Well, the AI office is officially closed in the week between Xmas and New Year’s, and I, AI editor, elected to just mainly hang around the house for most of the period, with my wife and my three kids coming and going seemingly at random. There was just too much movement to plan anything serious, so I’ve been doing some house puttering, some reading, a little work, and some thinking. I’ve found that a more leisurely pace of newspaper reading has turned up some thoughts, a few of them perhaps worth sharing — so that’s what this post/column is intended to do. If you have slacked off a little in your newspaper reading this holiday season –entirely understandable, of couse — what I have scribbled below may be of particular value to you, dear reader. Or not; hard to know.
Before getting to the points at hand, I have a small confession to make: I have not been reading the papers in recent months as assiduously as I used to. I think that owes something to having spent some time in government during 2003-2005, and having had my reading habits sharply altered during that experience. One comes to see that to know much of anything useful about a particular subject, the combination of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times even on a good day is missing about half of what you need to know, and a good deal of what is provided is either misleading or wrong. This has taught me to read the newspapers more symptomatically than I used to. Anyway, with that in mind, here goes.
Item: In the first issue of the AI, Michael Medved gave fair warning that Stephen Spielberg’s new movie, “Munich”, might be something of an atrocity itself. Judging by what Edward Rothstein has to say about it on the front page of the arts section of the NYT, December 26, Medved was not wrong to worry. Rothstein, one of only a tiny number of regulars still worth reading in the NYT, slams the film and locates its director’s mistaken “theory” of terrorism as the reason. This is must reading. The film is not necessarily must viewing.
Item: Speaking of the NYT and its mysteri0us ways, note, too, Bruce Baum’s letter in the Dec. 25 paper, pointing out that not a single one of the NYT’s 61 best “non-fiction” books for 2005 was published by any but a commercial trade publisher. Not a single university press publication made the list. This caught my attention. Readers: what’s your explanation for this interesting fact?
Item: Two items linked up to catch my attention in the Dec. 25 Washington Post. Page A3 began an article on how poorly living-history museums are faring, to the point that some, like the one in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, is struggling with the tension between being authentic and being attractive to holiday crowds. My favorite such museum is Connor Prairie, near Indianapolis, where interpreters re-create an 1838 midwestern village. If you’re ever around Indianapolis with nothing special to do, you won’t regret a visit to Connor Prairie. The other item was on p. A10, where I first learned that in the 1880s four huge paintings were created depicting major scenes from American history. And I mean huge: 376′ X 22 ‘. One of these, depicting Pickett’s Charge, was recently re-discovered behind a warehouse wall somewhere in Chicago. It has been lost since 1933, when is was displayed at the Chicago Century of Progress exhibit.
What’s the connection between the problems of living history museums and this lost “cyclorama” — the Imax of its day? Just that Americans seem not to give a rat’s behind about history, or historical artifacts. This is the only country in the world where the phrase “that’s history” means that’s irrelevant. How can anyone lose a painting that large? How could anyone want Sturbridge Village or Colonial Williamsburg or Connor Prairie to have to even consider compromsing on authenticity?
And then the very next day, Dec. 26, I read (I think in the NYT….I can’t remember) about a Portuguese priest stumbling upon a secret “marrano” synagogue from the 16th century in Lisbon. Ah, but there was a good reason that room got “lost.” It was built not to be generally known about and found in the first place…..
Item: Álvaro Vargas Llosa, son of AI Global Advisory Council member Mario Vargas Llosa, published an op-ed about the recent Bolivian election in the NYT on Dec. 27. Read it; it’s maybe a little too upbeat, but very well informed and written. On the same say, future AI author (check the Spring issue when it comes out) Andrew Erdmann had a piece about Iraq. Also highly recommended.
Item — last one for now: The Dec. 25 Washington Post also carried a long article on the possibility of a new round of warfare between Ethiopia and Eritrea (p. A23). This was pretty exasperating. The 1998-2000 war between these two countries was possibly the stupidest war of the past half century, and that is really saying something. More than 70,000 people died over a small and worthless piece of arid wasteland. If these countries go at it again — and all observers agree (not least some of my favorite cab drivers) that what’s going on here is a classic class of leaders trying to divert attention from their domestic policy failures — one won’t be able to properly quote Marx about the first time being tragedy and the second farce, because the first time was already an example of both. So what to do? I think the Security Council should convene a special session and invite both Mr. Zenawi and Mr. Afwerki to it, where they will be told by representatives of all the permanent members what a pair of idiots they are, and that if they start or countenance a war, the UN will vote them both official “nitwits” for 2006. Good grief; get a clue, guys.
Adam Garfinkle