culture

As your humble blogger has aged matured, he finds himself invited to more shindigs that are logistically impossible for him to attend [He also has started referring to himself in the third person -- what's up with that?--ed.  Oh, stuff it.] 

This occasionally gnaws atmy psyche, because missing high-falutin' conferences preys on the same insecurity I have possessed since my grad school days -- that somewhere, at this very moment, there is an awesome, interesting conference going on, and I wasn't invited. 

Fortunately, Slate's Jack Shafer makes me feel better about not attending The Atlantic's "First Draft of History" conference.  Whenever I get one of these invites in the future, I'm going to have to re-read this paragraph: 

I've got just three questions about "conferences" like these: Why, why, why? Other than hustling a little cash for the good cause that is the Atlantic magazine, what purpose do they serve? No, certifying members of the power elite does not qualify as a good cause. Will Gen. Petraeus make history by disclosing that he regrets the surge plan? Will David Axelrod volunteer that the Obama administration is a mess? Will Vikram Pandit fall to his knees and confess that the crash of 2008 was all his fault and beg to be shot? Not a chance. The participants will regift the presents they've given away dozens of times before, and the by-invitation-only audience will tear into the packages as if it's their ultimate Christmas.

Today, your humble blogger will be furiously trying to finish a draft paper before the friggin' students come back to campus hard at work at his day job, preparing for the fall semester.  So I'm outsourcing today's blog content to two videos.

The first has been making the rounds, but it's still funny.  And it's funny because, as Alex Massie observes, "this is horribly close to being a verbatim report from some ghastly cable TV "news" shoutfest.... proving once again that the "fake" news is often better than the so-called "real" news." 

I give you, from the Onion, the Minotaur debate:

Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

And, sometime this month is the three-year annivesary of the funniest bit Denis Leary as ever done anywhere at any time.  It's not easy to find this video, but for your viewing pleasure:

Your humble blogger has occasionally prided himself as something of an authority on the intersection between celebrities and international relations.  Which brings me to Jessica Biel.   

Sure, the woman in the picture above these words seems pleasant enough, but according to McAfee security, she's not what she seems.  This Reuters story by Belinda Goldsmith explains: 

Actress Jessica Biel has overtaken Brad Pitt as the most dangerous celebrity to search in cyberspace, according to internet security company McAfee Inc.

For the third consecutive year, McAfee surveyed which A-list celebrity was the riskiest to track on the internet after Pitt topped the list last year and Paris Hilton in 2007.

Biel, 27, who shot to fame in the TV show 7th Heaven and most recently starred in Easy Virtue, was deemed the most dangerous, with fans having a one-in-five chance of landing at a website that has tested positive for online threats, such as spyware, adware, spam, phishing and viruses....

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, who have featured on most celebrity list this year, were not at the top of risky public figures to search.

The Obamas ranked in the bottom third of this year’s results, at No. 34 and No. 39 respectively.

You can access the Top 15 list here.  Some interesting tidbits: 

• Megan Fox and Angelina Jolie are tied for 8th.  Read into that what you will. 
• Celebrities jump the shark before they lose their utility to cybercriminals.  My proof:  Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian remain in the top 15. 
• Declining soft power of America, my fanny:  13 of the 15 celebs on the list were American -- Gisele Bundchen and Rihanna were the only non-American celebrities on the list. 
• In yet another justification for her unparalleled status as Your Humble Blogger's Favorite Online Crush, Salma Hayek is not on this list. So there -- go ahead and search her out on these interwebs. 
• Flavor Flav did not make this list... exactly. 

A question to readers:  if this were a truly just world, which celebrities should be at the top of this list?

Children of the 1980's have suffered a series of body blows this summer -- the death of Michael Jackson, the death of John Hughes, etc.  Well, now it appears we will have to suffer another indignity.  MGM recently announced that they remaking Red Dawn (this week they announced their casting choices), a staple of basic cable outlets for twenty years -- and one of the most unintentionally campy movies ever made. 

For the uninitiated, the movie depicts a Russian/Cuban/Nicaraguan invasion of the United States, and the fierce resistance put up by a band of high schoolers.  As one of FP's movie geeks, I love this movie almost as much as I love Starship Troopers.  Harry Dean Stanton shouting "Avenge me!!"; Lea Thompson and C. Thomas Howell acting all tough;  Patrick Swayze shouting "because we live here!" as the justification for killing Russians; Powers Boothe's scenery-chewing; the Cuban occupiers subduing the population by accessing gun registration forms -- it's all good.  Wolverines!!!!!

Now, this movie -- the first one rated PG-13, by the way -- was pretty absurd even by Reagan-era standards.  Which brings one to an interesting question -- why remake it now? The commissioned screenwriter has provided the following justification:

Similar to the way the original played off Cold War fears in the 1980s, [writer Carl] Ellsworth says the remake will play off of current fears related to post-9/11 terrorism. ''As Red Dawn scared the heck out of people in 1984, we feel that the world is kind of already filled with a lot of paranoia and unease, so why not scare the hell out of people again?''

Well, sure, except that this makes no f***ing sense.  Post-9/11 terror scares Americans because of the prospect that an attack could take place at any moment.  The one thing actors like Al Qaeda can't do terribly well is secure and hold territory -- which is exactly what the Russians were ostensibly trying to do in Red Dawn.  I fact, in the original movie, it's the Wolverines who act a bit like terrorists, bombing Russian installations and such.  So I can't see how Red Dawn is a usable template for talking about post-9/11 terrorism concerns. 

This isn't as bad an idea as remaking Hogan's Heroes -- but it's pretty close. 

I know so little about rap music* that I can't directly comment on Marc Lynch's marathon post on Jay-Z and American hegemony.  [You could comment on Beyoncé, though, right?--ed.  Let's just say that I am in complete agreement with Marc that this is one of the most awesome display of soft power on the Internet] 

In reading the blog reaction to the posting, however, I was struck by Ezra Klein's shrewd point about how truly powerful actors rely on proxies to fight their more vicious battles for them. 

Which made me think about what's going on in Iran again.  Najmeh Bozorgmehr's Financial Times story today suggests that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei can't seem to find the necessary proxy to push back against his opposition: 

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, warned the country’s opposition leaders on Monday that they faced “collapse” if they continued to incite protests over the disputed presidential election.

The warning came amid an unprecedented war of words between the regime’s senior leaders and looked like a retort to Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the influential former president who has backed the opposition. Mr Rafsanjani said on Friday the country was in “crisis” and the regime had to regain people’s trust....

“The [political] elite should be careful,” warned Ayatollah Khamenei. “They [the opposition leaders] are in an exam session; a big exam. Failing in this exam does not mean getting one [academic] year behind. It will lead to [their] collapse.

“Anyone under any title and position who pushes the society toward insecurity would be a hated figure in the eyes of the majority of Iranian nation,” he said, in a clear reference to the top opposition figures including Mr Rafsanjani.

Meanwhile Mr Ahmadi-Nejad, who has been largely silent on the unprecedented dispute over his re-election, is preparing to swear in his new cabinet (emphasis added).

Pretty ominous words from Khamenei, to be sure -- but it's interesting that he's the guy who has to make these threats.  In doing so, Khamenei has brought himself down to the level of Rafsanjani and Khatami.  Like Jay-Z, I'm not sure he can maintain his hegemonic leadership status without throwing away almost all of the structural power that comes with being acknowledged as the Supreme Leader.  Now he just looks like the rapper with the biggest posse.   

Of course, the supreme irony is that Khamenei might have triggered his invitable downfall by pulling out all the stops to bolster a proxy.   

Question to readers familiar with Iran, rap, and IR theory -- did the above make any sense whatsoever?  Because at this very late hour, the parallels seem surprisingly strong. 

*Seriously, I'm not acting faux out-of-touch here.  This is the last rap song I remember enjoying from beginning to end. 

Blogging will be light the next week or two as I first go to a conference in England, and then onto a family vacation. 

[Sure you are!--ed.]  Hey, two FP colleagues can vouch for me on the conference, I swear! 

Seriously, given the events of the past 24 hours, I can't think of a better time to take a brief siesta from blogging. [Interesting use of the word "siesta"!--ed.  Oh, shut up.]

Your humble blogger is fully aware that everyone and their mother has been blogging and writing about the big Obama speech from yesterday.  Why, you might ask, have I been silent?  [I might, I might indeed!--ed.]

It's a combination of four things:

1. Like Mark Lynch, I want to wait and see what the longer-term effects are -- if any.  By longer term, we're talking past the six-hour window that bloggers would consider as long-term.
2. There are plenty of FP bloggers who can write about this to any ideological flavor.  So I'm free-riding off of them rather than write about a subject on which writing persuades no one and brings nothing but loopiness to the comments section.
3. [He's waaaay behind on some other writing assignments!!--ed.]  You weren't supposed to say that out loud.
4. Superficial cultural gadfly that I am, the thing that caught my attention this AM was not the reax to the Obama speech, but A.O. Scott's devastating evisceration of Sam Mendes' new movie Away We Go (though I do grant that the trailer looks amusing).  In this paragraph, Scott articulates for me the response I always have to Mendes' work: 

To observe that they inhabit no recognizable American social reality is only to say that this is a film by Sam Mendes, a literary tourist from Britain who has missed the point every time he has crossed the ocean. The vague, secondhand ideas about the blight of the suburbs that sloshed around American Beauty and Revolutionary Road are now complemented by an equally incoherent set of notions about the open road, the pioneer spirit, the idealism of youth.

Clearly, Sam Mendes is not the film equivalent of de Tocqueville.  This, of course, leads to a vital film question:  who is the cinematic equivalent of Alexis de Tocqueville?

In FP's sister publication Slate, Fred Kaplan critiques Steve Walt's list of top ten international relations films, as well as my own ("neither of them gives our own film critic, Dana Stevens—or, for that matter, Gene Shalit—the slightest cause for worry.")  In an act of sheer bravado, Kaplan then goes on to list 25 other films that he thinks are better than any of either Walt's film or mine. 

To which I say -- oh, it is so on now, Kaplan!!  You want to throw down on films?  Let's throw down!! 

[Wouldn't this have been a more succinct reply?--ed.  Yeah, I was going for more Jack Nicholson-crazy voice, but that works, sure.]

First of all, what act of hubris could make Kaplan claim that any film on his top-25 list is better than Dr. Strangelove?  It's like making a top ten best film list and consciously omitting Citizen Kane.  There's no point to it except sheer bloody-mindedness.  Dr. Strangelove captures all of the absurdities of the Cold War in one neat package ("Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the war room!").  I didn't elaborate on that point in my original post for the same reason the world doesn't need another essay extolling Orson Welles' masterpiece -- it's an exercise in redundance. 

Second, Kaplan reacts to my fave flick, The Lion in Winter, as follows: "Um, OK: a strange choice, especially for the top of the list, but there's a daring quality about it."  This leads me to wonder if Kaplan has actually seen the film (and, full disclosure, I haven't seen some of the films on Kaplan's list, such as The Lives of Others.  From what I've heard, many of these films would likely have been on my list had I seen them.  To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, however, you make top ten lists with the films you've seen, not the films you wish you've seen).  This is a movie about a powerful but aging leader desperate to ensure that the gains his country has achieved under his rule persist after he is gone.  To do this, he has to outwit a foreign leader and plenty of domestic (in both senses of the word) adversaries.  This movie is filled with strategizing, backroom dealing, bluffing, backstabbing, balacing, bandwagoning, and an waful lot of shouting.  In other words, a typical day in world politics. 

Third, and more interesting, is defining what makes a movie a movie about international relations.  Kaplan nitpicks at Wag the Dog because "it's more about domestic politics than international affairs."  He similarly picks on Seven Days in May because it "isn't really about international politics."  Part of studying global affairs, however, is investigating the interplay between domestic politics and and international relations.  Wag the Dog is about how domestic difficulties can translate into foreign policy escapades (or staged foreign policy escapades).  Seven Days in May is clearly about civil-military relations, but on an abstract level it's about the difficulties of implementing international agreements over the resistance of powerful domestic interests. 

Now, all this said, I can't deny the quality of some of Kaplan's selections.  The moment I posted my list, I started kicking myself because I forgot about The Godfather.  It really is the perfect metaphor about international relations -- alternating levels of tension and calm punctuated by occasional bouts of violence. 

As for Kaplan's other films, Goodbye, Lenin! is also an inspired choice.  Thirteen Days is less inspired -- I could never get past Kevin Costner's atrocious accent.  On the other hand, I do have a soft spot for 1974's The Missiles of October. 

Finally, a few other films that got omitted from all of our lists but merit further conversation: 

1.  A Fish Called Wanda (1988):  One could argue that the Anglo-American alliance was the most significant relationship for much of the twentieth century.  This film, on the cultural differences that exist within the special relationship, is worth multiple viewings.  In a perfect world, watch this with a mix of Americans and Brits -- they laugh at different parts. 

2.  Traffic (2000):  The debilitating effects of drugs -- and the drug war -- on both sides of the Rio Grande makes for interesting viewing.  Plus, there's a terrific Salma Hayek cameo. 

3.  Henry V (1944) and Henry V (1989):  Alex Massie makes a good point here:  "the Olivier and Branagh versions remind one that an individual text may be subject to more than one interpretation. Plus, of course, there's an awful lot of Just War theorising to be done on the back of Henry V."