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I won’t be saying anything in public about the recent events regarding this blog. I may have something to say in the future, but I’m sitting tight for the moment and I apologize to those I am disappointing. In the meantime, I made some comments a few weeks back in this article, which provide some perspective about the difficulties the issue raises. Alas, I underestimated them.
Alter-reviews:
The Real Thing on Broadway
The holiday gift-buying guide begins: Mister Ed, The Jeffersons, Merv Griffin and the Stones.
Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing has always been one of my favorite plays and I thoroughly enjoyed the Roundabout’s revival, currently on Broadway at the American Airlines Theater. It stars Ewan McGregor, who is thrilling, and Maggie Gyllenhaal, who is not thrilling, but who is luminously excellent in her part in ways that McGregor is not. It also stars Cynthia Nixon, of whom I am usually a fan, but who is woefully miscast in this and does not ever really even get her accent right. (Josh Hamilton is quite good in a smaller role.) You’ll not find a play with wittier dialogue than this one. It simply could not fail to entertain, and with McGregor in the main role, it actually sparkles. But as other reviewers have also noted, his performance lacks the sadness, the disappointment, the boredom that underlies a middle-aged loss of the power and bravery of youth. (Believe me, I know of what I speak.) So it’s a fun play, with scintillating, smart dialogue and entertainment galore, as the saying goes. But it’s not the masterpiece that we’ve seen before, sadly.
The holiday gift-giving guide begins:
Well, my friends at Shout! Factory have been busy reviving some of the more painful memories of my childhood, alone in front of the TV while everyone else was out having fun. Foremost among these are Mister Ed: The Complete Series, to be released on December 9. It’s six seasons, 143 episodes, 3,480 minutes and twenty-two discs of a talking horse saying “Wilburrrrrrr” a lot, and it’s pretty well-written. They are also about to release The Jeffersons: The Complete Series. That is a Norman Lear show and hence, helped set the standards for innovative TV in its day. It is an incredible ten seasons, 253 episodes, 4,440 minutes on thirty-three discs. The amazing cast includes Sherman Hemsley, Isabel Sanford, and Marla Gibbs, with guest stars Sammy Davis, Jr., Gladys Knight, Reggie Jackson, Billy Dee Williams, among many others. It’s still kind of weird to see how many cliches were necessary to communicate the lives of working class black people to white America in those days (1975-1985) but that makes it more interesting to watch today.
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Finally, I am really (really) enjoying MPI Home Video’s The Merv Griffin Show, 1962-1986, which I used to watch when the 4:30 movie was not something I wanted to see. It’s 2,520 minutes on twelve discs and includes, believe it or not, long interviews with and performances by Richard Pryor, Mel Brooks, Whitney Houston, Jerry Seinfeld, the Everly Brothers, George Carlin, Willie Mays, Aretha Franklin, Salvador Dali, Timothy Leary, Ray Bradbury, Andy Warhol, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Gloria Steinem, Ronald Reagan, Robert Kennedy, John Wayne, Bette Davis, Laurence Olivier, Ingrid Bergman, Jayne Mansfield, and the final interview with Orson Welles, who died just a few hours after the show, among many, many others. The discussions are relaxed, respectful and informative and never cloying the way so many interview shows are today. There’s also some great music. It’s a really terrific collection and anyone interested in the culture of that period will find it a rewarding one.
And finally finally The Rolling Stones have started a new series on CD, Blu-ray and DVD. The one I’ve got is from Eagle Vision From the Vault: Hampton Coliseum, from 1981. The show was on Keith’s birthday—wonder if he knew—and is a pretty damn good show, reasonably well-recorded visually, given the limitations of the time, but with excellent acoustics. For me the highlight is “Just My Imagination” into “Twenty Flight Rock” into “Going To A Go-Go,” but there’s also a mess with “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” at the end and a great “Under My Thumb” as the opener.
And now, here (finally) is Reed:
So Long at War, We’ve Forgotten Where It Started and Can’t See the End
by Reed Richardson
Ninety-six November 11ths ago: Americans were celebrating. No, celebrating is the wrong word. Better to say rejoicing, as in re-experiencing joy after a long stretch without much of it. Europe was rejoicing, too, even more so, as it had by far gotten the worst of it, but the US had paid a toll too. Though the signing of the official peace treaty was still months away, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month nearly a century ago, the guns of war literally fell silent, marking the real end of what had been the most efficiently bloodiest chapter in world history to date. The New York Times headline summed up the finality of the moment with an appropriately direct front-page headline: ARMISTICE SIGNED, END OF THE WAR!
Sixty November 11ths ago: Armistice Day was now officially Veterans Day, thanks to an act of Congress. The decision to change holiday’s name was made to broaden its focus and honor all those who had recently fought in World War II and Korea. In the Federal Register, President Eisenhower noted that commemorating November 11 wasn’t just about paying tribute to those who had served in the military, but was also about “redirecting ourselves to the cause of peace.” This was no boilerplate sentiment from the man who had led the Normandy Invasion; at that point, our nation had been at war for seven of the past fourteen years.
This November 11th, however, we’re entering our fourteenth consecutive year at war. And yet, an unprecedented thirteen Veterans Days removed from peacetime, it’s still increasingly hard to foresee a Times headline proclaiming a permanent peace. War has now become so normalized in our country that it serves as little more than background noise, both in politics and in the press. Even when we do wind down a major war, it gets little more than a relatively sleepy headline from the likes of The New York Times.
In fact, we’ve been at war for so many years that the media is now in the midst of ignoring our nation’s longest war for a second time. Twelve Veterans Days ago, you’ll recall, the war in Afghanistan was already being neglected by the press, who had begun to dutifully follow the Bush administration pivot to selling its disastrous invasion of Iraq. When Obama ran for president in 2008, he famously promised to refocus on the fight against the Taliban. His post-election surge of troops into Afghanistan drew more media attention with the Iraq War winding down. However, the establishment press proved too distracted with gaffes and optics during the 2012 election to notice the surge’s final results, which by the fall of that year were clearly little more than a complete failure. Perhaps that’s why the press moderators at the four presidential debates only asked one question about the war in Afghanistan across two of the debates. And why, in the other two debates, the word “Afghanistan” got but one mention.
That the media would prove so incurious and uninterested in our prosecution of the war in Afghanistan in a year when more than 300 American service members died was shameful. It also explains why, all too predictably, Afghanistan has faded even further from the press’s radar in the years since, especially during the recent run up to our newest war in the Middle East. This, despite the fact that our latest foreign enemy, ISIS, has killed but two Americans so far (plus one has died in the mission fighting them), while the war in Afghanistan has now claimed 2,350 US veterans’ lives in total, forty-nine of them this year.
How bad has this media myopia gotten? According to a search of the TV news archive, for all of 2014 the number of mentions of “Afghanistan” on the network news evening broadcasts and the five Sunday morning news shows is less than half of that for “ISIS” and “ISIL,” even though the latter terms had never appeared until a few months ago. (One specific example: NBC Nightly News has mentioned Afghanistan 115 times this year, but ISIS and/or ISIL 271 times.)
Similarly, while questions about the threat of ISIS were common fodder for press moderators during the recent midterm debates, only one question about Afghanistan appeared among nearly two-dozen debates in the eleven most competitive races. Credit Tim Carpenter of The Topeka Capital-Journal for asking the Kansas Senate candidates—Independent Greg Orman and Republican Senator Pat Roberts—if the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq justified all the blood and treasure expended. Both of their answers were a muddle of equivocation, but the American people aren’t so undecided. Roughly two-thirds of us agree that the war in Afghanistan and the (previous) war in Iraq simply weren’t worth it. These examples, one would think, would serve as powerful reminders to all of us that war never turns out as expected and wars of choice rarely turns out well.
Of course, it’s a nice sentiment when major media figures pay tribute to the sacrifices that generations of veterans have made, but retweeting old Defense Department profiles pictures isn’t enough. It’s of much greater service to our country—and to our veterans—when journalists do their actual job. Because if the press shirks its duty to ask critical questions about our military operations abroad, and to hold leaders accountable when they fail to achieve their promised goals, it makes it that much easier for our nation to make the same fatal foreign policy mistakes over and over again.
Not coincidentally our latest war in Iraq and Syria has already provided ominous examples of a mission gone awry, much like the unraveling we’ve seen recently in Afghanistan. And though the administration maintains that US combat operations on the ground isn’t an option in Iraq and will be officially cease by the end of this year in Afghanistan, the idea that the US won’t still be engaged in at least one, if not two combat wars come next Veterans Day is a tragic joke. Already, there are subtle signs that reality will play out differently. Leaving 10,000 troops Afghanistan and doubling the U.S. military presence in Iraq to 3,000 simply makes it that much easier to excuse and execute the next escalation.
However, if you want to find an honest, insightful critique of this potentially catastrophic quagmire, the mainstream media is the last place to look. It has grown too preoccupied with the theatrics and rhetoric of leadership to pay much attention to where we’re being led. So the task increasingly has fallen to few outspoken veterans, who aren’t afraid to speak up on behalf of their brethren on active duty. Count retired US Army General Dan Bolger among them. In his new book, Why We Lost, Bolger pulls no punches, taking on the madness of a militarized foreign policy trapped by a fixation with sunk costs and obsessed with turning an endless series of mythical corners.
What our active duty military and the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were asked to accomplish was effectively impossible, Bolger explains. Unless, he points out, the US is willing to become a multi-generational occupying power and engage in decades of intractable empire enforcement. Or, as he put it to The Guardian this week:
“That’s what the mistake is here: to think that we could go into these countries and stabilize their villages and fix their government, that’s incredible, unless you take a colonial or imperial attitude and say, ‘I’m going to be here for 100 years, this is the British Raj, I’m never leaving.’”
Neither the previous nor the current occupant of the White House would ever publicly commit to decades, if not a century, of war, but, in effect, that’s where our nation is headed. Sadly, most of the press couldn’t be bothered to notice. But this disinterest does a disservice to all of us—veterans included. For, the idea that ten or twenty or even ninety-six November 11ths from today, Americans might still be fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, with no end and no peace in sight, is a story we can’t afford not be told.
Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com.
I’m on Twitter here—(at)reedfrich.
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