We’ve got a holiday weekend coming up here in the U.S., so here are some longer articles I’ve read recently that might give you something to peruse if you get bored with raking leaves or watching football.
This anonymous post at N+1 is a first-hand account of an expat working for the Chinese propaganda ministry during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The author spent those two weeks dutifully transcribing every official announcement into English and posting it on the China Internet Information Center website, but in addition to mechanically publishing the usual official blahblahblah, the author found herself constantly under watch for any sign of anti-China sentiment and was expected to similarly scrutinize everything that was said by others. It’s an interesting glimpse into how carefully the Chinese government tried to control every single bit of media that came out of Beijing during the Olympics.
“The Lonely Crowd”, by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney is one of a series of sociological tomes that appeared in the 1950s and 1960s detailing the seismic changes in American society after World War II as people moved out to the suburbs and community life changed from shared experiences of tight-knit groups to greater and greater insularity and isolation. The 60th anniversary of the publication of the book received this retrospective in the Chronicle of Higher Education last month.
I also enjoyed this Wall St. Journal review by film critic Todd McCarthy of a new biography of the film director Cecil B. DeMille called “Empire of Dreams” (by Scott Eyman). The review begins with an interesting little anecdote about an encounter between DeMille and a young Ayn Rand, looking for her first writing job in Hollywood. McCarthy praises Eyman’s book for humanizing a figure who was regarded as imposing and imperial by his contemporaries, and whose directorial authoritarianism was the very foundation of our stereotype of the screaming movie director with the beret and megaphone. I love a book review that makes me want to read the book, and this did just that.
Former Army career officer, current BU history professor, and outspoke war critic Andrew Bacevich wrote this long piece for the Huffington Post back in July evaluating what he says is the failure of the Western model of war as a political tool, which he uses to criticize right-wing historian Francis Fukuyama, who notoriously declared that “history was over” after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He also compares the seemingly-unending conflicts between Israel and its neighbors to the equally fruitless military adventurism of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bacevich turns his lens on himself a little in this second HuffPo article which ran at the end of August, explaining how his own experiences stationed in Berlin in the 1960s shifted his whole appreciation of the world and America’s foreign policy from one of unquestioning orthodoxy to skepticism and critical inquiry. Both articles are drawn from his latest book “Washington Rules: America’s Path To Permanent War”.
