"Munich" Is NOT A Holiday Film!

The day after Christmas, I stood in line at one of the suburban cinema palaces (20+ screens) to see Spielberg's "serious film of 2005": "Munich." I thought that I would be alone (virtually) in the single venue assigned to this grim film, but it was SRO. Terrorism, Zionism, and Paybackism are tough fare for a holiday film audience. I viewed this film in the vicinity of the "People's Republic of Austin," as the red-meat, right-wing majority (outside Austin) terms it. So, the crowd — in retrospect — should not have surprised. Of course, multiple screens were devoted to "great" films like "King Kong" and "The Family Stone," and whatever. The terror visited upon the so-called Palestinian masterminds of the 1972 Olympics horror in Munich is imagined in less than "Saving Private Ryan" detail. Steven Spielberg and his scriptwriters created a plausible account of the assassins dispatched by Israel's Mossad (national security agency) to extract an "eye for an eye" penalty upon the Palestinian planners of the Munich horror of 1972. Eventually, 9 of the 11 Palestinian "masterminds" were assassinated (both on-screen and off-) and — of course — there has been no violence between Palestinians and Israelis since that time. If this is (fair & balanced) despair over the human condition, so be it.

[x The New York Times]
Connections: Seeing Terrorism as Drama With Sequels and Prequels
By Edward Rothstein

"There's no peace at the end of this," warns Avner, the morally anguished Mossad assassin, as Steven Spielberg's new film, "Munich," draws to a close. And by "this" he means the targeted killings that Israel is said to have begun after 11 of its athletes were murdered at the 1972 Olympics by members of the Palestinian Black September offshoot of Fatah.

But Mr. Spielberg, in collaboration with his screenwriters, Eric Roth and the playwright Tony Kushner, also has a different "this" in mind. The camera pointedly settles on the period's skyline of lower Manhattan, showing the World Trade Center in sharp relief.

The warning and image are meant to suggest that militant attempts to destroy terrorism lead not to peace but to cycles of violence, and that the 9/11 attacks may even be consequences of Israel's response to the Munich massacre. A war on terror amplifies terror. Moreover, the movie teaches, opposing sides begin to resemble each other. Moral credibility is destroyed along with hope.

The same argument is being made now about the war in Iraq, of course, as well as about Israel's continuing responses to terrorism. Indeed, before "Munich" opened, when it was reported that the film would emphasize the ethical qualms of the Mossad assassins, Mr. Spielberg explained, "By experiencing how the implacable resolve of these men to succeed in their mission slowly gave way to troubling doubts about what they were doing, I think we can learn something important about the tragic standoff we find ourselves in today." But can we? Though said to be "inspired by real events," Mr. Spielberg's film taps into a highly influential theory about terrorism that itself bears little relation to what is known about this history.

The theory asserts that terrorism is a violent and extreme reaction to injustice - the last resort of the oppressed. Typically, this injustice theory is used to explain left-wing terrorism. It not only coincides with the justifications offered by terrorists themselves, but it also accompanies a belief that a just cause lies behind the terrorist attack. The theory is never applied to right-wing terrorism - whether of the brown-shirt or Timothy McVeigh variety - and thus pre-selects its proofs.

Accepting the theory also leads to other convictions. If terrorism is solely the result of injustice, then without the injustice there would be no terrorism. So the best response is to work for justice. Threats, vengeance, security strictures - anything other than the addressing of legitimate grievances is ultimately futile. In particular, since killing terrorists does nothing to alter injustice, it will do nothing to alter terror. Instead, it only leads to more injustice, turning the victims of terrorism into mirror images of the terrorists themselves.

The theory and its prescriptions are the guiding presence in "Munich." Mr. Spielberg doesn't have to show the terrorists as sympathetic characters, and they aren't; the theory fully acknowledges that terrorism is morally grotesque. The question is how to respond to it. The film tries to show that Israel made the wrong choice. The Israeli agents are given an education in the injustice theory.

Along the way, of course, the injustice is acknowledged: a Mossad agent and a Palestinian terrorist both express their attachments to the same land. But the Israelis are tainted by blindness, by a failure to understand. Thus, Avner's mother sounds like a terrorist herself in her amoral declaration about Israel: "Whatever it took, whatever it takes, we have a place on earth at last." Golda Meir shows her own lack of perception when she establishes the Mossad team. "I don't know who these maniacs are," she proclaims about the Munich terrorists.

Gradually, as the assassinations begin, the moral weight of their acts brings the team of assassins close to breakdown. Avner (played by Eric Bana) hesitates before shooting one of his targets. The Mossad agents argue about whether they should rejoice in their success. One suggests that the Palestinians learned their tactics from the Israelis. Another, pointing to increasing acts of terror around the world in apparent response to their success, says, "All the blood comes back to us." By the end of the movie, Avner thinks the Israelis are going to kill him. He renounces his country. And he warns of a cycle of violence.

But the film is so intent on its theory that it eagerly departs from previous accounts - or even plausibility about how Mossad agents might act. It supposedly takes its guidance from George Jonas's contested 1984 book, "Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team," which is itself presented as an account based upon the recollections of the disenchanted head of the Mossad team. But Mr. Jonas's Avner, unlike Mr. Spielberg's, is not paralyzed by moral doubt; Mr. Jonas writes that he has "absolutely no qualms about anything they did."

Moreover, the film, to make its argument about the cycle of violence, ends up treating the Munich massacre almost as if it were the original act of Palestinian terror. The elimination of context makes the Israeli response seem intemperate, while all future acts of Palestinian terror are treated as if they were responses to the Israeli assassinations. But as the historical Meir well knew, in the years before Munich, maniacal terrorists aligned with the Palestinian cause had bombed a Swissair jet, thrown hand grenades into crowds at Israel's airport, hijacked planes and associated themselves with other terror groups trained and partly financed by the Soviet Union. These, like the attacks that followed Munich, were part of a continuing war, not evidence of an amorphous cycle of violence that developed out of Israel's attempts to undermine terror.

Aaron J. Klein's new book, "Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response" (Random House) based on interviews with unnamed Mossad agents, casts doubt even on the existence of Avner's assassination team, portraying instead a series of individual acts that had mixed success. But Mr. Klein suggests that one of the attacks portrayed in the movie actually succeeded in making a "searing impression in the Arab world," helping increase fear and deter terror. He points out: "The numbers show a steep slide in the frequency of terror attacks against Israelis and Israeli institutions abroad from 1974 to the present."

The precise truth of what happened is mired in the secrets of spycraft, but the film shapes the sources and evidence to lend support to the injustice theory. Which poses a challenge for Mr. Spielberg: How does he propose to undermine terror? Simple: by eliminating injustice and increasing understanding. Mr. Spielberg has said that he will be buying 250 video cameras and distributing them to Palestinian and Israeli children so they can share films about their own lives. Perhaps there will be peace, then, at the end of that?

After award-winning terms as music critic for The New Republic and chief music critic for the New York Times, Edward Rothstein (PhD, Chicago) is now cultural critic-at-large for the Times, writing in the Arts & Ideas section on culture, literature, music, intellectual life, and technology—in articles that move from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’s Fab Five to Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School in two paragraphs. "Connections," a critic's perspective on arts and ideas, appears every other Monday.

Copyright © 2005 The New York Times Company

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Have You Got It Enya?

I don't care for Stravinsky and I can tolerate only some types of jazz (Dave Brubeck?). As far as New Age music goes, I don't care for Yawnee (or whatever), but I do like Enya's sound. I first heard an Enya CD sitting in the great room of a baronial home on the Isle of Man. How I ended up in such a place is a story too long for any blog. As a result, I have most of Enya's CDs and listen to them on occasion in an Enya festival. I have yet to see a leprechaun, though. Perhaps I need to eat a bowl of Lucky Charms cereal while listening to Enya. If this is (fair & balanced) philistinism, so be it.

[x Slate]
The Faerie Queen: The secret to Enya's success.
By Jody Rosen

Who is Enya? More to the point: What is she? It's a question you can't help but ask of the 44-year-old singer from County Donegal, Ireland, who, over the past 20 years, has carved a niche as popular music's faerie queen. She's slathered her songs in otherworldly reverb, overdubbed her voice into angelic choirs, and appeared in music videos gliding through mist-shrouded landscapes. When we last heard from her, in 2002, she was crooning songs on the Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack—in Elvish. On the cover of her new album, "Amarantine," she gazes out with big dewy moon eyes, wearing what appears to be a spinnaker. Search beneath its billows and you would undoubtedly find a pair of wings and a wand.

Enya may not be of this earth, but she's done rather well here. She began her career in 1980, singing with her brothers and sisters in "Clannad," which blended pop tunes and traditional Irish folk music. She left the family band two years later, hooking up with producer/composer Nicky Ryan and lyricist Roma Ryan, the husband and wife who remain her collaborators to this day. The trio worked on film and television scores for several years before graduating in 1987 to proper albums, but those early gigs left their mark. To call Enya's music "cinematic" is an understatement—nearly every song plays like the soundtrack for a majestic film montage, with the camera swooping from lush green valleys to craggy coastlines and upward, zipping past mountain peaks, punching through cloud cover, soaring into the blue and beyond, to touch the face of God, or Gandalf.

On the opening song of Enya's self-titled debut album, "The Celts," this potent formula is already in place. A synth bassline provides a gentle throb; a major key melody swells, crests, recedes, and swells again. Rising over the music is Enya, or rather, Enyas—her voice multitracked into what sounds like a Gregorian choir on helium. The production values have been refined in the years since, with a synthesized string orchestra sound replacing the debut album's garish keyboard gusts. But Enya and the Ryans haven't altered their basic musical template one bit. And why should they? Enya broke through to a mass audience with "Watermark" (1988) and has gone on to sell 65 million records worldwide. The arrival of "Amarantine," currently No. 10 on the Billboard album chart, is a reminder that Enya is one of the savviest operators in the music business and, well, an original. Twenty years ago, no one dreamed that there would be a huge audience for an ethereal female vocalist singing pseudo-classical airs with misty mystical overtones—and Enya remains the genre's only practitioner. No one has even tried to imitate her.

On "Amarantine," Enya delivers her usual goods. The mood is worshipful and the tempos stately. There is a great deal of plinking and plucking; Enya is fond of harpsichords (or synthesizer approximations thereof) and, especially, pizzicato, the engine of many of her songs, including her signature hit, "Orinoco Flow" (Sail Away)." The new album's title track (and first single) is an Enya song par excellence, with every beat of every measure marked by little string stabs, the singer's voice majestically inflated by reverb and the lyrics a string of fuzzy beatitudes: "You know love is with you when you rise/ For night and day belong to love." The song is insipid and insufferable; it may be the worst thing I've heard on the radio all year. It's also a fiendishly effective mood-piece.

Enya has sold more records than any Irish artist besides U2, and she has leveraged her roots, flavoring songs with uilleann pipes, singing in Gaelic, and gesturing in other ways to Riverdance enthusiasts. But Enya's real musical sources are less Old Eire than High Church. There is a maxim variously attributed to Bob Dylan and Elton John—"When in doubt, write a hymn"—and Enya and the Ryans have written hymns ad nauseam. Their signature trick is the use of multitracking to create the soul-stirring lushness of a full vocal choir. It's a cost-saving measure, for one thing. Why hire a roomful of monks when you can conjure a plainchant choir by simply overdubbing Enya's voice to infinity? The result is a singular sound—unreal, inhuman, spooky, and "spiritual"—perfect for those who desire the mystique of medieval choral music without, you know, the medieval music or the chorus. Naturally, it's impossible to replicate this effect in live performance, and Enya has never mounted a concert tour, which has only added to her air of mystery. Roma Ryan, meanwhile, has made the churchy connection explicit, writing several songs for Enya in Latin.

On "Amarantine," though, there's a different kind of linguistic stunt. Inspired by their Fellowship of the Ring experiment with Elvish, Enya and Roma Ryan decided to create their own language, Loxian. I wish I could report that this gambit involves smoked salmon; in fact, it revolves around the more banal topic of extraterrestrials. The Loxians, Ryan told the Guardian, "Are much like us. They're in space, somewhere in the night. They're looking out, they're mapping the stars, and wondering if there is anyone else out there. It's to do with that concept: are we alone in the universe?"

Ryan has written a book about the language, Water Shows the Hidden Hear (also the title of a song on "Amarantine"), in which we learn, among other things, how to ask a Loxian if he'd like a cup of tea ("Hanee unnin eskan?"). The lyricist claims that it was necessary to invent an alternative language because "some pieces that Enya writes, English will just not sit on." But judging by songs like "Less Than a Pearl," one of three Loxian numbers on the new album, Loxian is not appreciably more mellifluous than English or Gaelic or Latin or any of the other terrestrial tongues in which Enya has sung. I suspect other, cheekier motives: an effort to deepen Enya's reputation as a mystic and to tighten her grip on the Hobbit crowd. What's Loxian for "brand extension"?

The truth is, it really doesn't matter what language Enya is singing in. No one is listening to her words; the beginning and the end of her appeal is that big gauzy sound. Even if you hate the aesthetic, you have to respect the craft. Beneath Enya's billowing sonic mists, you can discern the structures and symmetries of classic pop songwriting: the melodic hooks that leap out from every song, the revitalizing excursion of an eight-measure bridge, the triumphal return to the main theme. It all might be perfectly tolerable if it weren't so queasily feather-light. As Enya's career has progressed, and her air-goddess shtick has become more entrenched, the bottom end has disappeared from her songs, to the point where, on Amarantine, there is virtually no bass, no lower-register sounds, nothing to ground the music. Enya would do well to remember that, once in a while, everyone—earthling, Middle-Earthling, and Loxian alike—needs to bang on a drum.

Jody Rosen is The Nation's music critic and the author of White Christmas: The Story of an American Song.

Copyright © 2005 Slate

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Merry Christmas, Dub?

Wowser! The Chicago Trib — that left-wing rag — ran a very predictable Op-Ed piece on December 25, 2005, by the paper's chief political columnist. In it, ol' Steve Chapman (who grew up in Dub's home town) claims that calling Dub an Imperial President is an insult to all emperors. Hooyah! If this is (fair & balanced) slander, so be it.

[x Chicago Tribune]
Beyond The Imperial Presidency
By Steve Chapman

President Bush is a bundle of paradoxes. He thinks the scope of the federal government should be limited but the powers of the president should not. He wants judges to interpret the Constitution as the framers did, but doesn't think he should be constrained by their intentions.

He attacked Al Gore for trusting government instead of the people, but insists that anyone who wants to defeat terrorism must put absolute faith in the man at the helm of government.

His conservative allies say Bush is acting to uphold the essential prerogatives of his office. Vice President Cheney says the administration's secret eavesdropping program is justified because "I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it."

But the theory boils down to a consistent and self-serving formula: What's good for George W. Bush is good for America, and anything that weakens his power weakens the nation. To call this an imperial presidency is unfair to emperors.

Even people who should be on Bush's side are getting queasy. David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, says in his efforts to enlarge executive authority, Bush "has gone too far."

He's not the only one who feels that way. Consider the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen arrested in 2002 on suspicion of plotting to set off a "dirty bomb." For three years, the administration said he posed such a grave threat that it had the right to detain him without trial as an enemy combatant. In September, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit agreed.

But then, rather than risk a review of its policy by the Supreme Court, the administration abandoned its hard-won victory and indicted Padilla on comparatively minor criminal charges. When it asked the 4th Circuit court for permission to transfer him from military custody to jail, though, the once-cooperative court flatly refused.

In a decision last week, the judges expressed amazement that the administration would suddenly decide that Padilla could be treated like a common purse-snatcher -- a reversal that, they said, comes "at substantial cost to the government's credibility." The court's meaning was plain: Either you were lying to us then, or you are lying to us now.

If that's not enough to embarrass the president, the opinion was written by conservative darling J. Michael Luttig -- who just a couple of months ago was on Bush's short list for the Supreme Court. For Luttig to question Bush's use of executive power is like Bill O'Reilly announcing that there's too much Christ in Christmas.

This is hardly the only example of the president demanding powers he doesn't need. When American-born Saudi Yasser Hamdi was captured in Afghanistan, the administration also detained him as an enemy combatant rather than entrust him to the criminal justice system.

But when the Supreme Court said he was entitled to a hearing where he could present evidence on his behalf, the administration decided that was way too much trouble. It freed him and put him on a plane back to Saudi Arabia, where he may plot jihad to his heart's content. Try to follow this logic: Hamdi was too dangerous to put on trial but not too dangerous to release.

The disclosure that the president authorized secret and probably illegal monitoring of communications between people in the United States and people overseas again raises the question: Why?

After all, the government could have easily gotten search warrants to conduct electronic surveillance of anyone with the slightest possible connection to terrorists. The court that handles such requests hardly ever refuses. But Bush bridles at the notion that the president should ever have to ask permission of anyone.

He claims that he can ignore the law because Congress granted permission when it authorized him to use force against al Qaeda. But we know that can't be true. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says the administration didn't ask for a revision of the law to give the president explicit power to order such wiretaps because Congress -- a Republican Congress, mind you -- wouldn't have agreed. So the administration decided: Who needs Congress?

What we have now is not a robust executive but a reckless one. At times like this, it's apparent that Cheney and Bush want more power not because they need it to protect the nation, but because they want more power. Another paradox: In their conduct of the war on terror, they expect our trust, but they can't be bothered to earn it.

Steve Chapman is a columnist and editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune.

Chapman came to the Tribune in 1981 from the New Republic magazine, where he was an associate editor. He has contributed articles to several national magazines, including Slate, The American Spectator, National Review and The Weekly Standard.

Born in Brady, Texas, in 1954, Chapman grew up in Midland and Austin. He attended Harvard University, where he was on the staff of the Harvard Crimson. He graduated with honors in 1976 and later did graduate work at the University of Chicago.

Steve Chapman has three children and lives in suburban Chicago.

Copyright © 2005 The Chicago Tribune

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