Just a note…

In case you missed it, at the sister site, Just Above Sunset Photography, guest shots from the south of France –

Art Deco South (the former Belvédère du Rayon Vert hotel in Cerbère, France)

And Hollywood this week –

November Skies (very surreal)

Old Dogs (yep, another movie premiere)

After The Fall

Married guys know it not just a tired but always useful set-up and running joke in television sitcoms – you don’t forget the anniversary. It’s a big deal. There’s hell to pay if you forget that, and even if you remember, you’d better make a big deal of it and plan something damned special, and if not all that special, something at least lavishly expensive and obviously far beyond your means, and a total surprise if you can manage it. Otherwise, it’s obvious you don’t care. Bitter tears will follow, and you’ll be required to hang your head and, of course, then you’ll really pay. If you live out here in Hollywood sooner or later your circle of friends will include someone who writes for a network sitcom, part of the team, the team all hyped on expensive coffee concoctions and stale sugary pastry that sits in an overly air-conditioned conference room and tosses ideas and quips around hoping to come up with another episode. And when that’s just not working someone will say, quietly, “He forgot their anniversary.” That’s followed by groans all around, and then by hammering out the rough script. Yeah, it’s stale and stupid, from the days of I Love Lucy, but it’s universal. It’ll do.

Of course sly young men turn it around the other way – they make up arbitrary anniversaries to get points, and more than points. I brought you these flowers because it was three weeks ago to the day that we first met. It works every time, unless you’ve hooked up with a wry cynic who laughs at you. But we do like to mark off sections of time. Something big happened, and it’s good to remember what did, and you might want remember it, to savor it, exactly one year later, or ten, or twenty. Three weeks is pushing it, however.

And that brings us to Monday, November 9, 2009 – an historic day. On that day in 1953, Cambodia became independent from France. Not your thing? On that day in 1967, the first issue of Rolling Stone Magazine was published. No? On that day in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. Communist-controlled East Germany opened checkpoints in the wall, allowing its citizens to travel to West Germany, and people start demolishing the thing. That was a big deal. It was the end of the Cold War, or close enough, and the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which followed rather rapidly. And that’ll do. This was indeed a big deal.

And this year marked twenty years since the wall was torn down by a slap-happy crowd who loved every moment of the disassembly – happy folks with sledge hammers laughing and the rock ‘n’ roll blaring and a fine time. And the media was filled with retrospectives and analyses and human interest stories and first-hand accounts of being there, as was appropriate. No one forgets this anniversary.

CNN ran a comprehensive story with a cool, full-color slide show:

Thousands of people joined world leaders in the German capital Monday to remember the night 20 years ago when a euphoric wave of people power swept away the Berlin Wall and consigned the Cold War to history.

In scenes calmly mirroring the events of November 9, 1989, crowds thronged through the center of the once-divided city, joining German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a symbolic re-enactment of the first crossing of the breached Wall.

“It was worth fighting for,” Merkel said, after crossing the Bösebrücker bridge on Bornholmer Strasse, the checkpoint where people first poured across the frontier.

The Associated Press went the other way with Thousands Cheer Twenty Years since Fall of Berlin Wall – all human interest stories and first-hand accounts, if you’re into that sort of thing. It’s a matter of personal taste, of course.

But the conservative right wanted to turn this into a second rate episode of I Love Lucy. “He forgot the anniversary.” Yes, President Obama did not fly to Berlin. He was a no-show. You can spin a serviceable comic hapless-husband plot out of that – conflict, then crises, then denouement. In the end the guy is just a doofus, maybe a loveable doofus, but a doofus nonetheless. Or he could be a dangerous, insensitive and arrogant bastard. You can play it either way.

The New York Post – since 1993 owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (he’d owned it previously, from 1976 to 1988, but had been forced to sell it because of government restrictions on media monopolies) – went with the dangerous, insensitive and arrogant bastard angle, with this editorial:

World leaders past and present will be in Berlin today for the 20th anniversary of the fall of communist repression’s most visible symbol: the 112-mile concrete wall that split the city for more than a quarter-century.

Conspicuously absent: the president of the United States, Barack Obama.

Obama’s folks say he’s too busy to accept German President Angela Merkel’s invitation to attend today’s festivities.

It’s pathetic that Obama won’t be there – and telling, as well.

Obama just isn’t JFK, and he’s certainly not the best president ever, Reagan:

After all, it was one of his own supposed heroes, President John F. Kennedy, who famously flew to Berlin in 1963 and denounced the wall as “an affront to history” when he memorably proclaimed to all the world: “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

And it was another predecessor, Ronald Reagan, who even more famously stood before the heinous barrier and declared: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Less than two years later, the wall had tumbled.

The idea here is that Kennedy said the right things, but Reagan said the magic words, and the wall simply fell. Those precise words did the trick. It was “the triumph of American exceptionalism, leadership and strength.” You demand, because you’re special, better than the riff-raff in all the other countries in the world, and you scare the crap out of people, and they comply. It’s as simple as that.

And of course Obama just doesn’t understand how to deal with adversaries:

For Obama, America is but one nation among many, no different – or more exceptional – than any other. Its record is one that, increasingly, he has felt compelled not to extol but to apologize for.

And, for this president, ideologies bent on America’s destruction must be met not with resistance but with rhetoric, outreach and “understanding.”

So, no matter what he says, the Cold War, in this view, must seem to him “an irrelevant historical relic – an example of American paranoia and fear-mongering prolonging a conflict that could have been resolved with warm-and-fuzzy speechmaking and the soft-pedaling of political differences.” That’s not what he says exactly, but that’s what he means, and that is “not only shameful – but dangerous.”

Well, the Post is a classic tabloid, and railing against outreach and understanding is what they do – bad guys should get hammered and real men are the one who hammer them, as niceties, and trying to figure out what other people think and working with that, is sissy stuff.

In late 2007, however, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought the Wall Street Journal, and that’s never been a tabloid. There the opinion piece comes from Anthony R. Dolan, and he was chief speechwriter at the Reagan White House for eight years, and served in the second Bush administration as special adviser in the offices of the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense. He’s not crude and rude, and he tells the tale of how no one at State or Defense wanted Reagan to include the magic words, “Tear down this wall.”

Yes, those words were too provocative and dangerous. It could mean war. But Dolan say Reagan insisted on saying them, as he was a rue genius who knew better than all the wise men in the world. And course, Dolan, in Four Little Words, comes down just where the Post came down:

The current administration, most recently with overtures to Iran’s rulers and the Burmese generals, has consistently demonstrated that all its impulses are the opposite of Reagan’s. Critics who are worried about the costs of economic policies adopted in the last 10 months might consider as well the impact of the administration’s systematic accommodation of criminal regimes and the failure to understand what “good vs. evil” rhetoric can do.

Yep, that worked so well for the younger Bush, didn’t it? Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation seems to have decided to use the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall to argue that sure, the younger Bush made a mess of things, but once, long ago, that sort of “good vs. evil” rhetoric changed the world, so Bush’s heart was in the right place – there are good guys and bad guys, and the good guys win and the bad guys lose. It’s as simple as that. Everything else is dangerous nonsense – unless the whole Soviet system was going to collapse upon itself anyway, as they had botched their economies for decades, and the economies of their satellite states, and that wall was coming down no matter who said what, where, and when. Maybe all we had to do is wait and watch. It was certain to happen, really. But that’s best left to historians and economists. They are not Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

And the whole sitcom plot is muddled by this – Obama’s Surprise Video Address to Berlin on Anniversary of Fall of Berlin Wall – which is pretty basic. Cool. Good thing. Glad it happened. Everyone is glad it happened.

But all this needs perspective, which the former neocon Michael Lind provides in Three Anniversaries – there was the fall of the Berlin Wall, and there was 9/11, and there was the collapse of Lehman Brothers, He argues that each of them ushered in a new American era, so we should think about all three.

The first:

Ever since its construction began in 1961, the wall had symbolized the division not only of Germany but of Europe as a whole between the dreary, tyrannical Soviet bloc and the imperfectly democratic and vibrant West. Over the decades several hundred East Germans had been slaughtered by their own government as they tried to escape to freedom in the West. Now, on the night of Nov. 9, jubilant crowds streamed through the wall, and East Germans and West Germans collaborated to begin to tear the monstrous edifice down. The liberation of Eastern Europe from the Red Army and the reunification of Germany, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the final collapse of belief in the secular religion of Marxism-Leninism, even in nominally communist countries like China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam, quickly followed.

The second:

To the horror of a world watching on television, two jets crashed into the iconic twin towers of the World Trade Center, capsizing them and killing around 3,000 victims. Another jet crashed into the Pentagon, while a fourth, headed for Washington, plunged to destruction in a field in Pennsylvania, after passengers overpowered the terrorists. The U.S. invasions of Afghanistan, whose Taliban regime had hosted al-Qaida, and Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks on the U.S., quickly followed.

The third:

On Sept. 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. As news spread of the collapse of America’s fifth-largest investment bank, credit markets froze and the Dow Jones industrial average plunged more than 500 points. In the next few weeks, the stock market quickly erased a decade’s worth of gains. Waves of bank failures and business failures and mass unemployment, from North America to Europe to Asia, marked the greatest global financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

He says it’s simple – these three events divide three eras in recent history “the Age of Euphoria, the Age of Paranoia, and the Age of Disillusionment.”

The Age of Euphoria, in his formulation, lasted from the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11:

In Washington, the fall of the Soviet Union was misinterpreted as the rise of the United States. The Gulf War of 1991 seemed to ratify American hubris. Using advanced technology designed to defeat the Soviet Union, the U.S. military quickly demolished the armed forces of Saddam Hussein’s feeble regime. It was said that the world had gone from being bipolar to unipolar, that no force since Rome had been as powerful as America and its legions.

This was absurd hyperbole, of course. It was true that the U.S. was the only great power with power projection capabilities that permitted it to defeat weak states on the Eurasian periphery like Iraq, Serbia and Afghanistan. But America’s unmatched abilities in the new colonial warfare hardly gave it hegemony over Europe or Asia. The U.S. military budget was strained nearly to bankruptcy merely by the cost of fighting low-level wars against primitive opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some solitary superpower.

And Lind point out that no one chose to compete with the “New Rome” – they “they had better things to do with their wealth.”

The Europeans slashed their military spending after the Cold War to pay for welfare and amenities for their people. The Chinese, having discarded communism in practice, threw their energies into building up a world-class industrial base. If Americans insisted on sacrificing American blood and American treasure to protect oil destined mostly for Europe and East Asia rather than the U.S., well, the Europeans and East Asians were not going to object.

Of course after 9/11, euphoria gave way to paranoia, and perhaps the less said about that the better – it was the panic and overreaction the bad guys sought. We gave them what they wanted, and our government told us to be afraid, very afraid, which of course became unsustainable:

…despite the best efforts of conservative politicians and ideologues to frighten the American people, it has proved to be impossible to sustain a high level of public anxiety for a prolonged period. The public mood changed in a national burst of laughter in February 2003, when Department of Homeland Security director Tom Ridge urged citizens to amass duct tape in order to seal their windows as a precaution against anthrax or gas attacks. The spell was broken. America relaxed. George W. Bush was narrowly reelected as a wartime president in 2004, but by 2006 the electorate no longer saw the connection between the costly war in Iraq and their own security and threw the Republican Party out of both houses of Congress.

And the rest is history, or was until September 15, 2008:

The subject changed from the threat of terrorists with atomic bombs to the threat of bankers with financial bombs, in the form of unexploded “toxic assets” with strange names like credit default swaps and over-the-counter derivatives. There was a brief upsurge in optimism, when a young, vigorous, mixed-race senator named Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. With Democrats in control of the White House as well as Congress, many assumed that an era of sweeping change was about to begin.

But Obama soon proved to be a cautious incrementalist, not a bold reformer. He froze out innovative thinkers and assembled an economic team dominated by center-right Democrats, including some like Larry Summers who had helped to make the crisis possible by supporting the deregulation of American and global finance in the 1990s. Obama’s Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, said no to all proposals for serious restructuring of the financial industry that might upset investment banks and hedge funds. Every major idea for financial reform – from forcing investment banks into insolvency and nationalizing them temporarily to restoring the Glass-Steagall separation of retail banking from casino finance and cracking down on offshore tax havens to imposing a “Tobin tax” on financial transactions – was rejected as too radical by the best friends in the White House that Wall Street has ever had. By the fall of 2009, according to press reports Paul Volcker was considered too radical to be taken seriously by the Obama administration. Paul Volcker.

Lind goes on with other details of how “Obama was just as timid and deferential toward the organized business lobbies who had helped cause the problems he claimed to be trying to solve.” But you get the idea – we’ve become used to disillusionment. Lind says it now feels like the Hoover years rather than the years just after Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration. We all shrug now. Things are a mess now. That’s just how it is.

All Lind can add to cheer us up is this:

But the present Age of Disillusionment that has followed the fall of Lehman Brothers may yet prove to be as much an overreaction to dramatic events as were the Age of Euphoria that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Age of Paranoia that followed the fall of the twin towers. The U.S. was never as strong as it seemed after 11/9; it was never as weak as it seemed after 9/11; and it is not as bankrupt as it has seemed after 9/15. Let us hope that we can work our way out of the present Age of Disillusionment, without the need for a new catastrophe to mark this epoch’s conclusion.

The man has no respect for anniversaries. His wife must despise him, or at least find him frustratingly analytical and cold. But he may be onto something. Sometimes what you’re celebrating just isn’t what you thought it was.