Straight Up |: May 2007 Archives

If brave Olaf "whose warmest heart recoiled at war" were alive today, would he tell the President With His Head Up His Ass what e.e. cummings once had him tell a West Point colonel? "I will not kiss your fucking flag."

It would be unfeeling at the least, given the stunning 5-column photo on the front page of this morning's New York Times and the accompanying story of a young soldier killed, of others wounded, on a foot patrol in Iraq.

Besides, the absence of a military draft and the use of an all-volunteer force for making war tend to neutralize the very idea of Olaf the C.O. If you're a conscientious objector, what are you doing in the military in the first place? (Pace Pablo Paredes, the sailor who refused to deploy to Iraq, filed a C.O. application and -- surprise! -- avoided prison time.)

Still, Olaf certainly would not say "DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI," the famous words of the Roman poet Horace that are etched above the west entrance of the amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery. (Translation: "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.")

Olaf didn't believe in patriotic gore. And when saying so got him beaten up and reamed with a hot bayonet, he made it even plainer, "There is some shit I will not eat."

Would that all of us were as brave as Olaf.

Have we beaten this to death? I mean the Copycat and the Original Cat, which I've already referred to twice before, here and here. But Randy Kennedy's item, "Photographer Wins Suit Against Designer," in the Arts Briefly column of The New York Times, revived the issue for me -- particularly his description of the plagiarism involved.

A French judge ruled that John Galliano's fashion ads "too closely mimicked a technique" created by William Klein. (An example of Klein's technique, right.) In other words, the plagiarism did not involve an exact image but rather the imitation of a style -- or as the Associated Press put it, "[the judge] said the ads clearly violated intellectual property laws because Galliano never asked Klein's permission to use the style, which the New York-born photographer developed more than a decade ago."

The parallels to the case of a Vik Muniz fashion spread in The New York Times Style Magazine, which imitated the technique and the imagery of the artist Norman O. Mustill, are so close that it's bizarre. Here's some of the evidence one more time, as quoted from the original Muniz-Mustill item of March 13, 2006:

Yes, the royal editorial we took a break from blogging. But not from reading. A theater column, of all things, caught our attention while we were out because of its straightforward accuracy, let alone strong writing: "Prisoners of the Past" by Michael Feingold, in the Village Voice. He pinpoints the connection between the Living Theatre revival of Kenneth H. Brown's 24-year-old play "The Brig" and the American premiere of Peter Morgan's "Frost/Nixon."

If The Brig's power comes from the U.S. military's being tragically the same in 2007 as in 1963, or worse, Frost/Nixon gets its resonance from the difference. Though Peter Morgan's play centers on President Nixon's on-camera post-Watergate "confession" to British interviewer David Frost, its unconscious moral is how good Tricky Dick looks, compared to the slime we have in office now.

The slime, a k a the President With His Head Up His Ass, recently reminded the Congress: "I'm the commander guy." That also caught our attention. (See the video.)

Had the royal bloviator kept up his reading, which we doubt, he might have seen Greg Jaffe's frontpage story, "At Lonely Iraq Outpost, GIs Stay as Hope Fades," in The Wall Street Journal. "None of the soldiers in Tarmiyah talk about winning anymore," Jaffe reports.

Tarmiyah is a "small, trash-strewn city 30 miles north of Baghdad" where "U.S. troops just walking a simple foot patrol ... has become unthinkable," Jaffe writes. The 50 soldiers in the outpost are surrounded by about 30,000 Iraqis. The goal of the troops "is to keep the enemy off-balance, with periodic raids. It's the best they can hope for under the new U.S. 'surge strategy,' which some U.S. officers in Iraq say does little more than chase insurgents from one part of the country to another."

Jaffe's war reporting is particularly good (not that it makes any difference to the "commander guy," of course), and we've cited it before -- here and here.

Meanwhile, leave it to The Journal to slam dunk George Tenet's memoir, "At the Center of the Storm," with the most devastating review that we also read on our break from blogging: "Inside the Inside Story," written by Doug Feith, one of the chief Pentagon culprits for the phony intelligence and "facts fixed around the policy" to justify the invasion of Iraq. It's behind the WSJ subscription wall, unfortunately, but Feith provides a way around that by posting the review on his own site.

See if you don't get the impresson of a viper baring its fangs. Note, too, the tin-eared attempt at humor in the last paragraph of the review. While that doesn't undermine the points Feith makes, it does reveal a peculiar callowness -- not suprising, I suppose, given his war crimes, but strange nonetheless.