Documentary Movies

I saw a documentary movie yesterday, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" -- 2005. For those of you who'd like to know more about it, go here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1016268/

It got me to thinking about the documentary as a genre. An ancient critical precept holds that the goal of any art, in any medium, is dual: the please and to teach (to "delight and to instruct," in older translations). If we're not pleased by watching it, we won't. If we're only pleased, if we don't feel that we gain anything from those two hours other than a fleeting uptick in hedonic points, there will come a point pretty quickly when it, too, isn't worthy of our time.

Perhaps the difference between documentaries and other movies is simply that in the former the "teach" part of the old formula is more in-your-face.

Not long ago, I saw an old 1930s movie about Marco Polo. Nobody would confuse it with a documentary. The Italian and Chinese characters both spoke English (which was convenient) and everybody looked Caucasian. But even that movie had some instructive value. Marco Polo discovers pasta and firecrackers, he is on hand when the Khan tries to conquer Japan, etc.

Still, genre boundaries aren't quite that loose. What is the definition of a documentary film, for the purposes say of awarded an Oscar?

There are rules that have to do with the movies' continuing competition with the small screen, television. One of Michael Moore's movies was once ruled inelible for consideration by the academy because he allowed it to be shown on TV in the same year as its theatrical release. Another highly regarded documentary, Grizzly Man, was I understand excluded because the producers relied too much on archival footage. (So what? Film editing is less valuable for a documentarian than the actual photography?)

Upon further consideration, I don't think the Academy is of much help in this matter.

And I'm not really going anywhere with this line of thought so I might as well allow it to peter out right around ....

Just a Guess

A young friend of mine recently told me that about 90% of the people he meets in his "Journalism and Mass Communication" major in college are liberal, and asked me whether that was the case back in the prehistoric days when I attended college.

I didn't have intimate knowledge of our Communications Dept. at Marist, since I was a poli-sci major with a pre-law focus. But I did know some of them, and I had to tell my young friend that, yes, they were probably to the left of the campus average, however exactly one would go about measuring or defining the scale.

He asked whether I had any thoughts on why this is so. The best I could do was this:

I suspect that the characteristics that go by the label "liberal" in the US are, largely, characteristics psychologically associated with the love of words, word-play, compositional skill, etc.

I also suspect that "conservatism" tends to be psychologically associated with the love of numbers, calculation, and and keen sense of spatial relations.

I have no real good evidence for any of that, its just a hunch based on personal experience.

If there's anything to it, one would expect budding journalists to be "liberals," except possibly those who wanted to specialize in financial and/or science journalism, who might be numbers-people, and thus "conservatives."

This sort of psychological (neurological) clustering may, indeed, be at the bottom of what the words mean.

New York Times goof

The New York Times did a puff piece on "Money Honey" Maria Bartiromo on Monday. She came under intense criticism in January for conflicts of interests, under circumstances that suggested hanky-panky on a corporate jet. That's all settled down, though, and as the NYT story suggests at length, she's had a good year since.

Why do I care? I don't. But this is what I care about. The reporters transcribing her interview evidently didn't know enough about contemporary finance to know what a "sovereign fund" is.

“I love this thing now called sovereign funds,” she said, meaning the large pools of capital amassed by governments in Asia and the Middle East, and managed by groups like Cutter Associates, an international investment firm. “I had the head of Cutter on and he said: ‘Look, we have $60 billion we want to put to work.’ I find that kind of stuff so exciting. I find it so sexy.”

(That's how the final graf of the story read when it first ran. It's been changed since, so that's not exactly what you'll see if you look for the online version. I'm getting to that.)

A "sovereign fund" is by definition an investment fund operated by, and in pursuance of the policy goals of, the government of a sovereign nation. Usually a nation that's got way more revenues that it can spend on ordinary government operations, and it needs to figure out what to do with the surplus. Oil exporting nations are often in that situation.

It seems pretty obvious, if you know that much, that she wasn't talking about Cutter Associates. That's a research/consultancy. http://www.cutterassociates.com/cutter_research/index.html

I doubt Cutter has $60 billion lying around. And even if it did, it wouldn't be a "sovereign fund."

No, the Money Honey was talking about the Qatar Investment Authority. Qatar is pronounced much like Cutter, at least by those of us unaccustomed to the phonetics of the Arabic tongue. I can only hypothesize that the interviewer heard "Cutter something something," wrote it down, and did a google search later. What do you know? google doesn't recognize "Cutter" as being "Qatar," but it would refer the inquiry to Cutter Associates, which "must be what she meant." So that's how it got into the story.

I'm not a reliable reader of the New York Times. I read something when I have a reason to. In this case, a couple of blogs I check out regularly jumped on it, and I followed the link from one of them.

Surely, you might think, this would be easily fixed, right? It would come to the attention of some editor who knows what a sovereign fund is, and "Cutter Associates" would be changed into "Qatar Investment Authority." Heck, Maria might give them a call and say "that's not what I said or meant" if she had a moment.

Well, I don't know whether Maria called. But somebody at the NYT recognized the problem. And there was a change. But not really the right one. If you surf over to the on-line version of the story now (unless they change it again between the time I'm writing this and the time you read it) it'll say "Qatar Associates." You'll also find a "For the Record" correction pointing this change out.

There is no Qatar Associates. At least when they printed "Cutter Associates" they were referring to a real institution, even if it's the wrong one. On the third try, they might actually check out a link like this: http://www.zawya.com/cm/profile.cfm/cid1003480

and learn something about the Qatar Investment Authority.

I think Felix Salmon draws the right lesson from all this, so I won't make any puns about his feline/fishy name. Here's his take.

http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market-movers/2007/11/06/nyt-bartiromo-the-comedy-of-errors-continues

James Russell Lowell

I trust that this poem, "The Present Crisis," is in the public domain, because I'm going to reproduce all thundering 90 lines of it.

Lowell wrote the following in 1844, and the "present" crisis he had in mind involved expansion -- the Oregon boundary dispute to the northwest and the proposed annexation of Texas, with the prospect of a war with Mexico in the near background, to the southwest.

----------------------

WHEN a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth’s aching breast
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west,
And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb
To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime
Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time.

Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe,
When the travail of the Ages wrings earth’s systems to and fro;
At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing start,
Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart,
And glad Truth’s yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future’s heart.

So the Evil’s triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill,
Under continent to continent, the sense of coming ill,
And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels his sympathies with God
In hot tear-drops ebbing earthward, to be drunk up by the sod,
Till a corpse crawls round unburied, delving in the nobler clod.

For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along,
Round the earth’s electric circle, the swift flash of right or wrong;
Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity’s vast frame
Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame;—
In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever ’twixt that darkness and that light.

Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand,
Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land?
Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet ’tis Truth alone is strong,
And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng
Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong.

Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments see,
That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion’s sea;
Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry
Of those Crises, God’s stern winnowers, from whose feet earth’s chaff must fly;
Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by.

Careless seems the great Avenger; history’s pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness ’twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great,
Slow of faith how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate,
But the soul is still oracular; amid the market’s din,
List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,—
‘They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.’

Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood,
Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood,
Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day,
Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;—
Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,
And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

Count me o’er earth’s chosen heroes,—they were souls that stood alone,
While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone,
Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline
To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine,
By one man’s plain truth to manhood and to God’s supreme design.

By the light of burning heretics Christ’s bleeding feet I track,
Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back,
And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned
One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet-hearts hath burned
Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned.

For Humanity sweeps onward: where to-day the martyr stands,
On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands;
Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn,
While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return
To glean up the scattered ashes into History’s golden urn.

’Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves
Of a legendary virtue carved upon our father’s graves,
Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime;—
Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men behind their time?
Turn those tracks toward Past or Future, that make Plymouth Rock sublime?

They were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts,
Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past’s;
But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free,
Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee
The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across the sea.

They have rights who dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires,
Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom’s new-lit altar-fires;
Shall we make their creed our jailer? Shall we, in our haste to slay,
From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral lamps away
To light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets of to-day?

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.

Bram Stoker

It hasn't been so long since Halloween already that we can't spare a moment to remember Bram Stoker, 1847-1912, the novelist and dramatist who gave to vampire lore its classically Victorian formulation.

I say "dramatist" because Stoker -- an Irishman -- was an actor at, and the manager of, a London theatre beginning in 1878. To an ambitious Irishman in the arts in the 19th century, politics notwithstanding, going to London was "making the big time." Indeed, it is still thus, as you can see from the attitude of the Dublin musicians in the recent bittersweet romantic movie "Once."

It is, I submit, worth spending the time and pixels to make that observation because Stoker gave to vampire lore the element one might expect from a man who crashed the London dramatic scene in his early thirties. Dracula is the same way. A man trying to make it in the big time.

One theme of the fanous novel, I submit, is that the Count could be a frightening bigshot to the peasants of Transylvania. He could have the huge scary castle on the mountain. But if he really wanted to be in the center of the world he's have to bite some blood in London!

When we first see him, the Count is already negotiating with a real-estate agent to obtain a house in that city.

I can hear Frank Sinatra in the background of the novel. "If you can bite necks there you'll bite them ... anywhere."

U.S. Trade Deficit

Okay, so not everything I have to say about economics and finance will go onto my other site, despite the bifurcation.

Proxypartisans.blogspot.com will get the micro-economic stuff, which will free me up to be macro when I write here.

Today, let's say a little something about the U.S. trade deficit, which is the one of our nation's problems that troubles me the most -- the war saddens me, but the trade deficit troubles me.

I'll begin with what must be the least controversial statement possible on the subject. The trade deficit comes about because, by definition, the US is selling to the rest of the world less than what we collectively are buying from the rest of the world.

The US/China trade deficit has caused the greatest amount of angst, although to talk about these things in bilateral terms always risks distortion. Consider my relationship with my barber. He cuts hair for a living, I write about economics for a living. He doesn't have any need of my services -- except perhaps very indirectly -- I have regular need of his. So I'm in a drastic condition of trade deficit vis-a-vis my barber.

Fortunately, I'm in a condition of trade surplus vis-a-vis my employer, so I use the proceeds from the labor I sell to pay for the haircuts I buy.

The problem arises, though, when I'm in a trade deficit as against the rest of the world. And the problem compounds as that trade deficit preserves itself year after year, decade after decade, and I have to borrow from the rest of the world in order to finance my purchases from the rest of the world.

This is a dynamic situation. On a national level, its the de-something-or-other. Deindustrialization? Maybe not. But de-something. And on a national level, too, it is worth noting, whatever the particular terminology you wish to adopt for it.

Fortunately, things may be improving. The US trade deficit decreased somewhat in August 2007, the last month for which statistics are available. But it decreased to the still quite impressive number of $57.6 billion. In other words, in August the United States sold the rest of the world goods and services worth $138.3 billion. We bought from the rest of the world goods and services worth $195.9 billion.

Blaming "the media" doesn't cut it. Don't shoot the messenger. That is real news about which there ought to be more reporting, not less. This sort of deficit has become almost taken for granted over the last twenty years or so. Google the phrase "Plaza Agreement 1985" and you'll see what I mean.

The Day of Battle

The title of this blog entry is that of a new book by historian Rick Atkinson, about the war in Sicily and Italy in 1943 -- 44.

This is the middle part of a projected trilogy on the Anglo-American armies and the liberation of (western) Europe.

The first book, An Army at Dawn, discussing the liberation of North Africa, was very highly praised -- and won the Pulitzer Prize.

The third book will of course start with Normandy and end at the Elbe.

But let's get to it: the first sentence of the second book reads: "She could be heard long before she was seen on that foggy Tuesday morning, May 11, 1943."

The "she" in question, it soon transpires, is a ship -- the Queen Mary -- which on thatdate brought Winston Churchill into New York harbor. He was coming, with a sizeable retinue of staff and generals, to argue with Roosevelt and his retinue about the next step in the war, as well as to offer Congress a first-hand taste of his oratorical skills.

At that time, the American high command was very wary of moving up the boot of Italy. Thegenerals' preference was to mass forces in England in preparation for a Cross-Channel landing on the presumption that when Hitler fell, Mussolini would be just a mop-up operation. They didn't expect that the cross-channel invasion could happen until another year had passed, but they figured there was enough to do in the Pacific and Asian theares during that intervening year anyway.

Churchill was an enthusiast of an Italian campaign, a strike at what he called the "soft underbelly" of Europe. At best, it might inspire the Italians to change sides quickly, and the assist their new allies in a quick war-winning strike north, across the Alps, to Berlin, making a cross-Channel action unnecessary. At worst, it would pressure Hitler to send troops south, relieving pressure on the Russians.

What they adopted -- an Italian campaign coupled with continued plans for the cross-channel invasion the following years -- might or might not have been the best thing militarily. If it was, the fact was an accident. The compromise wasn't a result of a strategic breakthrough but was a political deal to paper over the profoundly different perspectives of the allies, and Atkinson explains the wheeling and dealing that went into this quite well.