The Guns of August

In August of 1914 the world erupted into the conflagration that came to be known as the Great War. After the European powers repeated the steps less than thirty years later, the Great War was amended to World War I. It is a conflict about which I know very little. Its brutality and pointlessness do not make way for glory in the same way as its better known child. There is little glory at the bottom of a trench, nothing rousing in a pile of young bodies rotting in no man's land. 

Attempting to rectify my ignorance of the conflict I spent the past month or so reading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, her account of the first month of the war. Superlatives fail. It was a fascinating read. Even though the Europe it conjures is scarcely a century past (there are people in your town who were alive during the conflict), it is an entirely foreign world--a world of princes and kings and archdukes and detente and entente and confusing treaties and the vast progeny of Queen Victoria. It was an era that still believed in honor, that took a nation's right to dominate whatever was within its power to control as a piece of natural law, that saw Europe as a continent of competing powers and not some panEuropean utopia. 

Tuchman begins with a vision of old Europe. The death of King Edward VII of England was attended by nine kings, five heirs apparent, forty imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens, and numerous ambassadors. The Kaiser of Germany, William II, rode in attendance; the new King of England, George V, rode in the front row; King Frederick of Denmark was there, as was Alfonso of Spain and Manuel of Portugal and the soon to be famous Albert of Belgium. Franz Ferdinand was there, accompanied by the old Emperor Franz Josef. Crown Prince Rupprecht, who would lead the German army in battle, was there. Edward had broken England's isolation, uniting the nation with France and Russia, two old enemies and the upstart Japan. 

The unity with France unsettled the Kaiser and prevented him from pursuing a better peace with England. The Kaiser longed for the acclaim of France, dreamed of being paraded through the streets of Paris. Tuchman notes, "it is perhaps the saddest story of the fate of kings that the Kaiser lived to be eighty-two and died without seeing Paris." The rapprochement was not to come. The new Germany, united by Bismarck, emboldened by the victories over France in 1870, chomped at the bit, straining to assert itself in a continent that openly derided its parochialism and provinciality. Germany would soon get its chance. 

England's unity with Russia was even more of a blow to the German people. Alexandra, Czar Nicholas's wife, was German. Nicholas and William were cousins. But Alexandra hated William and the czar was constrained by his more evenhanded ministers from signing an entente with Germany. Germany was, for all intents and purposes, surrounded. France to the west, Russia to the east, England on the seas. Their alliance with Italy was suspect and Austria could not provide enough protection against the hulking beast of Russia to give Germany freedom to fight only on one front in the west. A two-front war haunted Germany's military minds.

However, much of this was subliminal at the death of Edward. Peace seemed to be the order of the day. Germany could pontificate and quotes its Nietzsche and thump its chest, but the balance in Europe seemed to be stable. In 1910, the year of Edward's magisterial funeral, Norman Angell published The Great Illusion, which "proved that war had become vain." Given the economic interdependence of the nations, no country would be foolish enough to start a new war. A cult grew around the book and optimism seemed to replace predilections of war.

But at the end of June, Gavrilo Princip's shot rang out in the Sarajevo morning and the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire choked to death on his own blood in the back of his motorcar. Austria declared war on Bosnia, Bosnia was defended under treaty by Russia, Germany came in for Austria under odd pretenses. Thus the war in the east began. Inventing a threat from France, Germany violated Belgian neutrality in order to invade France from the north. Treaty-bound to defend Belgium, England declared for the side of the Allies and dispatched an expeditionary force to France. Thus the war in the west began. 

Four years later, after 16 million people had died, the madness was put to bed for a time. 

In my next post I will take a brief look at how that first month played out and how it served as a harbinger for the horrors to come. I would love to have more time to engage with the book, but tomorrow morning I start teaching and will be pretty busy for the next several months. My posting has fallen off the map since moving to Colorado, but I anticipate being able to post once per week during the school year. I should have a follow-up post by the end of next weekend.

Is Even Good TV for Dummies?

I read Liel Leibovitz’s recent article in Tablet, a magazine that even a goy like me can enjoy, provocatively titled “TV is for Dummies.” His basic thesis I am inclined to agree with: the great novels are more satisfying and intelligent than today’s great television. As a great lover of the great novel, and a great lamenter of the fact that people watch Two and a Half Men and whatever the show about physicists hanging out with a hot blonde is called, as well as 34 iterations of CSI and other acronym-based franchises, it is self-evident to me that Dostoevsky beats Chuck Lorre. But as I read on and reflected I realized that I didn’t agree with Leibovitz overall, and the examples he used of TV shows inferior to the novel displayed a lack of actual engagement with these shows.

Leibovitz assures the reader that he is fine with the high estimation of many of the modern prestige television shows, but that he loses patience when the contemporary TV proselyte utters what he calls “the Phrase”: “TV is so good now that it’s just as great as our great novels. Maybe even better!” First of all, I am not sure who has ever uttered that phrase seriously. I know lots of people who love these shows, but I have never heard anyone compare Mad Men to Middlemarch. I myself am a hopeless addict of many of the modern shows Leibovitz namedrops here, but I have never entertained the thought that they are better somehow than the great novels of the past. The new shows are certainly better than most anything that came on TV before The Sopranos put television on a trajectory to actually be more interesting than movies, but they are not great art like War and Peace or David Copperfield.

But television shows are a different medium altogether than the book and it is therefore not possible to compare the two side by side. It is like comparing painting to epic poetry. Leibovitz praises what masters such as Henry James can do with different perspectives and word choice and accuses television of not having the same power, but his critique is merely a fancier way of saying books are written on paper and television uses live action and spoken words. A kinetic experience such as television will of necessity be different than the static book-reading experience.

Moreover, what serialized television allows that comparable mediums like film do not is a chance to slow the pace down and let things happen at a cadence truer to life. So when Leibovitz writes “(i)n television narrative, any television narrative, the commandments are few and simple: Something must always be happening, for otherwise there would be little reason to tune in next week; and whatever’s happening must happen on screen, for this is a visual medium, and a shot of Walter White brooding in his kitchen isn’t quite as gratifying as a shot of Walter White shooting some guy in the head” he is ignoring the way in which the multi-episode structure of a show like Breaking Bad allows us to see Walter White brooding in his kitchen, which we often do see. In fact, we see Walter White brooding far more often than we see him shooting someone in the head, something which makes one question if Leibovitz was merely beginning from ignorance in his jeremiad against prestige TV. 

This slower pace is what makes the sudden and stark violence of the show all the more affecting—it is set against the backdrop of a much slower and far more human experience than the typical action movie with its ten minutes of beginning exposition and hour and a half of violence. In other words, the fact that there are 13-16 episodes in a season of one of these shows and they therefore get 585 – 720 minutes of run time compared to the 100 – 120 minutes of a movie allows them, despite the differences in medium, to more closely resemble the muted structure of a novel.

Another quibble I have with this article is a fallacy I will call reductio ad Dostoevskyum. If Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, is not an intellectual and storytelling heir and equal to Fyodor Dostoevsky than current television is for the people Neil Postman warned us about in Amusing Ourselves to Death. (A similar fallacy would be, in conversations about the dire straits of contemporary Christian music, reductio ad Bachum, in which modern musicians are berated for not being equivalent to the quintessential musical genius.) Listen, I am reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot right now, and it is incredibly brilliant. It is difficult, packed with philosophy and history and theology, incredibly slow-moving at times, and filled with such a list of characters (all of whom have three or four nicknames, Christian names, or last names they are referred to as at different times) that you really do have to make a list to keep everyone separate. But Dostoevsky is freaking Dostoevsky. An unparalleled genius. A man so amazing and with such a rich life and a catalogue of works of such depth that Joseph Frank of Stanford wrote a five volume biography of the man. Of course Vince Gilligan or Matthew Weiner is not Dostoevsky, but whoever was before him and whoever will be again?

I have my own problems with the state of contemporary television, but part of me wishes we could all get along—the TV lovers and the TV haters. Because, really, most of the people who watch Breaking Bad or Mad Men or The Americans are also people inclined to read a book and not really the people you need to encourage to pick up a copy of Dickens. You can tell by all of the people and outlets who cover those shows as compared to all of the critical analyses of, say, CSI: Omaha. And maybe it is a bit silly to imbue television shows with all of the meaning and creepy level of addiction that some people do, but there is nothing wrong at the same time with a little entertainment. You can’t read Henry James all of the time (and who in the hell would want to?).