Fiat Lux

I finally got around to watching The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara yesterday.

All I can say is, wow. Anyone who doesn’t think our situation in Iraq today is not similar to the situation in Vietnam needs to see this. It’s oh so clear that the people running this country have not learned a damn thing in the ensuing 40 years. Some of the things LBJ said in 1964 (according to the movie) could just have easily come out of GW Bush’s mouth. I’ve blogged previously about how Rumsfeld has channeled McNamara.

One point McNamara made that stands out in my memory was about the huge culture gap between the US and Vietnam, and its resulting problems. He more or less said, “we though we were fighting the Cold War. They (the Vietnamese) thought they were fighting a civil war”. This was contrasted sharply in the movie with how the Cuban Missile Crisis was handled, where McNamara describes how the US players put themselves into the Soviet shoes and thought through how to resolve the crisis and save face on both sides.

With Vietnam, LBJ is quoted as saying they didn’t know what was going on in Vietnam as they got into the war, except that they knew they had to win the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese. “We need to be able to guarantee their security” was another phrase I jotted down as I watched. The parallels with today are so obvious it’s not even funny.

McNamara paints himself now as someone who had grave reservations about Vietnam but ran the war as best he could out of loyalty, until finally he found himself disagreeing with LBJ so strongly he had to go. Whether that’s really how it was, I don’t know. And although he was pushed rather strongly by the filmmakers, he refused to say whether he regretted what he did as Secretary of Defense or explain why, if he felt the war was wrong, he would not speak out against it after he left government service. he sys he has his reasons, but doesn’t say what they are.

All in all, for history or political buffs, it’s well worth renting. In the additional materials on the DVD are several clips not included in the movie. One was the famous 1964 ‘girl with dasies/nuclear bomb’ commercial LBJ used. I’d read about it many times but never seen it. I sat there slackjawed as it played out - it is amazingly powerful.

You know it’s getting silly when what Dan Brown left OUT of “The Davinci Code” is newsworthy.

Dan Brown said that when he wrote the best seller that dissects the origins of Jesus Christ and disputes long-held beliefs about Catholicism, he considered including material alleging that Jesus Christ survived the crucifixion.

It’s a reasonably entertaining novel but it’s not going to sit next to “Wuthering Heights” or “I, Claudius” in the annals of classic fiction. I have to assume that it’s the subject matter, and that some people are having a hard time having their religion treated as fodder for fiction.

I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised. The amount of traffic my little review of “The Davinci Code” has generated is still regular, more than six months after I posted it.

I’m currently in the middle of a Daniel Silva novel, “The Confessor.” It’s a decent read so far. I hope he doesn’t have the same third-act problems that Dan Brown has.

It’s late and I’ll pay for this when the alarm clock goes off oh so early tomorrow morning, but I saw “Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World” tonight & wanted to throw down a few lines while my impressions are still fresh.

As a longtime avid fan of the Patrick O’Brien Aubrey/Maturin series, I had waited for the opening of the movie version with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Happily, I was much more pleased than disappointed by the results. Given the limits of what you can cram into one movie, I think they did a fair job of bringing an O’Brien book to the screen. But my pleasure was not unalloyed.

Other, less exhausted reviewers of the movie will go into detail of the subplots cut, the bits freely borrowed from other O’Brien novels, and the somewhat contrived ending. I’ll limit myself to these few observations:

1) I think they could have kept the original love triangle subplot with Midshipman Horner, the gunner, and his wife rather than making Horner out to be just another aging, inept midshipman who couldn’t pass for lieutenant. I suppose it made the film too long to add it in.

2) I’m a fan of Billy Boyd, but I found him somewhat incongruous as Barrett Bonden. I’d always pictured Bonden to be older and not as good looking.

3) Russell Crowe did a good job as Aubrey. I would have liked to see Aubrey a little more human and less permanently enrobed with the godlike authority of a captain, but that’s not what you get with Crowe, and all things considered it was an acceptable tradeoff. He certainly did a good job of the glee Jack felt when sailing Surprise into a storm or boarding a Frenchman’s deck, for example. And I loved the ‘lesser of two weevils’ bit.

4) Maturin. As with Billy Boyd, Paul Bettany is a good actor, but my mental image of Stephen Maturin was not in line with him. Bettany is too tall and too good-looking to be the small, scrawny, bewigged Doctor. And in the final battle, despite the fact that O’Brien does take pains to demonstrate that Stephen is a good fighter, there’s no way Maturin would have boarded the enemy. His place was in the cockpit with the wounded and he would not have left it.

4) Blakeney. I would have preferred meeting young Babbington.

Despite my quibbles, I do think “Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World” is a move well worth seeing and I suspect it will fight it out with “Lord Of The Rings” for a few Oscars this springtime.

Thanks to the ever-so-generous people at AlphaSmart, a fabulous new PDA landed on my desk today - the Dana Wireless. Now I can blog from anywhere in the house, untethered to my PC.

The only problem is that the DanaWeb browser, which takes advantage of the Dana’s widescreen capability, is quite buggy. The two problems that I find most annoying are it has issues with scrolling and the forms handler doesn’t like extended text entry (a big minus for bloggers!). Eudora’s PalmOS web browser, although not widescreen enabled, seems to handle forms a bit better and is thus more suited for WiFi blogging, although it doesn’t take advantage of the Dana’s ample screen real estate.

Other PalmOS Internet apps I’ve tested seem to work fine too. Verichat and upIRC, my two favorite messaging apps, both work flawlessly with the Dana, although neither had widescreen capability. And SnapperMail, an awesome email app, IS widescreen enhanced and works quite well.

The Dana keyboard is full sized and handles nicely, although some of the keys tend to be a bit sticky. I’m not sure if that’s an issue with my Dana or if I’m pounding the keys too hard (a bad habit). At any rate, I’ve long wanted a simple laptop or laptop alternative that was wifi enabled so I could do some basic online tasks without having to leave the bedroom or living room.

Now I can.

Go Dana go!

I sacrificed a few hours of sleep last night to finish Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code”. I have to say, when I finished, I kind of wished I’d gone to sleep instead. I won’t say too much because I don’t want to give away plot if you haven’t read it, but given the generally excellent reviews the book has gotten, I felt that the ending was a real wimp-out.