Boyhood

In the film Boyhood, there can be a tendency to view the product closeups as being intentionally shown to indicate a point in time - Game Boys and Halo on Xbox and iPods and iPhones.  Usually, of course, that's just what such things are - and indeed, in this case they are again. The twist is that the shots had to be set up when those products were actually being used, because the film was done over the course of 12 years. There was no need to go back and find those products so they could be included: The shots were done then and there, or they were not. Similarly, nobody had to craft how Ethan Hawke's Dad was railing against Bush and Iraq and McCain so that it sounded as if it fit in that time: It already would have, because nobody would have known a different way to talk about them.

It makes the film its own special kind of time capsule, showing how the world changed over a specific decade. In this way it's similar to The Best Years of Our Lives. That film came out right after World War II ended, and can't have shown how folks viewed the war upon further reflection. It had to show attitudes that were already prevalent. Nobody was going to come from the future and tell the filmmakers about the Cold War or McCarthy or revisionism in Japan. Or, for that matter, about how people 70 years later might see the ubiquitous smoking as an indicator of the time period, rather than just What People Did at that time.

The First Clash

Finished reading The First Clash by Jim Lacey today, a history of the battle of Marathon. As the author notes early on, people know Thermopylae better lately because of the movie 300...and maybe because 300 vs. 300,000 is cooler than 10000 vs. 60000. (Rough numbers, all around - I don't feel the need to get exact about them, since for every one - except the 300 Spartans - nobody else seems 100% sure either.)

He makes the good point that, without Marathon, Thermopylae wouldn't have happened. Athens gets taken over, all the other city-states submit to Persia, Sparta holds out for a while... but the best case there is a glorious but decisive defeat. By showing that the Persians were not invincible - not by a long shot - the Greeks had some expectation that a battle held the possibility of victory.

This appears, of course, to be a Crisis period, at least for the Greeks. It's not clear whether Thermopylae 10 years later is the final culmination of the Crisis, or if it was a relatively minor issue
 to the Greeks, so indicating that this was more of a First Turning war than a Peak Crisis one.  At the least, though, Lacey refers to the men at Marathon as a "Greatest Generation" indicating that, whatever side of the Crisis they were on, those who were there were the Heroes of their day.

1973, Then and Now

Opinion piece in the Times this week about ending the abortion wars.

It's an opinion piece, of course, so it naturally supports the points its trying to make. And for that matter, it's of interest here because it supports the points made here: As the Crisis takes hold, and the Hero generation becomes dominant, fights over moral issues like abortion stop being the most important political question. And nobody is likely to miss them.

When setting up The Grid, 1973 was a very tempting year to consider for the latest Awakening, specifically for Roe v. Wade. It's a line drawn with words, a battle between ideas. memorable, significant, with two sides who are both always absolutely certain that their side was the only right one. That it had a hefty religious and spiritual component is overkill.

And it may, eventually, be incomprehensible as well. Why that case and this cause was the major one of the last 40 years could be as difficult for schoolchildren to understand as Henry's motivations or the goals of the Free Silver movement.

Crisis, Apocalypse, and Cloverfield

Sometimes it seems like it's all staying the same:

Crisis: Climate Crisis, Greek Crisis, Crisis in Mexico, Crisis in Ukraine.
(Pretty standard, really - not difficult to look those up yourself.)

Apocalypse: How Democrats and Republicans see their chances in apocalyptic conditions; A show about a conspiracy concerning apocalypse; A movie about Australia being wiped off the map; and just because this bullet point has ended up about cultural touchstones, The Last Man on Earth started last Sunday.

Cloverfield: New Spiderman movie uses someone from Cloverfield, and Harrison Ford crashes a plane that took off from Santa Monica Airport - formerly known as Clover Field. (No coincidence: The movie Cloverfield took its name from the Santa Monica street Cloverfield which is named after the airport.)

The Old-Fashioned Way to Mess with Putin

A Slate article on U.S. strategy for Ukraine caught my interest in part because it includes a fundamental point from my original Crimea post: There are no U.S. vital interests in Ukraine that justify the risk of a shooting war with Russia.

Beyond my point about it not likely the main Crisis hotspot, Fred Kaplan suggests that the best victory there is helping Kiev win economically. Support their economy, make them more successful than Russia, and then ... actually, it's not clear what then, except that Putin wouldn't like it. Although it wouldn't be as easy to say the country is a Western puppet if the main support is Apple computers - much less affordable in Russia anymore - rather than Boeing munitions.

The extra fun part of that, of course, is the replay of the Reagan Cold War strategy, this time against Russia rather than the USSR: Make them see that their way leads to a crappy life, and they'll give it up on their own. It's like the fable of the sun and the wind, who had a bet to see who could get a man's coat off. The more the wind blew, the harder the man held on; when the sun shone, he took it off himself.

If we're going to get involved, we should aspire to be like the sun.

A Quick Thought on ISIS

There are people around talking about how Chamberlain is agonizing again, knowing from his current vantage that we are re-making his mistake.

I'd say, though, that this doesn't feel like Munich. There's no appeasement - indeed, anything that ISIS does seems to make their situation worse. The United States staying out of it is a matter of realpolitik,  not cowardice or misguided optimism.

There is a resemblance, though, to Bleeding Kansas - well-meaning changes in the political situation causing law and order to take a quick downward slope. Evidently skirmishes continued in the area until the Civil War started. Which doesn't mean they stopped, then, just that they were less significant by comparison.

If that is the appropriate analogy, what's next? We can expect ongoing fighting in area, until the decision comes to make these "skirmishes" irrelevant.  Unless it turns out this was never the real battlefield for the United States at all, and the REAL Crisis will come from a different direction. Which seems quite possible.

A Slow Crisis Day

Under Crisis, we have mostly repeats: Japan hostage crisis, Ukraine insanity crisis, a call-back to the financial crisis (noted there as starting in 2007) and eventually a reference to the Ebola crisis. Plus this Brian Williams controversy or crisis or whatever people want to call it.

A number of items under Cloverfield, mostly about the movie itself or people related to the movie. And a callback to the K-cup issue previously noted.

Apocalypse is staying about the same: the X-Men movie, again, plus the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moving the doomsday clock up another minute.

Shouldn't mind it though. We've had enough days where every day it is something new.