[lbo-talk] media birdbrains

[Carl Remick]

>From: Jon Johanning <jjohanning at igc.org>
>>
>On Sep 3, 2004, at 10:33 PM, Carl Remick wrote:
>
>>But that's just it:  I don't think George Butch matches the High Noon 
>>template of lone hero at all.  Totally on the defensive, Gary Cooper was 
>>just one guy with a pistol against, what, six or more hired guns?  He was 
>>literally a *lone* hero.  Butch, OTOH, has had history's most awesome 
>>armed forces at his beck and call while swaggering around the world on one 
>>self-appointed harebrained chase after another.  Butch is more the head of 
>>a lynch mob than he is an embattled romantic hero.
>
>Yes, that's the reality, all right, but Gary Cooper is the myth, and Bush, 
>IMHO, is doing a fine job of enacting it. That means that a lot of people, 
>swept away by the myth, don't register the reality in their minds. That's 
>the problem with mythical politics.

There's no denying the power of myth.  I just finished reading Adam 
Zamoyski's new book on Napoleon's catastrophic 1812 campaign.  Unbearable 
military and civilian suffering on every page.  Zamoyski says that a total 
of one million people were killed, equally divided on both sides, between 
June 1812 and February 1813.  Through fecklessness and even greater 
self-centeredness than usual, Napoleon destroyed his army to no purpose at 
all, then abandoned it to freeze and starve to death while he hustled back 
to France.  And still, DESPITE all this, his dying troops would cheer on 
their tubby little emperor -- "You da man!" comme on dit en francais -- as 
he fled past them homeward bound.  Why?  Zamoyski quotes Raskolnikov in 
Crime and Punishment:  "The real Master, the man to whom all is permitted, 
can storm Toulon, stage a massacre in Paris, forget about an army in Egypt, 
throw away half a million men in the Moscow expedition and then get away 
with a witty phrase in Vilna.  Yet altars are erected to him after his 
death, for to such a man all is permitted.  No, such people are clearly not 
made of flesh, but of bronze!"

But I still don't get it.  Whatever my fellow Americans may see in GWB, to 
me he's more Bonzo than bronze.

Carl