2003-02-11
All About Your Mother
Injustice is never in short supply at the Academy Awards, but some of the greatest absurdities are the result of the rule limiting films eligible for the Best Foreign Film category to one per country, and permitting that one film to be selected by its country’s government. Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead, but the Spanish government was nevertheless hidebound enough to withhold Talk To Her from consideration by the Academy. Talk To Her was easily the most thoughtful and heartfelt film I saw last year, so I was gratified to see that Sony Picture Classics’s campaign bore fruit in nominations for Pedro Almodóvar in the Best Director and Best Original Screenplay categories. In addition to Pedro, I’ll be rooting for The Pianist and Roman Polanski (who was curiously absent from Clinton’s roster of eleventh-hour pardons two years ago).
2003-02-10
2003-02-08
2003-02-05
Sovereign PowerPoint
Let us be clear about who was the primary audience for Powell’s presentation. It was not the U.N. Security Council, which has historically suffered the indignity of having its resolutions flouted before (and not just by Iraq). It was not the U.S. Congress, which has abdicated its responsibility to provide a check upon a reckless executive branch. It was not the American public, which has been successfully propagandized into displacing its fear and outrage over 9/11 into fueling George Dubious’s Iraq obsession. It was, of all parties, the French government.
As is becoming a bit of tired political theatre, the French Foreign Ministry has decided that all expressions of American foreign policy must be met with token cavils, regardless of the merits of the case. In the case of Iraq, France has hewed to a (overly) legalistic interpretation of UNR 1441, affording them plenty of opportunities to complain that the U.S. is (surprise!) less than scrupulous about fulfilling each and every obligation in accusing Iraq of being in "material breach." In the end, however, France (and the U.N. Security Council) will likely conclude that they can’t afford the humiliation of having failed to sanction what they know to be an inevitable exercise of American military fiat.
In what must be the result of herculean efforts by career foreign service officers (who suffer from the occupational hazard of foresight), Secretary Powell agreed to jump through the hoops and lay out, not a "case for war," but a finding that best satisfied the French demands for evidence without compromising our intelligence sources (which have been oh so helpful in the past). In giving the French this fig leaf, the U.S. Department of State is doing what it can to preserve the U.N. and NATO, towards which the rest of the Bush Administration is not yet antagonistic but merely contemptuous.
As is becoming a bit of tired political theatre, the French Foreign Ministry has decided that all expressions of American foreign policy must be met with token cavils, regardless of the merits of the case. In the case of Iraq, France has hewed to a (overly) legalistic interpretation of UNR 1441, affording them plenty of opportunities to complain that the U.S. is (surprise!) less than scrupulous about fulfilling each and every obligation in accusing Iraq of being in "material breach." In the end, however, France (and the U.N. Security Council) will likely conclude that they can’t afford the humiliation of having failed to sanction what they know to be an inevitable exercise of American military fiat.
In what must be the result of herculean efforts by career foreign service officers (who suffer from the occupational hazard of foresight), Secretary Powell agreed to jump through the hoops and lay out, not a "case for war," but a finding that best satisfied the French demands for evidence without compromising our intelligence sources (which have been oh so helpful in the past). In giving the French this fig leaf, the U.S. Department of State is doing what it can to preserve the U.N. and NATO, towards which the rest of the Bush Administration is not yet antagonistic but merely contemptuous.
2003-02-04
Plundering The Chinese Main
Nick Denton claims to eschew romance in his prescription for reinvigorating space exploration, but how can you beat pirates for romance?
Plundering The Chinese Main
Nick Denton claims to eschew romance in his prescription for reinvigorating space exploration, but how can you beat pirates for romance?
Plus La Même Chose
Along with reruns of Hill Street Blues on Bravo, this is giving me severe vertigo.
2003-02-01
Per Aspera
This morning, as the TV repeated the video of the daylight meteor shower over Texas, I watched my one-year-old son playing on the floor and wondered if he would ever ask me about today. A staple of grade school historians, "national tragedies" are ready-made segues for inter-generational bonding. Ubiquitous media never hurts; while I’ve asked my grandfather where he was when he learned of Pearl Harbor, it never occurred to me to ask where he was when the Hindenburg went up. Perhaps it’s the element of human villainy that transforms catastrophe into infamy.
Nevertheless, I will always remember January 28, 1986, if only because my high school class was interrupted and we were all permitted to watch CNN for the remainder of the period. More enduring than the shock of that morning was the frustration and loathing for the craven bureaucrats who used the occasion to make political hay and to defer the dream of exploration.
While I feel an undertow of that same dread today, I find my thoughts turning not to Challenger or Apollo I but to Pathfinder, which I vividly remember tracking on the Web and watching on TV. Tellingly, I was no less excited for the fact that it was a robot and not a human taking the risks; it was sheer technological geekiness on display, the same geekiness that saved the day on Apollo XIII. I was eleven months old for Apollo XI, and I like to think my parents convinced me to watch Armstrong step off into history. I won’t forget Columbia, but in a few years I hope my son asks me about how cool it was to watch a Lego Mindstorms kit roll about the Martian landscape, and perhaps one day he’ll go bring it back.
Nevertheless, I will always remember January 28, 1986, if only because my high school class was interrupted and we were all permitted to watch CNN for the remainder of the period. More enduring than the shock of that morning was the frustration and loathing for the craven bureaucrats who used the occasion to make political hay and to defer the dream of exploration.
While I feel an undertow of that same dread today, I find my thoughts turning not to Challenger or Apollo I but to Pathfinder, which I vividly remember tracking on the Web and watching on TV. Tellingly, I was no less excited for the fact that it was a robot and not a human taking the risks; it was sheer technological geekiness on display, the same geekiness that saved the day on Apollo XIII. I was eleven months old for Apollo XI, and I like to think my parents convinced me to watch Armstrong step off into history. I won’t forget Columbia, but in a few years I hope my son asks me about how cool it was to watch a Lego Mindstorms kit roll about the Martian landscape, and perhaps one day he’ll go bring it back.
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