Just as nasty as the enemy

Gregory Peck in The Guns of Navarone (1961)

Despite YouTube’s thrumming ecosystem of amateur film criticism scene, there are precious few video essays on movies from before the Star Wars era, much less classic war movies. So it was a pleasant surprise to discover this nine-minute video (from five years ago) unpacking a little of what makes The Guns of Navarone great.

The host rightly starts with the strength of The Guns of Navarone’s story—a cast of interesting characters on a dangerous mission, wonderful scenery, a Mission: Impossible-like situation requiring a multi-part plan using all of the characters’ skills to accomplish. This is only right. The story should be good first; only then can interesting themes or lessons or philosophical implications emerge to be examined. Navarone has both: scope and depth.

As the host gives attention to the movie’s moral and philosophical dimension he highlights the contested pragmatic or utilitarian ethics of the men on the mission. The man who came up with the plan, Major Franklin (Anthony Quayle), is horribly injured while infiltrating enemy territory and, now viewed by some of the others (and himself) as a burden upon the team’s time and resources and a danger to the mission, there is a brief debate about what to do. Andrea Stavrou (Anthony Quinn), the hardened local guerrilla, suggests shooting Franklin and moving on. Captain Mallory (Gregory Peck), now the leader of the team and an old friend of Franklin’s, nixes that and they take Franklin along.

Franklin later tries to shoot himself—a calculated, coldly rational solution to the obstacles created by his injury rather than an act of desperation. Demolitions expert Corporal Miller (David Niven), Franklin’s most doggedly loyal subordinate, stops him. This is a pure act of love, and Miller, who has been comic relief up to this point, functions as the film’s conscience for the rest of the movie. (We learn during the briefing that Miller once blew up a Nazi headquarters in North Africa without damaging the orphanage nextdoor. This is presented as evidence of his skill with explosives but it also suggests an attempt to fight justly that is absent in the others, like Spanish Civil War knife-fighter Brown or “born killer” Spiros.)

Captain Mallory (Gregory Peck) has a quiet word with Franklin. Miller, unable to listen, at first interprets this as a moment of moral suasion, one old friend trying to reason with another. But Mallory is actually feeding Franklin false information—the mission has been canceled—that could play to their advantage if Franklin is captured and interrogated.

Mallory does his best to protect Franklin and the rest of the team but they do end up captured, and, when they manage to escape, Mallory leaves Franklin behind. His argument is that Franklin needs medical attention that they can’t give him. But he also has the secret knowledge that Franklin might be useful.

When Miller learns this—in later circumstances I won’t spoil—he is appalled: “Oh, I misjudged you. You’re rather a ruthless character, Captain Mallory.”

Not entirely, however. Mallory appears conflicted, as well he should be. (This is my favorite Peck performance, by the way.) Earlier in the film, in private conversation with Franklin long before Franklin’s accident, Mallory confesses to having ruined Andrea’s life through a gesture of chivalry earlier in the war, which he blames on “my stupid Anglo-Saxon decency.” But he’s gotten wiser since then: “To win a war you have to be just as nasty as the enemy. What worries me is that we’re likely to wake up one morning and find out we’ve become even nastier.”

It’s a rare film that raises this as a possibility for the good guys, especially in the main character’s argument for himself.

The thing is, Mallory’s ploy works—the Germans do get the false intelligence and do strip the defenses of the team’s target. But that’s not a neat resolution. We see Franklin being tortured and must assume that, offscreen, he broke. In Miller’s words, Mallory has “used up” his old friend for the sake of the mission. Mallory’s utilitarian arguments don’t withstand Miller, and Miller’s attempt to treat Mallory as coldly as he has treated Franklin ends in obvious regret. Both men, for different reasons, have tried to play the pragmatist and learned the hard way that it’s wrong.

And Franklin is only one instance of the damage wrought by the mission. Mallory’s self-accusing worries and Miller’s accusations are allowed to stand, even in light of the team’s ultimate success. What is permissible to win? An ever-necessary question.

Like The Bridge on the River Kwai, which similarly throws characters with distinct, conflicting worldviews at each other in a dangerous situation, The Guns of Navarone lets all of this grow organically out of the characters and story. It doesn’t feel forced, which makes it more powerful and also means that the action-packed adventure I thrilled to as a kid has grown deeper and weightier as I’ve gotten older. A rare accomplishment.

Thunderstruck

I’ve written about my maternal grandfather here many times before. A year or so ago I learned something surprising about him: he was terrified of thunderstorms.

The house he raised my mom and her siblings in and in which I spent many happy days of my childhood sat on a hilltop. Three enormous oaks stood around the driveway. One by one over the years the lightning took them. One I can only remember as a stump, right from the beginning of my own awareness. Another I remember faintly, as both a living tree and as a shattered obstacle and tangle of limbs to be removed. The last, in which he hung a rope swing for us, lasted until I was an adult, but now it too is gone.

Maybe that had something to do with it—living in a lightning rod. It occurred to me recently that he also used the very top of the hill as a scrapyard for his plumbing-electric business. Coils of copper wire and stacks of copper pipe lay there, inviting the storm.

What most surprised me about this fear was his response. Apparently when my mom and her siblings were kids, if a thunderstorm rolled in over the northeast Georgia mountains he would load the entire family into the car and drive around until it had dissipated. He didn’t want simply to get away from the house, but to keep moving and stay busy during the entire storm.

“I don’t know what happened to him to make him like that,” my mom has said.

This is the man who inspired the grandfather in Griswoldville, who worked for decades in a business that exposed him to electrocution and sewage and crooked contractors, who told me stories about watching the flash of artillery over the next ridge in Korea, who grew up in poverty with no indoor plumbing. Imagining him frightened, and so frightened that he chose flight, was a revelation. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, especially when my turn now comes for thunderstorms to roll in over the South Carolina upstate. I may not react the way he did, but I understand the fear.

A curious change: as a kid I didn’t mind the thunder. When I was small we replaced our shingle roof with metal and I learned to love the sound of rain on it. (If I could find a white noise app that combined heavy rain on a metal roof and the rushing mountain creek about fifty feet from my bedroom window, and if the storm could gradually fade into the sounds of crickets and tree frogs, I’d never struggle to sleep again.) The occasional thunder was rarely sharp or loud enough to be frightening, and when it was my parents taught me to regard it as a demonstration of God’s power. Look at what his creation can do! As a result, for many years I saw thunder as just that—a novelty if not an inconvenience, an instructive change in the weather that usually passed quickly.

But somewhere in the last few years my granddad’s terror has sprouted up in me. It’s not fear, precisely, but a gnawing worry. I can feel it in my chest. When the sky dims and clouds—as it did earlier this week, as it is today, as I write this—something clenches and won’t release, not until the storm is over. Until then, I fret over wind and leaks (our roof hasn’t leaked once and there is no sign that it will) and tornadoes (a real but much more remote threat).

Frontline troops in the First World War sometimes described waiting out a barrage in terms like “weathering a storm.” The strain broke some men. Passive sitting, waiting for destruction that may or may not come, confronts one with smallness and a total lack of control. Waiting out a thunderstorm is usually not nearly as serious, but that feeling is recognizable. Better, since one has the option unlike the men on the Western Front, to do something—even just drive around—than sit still and take it.

What happened to my granddad to give him that fear? Maybe something as a kid, which is what the question suggests. Then again, people aren’t that simple, so maybe nothing. But if this was not a lifelong fear, as in my case, where it’s only cropped up in the last several years, I suspect responsibility played a role. As a kid I enjoyed the thunder because of the blessing of being taken care of, rather than taking care of others. I only fret about these things now because of the good things in life—a house, my wife, our kids. I don’t want to worry away my forties and the kids’ childhoods in fear.

I have to wonder whether my granddad’s destinationless thunderstorm car rides stopped once my mom and aunt and uncle were older. I remember my granddad as unflappable. He was a man of integrity and duty and I wish I could ask whether he learned to take captive his fear and, if so, how.

Perhaps someday, when it will all seem so eternally distant that we can both laugh about it. Until then, with each storm and downpour, I pray to think of blessing rather than danger, and to control my worry, actively and purposefully, with love.

The Desecration of Man

Midway through his documentary “Why Beauty Matters,” the late Sir Roger Scruton surveys the brutalist wrecks in the hollowed out town center of Reading, a formerly quaint Victorian town updated in mid-century and now derelict, and asks us to look past the broken windows and spray paint. “[W]e shouldn’t blame the vandals,” he says. “This place was built by vandals, and those who added the graffiti merely finished the job.”

We clearly live in an age of vandals, with vandalism lauded as both high art and meaningful political protest, and that is before we even consider darker acts of defacement: the surgical mutilation of human bodies in pursuit of phantom identities, the buying and selling of sex through pornography, the devaluing and destruction of unborn, disabled, and elderly life. But like Scruton looking at Reading, Carl Trueman, in his new book The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades our Humanity, presents us the obvious acts of profanation while asking us to consider the subtler, invisible acts that first made them possible—the graffiti artists as well the architects who provided the already crumbling concrete walls.

Trueman’s project for some years now has been the basic historical task of explaining how we got here. Where his best-known book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, and his more recent study of critical theory, To Change All Worlds, are big, sweeping books tracing multiple interrelated threads of philosophical and cultural development, The Desecration of Man is a short, brisk book concerned specifically with anthropology—the question What is man? If asking How did we get here? is the fundamental question of the historian, this is the fundamental question of the philosopher and theologian.

Everything else, Trueman demonstrates, is downstream of one’s answer to this question. Invoking Nietzsche’s Madman, Trueman argues that a shift in how both intellectuals and ordinary people answered that question began a long, slow rot that has only recently become obvious. The culture coasted for a long time on shared mores even as the anthropological assumptions that shaped them disintegrated. But the assumptions that man is not transcendent, that he is an atomized individual with no connection to others, that his interior life is his true self, that flesh is just flesh and sex is just stimulation, and that all of these are malleable have in the last century born fruit. A spirit of negation—a phrase borrowed from Goethe’s Mephistopheles—has led to a culture of desecration, the vandalization of mankind.

The surgeries, the “exuberant nastiness” of present day political rhetoric and online Holocaust denial, the public celebrations of aberrant sex, the industrial output and consumption of pornography, the epidemic of abortion or, in a seemingly opposite extreme, IVF, the push for infanticide and the rise of euthanasia regimes, the aims of Silicon Valley transhumanists, and even our consumerist obsession with youth and fitness—all of these treat man as a commodity to be bought, sold, upgraded, or disposed of as if man is just another product. These are desecrations, Trueman argues, and as often as not intentional. The frenzy with which, to choose one example, people are encouraged to take vocal public pride in having killed an unborn child betrays this spirit.

Some of this will be familiar, at least if you’ve read Trueman’s essays or have simply been paying attention. Rousseau, Marx, Freud, and others appear, tearing down the old anthropology and replacing it with their functional, brutalist edifices—the individual unsullied by society, the economic man, the Id. This is succinct and pointed, and should prove enlightening to anyone who hasn’t considered the longer history of how we think about ourselves before. But what Trueman does best is illuminate the logical connection between a debased understanding of what we are and how these outcomes—the spraypaint on the office block and bus stop—naturally result.

At this point it is worth noting, in case this sounds like a straightforwardly conservative polemic, that Trueman is bipartisan in his criticisms. He credits neither side in our current political environment or culture wars with a correct anthropology; both of them embrace the commodification of man in only superficially different ways. The end result is the same.

If a diagnosis were all The Desecration of Man had to offer it would be a good book, but Trueman ends with his most surprising and challenging material: a pair of cautions and a vision of the only true solution to the desecration. He roots both in three inextricably interlocked Cs: creed, cult, and code. Creed he defines as a given set of beliefs; cult, in the technical sense of a body of ritual, as the trappings and practices of those adhering to a creed; and code as the ethics, mores, and courtesies of those believing the creed and practicing the cult.

Trueman offers two examples as cautions. The first, Richard Dawkins, enhanced his already exalted reputation as a biologist by becoming the voice of an aggressive, hostile new form of atheism in the early 2000s. Recently, with the best years of the New Atheists behind him, he began to describe himself as a “cultural Christian,” someone who wants the customs and ethical priorities of the West, which he treats as having emerged apparently ex nihilo and as still viable without the pesky need to believe in God. This, Trueman argues, is a dead end, because it wants only the code but not the cult that sustains it or the creed in which it originates.

It is hard to feel sorry for Dawkins, who has shown himself so clearly to be a man sawing off the limb he has spent his life sitting on. More difficult for me was Trueman’s second test case, the aforementioned Sir Roger Scruton himself.

Even after reading more than a dozen of his many books, Scruton’s precise views of Christianity remain opaque, or at least unclear. There are some signs in interviews and reminiscences that he became more traditionally religious toward the end of his life and his arguments in favor of it clearly come from a deep, sincere place, but the usual tenor of his work is merely to treat Christianity as useful. This was not solely for the way it propped up modern niceties about equality and self-congratulatory do-gooder ethics, like Dawkins, but because it made manifest the transcendent, which is aesthetically and spiritually good for people. Scruton, then, in lauding the faith as a way to bring beauty and a sense of wonder into the world, embraced the code and participated eagerly in the cult, but it seemed not to matter to him one way or the other whether the creed was true.

Other examples could be supplied. Trueman mentions Tom Holland and Jordan Peterson. But this also, Trueman argues, is a dead end. It matters whether the creed is true or not because, if not, the anthropology derived from the creed will be a sham. Once this is discovered, as so many thinkers over the last centuries have so eagerly asserted they have, why maintain it? And so we end up right back where we are.

If the problem is desecration, Trueman writes in his conclusion, having “imagined ourselves as gods” only to “have ironically reduced ourselves to dust,” the solution is the long, slow task of consecration, of taking the thing we have vandalized and treating it as it deserves again. The only way forward is Christianity in accord with those three Cs: belief in God and his vision of what man is and what he is for, teleologically; acted out in community rather than as individuals, in embodied, physical liturgy; and lived out in real-life acts toward flesh-and-blood people: giving, hospitality, neighborliness, even acknowledging our shared mortal limits by attending funerals. These three things are inseparable, and only if taken together may restore our anthropology and begin to undo the vandalism, both the obvious and invisible kinds.

The Desecration of Man is a helpful intellectual history, cultural critique, and religious appeal in one short book, briefly and clearly explained for the widest possible readership. And far from affirming a reader inclined to agree with Trueman, he graciously but clearly points out the weaknesses in much modern rediscovery of the utility of faith. Picking up some of the themes CS Lewis presciently explored in The Abolition of Man eighty years ago, this is a worthy successor to that book, and one that I hope many will find challenging and helpful, not to mention hopeful.

Another justice

Julia Jentsch as Sophie Scholl in Sophie Scholl: Die letzten Tage (2005)

The past two weeks in my Western Civ II class I’ve been teaching the interwar period and the Second World War. By coincidence, I have two things fresh on my mind:

First, I recently finished reading Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, by Richard J Evans. This collection of profiles and capsule biographies of people from every level of the Reich—from Hitler himself to ordinary citizens—concludes with a look at some commonalities: bourgeois backgrounds, decent education, a humiliating loss of status at some early point in life. Evans does not mention them specifically in his conclusion, but broken homes and religious apostasy feature in a nontrivial number of these lives.

Second, I recently listened to a Rest is History Club bonus episode with Jonathan Freedland, whose latest book tells the story of a German anti-Nazi resistance group. Freedland, in the course of the interview, notes that a significant factor in both motivating and sustaining the actions of many members of the ring was a deep Christian faith that allowed them to see beyond the Nazis and the Reich, to prioritize God above state and live sub specie aeternitatis.

In class Monday I mentioned to my students the story of the White Rose and recommended Sophie Scholl: The Final Days to them. Few movies tell a true story better or better demonstrate the truths to be inferred from the two items above.

Briefly, the film dramatizes the last several days of Sophie Scholl’s life in 1943. Scholl, her brother Hans, and a group of friends—Lutheran, Catholic, and Orthodox—had begun the White Rose as an anonymous protest against the Nazis’ conduct of the war. They drafted, printed, and secretly distributed leaflets denouncing Hitler’s leadership, the mass murder on the Eastern Front, where Hans had served, and the Reich’s top-to-bottom disregard for human life. Hans and Sophie were caught leaving stacks of their final leaflet outside the lecture halls at the University of Munich, and within days had been interrogated by the Gestapo, tried by hanging judge Roland Freisler in a specially convened Volksgerichthof (People’s Court), and guillotined.

The Scholl siblings had some steel in them, standing up to both the Gestapo, the Reich’s most brutal kangaroo court, and the threat and promise of death, and the film—which is very closely based on fact, including verbatim recreations of interrogations and the trial proceedings—shows us why.

There is their faith, invoked again and again and the source of their perspective. Hitler and the Reich hold no terror for them—these can only kill the body. Revealingly, the Scholls’ appeal to eternity and the City of God (he is never mentioned, but St Augustine heavily influenced the White Rose) are not so much disregarded by Gestapo investigator Robert Mohr or Judge Freisler as they are simply unintelligible. These two, the nose-to-the-grindstone cop and the ideologue, are alike so wedded to the State, the Party, and the Spirit of the Age that anything deviating from their devotion is worthy only of mockery and destruction. Evil cannot understand good.

Second, and inextricably linked with the Scholls’ faith, are their parents. Robert and Magdalena Scholl show up in the middle of the Volksgerichthof’s proceedings and demand a chance to testify. Freisler shouts them down and has them removed from the courtroom. Later, given a chance to see their daughter a final time, they praise her—“You did the right thing”—and tell her to remember Jesus. Like them, Sophie invokes the transcendent: “We’ll meet in eternity.”

Where do children get such faith and strength? Their parents. The film shows most clearly where the Scholls got their courage in their father’s one line as he is hustled out of Freisler’s courtroom, the line that still strikes me most powerfully: “Es gibt noch eine andere Gerechtingkeit!”

There is another justice. A promise to the faithful, no matter how terrible the suffering; a threat to the wicked, not matter how temporarily successful.

When introducing Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler in class a few weeks ago, I noted as an aside specifically for my male students that if they planned to have children they should take care to be good dads. All four of these dictators, and many others besides, not to mention many of their underlings, had terrible relationships with their fathers. The regularity with which the tyrannical, unfaithful, or absent father crops up in Evans’s book is telling. Hans and Sophie Scholl—not to mention the Stauffenbergs and Bonhoeffers—offer a positive counterexample and a challenge. We need more Robert Scholls than ever.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is well worth your time. I own the recent Blu-ray of the movie, but the entire thing is available on YouTube (with English subtitles available in the closed captioning button). I strongly recommend it.

Lying and counting the inexplicable

The Messenger, Luc Besson’s brutal, ugly, inaccurate, and very very late 90s film about St Joan of Arc, is a terrible movie, but it has one brilliant scene that I’ve reflected on since the one time I watched it more than twenty years ago.

Late in the story, as Joan sits in prison awaiting trial and sentencing, she is visited by a character played by Dustin Hoffman called “The Conscience.” The Conscience has a literally satanic role as an accuser, introducing doubt where Joan has heretofore felt only conviction. His interrogation eventually centers on Joan’s sword, which she miraculously found in a field, an event she took as a calling from God. The Conscience seizes on this, pointing out that it is not self-evidently a sign, but simply a sword in a field. In an increasingly rapid montage, the Conscience suggests many possible ways the sword could have wound up there that did not require God placing it here for her to find.

Having run through several scenarios in which the sword is dropped during combat or simply lost by accident, the Conscience says, “And that’s without counting the inexplicable.” Whereupon we see a man trudging through the same field carrying the sword, which he throws, entirely unprompted, into the tall grass. He doesn’t even stop walking.

The scene is clearly meant to mock supernatural belief—and it doesn’t even get St Joan’s history with that sword right—but that penultimate image of “the inexplicable” makes a valid, important point.

A young true crime YouTuber got me thinking about the Conscience and the inexplicable again. In my constant search for another Lemmino, I’ve tried out a lot of documentary channels on YouTube. Sturgeon’s Law being what it is, most of them aren’t very good. But in the course of finding a handful of decent documentary YouTubers to listen to or watch as I do the dishes or make the kids’ lunches, I’ve noticed that even the best of them have a persistent flaw.

The YouTuber in question is a college graduate with a degree in history. He’s smart, funny, and clearly paid attention in his historiography classes, as he demonstrates a good historian’s grasp of how to gather and assess evidence—most of the time. Faced with contradictory or irreconcilable details in whatever evidence he’s gathered (usually on old missing persons cases), he is far too willing to declare that someone is lying. Not mistaken, ignorant, misremembering, or misinformed—lying.

Part of this may be generational and cultural. I’m a geriatric Millennial from the Deep South, where accusing someone of lying is still serious business, and he’s a northern Zoomer. But it’s also a historiographic problem.

The accusation usually stems from discrepancies in whatever evidence is available—note that—and unacknowledged subjective impressions of the people involved. Discrepancies, in true crime theorizing, offer the same incentive that “anomalies” do to the conspiracy theorist. Our YouTuber falls into this trap whenever he takes discrepancies as evidence of willful deceit.

A lightly fictionalized version of a real example:

Two tourists disappear while hiking in Central America. Their diaries, when found, include a final entry on Monday, April 20. Locals confirm this date. But another tourist who briefly got to know them before their disappearance later recalls seeing the two tourists on Tuesday the 21st. But when first asked about the missing tourists by the police, the records show she stated this happened on that Monday. Why did she change her story? Why is she lying?

The most likely answer is that she didn’t, and she’s not.

Imagine meeting two strangers in a foreign country. You see them again sometime later. Being recent acquaintances, you notice them, but you’re busy with your own business. When they disappear, it turns out you’re one of the last people known to have seen them alive. Suddenly, details of that day take on a significance you never could have anticipated, you’re forced to try to recall things you never knew you would need to remember, and you may not have learned about the disappearance for days or weeks after it happened.

You’re interviewed by local police and by investigators from the tourists’ home country. You return to your own country and your previous life, and years go by. The investigation is reopened several times and you are interviewed again at some point in the process. How well will you remember these things this time? How well did you remember them in the first place?

No one in this scenario is lying, covering things up, or changing their stories. People make mistakes, misremember things, have their memories tainted by bad information relayed from someone else, or simply don’t know. None of this is “lying.”

This is where the inexplicable comes in. Without even factoring in these faults and flaws of memory, how well can you account for your own behavior, even in ordinary circumstances? People do things they can’t even always explain to themselves—out of habit, or intuition, or boredom, or a myriad of other barely conscious non-reasons. To paraphrase a meme, you do just do things.

But imagine a single day of yours is, for reasons beyond your control, placed under a microscope, with the authorities—and YouTubers and podcasters and a legion of other amateurs—poring over your every movement. Who wouldn’t end up looking a little suspicious, especially after being run through a strong rinse of insinuation, as the true crime and conspiracy folks are wont to do? Who couldn’t be accused of lying when forced to remember details you may have forgotten or simply can’t explain?

A few good rules of thumb for sifting evidence:

• Always assume there is information you don’t have, especially when dealing with incomplete evidence. You can only work from what’s available. It’s irresponsible in the extreme to speculate on casefiles that are still partially classified, but guess what you’ll see on almost every true crime YouTube channel?

• Even if you have a complete set of the available evidence, remember that the evidence is not a complete account of reality. Every piece has its own built in biases—limitations in the kind of evidence it’s designed to gather—and will leave things out.

• Always assume there are things you don’t understand. This is especially important in highly technical cases like the radar, transponder, and cell tower evidence in the Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 case which—guess what?—our YouTuber, who doesn’t understand a lot about aviation, takes as evidence of the authorities lying. Aviation is a good example because it’s so obviously complex, but there are hidden technical pitfalls everywhere. In our lightly fictionalized example, consider the possible role of customs and immigration law in our tourists’ story, or unspoken local custom, or simple slang. These invisible technicalities can be the most dangerous. Just keeping Old and New Style dates straight in modern history can wreck your study of a specific event.

• Don’t let your prejudices influence your interpretation. This should be obvious, but how many of us consistently meet this standard? Our YouTuber hates the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI, so guess how evenhandedly he approaches reports, statements, or other evidence from these institutions? The FBI’s handling of Waco doesn’t mean they’re lying about a child who went missing in the Great Smoky Mountains.

• Always leave room for the inexplicable. Compare the Umbrella Man. And even if you carefully work through every alternative and can prove someone is lying, as the aforementioned Lemmino points out, you may never determine why they are.

• Above all, remember historian’s bias. Approaching any event in the past will give us a different perspective and sense of its significance from everyone who actually lived through it. This is especially important to remember for people called to give an account of something that wasn’t significant to them at the time, that might, in the moment, to have been able to turn out some other way.

I could go on, but these are handy and important and should remain at the forefront of your mind when doing research. And if these are still not enough to dissuade you from leaping to the conclusion that someone you don’t know, under circumstances you haven’t lived through, that you don’t and can’t ever have a complete picture of, is lying, at least have a high enough regard for truth that accusing someone of falsehood becomes a charge you hesitate to make. Your conscience, at least, should demand as much.

Obvious headline is obvious

Late last week I happened to see this front-page headline in the print edition of the Greenville News: “Fort Hill has ties to politics, slavery, founding of Clemson.”

Fort Hill is the name of the plantation house now situated on the campus of Clemson, a few hundred feet away from where I spent grad school in Hardin Hall. It belonged to John C Calhoun, one of the most influential politicians—and one of the only important American political theorists—of the Republic’s second generation. His son-in-law, Thomas Green Clemson, bequeathed the former plantation property to the state for the creation of an agricultural college, which was founded the year after his death in 1888. So one could rewrite the Greenville News’s headline like this:

Plantation house of former congressman, senator, Secretary of War, Secretary of State, and VP John C Calhoun on campus of Clemson University has ties to politics, slavery, Clemson.

The only headline I’ve ever seen that exceeded this one in obviousness was in the New York Times in 2021: “With the Suez Canal Blocked, Shippers Go Around Africa.”

My chief question when looking at the original headline was “Who is this for?” Anyone who attended Clemson (and cares about the university for more reasons than football) already knows this, as do locals and anyone interested in upstate history. The paranoid part of my mind, which I usually hold firmly in check, perked up: was this meant as some kind of agitation for the legions of outsiders swarming into the area? A certain kind of newcomer to the South, a devout worshiper at the altar of the genetic fallacy, loves to discover “ties” that they can be outraged about. I’ve seen it happen.

I actually drafted a version of this post sitting in my kids’ car line Friday afternoon, right after seeing this newspaper lying on a lonely shelf in a Spinx. But before I could post it I began to doubt myself. I had skimmed the article just enough to roll my eyes at the predictable appearance of the circumlocution “enslaved people,” which I’ve picked apart here before. Had I misremembered the headline? Was this actually a front-page, above-the-fold article, or had I seen an accidentally separated travel section?

Well, that newspaper was still sitting there Saturday when I stopped at that same Spinx on the way to the dump. I made a point of doublechecking: it was a front-page story, and I hadn’t misremembered the headline. But looking through the whole article, I finally discovered what it really was—a poorly put-together travel article for a USA Today history initiative called USA 250, assembled mostly from spare parts of previous Greenville News items. The online version of the article makes this clearer without the apparent intent to stir something up: “How to visit historic home at Clemson University.”

The paranoid part of my mind could be safely returned to its cage. The truth was both more mundane and sadder: that print headline was an attempt to inform trying a bit too hard to be interesting. (Though the same article, shared on the paper’s Facebook page, did attract the following comment from one Boomer: “Calhoun bigot and racist.” Speaking of the obvious and predictable.)

Nevertheless: a slow week at the Greenville News. And people wonder why newspapers are dying.

Bones and Berserkers

I mentioned in my recent review of Chloe Bristol’s picture book of The Raven that the Poe fan is chronically short of material making Poe accessible to kids. Her book was a welcome exception. Here’s another.

One of our family’s great favorites right now is Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales, a series of historical graphic novels aimed at eight- to twelve-year olds. Nathan Hale is both the author and artist behind the series and—in the form of tragically terrible spy Nathan Hale—the narrator of most of the books. Each book begins with Hale on the gallows with two other characters, the Hangman and the Provost, the British officer in charge of his execution. Hale, in order to buy time before his date with the noose, entertains the others with stories from history past and future.

It’s a fun concept and Hale—both of them—executes it brilliantly. All the stories I’ve looked at so far have been well-researched and beautifully designed and illustrated, and the Hale, Hangman, and Provost characters work as a kid-friendly chorus, popping into the scenes to comment on the action, ask questions, and provide comic relief from the frequently grim subject matter. Hale (the author) presents the stories faithfully, with charity and nuance but without blunting the truth. Since discovering them at our local library I’ve encouraged the kids to read them, and they’ve happily gobbled them up.

Favorite so far include Raid of No Return (Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid), Alamo All-Stars (the Texas Revolution), Treaties, Trenches, Mud, and Blood (World War I), Above the Trenches (World War I aviation), Lafayette! (the Marquis de Lafayette in the American Revolution) and Donner Dinner Party (self-explanatory). The kids not only enjoy them, they’ve learned a lot. Touring Patriots Point in Charleston over the weekend, my daughter recognized a life-size cutout of Jimmy Doolittle in the USS Yorktown’s hangar and demanded I take her picture with him. A proud dad moment.

Bones and Berserkers is the thirteenth in the series, and to mark the occasion Hale offers an anthology of thirteen short stories. A storm rolls in on Hale, Hangman, Provost, and Bill Richmond (a fourth narrator who becomes more prominent as the series goes on), who shelter under the gallows and build a fire to stay warm. This frame tale sets up an exchange of campfire stories—horror tales.

The stories range wonderfully. We get folklore like the Jersey Devil, the “demon cat” haunting the US Capitol, and the Gullah Geechee story of the boo hag, a woman who sloughs off her skin at night to drink blood from the living. The book includes true stories like Abraham Lincoln’s dream of his own funeral in the White House; Eben Byers, a golfer whose excessive use of radium-infused patent medicine disintegrated his jaw and left his corpse radioactive a century on; and the axe murder at Frank Lloyd Wright’s house Taliesin, which left Wright’s mistress, both of her children, and four employees dead and the house burned to the ground. Then there are uncertain blends of fact and fiction, like the well full of Confederate dead at South Mountain and the career of California bandito Joaquín Murrieta, both of which are true stories so heavily embellished that it remains impossible to say which details are accurate.

But the stories that first drew my attention are purely literary. The only story narrated by the Provost—who wants to prove he can tell a scary story—is an adaptation of the underappreciated Edgar Allan Poe tale “Hop-Frog.” Every word of the story in comic form comes verbatim from Poe, a wonderful touch, and the cruelty of the king’s court and Hop-Frog’s deliciously grotesque revenge are vividly realized. The other is a portion of The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki, an Icelandic legendary saga about a king reclaiming his stolen inheritance with a band of warriors, his chance encounters with Odin, and his eventual doom at the hands of his sorceress half-sister. Marvelous stuff, and a great kids’ introduction to both lesser-known Poe and the sagas.

All of the stories are excellent. The drawings are beautifully done, and Hale experiments a bit from story to story. Most of them have the series’ clean, energetic signature look, but Lincoln’s dream, a simple two-page spread in a charcoal sketch-like style, and “The Butler Who Went Berserk,” about the tragedy at Wright’s Taliesin, drawn in a series of geometric panels mimicking Wright’s style, are standouts. The characters in “Hop-Frog” also look a bit like 1930s Warner Brothers cartoons, with exaggerated round features and shiny eyelids. A nice choice for the heightened tone of the story.

And the care put into research is evident throughout, both in the art and the storytelling. Historical costumes look good in every story, especially the semi-legendary story of Hrolf Kraki, which has evocative Viking Age design (with at least one nod to pre-Viking Norse art). Hale also makes sure the context and details necessary to the story are clear, whether through the chorus of characters chiming in to ask, in-story conversation, or dedicated explainers, like a succinct one-page explanation of the berserkr of Norse legend. At the end of the book, Hale includes a page detailing which stories are true, which are fiction, and which lie in some uncertain place in-between.

It’s nice both to enjoy a book and appreciate the effort put into getting things right, but the stories and the dread and terror they offer are the main attraction. Hale promises spooks and horror and delivers. In the same way he doesn’t downplay or ignore difficult or uncomfortable details in his historical books, he doesn’t skimp on the atmosphere, the scares, or the gruesome details. It’s never gratuitous or excessive and Hale’s narrators offer expertly timed comic relief—including dashes of juvenile humor that I certainly enjoyed—but this book isn’t for the faint of heart, either. Really sensitive kids should probably skip it—something Hale’s characters themselves warn the reader about on the title page.

But if you think your kids can handle a good fright and want to expose them to a thrilling blend of legend, literature, and real spooky history, Bones and Berserkers is a fun and exciting read. I’d gladly recommend it alongside the other favorites in the series mentioned above.

Tron: Ares

Scientists at Disney generate a sequel to Tron and Tron: Legacy

I was one of the handful of people who saw Tron: Ares in theatres last fall. I love and enjoy Tron: Legacy beyond its merits and have shared it with my kids, who revere it, and if Tron: Ares had turned out to be good I planned to take them. I never did—not because it wasn’t good but because it was neither good nor bad enough for me to make up my mind about. I decided to give it another look at home when it came out on Blu-ray. That finally happened this month.

The plot, in brief: Tron: Legacy ended with the escape of a purely digital person into flesh-and-blood reality, and the new film’s very loose connection to that one is in the vast potential latent in the ability to transfer digital assets to reality. Kevin and Sam Flynn’s old company Encom is trying to develop this power to solve all the problems in the world. Old Encom rival Dillinger Systems wants to 3D-print weapons, vehicles, and expendable soldiers to sell to the military. Both are headed by Wunderkind CEOS: Encom by Eve Kim, who struggles to keep her idealistic sister’s dream of ending scarcity alive, and Dillinger by the ruthless Julian Dillinger, under the watchful but impotent eye of his mother Elisabeth.

Into this computer arms race steps the Ares of the title. Ares is a combat program created by Dillinger and trained on countless cycles of simulated combat, death, and regeneration. Dillinger shows him off to investors as the crowning achievement of his project. The problem is that Ares—and everything else generated from the system—only lasts twenty-nine minutes in the real world before disintegrating. This fact drives both Kim and Dillinger’s pursuit of “the permanence code.”

Through a little friendly corporate espionage, including the use of Ares to penetrate and exploit Encom’s servers in search of the code, Dillinger learns that Kim may have recovered it from old files hidden away by her sister. From this point forward it’s a race for Kim to bring the code safely back to Encom, for Dillinger to stop her and take it—through increasingly desperate means—and for Ares, who has begun questioning his programming, to decide what action to take.

Tron: Ares has a number of weaknesses, the chief of which is that the villain is much, much more interesting than either of the heroes. Eve Kim and friends are annoying do-gooders whom the screenwriters have worked too hard to make plucky and likeable, and Ares, as played by Jared Leto, is too convincingly robotic. Evan Peters’s Julian Dillinger, on the other hand, shows cunning and intelligence from his first scene and an amoral pragmatism barely restrained by the influence of his mother, played with chilly and ambiguous control by Gillian Anderson. The moment Julian has an opportunity to take decisive but irreversible action against his greatest rival, he struggles, but only so much. His lifetime of seizing every opportunity that will benefit himself has led to this, and even though he knows it’s wrong and we know that he’ll choose it, we see and feel the weight of the temptation crush him. Peters is likely the best thing in the movie.

This imbalance affects the entire film. It may be a cliche to point out how bad Jared Leto is since everyone online has been dogpiling him for months, but some cliches become cliches because they’re true. (My kids also insist I point out that he has weird hair. In a more artistic vein, my daughter noted that Ares, as a character, is more interesting in the first few minutes when he wears a mask. The moment Jared Leto’s vapid face is revealed, the mystery dissipates. A sharp observation, I’m proud to say.)

That said, the plot, which is simple but effective despite the banality of the movie’s heroes and escalates nicely heading into the final act, the production design and look of the film, the music, the special effects, and the action scenes make up for a lot. Despite the complexity of some of what the movie is offering, it’s intuitively presented—my kids had no trouble following it. I’ve seen director Joachim Rønning take some flak for Tron: Ares as an unimaginative hired gun, but I think the visual storytelling and style of the film serve the story well. I don’t find Nine Inch Nails’ electronic score as enjoyable by itself as I still do Daft Punk’s incredible Tron: Legacy score, but it works well within the movie.

No one should go into a Tron movie looking for deep ideas. As much as I love Tron: Legacy, its Kevin Flynn is given to some silly opining about how much his video game world will challenge the foundational thought of all of civilization. Spoken like a true techbro. Kim and Dillinger, at least, are less prone to philosophizing. (There is an irony in how this movie asks us to root for the good AI overlords against the bad ones; I found myself wishing both could fail. A touch of tonedeafness on the part of the producers.)

But Tron: Legacy and now Tron: Ares do deliver some great action. My kids found the buildup to the climactic sequence, in which Dillinger, having lost control of his own programs, sees his facility print and dispatch lethal weapons tech into the city in pursuit of Kim and Ares, unbearably suspenseful. It’s well-set up and well-executed, and the Terminator-like indestructabilty of Dillinger’s chief henchman posed an intense added threat.

Tron: Ares does not measure up to Tron: Legacy, but it tries to develop one small element of the latter in interesting ways and has satisfying, enjoyable Tron-flavored action. One can’t help but wonder how much better it might have been with a few tweaks, including someone in the title role with more visible depth than Jared Leto (which wouldn’t have happened, as he produced the movie). Having waited several months to rewatch it with my kids, I found myself liking it much more the second time around, not least since they responded so strongly to it.

Impressing kids is not everything, but it’s not nothing, and—following on from The Fantastic Four: First Steps—I’m pleased to have shared it with them. If there are more flawed but enjoyable and workmanlike adventures out there, we’ll take them.

Bad Southern accents and bad history

Earlier this week, as I wrapped up listening to the recent Rest is History series on the first and second iterations of the Ku Klux Klan, I joked on Substack that Tom Holland’s Southern accent “would count as a hate crime in many jurisdictions.”

That was just a couple days ago, so when Alan Jacobs posted yesterday that the accents and, finally, a remark about American cheese in the new samurai series—which I haven’t even started yet—had driven him to the nuclear option of canceling his Club membership and deleting the show, I was surprised by the coincidence and actually a little shocked that he had gone so far.

I am not, however, surprised by the annoyance. I was joking about Tom’s Southern accent and realize that it’s done at least partly in jest, but it is genuinely painful to listen to. And Jacobs points at a deeper problem evinced by Tom and Dominic’s resort to this kind of parody, what he describes as

a low-level but constant sniping and sneering at virtually every element of American culture. For instance: recently, in a series of episodes on the Ku Klux Klan, Tom decided that the Southern accent he wanted to imitate, in reading Klan speeches or newspaper editorials, was that of Cletus from The Simpsons, AKA Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. A more pompous diction would’ve been more appropriate, but Tom wasn’t interested in reinforcing the point that these people were evil (which they were); instead he wanted to indicate that they were stupid (which, alas, they were not). I’m a Southerner, I’m used to this sort of attitude—it’s almost universal among non-Southerners, and especially common among Brits—but when it goes on and on and on, it gets wearisome.

Also worth noting: the second Klan may have started at Stone Mountain but was a huge Midwestern phenomenon. Tom and Dominic acknowledge this several times, but guess what kind of dialect they (attempt to) use for quotations? Per Drive-By Truckers, “it’s always a little more convenient to play [racism] with a Southern accent.”

Jacobs’s primary complaint is “the compulsive mocking” of American culture on the show. I don’t feel much of a need to stick up for American culture because “American culture” is so vast and I’m at heart a provincial, with a much narrower window of loyalties than anything “American.” You have to get more specific and intrude on my patch to rile me. But of course, being a Southerner with a chip on his shoulder, I have lots of opportunities to get riled.

I also haven’t had quite the experience Jacobs has with British attitudes toward the South. My interactions have been msotly positive. I’ve met Brits who love the South—or at least find it endearing—and even some who have noted the South’s vestigial affinities with the mother country: the fossil Englishness preserved in our dialect and culture. But there are exceptions that match Jacobs’s observations. One British literary guy I follow on Substack spent a good bit of a trip to Virginia expressing dismay every time he saw a house flying a Confederate Battle Flag. He never showed any curiosity about what these people meant by flying the flag and even wrote sneering rejoinders to commenters who suggested he may be overreacting.

What both British Lit Guy and Tom and Dominic show in these examples is an unrealized and therefore unexamined incuriosity. The easy mockery of the accents and the finger-wagging tourism reveal a blind spot; you can’t learn what you think you already know. That’s a flaw with serious repercussions for any critic or historian, and the episodes in which Tom and Dominic give in to the inclination to mock tend to be those with the least insight into whomever they judge the villain. Even the Klan deserves to be understood—dismissing or misapprehending groups like them is dangerous and results in bad history.

That’s the truly annoying aspect of all of this. As Tom and Dominic might say, they’ve let themselves down.

Read Jacob’s entire post. He has many more complaints, some of which I agree with, including the perceptible difference between topics in which Tom and Dominic are intellectually engaged and those in which they aren’t, though I am nowhere near ready to go as far as he did in remedying what to me are still minor annoyances. But he’s absolutely right that putting up with a lifetime of mockery of your home—whether you construe that as America or the South—gets old.

The Raven: The Classic Poem

A representative two-page spread from The Raven as illustrated by Chloe bristol

Opportunities to share Edgar Allan Poe, one of my favorite authors, with my kids are vanishingly rare. Even good modern works meant to make his stories accessible to new readers, like graphic novelist Gareth Hinds’s excellent collection of Poe stories and poems, skew creepier and darker than necessary. As a result, I’ve told my kids a lot about Poe, summarized some of his best stories for them, and we’ve listened to audio performances of some of his work, but I haven’t found much visual media that can introduce Poe’s work to them without inducing nightmares.

I was excited, then, to discover this hardback picture book of “The Raven” at our used book store over the weekend. The Raven: The Classic Poem is a single Poe work given a thorough artistic treatment. Beginning with the poem’s speaker—depicted as Poe himself—drowsing in his armchair, the pictures follow the events stanza by stanza as he first wakes to a tapping, investigates its possible source, and finally admits the raven, which flits across the study to perch on the bust of Pallas. First the name “Lenore,” her shadow, and finally her ghostly form emerge with the narrator’s ruminations, and the pictures leave the narrator at the center of a giant, abstracted black shadow with one burning red eye.

This sounds simple and straightforward, but illustrator Chloe Bristol’s pictures imbue the familiar refrains of the poem with great weight and establish a wonderfully spooky and mournful mood. I can’t stress enough the perfect balance she strikes: atmospheric without being scary, gothic without veering into self-parody, faithful to the words of the poem while still being inventive and surprising.

I found Bristol’s artwork so good and such a support to Poe’s own words that I bought a copy on impulse. I read it aloud to my three oldest that night, and they were suitably engrossed in the pictures and chilled by the poem without finding it disturbing. I enjoyed reading it—and appreciating, for the first time in a good while, what a good poem “The Raven” is for performance—and together we enjoyed talking about it. Bristol notes on her website that the project’s stated aim was to make the poem “digestible” for younger audiences. She did exactly that.

The book ends with a one-paragraph biographical sketch of Poe that emphasizes the role of “The Raven” in his late-career fame. This is the one place I wish the book included more detail, but that’s a niggle. There’s a note explaining or clarifying some of what’s going on in the poem that should be helpful for parents, educators, or precocious kids picking up the book. It also includes some insight into Bristol’s approach to the illustrations, some of which are based on the rooms at Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia, one of the handful of surviving Poe houses.

But the main draw is Poe’s poem, which Bristol’s pictures beautifully showcase. Whether you love Poe and want to introduce him to your kids with an appropriate amount of spookiness or you simply enjoy good poetry and good picture books, The Raven: The Classic Poem is ideal for both purposes and well worth seeking out. I’m certainly glad I stumbled across it.