Thinking of many things, people I miss & places long gone.
Simple Twist of Fate - Bob Dylan
See No Evil - Television
Glory - Television
Days - Television
Sad Song - Otis Redding
You and Oblivion - Robyn Hitchcock
Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John - Belle and Sebastian
Sweet Part of the City - The Hold Steady
Lost Love - Golden Smog
Destined for War documents the remarkable resurgence of China over the past 70 years. Most Americans are reluctant to realize the Chinese have not only caught up with the United States but surpassed it in many ways. Since 1980 China's economic has doubled every seven years. Allison estimates their economy will be the most powerful in the world - leaving the United States in the dust after 2024. China has already surpassed the United States in manufacturing, producing cars, and countless other consumer products with a specific advantage on cell phones. Their infrastructure is exploding with growth, skyscrapers are built in terms of weeks not months. In 2015 the 1300-ton Sanyuan Bridge was constructed in 43 hours! (13-14)
Economic power almost always translates to military power and China under Xi Jinping has embarked on expanding the military and is approaching parity with U.S. naval power in the Pacific. Their use of cyber weapons has already made waves would be used if conflict should ever occur. Xi's leadership has focused on rooting out corruption, instilling a nationalistic pride, maintaining the economic growth, and establishing China as the dominant power in Asia. With a growing fleet and increasingly assertive gestures towards the United States many believe a war is likely within the next 20 years.
Allison provides sound analysis throughout on the possible likelihood of war. He identifies 16 instances in history when an established great power has been challenged by a rising power. The statistics suggest war is likely since only four ended peacefully (75% chance of conflict). Cultural differences between America and China are also a factor since both believe in their own superiority which makes a misunderstanding more likely. Chinese society emphasizes hierarchy and "knowing one's place," while Americans emphasize individuality. Xi envisions China as a superior alternative to Western democracy.
Despite the ominous assessment one gets from history, Allison believes a possibility exists for the two nations to become partners. Domestic politics are crucial. China's internal problems revolve around preserving a traditional society in a world driven more and more by digital technology. Meanwhile America under Trump witnessed democracy undergo major strain and the threat has by no means disappeared with his exit from office. While the 2020 election of Joe Biden suggest a majority of Americans still believe in truth and democracy, 74 million Americans were solidly behind Trump's anti-democratic rhetoric and actions. The January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters denied the country a peaceful transfer of power and most Republicans continue to believe the big lie of a rigged election. China is watching closely.
With slim majorities in Congress, Biden has passed massive relief bills in the wake of the pandemic with no GOP support. Whether the house divided era in America will calm down or flare up will directly influence the China relationship. Americans remain unprepared psychologically on the challenges posed by China and may take a Sputnik type event to change perceptions before its too late.
There are many flashpoints for a China/US confrontation that could spiral into a shooting war, Taiwan or the South China Sea are the most likely places. Trouble in North Korea would also likely lead to a confrontation. The prospect of a war is just as apocalyptic of a full-scale war between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. Cyber weapons would certainly be used, attacks on power grids, banking systems, and broadband networks would happen within 24 hours of conflict. Space would likely be another front in the war as each side attacks each other's satellites. As to the nuclear question, each side also has the ability to destroy each other many times over.
Allison takes comfort from the fact that the Cold War never went hot. A realist, Allison argues containment and deterrence worked in the long term in preventing a third world war. Both sides realized going to war would result in their self-destruction, so they found a way to coexist however imperfect. As awful as they were, wars in Korea and Indochina remained limited. While there were many close calls such as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1973 Middle East War, and the Able Archer Exercises of 1983 neither side ever went through with the unthinkable. Did we survive by blind luck? Or did creative diplomacy work?
Allison argues America must reconfigure its China policy through creativity and realism harkening back to the containment policies developed by George Kennan in the late 1940s. Policymankers will have to make concessions with China, while at the same time find areas of common ground and establish rules of conduct - the parallel being arms control during the Cold War. If America can reinvigorate its troubled democracy, it could also provide a viable alternative to the China (and Russian) model.
Destined for War is thought provoking use of history to make sense of current events. Yet studying history never tells anyone what decision to make, it's merely a guide. China's rise is a world historical event, far more significant than the rise of the Soviet Union and other great powers throughout history. Relations with China have worsened since the book was published in 2017 and it will be one of the key challenges facing the Biden administration which has yet to venture too far from its predecessors. The book demands one ponder the future and the potentially unnerving existential arc of this century.
The novelty of watching music videos all day or Clint Eastwood marathons on TNT is probably lost on anyone born after 1990. Flipping around from 24-hour news to 24 hour sports to 24 hour weather felt like freedom! Far from it of course! I'm not of the set who believes the only way to save humanity is ban all mass media*, it comes down to using the tool, so it doesn't control you. I'm trying to be a realist today.
Later my parents got Direct TV which was superior to cable in terms of quality and customer service. Direct TV had a lot to offer in the 2000s with some excellent radio channels and a user friendly interface. The IFC and Sundance channels actually showed independent movies introducing to all sorts of offbeat films like Primer or Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. Today those channels only air banal studio product interspersed with endless Law & Order marathons.
As streaming began to gradually takeover by the 2010s the phrase "cutting the cord" entered the parlance. Why bother with cable subscription when you could pay an easy $7.99/month for Netflix? Younger people I knew found getting cable to be a ridiculous expense, understandable in the austere economic days since the 2008 crash. Streaming appeared to be the ultimate antidote in the scramble for cheap entertainment.
With a new streaming service popping up every month, it's way too easy these days to subscribe to only a few services and pay the equivalent cost of cable - so cutting the cord is not the money saver of a decade ago. Many services charging higher prices to avoid the intrusion of ads raises the cost is even more. I always considered the DVR a godsend since I can speed through the commercials. DVR is VCR programming one better, just a few clicks can assure you can watch anything you want without the ads.
So, while I've considered cutting the cord over the years, I'm a holdout to cable. As homogenized and corporatized Cable TV has become, from the abysmal turn so many channels have taken. The "History" and "Science" channels devote hours to dull paranormal topics. Ancient Aliens has contributed way too much into the devolution of critical thinking. Turner Classic Movies remains of the few bright spots, although the variety in their programming has fallen off lately.
Maybe I'm trying to talk myself out of keeping cable. I guess there's comfort in TNT and TBS with their wall of popular entertainments or local channels keeping the spirit of local news alive. Or it could just be holding on to something from the past, not in the since of remembering where you were for the Seinfeld finale, but more in the sense of remembering TV bonding families or even groups of people together.
Looking into the crystal ball we appear to be years away from having access to the ultimate cloud where everything ever produced is simply a click away. In terms of music, we're close, with movies and TV getting edging closer. Will there eventually be three major streaming services offering quantity but not much in the way variety and quality? Back to 1979.
*I often see the book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander being promoted on social media. Published in 1978 when network TV still ruled, Mander provides powerful and prescient arguments in support of his title. Much of what he wrote can also be applied to social media in the 21st Century. Compelling as it is, not enough time to go into detail here, an uncompromising attitude that has all the passion of the newly converted. Eliminating TV or mass media will not happen (of course individuals have that option) I'm more in the camp of let's adapt to the technology and look for creative solutions. And that includes more government oversight because an unregulated social media is now a public safety issue.
Yet at some point it all starts to feel like an illusion. The digital world is really not all that different than its analog counterpart. Social hierarchies come into play. Not all podcasts are equal to others, nor in terms of their communities. The pros have corporate sponsorship and mainstream appeal. Those in the minor leagues cultivate a niche audience. Everybody wants to rule the digital world, infinite content to fill many lifetimes.
Even within podcasting networks a dynamic begins to develop. Members of the audience may compete for attention from the hosts. Everybody wants attention and some want it more than others (see discussion boards or twitter feeds). In the early days listening to podcasts was like being invited to a party with an eccentric group of friends and acquaintances, then it gets bigger and suddenly what used to be novel starts to feel like the lunch room in High School. Who has fond memories of that?
There's a difference between being bombarded with ideas and being bombarded with opinions, the former is slightly more worthwhile. Ideas are processed; opinions are simply given. The web allows anyone with an opinion to have a platform beyond their front porch, some have nicer porches than others. Some live on mountain tops. A digital provocateur at the end of the day becomes a nothing more than a blowhard, armed with a gift for repetition and skewed outrage. Exchange of ideas has its Orwellian undertones as well I suppose. Maybe someday the AI will create holograms of all the top thinkers of history or whatever their algorithm will produce will be the ultimate podcast. I imagine it would be somewhere between Bill and Ted's history report and a Ted Talk (which already have an AI vibe).
We all want to be a part of "the conversation" of the things we care about. And a podcast simply cannot make that happen for all involved, which in the end frustrates. While anyone can start a podcast - anyone can make a film or write a book as well, it's the idea of it more than actual doing of it that's more attractive. All the conversations and all the talking, analyzing, and interviewing in the end turns us into mere antiquarians of knowledge.
Burnt out on podcasts. Burnt out on social isolation. Burnt out on everything Where does one go? We have to find some way to fill our time. I suppose there's far worse things than consuming podcasts. But what can provide a respite from alienation is just that . . . a respite. And to paraphrase Estragon from Waiting For Godot, we're all just looking for the impression we exist. Sometimes, that's enough.
Holly Martins : A lot of good your money will do you in jail.
Harry Lime : That jail's in another zone.
Book Review: Rod
Serling: His Life, Work, and Imagination by Nicholas Parisi
by Eric Gilliland
Serling grew up in in
Binghamton, New York and had a rather ordinary childhood, a place he would
often return to in his writing (The Twilight Zone episode “Walking
Distance” being an example). He served in the Pacific Theatre during the Second
World War as a paratrooper, earning a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. His war
experiences would influence his work which often dealt with the lasting
consequences of violence. Shaken by what he saw in the war, Serling dealt with
PTSD symptoms for the duration of his life. Aimless after the war he found
purpose through creative writing as a student during his years at Antioch
College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
After college Serling found
work writing scripts for local radio and television in Cincinnati. Parisi devotes
particular attention to a short-lived anthology TV series Serling authored
entitled The Storm, a precursor to The Twilight Zone. The
Storm revealed his interest in fantastical storytelling to address current
social issues. An episode entitled “As Yet Untitled” dealt with a Chinese-American
couple being persecuted after moving into a white neighborhood, which was based
on a real incident in San Francisco. Most of his early radio and television
work in Cincinnati only exists in script form that’s available at his archives
at Ithaca College and it is to the author’s credit for unearthing these key
works in Serling’s evolution as a writer.
From Cincinnati he moved
on to New York City and began writing for the television networks. He broke in
during the “Golden Age of Television” when live dramas were shaping the future
of the medium. If movie studios were still relying on big budget star driven
vehicles, television was moving in the direction of gritty socially relevant
stories that were giving voice to a new generation of writers, directors, and
actors. Patterns would be the work that made Serling a household name, a
stark tale of corporate intrigue presenting a grim vision of the American
dream, in Serling’s words, “an indictment of the supposed values of a society
that places such stock in success and has so little preoccupation with morality
when success has been attained.” Patterns would be made into a feature
film, as would his other teleplays Requiem for a Heavyweight and The
Rack.
Parisi also details
Serling’s battles with censors during his years writing for live television, with
“Noon on Doomsday” being a noteworthy example. Based on the 1955 Emmett Till case,
Till was a 14 year old African-American teenager who was lynched in Mississippi
while visiting relatives. When Till’s murderers were acquitted by an all-white
jury, it became a moment that would galvanize The Civil Rights Movement.
Serling was outraged at the triumph of racism and mob justice in America and
felt compelled to write a teleplay directly addressing the gross injustices of
the Jim Crow system. Sponsors and the network feared that such direct
references to the case would offend white Southerners and hurt advertising
revenue, so he had to water down the script into a vague story dealing with mob
justice set in New England with barely a mention of race. His struggles with
censorship led to the creation of The Twilight Zone, the legendary
anthology series that would give him complete creative control.
When The Twilight Zone
debuted on CBS during the fall of 1959 it would change television forever.
Serling’s creative breakthrough allowed him to explore social issues through
the lens of fantasy and science fiction. He wrote 92 of the 156 episodes,
supported by some of the strongest genre writers of the day including Richard
Matheson, Charles Beaumont, and Ray Bradbury. Serling’s opening and closing
narration for each episode allowed him to act as a presence outside of the
show’s universe. While the Cold War anxieties of the era are evident throughout
the run of the series, The Twilight Zone also dealt with issues of
history including The Holocaust in “Deaths-Head Revisited” and mob mentality in
“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” Noteworthy episodes also looked towards
the future and the changing relationship between humanity and technology.
The Twilight Zone
shaped the collective unconscious of the burgeoning boomer generation. Everyone
who came after, including Stephen King to Jordan Peele, have cited Serling as a
major influence. Like most anthology shows, the quality was inconsistent, but
so many episodes hold up as classics. It ran for five season and has remained a
staple of syndication, 24-hour marathons are an annual New Year’s Day tradition
on the Syfy channel. From clever parodies on The Simpsons to multiple
reboots, The Twilight Zone has never gone out of style.
Serling’s next TV project
was The Loner, an allegorical Western starring Lloyd Bridges that ran
for one season on CBS. Still largely unseen, The Loner was
finally released on DVD in 2016. Serling wrote 15 of the 26 episodes with the American
West serving as a backdrop to explore his recurring themes of intolerance and
the consequences of violence. Bridges played William Colton, a Union Captain
haunted by his experiences during the Civil War, he searches for meaning, often
finding himself in the role as peacemaker. Parisi compares the show’s
existential themes to The Prisoner, in any event, The Loner is a
must see for fans of Serling.
In the latter half of the
1960s Serling continued to work in film and television. He earned a
screenwriting credit for the classic Sci-Fi film Planet of the Apes and
the political thriller Seven Days in May. Various TV projects continued,
perhaps most famously “Carol for Another Christmas.” The Christmas season was
another setting Serling loved to write about. Airing on December 28, 1964,
Parisi called it the darkest interpretation ever written on the immortal Charles
Dickens novel A Christmas Carol. The stellar cast included Sterling
Hayden and Peter Sellers (a Dr. Strangelove reunion) and it dealt with
heady themes of corporate greed and nuclear war!
Night Gallery
would become another notable TV project. An anthology series that ran from
1969-1972, the pilot episode featured an early directorial effort from Steven
Spielberg entitled “The Eye.” Night Gallery emphasized horror and
fantasy with Serling hosting and writing about 40% of the scripts. But it would
prove be an unhappy experience. Without creative control Serling was chagrined
to stand by as his scripts underwent significant revision in some cases. Parisi
sees much to admire in Serling’s Night Gallery work, including special
praise the collection of short stories that adapted his episodes into print
form. After Night Gallery Serling remained a presence on television
(often as a narrator) and continued to write screenplays until his untimely
passing in 1975. In 2013 J.J. Abrams’s production company Bad Robot purchased
the rights to one of Serling’s unproduced screenplays “The Stops Along the Way”
about a hitchhiker aging from a young to old man as he travels across America.
Rod Serling: His Life,
Work, and Imagination belongs on the bookshelf of any pop culture devotee. Everything
Serling wrote is summarized and critiqued by Parisi, along with supplemental
chapters focusing on specific ideas in his work. For Serling, television was
never a place simply for mere entertainment, but one to expand the minds of
those willing to go along with him on the journey.
Pynchon remains something of a mysterious figure. While the idea of a "reclusive" seems to be a 20th century phenomenon, Pynchon's continued to uphold the tradition (if you would call it that). Now 83 years old, there's still only a few photos of him available to the public. Pynchon rarely gives interviews, although he did appear on The Simpsons in a voice role as himself in 2004 (also in two more episodes). He grew up in Glen Cove, Long Island, attended Cornell University, dropped out for a stint in the Navy, then returned to finish his degree in English. Novelist and songwriter Richard Farina (1937-1966) was an influence and close friend of Pynchon's at Cornell, Gravity's Rainbow would be dedicated to him. Vladimir Nabokov was one of Pynchon's professors, coincidentally Ruth Bader Ginsburg was also a student of Nabokov's around the same time.
I started reading Pynchon back to the mid-2000s. The first Pynchon novel I read was The Crying of Lot 49, published in 1965. For anyone interested in Pynchon, that's maybe the best place to begin. Set in phantasmagoric 1960s California, the novel follows Ophelia Mass as she discovers a vast web of conspiracy (the post office plays a big role). I was also assigned to read Lot 49 in graduate school for a course on Postmodern American Fiction, one of the best literature courses I was lucky enough to get into. Then I read his debut novel V published in 1963, a pre-psychedelic journey through the 20th Century.
Gravity's Rainbow takes place during the final months of the Second World War, alternating between London and Germany. The novel defies any attempt at a plot synopsis. Pynchon jumps around between points of view and time periods, sometimes between paragraphs. The famous opening passage describes a rocket descending upon a building, "A screaming comes across the sky," and we are off. The "A" mimicking a rocket about to be launched.
Many, many, characters are introduced throughout, some of which are real figures, but most are fictional. If there's a protagonist in the novel it would be Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, an American serving in London being kept under close scrutiny by various intelligence agencies and other interested parties. Other characters include rocket scientists, psychologists, neurologists, military officers, statisticians, diplomats, spies, nurses, psychics, and mediums. Pynchon's view of the war is that of an apocalyptic event, a dividing line in history with shades of the future embedded throughout (way more on this in further posts).
Gravity's Rainbow almost requires a supplemental reading list to go along with it. In addition to the onslaught of 1940s cultural references Pynchon throws at you, for the dedicated reader, primers in Pavlovian psychology, classic psychotherapy, rocket science, quantum physics, the occult, Calvinist theology, colonialism, statistics, strategic bombing, bananas, and a chronology of events in 1944-45 would also help. Written long before google, my guess is Pynchon had the Encyclopedia Britannica at his side as he wrote.
The novel throws so much at you in terms of imagery and plotting I find the best way is to just keep moving forward. Don't worry about understanding everything, you learn as you go along. I get the sense Pynchon set up the novel to steer away those who are not serious, one must get obsessive and let yourself into its world. You have to get familiar with the landscape!
Dedicated readers are rewarded with striking passages about life in wartime London and living under the constant dread of a rocket landing anytime, anywhere. Here's a passage from the opening pages:
Some wait alone, some share their invisible rooms with others. Invisible, yes, what do the furnishings matter, at this stage of things? Underfoot crunches the oldest of city dirt, last crystallizations of all the city had denied, threatened, lied to its children. Each day has been hearing a voice, one he thought was only talking to him, say, "You didn't really believe you'd be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you, old fellow . . . ." (4)
My strategy so far has been to read the book in small doses. Some may be able speed read through it in one gulp, but not me. Every sentence reads like it was thought out and constructed with the precision of an algebra equation. Digressions are common, but you get used to them. The book is full of graphic descriptions of certain acts we'd rather not know or even think about (especially on human digestion) and will put off many (as it did for the Pulitzer Jury). The book is dark, crude, sad, ugly, yet witty and often hilarious. In the chaos are stunning moments of humanity to counter the darkness.
As of now I'm on page 156 of the Penguin Classics version, closing in on the end of Part One (Beyond the Zero), the first of four. I started the book on August 9, so I've been reading in fits and starts. I usually try to read a fiction and non-fiction book at the same time, ideally a short novel I can knock out in a few sittings, not this one. Finishing before the end of 2020 is within the realm of possibility I suppose, we'll see. If not then, hopefully by Spring of 2021!
