dovetail with its borders, and its people find in the achievements abroad of their countrymen only fodder for resentment. I have no trouble deciding which Canada I prefer, and still think enough of the Canadian public to believe a majority of it would agree.
Even if the attack were less dishonest and demagogic than it is, it would still be an exercise of stupefying irrelevance to an electorate that seems, rightly, more interested in such matters as the present economic situation and the plans for dealing with it of the various parties than in precisely what percentage of Michael Ignatieff's time on earth has been spent in other countries. In light of their economic record, it's understandable that the Conservatives would prefer to change the subject. Their leading figures are also keenly aware that, as Stephen Harper's long-time adviser Tom Flanagan has lamented, Canada is the only major democracy where the Party of the Right does not enjoy an inbuilt advantage as the 'patriotic party.'
In their zeal to redress this vulnerability, Harper and his colleagues display an indifference to occasion as well as a failure to think through the drawbacks for themselves of ginning up such a debate. There is at the very least the appearance of inconsistency in banging the patriotic drum when you are as openly disdainful of central national institutions as Mr. Harper has been on occasion. If the 'autonomists' who seek de facto independence for Quebec are ill-positioned to lecture others about their attachment to Canada, so is an unrepentant signatory to the 'firewall letter' which conceded so much of substance to Alberta separatism while eschewing the formality. Nor is Ignatieff the first politician with a healthy element of ambition in his makeup;you don't become a party leader without it, whether you are Liberal or Conservative. But the charge that nothing else is present in Ignatieff's case comes with ill grace from a leader who shows as much alacrity as Mr. Harper in abandoning principles and changing policies when this is the price of achieving or retaining power.
And of course the Conservative bill of particulars rests on distortion of Ignatieff's record where it is not provably spurious. Even when based in Britain or the United States, he frequently returned to Canada, ruminated and opined on Canadian concerns and figures (look at his 1980s articles for Saturday Night on Pierre Trudeau and Charles Taylor, and in the New Republic about Marshall McLuhan, for instance)and analysed events elsewhere with an unmistakably Canadian sensibility. The archetypal Canadian experience of accommodating multiple ethnocultural identities within one community is clearly a major influence on Ignatieff's analyses of nationalism as a scholar and war correspondent. Indeed, the arc of his public life is most persuasively understood as a series of excursions into concerns at the heart of the Canadian condition, with which he could reckon definitively only by coming home. Recognition of this was not Ignatieff's alone; his speech to the 2005 Liberal convention convinced many that his knowledge of the wider world had shaped a uniquely fresh perspective on the Canadian situation, and led them to see him as a potentially inspiring leader of both party and country.
It was not that long ago that Conservatives urged Canadians to embrace global markets, confident in our ability to compete beyond our own borders. Yet Stephen Harper contradicts this healthy optimism about our capacities by presenting Ignatieff's record of success at institutions like the BBC and Harvard not as an exemplary success story but as the abandonment of Canadian roots. In this new variant of conservatism, it seems, you must choose between your Canadian identity and achievement elsewhere. While they attack him, Ignatieff rightly observed, the Conservatives also insult the many Canadians who in any given year are living and working abroad. Just how many consecutive days, I wonder, can you be outside Canada before your affection for it falls into question? Are there special exemptions for our foreign service officers or the soldiers the Conservatives seem to think they alone among parties respect? These are the absurd calculations in which you are soon entangled once you reduce patriotism to a question of mailing address rather than of heart and mind. "The world needs more Canada", said one of the more successful ad campaigns of recent years. But if we are to take Mr. Harper at his word, any Canadians with something to share should get it done with and hurry home before their welcome expires.
And there's a nasty streak of anti-intellectualism in the sneers at Ignatieff as an "elitist" or an "academic";at what sad moment in recent Canadian politics did a well-stocked and disciplined mind become an object of reproach? I doubt it was an accident that one of the very few of Stockwell Day's innumerable gaffes that was actually feigned saw him refer in Parliament to Ignatieff not as the Member for Etobicoke-Lakeshore, or even for London or Cambridge, Mass., but as "the Member for Harvard." A hard-earned association with a great university is just a cheap punch-line for a Conservative Party whose stance towards the realms of art and intellect often seems like a variant of "let's beat up the kid with the glasses." Extensive travel and considerable learning are, to be sure, neither guarantees nor prerequisites of patriotism; but it is the most insular know-nothingism to imply that they're somehow incompatible with it.
The Conservative web site that says of Ignatieff "it's all about him" also recycles his observation that if his electors chose to reject him "I hope Harvard will let me back." Hell, if I were giving up the leadership of a research centre at the Kennedy School for something as chancy as a political career, I'd hope like Hell Harvard would take me back if it didn't work out, as would anyone with a groat's worth of sense. Overlooked in the chortling of the superannuated frat-boys running the Conservative ad campaign is the fact that for all the potential rewards Ignatieff courted in changing careers, there were risks and sacrifices as well. And there is an element of perversity in suspecting that because his presence here is the result of conscious choice and not geographical happenstance it is somehow discreditable.
Precisely because he has spent so much of his adult life elsewhere, it must have been an act of will for Ignatieff to nourish ties to Canada beyond nostalgia for the setting of youthful happiness. In its depth of understanding for the history and culture of this country, Ignatieff's patriotism is an achievement, not simple habit or sentiment. And like any praiseworthy attribute it is all the more admirable insofar as it is rooted in effort rather than that fortune which owes nothing to merit or dessert.
It would be a degrading diversion from more pressing matters for the leaders of our two major parties to fall into a protracted squabble over which has a stronger attachment to Canada. But it is not inappropriate to note how each man's version of patriotism is reflected in his rhetoric or program. A nation, Ernest Renan wrote, is a group of people who have done great things together and wish to do more. As his recent book shows, Ignatieff is taken by the unfinished nature of Canada and thus the possibility of great projects yet to be commenced. If the recent attacks on Ignatieff are indicative, Stephen Harper sees a smaller Canada, timid, inward-looking, defensive. This Canada excludes those whose horizons don't dovetail with its borders, and its people find in the achievements abroad of their countrymen only fodder for resentment. I have no trouble deciding which Canada I prefer, and still think enough of the Canadian public to believe a majority of it would agree.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
J.G. Ballard, RIP
J. G. Ballard, who died of pancreatic cancer at 78 on April 19, was known mainly to aficionados of science fiction until the publication of Empire of the Sun in 1984. That autobiographical novel, and Steven Spielberg's film adaptation, brought him a wider public, but the more discerning among his established readership appreciated it not only for its own qualities but the light it cast on what had come before.
As part of the circle around New Worlds magazine in the 1960s, Ballard was a major figure in the New Wave of science fiction, whose concerns were less with the familiar tropes of space opera than with experimentation in narrative form and with the hypothesized future as avenue for commentary on the current scene. One distinctive feature of Ballard's work was a preoccupation with natural and man-made disaster (global warming precipitated by solar radiation in 1962's The Drowned World, worldwide drought in 1964's The Burning World ). Another was the proliferation, whatever the ostensible subject matter, of hellishly grim cityscapes, collapsing under either the blows of external assault of one sort or another or the inescapable weakness of their own material and moral underpinnings.
As Jason Cowley noted in The Observer, Ballard's longer fiction often lingers for several hundred pages over the protracted decline of an elaborately constructed, but sterile artificial environment. Decay is sometimes presented as literal, with steel and glass yielding to proliferating jungle; but it almost always has a moral element as well, with the human nature that stretches socially dictated constraints until they shatter just as savage as the physical world that the designers of the modern metropolis cannot keep at bay indefinitely. Many of his protagonists are by training and outlook men devoted to order (architects and psychiatrists are among their favoured professions)who contend with, but often find themselves unexpectedly liberated by, its breakdown.
An early collection of linked stories, Vermilion Sands, carried the technologies of distraction and solipsism to their logical extreme in the desert resort of the title, where affectless sybarites seek the charge of lived experience through increasingly elaborate and desperate means, including mood-sensing houses and self-painting canvasses (well before either Bladerunner or William Gibson, Ballard anticipated both virtual reality and the aesthetic of cyberpunk). But the technological society has unintended consequences and can easily turn upon its creators, who can find both new dangers and the thrill of unmediated emotion in escape. In 1974's Concrete Island, an automobile accident strands an injured motorist on a traffic island; for days, he tries in vain to catch the attention of drivers racing by, but none will risk stopping to help. Eventually he gives up on returning to the world he knows, joining a primitive society of other accident survivors on the island. (A more cerebral Lost, if you will.) In the 1975 High Rise, the inhabitants of an apartment building where the abundance of amenities leads to a growing isolation from the outside world segregate themselves from their wider lives. Sporadic power failures and petty humiliations over matters of class and lifestyle lead to their dividing into rival tribes or clans, engaged in a localized but remorseless civil war; what was designed as impenetrable refuge becomes a Hobbesian nightmare.
No work of Ballard's acquired more notoriety than his 1973 Crash, which depicted the soul-deadening effects of the celebrity culture and the mindless hedonism the affluent society makes possible, as well as the possibility of sexual and personal release through the violence of the machine age. A group of car crash survivors seek to recapture the heightened awareness of their accidents through reenactments of celebrity crashes, engaging in sexual acts in damaged vehicles with wounds as apertures for penetration. Both the book and David Cronenberg's uneven film occasioned fierce, often intemperate, controversy.
Ballard's career path was far from the conventional series of writing workshops and teaching fellowships, including as it did abandoned medical training, a stint as an advertising copywriter, and service in the RAF (with training at CFB Moose Jaw). But Empire of the Sun illuminates what I take to be his formative experience as a writer. Ballard was born in China in 1930, and spent much of his early life in an English enclave in Shanghai's International Settlement. War destroys what the quasi-fictional 'Jim' of the novel comes to realize is a precarious simulacrum of a stable world. The 'Great Asian War', as its historians Chris Bayly and Tim Harper note, lasted longer and took more lives than the European conflict to which it is often seen as a sideshow or pendant. And as Ballard knew and demonstrates, its impact on individuals was as shattering as that on the rickety imperial system that Britain anchored and subsequently cobbled together again with spit and baling wire once Japan's imperial ambitions had been thwarted.
After Pearl Harbour the Japanese move into the Settlement and Jim spends several months, lyrically evoked by Ballard, scavenging from the ramshackle house from which his parents have been driven, eventually to be interned in Lunghua Internment Camp. While it is the Japanese who have shattered the illusory universe in which Jim blissfully lived, the plane-infatuated boy finds the enemy pilots figures of incredible glamour, despite, and because of, their association with the machinery of apocalyptic destruction. And if the evanescence of the mock-England of Shanghai is profoundly disorienting to Jim, freedom from parental stricture is liberating; the Japanese jailers may impose what is, by any impartial measure, a harsher rule, but that rule is more easily , and pleasurably, outwitted than that of Jim's father and mother. Worsening wartime conditions bring austerity and finally near-starvation before deliverance comes, through the agency of the American military might whose reliance on awesome technology is signaled by the flashes from Nagasaki that Jim sees toward the close.
Spielberg's film version focused on the director's pet theme of a child looking for his lost parents, and neglects the more interesting one of the dread and freedom that come with the downfall of what one thought was a rock-firm world. Commentators on Ballard's science fiction have often observed his affinity for surrealism (Delvaux and de Chirico were two of the artists in whose imagined worlds he was comfortable)and the extent to which the near-future of his work was an intensified present, its defining features exaggerated to the point of threatening parody.
The key to Ballard's world is the understanding that any society, whether the Britain in amber of 1930s Shanghai, the suburban Shepperton in which he lived for the latter decades of his life, or the seemingly safe city of the near-future whose outlines we can but dimly discern, is a ludicrously artificial undertaking, an inherently unconvincing approximation of some Platonic ideal of community. It is the apparent order of life that is inherently surreal, and in its annihilation that we find the bracing freedom of the savage reality for which, we must reluctantly conclude, we were finally made.
As part of the circle around New Worlds magazine in the 1960s, Ballard was a major figure in the New Wave of science fiction, whose concerns were less with the familiar tropes of space opera than with experimentation in narrative form and with the hypothesized future as avenue for commentary on the current scene. One distinctive feature of Ballard's work was a preoccupation with natural and man-made disaster (global warming precipitated by solar radiation in 1962's The Drowned World, worldwide drought in 1964's The Burning World ). Another was the proliferation, whatever the ostensible subject matter, of hellishly grim cityscapes, collapsing under either the blows of external assault of one sort or another or the inescapable weakness of their own material and moral underpinnings.
As Jason Cowley noted in The Observer, Ballard's longer fiction often lingers for several hundred pages over the protracted decline of an elaborately constructed, but sterile artificial environment. Decay is sometimes presented as literal, with steel and glass yielding to proliferating jungle; but it almost always has a moral element as well, with the human nature that stretches socially dictated constraints until they shatter just as savage as the physical world that the designers of the modern metropolis cannot keep at bay indefinitely. Many of his protagonists are by training and outlook men devoted to order (architects and psychiatrists are among their favoured professions)who contend with, but often find themselves unexpectedly liberated by, its breakdown.
An early collection of linked stories, Vermilion Sands, carried the technologies of distraction and solipsism to their logical extreme in the desert resort of the title, where affectless sybarites seek the charge of lived experience through increasingly elaborate and desperate means, including mood-sensing houses and self-painting canvasses (well before either Bladerunner or William Gibson, Ballard anticipated both virtual reality and the aesthetic of cyberpunk). But the technological society has unintended consequences and can easily turn upon its creators, who can find both new dangers and the thrill of unmediated emotion in escape. In 1974's Concrete Island, an automobile accident strands an injured motorist on a traffic island; for days, he tries in vain to catch the attention of drivers racing by, but none will risk stopping to help. Eventually he gives up on returning to the world he knows, joining a primitive society of other accident survivors on the island. (A more cerebral Lost, if you will.) In the 1975 High Rise, the inhabitants of an apartment building where the abundance of amenities leads to a growing isolation from the outside world segregate themselves from their wider lives. Sporadic power failures and petty humiliations over matters of class and lifestyle lead to their dividing into rival tribes or clans, engaged in a localized but remorseless civil war; what was designed as impenetrable refuge becomes a Hobbesian nightmare.
No work of Ballard's acquired more notoriety than his 1973 Crash, which depicted the soul-deadening effects of the celebrity culture and the mindless hedonism the affluent society makes possible, as well as the possibility of sexual and personal release through the violence of the machine age. A group of car crash survivors seek to recapture the heightened awareness of their accidents through reenactments of celebrity crashes, engaging in sexual acts in damaged vehicles with wounds as apertures for penetration. Both the book and David Cronenberg's uneven film occasioned fierce, often intemperate, controversy.
Ballard's career path was far from the conventional series of writing workshops and teaching fellowships, including as it did abandoned medical training, a stint as an advertising copywriter, and service in the RAF (with training at CFB Moose Jaw). But Empire of the Sun illuminates what I take to be his formative experience as a writer. Ballard was born in China in 1930, and spent much of his early life in an English enclave in Shanghai's International Settlement. War destroys what the quasi-fictional 'Jim' of the novel comes to realize is a precarious simulacrum of a stable world. The 'Great Asian War', as its historians Chris Bayly and Tim Harper note, lasted longer and took more lives than the European conflict to which it is often seen as a sideshow or pendant. And as Ballard knew and demonstrates, its impact on individuals was as shattering as that on the rickety imperial system that Britain anchored and subsequently cobbled together again with spit and baling wire once Japan's imperial ambitions had been thwarted.
After Pearl Harbour the Japanese move into the Settlement and Jim spends several months, lyrically evoked by Ballard, scavenging from the ramshackle house from which his parents have been driven, eventually to be interned in Lunghua Internment Camp. While it is the Japanese who have shattered the illusory universe in which Jim blissfully lived, the plane-infatuated boy finds the enemy pilots figures of incredible glamour, despite, and because of, their association with the machinery of apocalyptic destruction. And if the evanescence of the mock-England of Shanghai is profoundly disorienting to Jim, freedom from parental stricture is liberating; the Japanese jailers may impose what is, by any impartial measure, a harsher rule, but that rule is more easily , and pleasurably, outwitted than that of Jim's father and mother. Worsening wartime conditions bring austerity and finally near-starvation before deliverance comes, through the agency of the American military might whose reliance on awesome technology is signaled by the flashes from Nagasaki that Jim sees toward the close.
Spielberg's film version focused on the director's pet theme of a child looking for his lost parents, and neglects the more interesting one of the dread and freedom that come with the downfall of what one thought was a rock-firm world. Commentators on Ballard's science fiction have often observed his affinity for surrealism (Delvaux and de Chirico were two of the artists in whose imagined worlds he was comfortable)and the extent to which the near-future of his work was an intensified present, its defining features exaggerated to the point of threatening parody.
The key to Ballard's world is the understanding that any society, whether the Britain in amber of 1930s Shanghai, the suburban Shepperton in which he lived for the latter decades of his life, or the seemingly safe city of the near-future whose outlines we can but dimly discern, is a ludicrously artificial undertaking, an inherently unconvincing approximation of some Platonic ideal of community. It is the apparent order of life that is inherently surreal, and in its annihilation that we find the bracing freedom of the savage reality for which, we must reluctantly conclude, we were finally made.
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