Archive for September, 2006
The five best Police Academy Films
I had a surprisingly busy day today so here’s the meme I’ve been working on: The Five Best Police Academy films.
1) Police Academy 2 – Their First Assignment
Jerry Paris, the genius behind other social commentaries like Happy Days took the director’s seat for this one. There were mutterings from the studio that the title shouldn’t have been Police Academy 2 at all, given the radical departure from the previous film. Using 1980s America as a metaphor for 1960s optimism Harris created an uncomprising and biting satire of the American action in Vietnam – the climax being the “police action” against an enemy who can barely be understood but one who stands against America as embodied by the Police Academy. Steve Guttenberg’s tortured performance as Cary Mahoney reaches new heights when, out of the force, he is required to become what he has fought against and engage in subterfuge. This climaxes in an emotionally traumatic scene where he takes on the persona ‘Jughead’ to locate the enemy. It also includes a hilarious scene where two officers accidentally enter the Blue Oyster Club and are engaged in a dance.
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Archaeological Fantasies edited by Garrett G Fagan
This is one of those things that has been sat in the drafts box for a while and if quality was proportional to time then this review should be much much better than it is. Really I’m tempted to simply link to Martin Rundkvist’s review and say ‘me too’. I first saw Archaeological Fantasies, edited by Garrett Fagan, at the Classical Association conference this year. It was on one of the book stalls with a minimal discount so I didn’t buy it, thinking Amazon would be cheaper. That was a mistake twice over. It wasn’t cheaper at Amazon and it led to a long delay in me getting my hands on a copy. It’s a good book and it’s a much needed debate. You get the impression that people have been queuing up to talk about this from the way the book has a foreword, preface and introduction from various people. The book itself is divided into three sections.
The first is The Phenomenon. Rather than just say here’s pseudoarchaeology – it’s Bad. There is an exploration of what fringe archaeology is and what the attraction is. Probably the best chapter in this section is Katherine Reece’s Memoirs of a True Believer. I think this chapter underlines that fringe archaeology can appeal to intelligent and imaginative thinkers. What I didn’t see so much in this section was a view of fringe archaeology as a collection of phenomena. By trying to produce a single definition of pseudoarchaeology I think they may have overlooked the variety inherent in the field. A hard-line creationist would be the polar opposite of a New Age relativist, though I can see they could use similar methods to examine the past.
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America really really REALLY isn’t the new Rome
[Cross-posted to Revise & Dissent]
Las Vegas Trevi Fountain. Photo by *nathan
I’m running out of emphasis. On Sunday the Independent ran a story US ‘mirrors Roman Empire’ in Iraq war. It’ll be disappearing behind a pay wall soon. Potentially this could be a really interesting story. The Romans made repeated attempts to conquer the east and failed. For instance is the Coalition of the Willing running into similar difficulties in the terrain? But the parallel isn’t with the invasion of Mesopotamia. Read the rest of this entry »
America really really isn’t the new Rome
[A version is cross-posted to Revise & Dissent]
The Jefferson Memorial based, ultimately, on the Pantheon in Rome. Photo by dbking.
Now this could be a carnival in the making. A round-up of all the America is the New Rome stories on the web. I’ve already posted on how you can inanely cherry-pick elements of the past to bolster a political assertion. It’s an unquenchable well.
It’s awful politics though. Important politics issues are hidden behind what is often poor history. In many of the America is the new Rome articles there’s an idea that situations lead to inevitable consequences, like the idea that if America is the new Rome then moral decline and the fall of Empire are inevitable. You end up with the situation where people argue that society is monocasual, or close to it, rather than the complex interplay of creative individuals. An example is an analysis by William Federer which I found via The Lighthouse Patriot Journal, but a search on Google shows it’s been quoted with approval by many different people. It’s a shame because you could probably write a whole book about the errors in it:
Rome fell September 4, 476AD. It was overrun with illegal immigrants: Visigoths, Franks, Anglos, Saxons, Ostrogoths, Burgundians, Lombards, Jutes and Vandals, who at first assimilated and worked as servants, but then came so fast they did not learn the Latin Language or the Roman form of government. Highly trained Roman Legions moving rapidly on their advanced road system, were strained fighting conflicts worldwide. Rome had a trade deficit, having outsourced most of its grain production to North Africa, and when Vandals captured that area, Rome did not have the resources to retaliate. Attila the Hun was committing terrorist attacks. The city of Rome was on welfare with citizens being given free bread. One Roman commented: ‘Those who live at the expense of the public funds are more numerous than those who provide them.’ Tax collectors were ‘more terrible than the enemy.’ Gladiators provided violent entertainment in the Coliseum. There was injustice in courts, exposure of unwanted infants, infidelity, immorality and perverted bathhouses. 5th-Century historian Salvian wrote: ‘O Roman people be ashamed… Let nobody think otherwise, the vices of our bad lives have alone conquered us’.
The corn dole was instituted around 50BC and as surely as night follows day over five hundred years later the city of Rome fell. Except it wasn’t Rome – it was Ravenna that fell in 476, the capital of the Western Roman Empire, but I assume Rome was synonym. Gladiators provided violent entertainment in the Colosseum? Not after AD 404 they didn’t – the Emperor Honorarius banned them. Attila the Hun was committing terrorist attacks? No. Not only is terrorist is not a synonym for nasty, Attila died in 453. He wasn’t terrorising anyone. Infidelity? That’s a human constant in all societies. So is talking, but so far no-one has suggested Rome could have remained great if it had embraced mime. Or if they have I haven’t heard them.
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When to debunk?
It’s another post I’ve been mulling for a while because I’ve been reading some dire stuff recently. Not merely bad but atrocious. There’s a feature on Wordpress called Tag Surfer which means I can read an aggregated page of recent posts on specific tags. If you’re on Wordpress and you put a post in the ‘History’ or ‘Science’ category there’s a fair chance I’ll read it. This is great when the posts are about History or Science. It’s less so when someone decides that they only need to read one book and they let someone else translate it from the Hebrew.
Bafflingly the worst stuff recently hasn’t been evolution, it’s been about Global Warming. There have been posts that have gleefully cited things like the expansion of a glacier in Pakistan, and then said the scientists are unreliable when they correlate this with climate change to global warming in the same paper. It is possible that you can agree with parts of a scientific paper, but it’s traditional to give reasons why you accept one part and not others. Simply saying the author is unreliable rules out the whole text.
Others have sagely pointed out that, like Evolution or Fox News, Global Warming doesn’t appear in the Bible. I assume Fox News has really low ratings among Good Christians in the Bible Belt.
What I haven’t understood is why this wave of emotion has been unleashed. At least not till now. Carl Feagans at Hot Cup of Joe gave the game away in his piece Pseudo-skepticism and Pseudo-Journalism about Global Warming. Global Warming is an Al Gore thing.
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