Dog Bites Man

Two dolly birds advertise a motorbike.

No, I don't like the term 'dolly bird' either, but you will immediately work out from that gorgeous looking ES250/2 that this is the early 1970s here, so tell me you think the marketing team that came up with this shot didn't use the phrase themselves. It could be any one of a million publicity shots used in motorcycle advertising at that time, and for far too long afterwards, for that matter. To be fair, at least they are wearing riding gear. The only slight cause for interest might be that the MZ company was based in East Germany, which might have been thought rather too socialist to indulge in the kind of imagery favoured by the decadent imperialist West.

Ah, but: Compare and contrast that shot with this:

Is that a deliberate attempt to subvert decadent, imperialist motorcycle advertising convention? I am not a specialist on the DDR, but I never had the Soviet Bloc down as a bastion of support for same-sex relationships. To be honest, I am not sure the hairy-arsedchested biking scene in 1970s Britain would have been that much more tolerant. Granted, Hunter S. Thompson, in his classic "Hells Angels," reports LA HA accepting money from gay men in return for consenting to receive oral sex, but explains this as part of the whole HA performance of shocking conventional society. Maz Harris never broached the subject at all in his doctoral thesis about the UK HA scene.¹

You don't have to look at too many covers for the likes of Bash Street Heroes or 100% Biker (just about SFW) in order to conclude that a, shall we say, 'traditional' view of gender relations persists, at least in the mags that cater to the custom end of the biking scene. To be fair, like I said a post or two ago, what the media say and what people think don't always correspond, and I remember the vocal disapproval from BSH readers back in the 1980s when it ran a photoshoot of a model stripping next to some Russian bikes. Nonetheless, I can't help but wonder how many bikes that second shot shifted.

1. Harris, Ian Richard (1986), Myth and Reality in the Motorcycle Subculture, Unpublished Ph.d Thesis, Warwick University, Department of Sociology.

This Story Shall the Good Man Teach His Son

Do you know what the outright highest-rated production, as voted for by viewers, on IMDB is? Nope, not Shawshank (9.2/10), nor the Godfather (also 9.2/10), but the HBO mini-series Band of Brothers (9.6/10). Google it, and it is clear that the series has gripped the imagination of millions. Not surprising, really: it has a superb ensemble cast, great attention to period detail (at least, as far as my inexpert eye can judge), and the story-telling savvy of Spielberg and Hanks (although, if anything, the liberties taken with the historical record seem remarkably few for a big Hollywood-style treatment of this kind).

I am feeling torn as I type, because the feats achieved by the men of Easy company were extraordinary, and by any usual mark they can be considered heroes: The very final scene is an interview clip with the real Major Dick Winters, who cites Bill Guarnere's response to his grandson: "'Grandad, were you a hero in the war?' 'Nope, but I served in a company of heroes'." The major can barely enunciate the words due to the strength of his emotion, and it is clear how sincerely he believes them to be true. The objections I am about to raise should not be taken as aspersions on the courage of the men featured in the film. My compulsion to write the previous sentence, though, while honest and sincere, sits strangely with the ideas I want to explore.

It is my contention that Band of Brothers, while genuinely intended as a tribute and memorial to the sacrifices of allied soldiers, unconsciously accepts a number of dubious positions that undermine this position. For all its good intentions and modern sensibilities, it ultimately becomes just another weapon in the arsenal of a culture that would have us believe violence can be a valid solution in some circumstances, that there does exist the concept of a just war, and the epitome of masculine virtue lies in the willingness to subordinate, not only one's fear, but one's feelings of empathy, compassion and mercy when facing people labelled the enemy - boys in our culture, of course, are taught such feelings are not manly, whether for one's friends or one's enemies. The damage inflicted on our society by this set of attitudes should not be underestimated, and yet these ideas are all too infrequently brought out into the light for examination.

In many ways, I agree with the broad thrust of this review; it is clear that WWII films have undergone a transformation from straightforward flagwaver - unquestionably having its roots in wartime morale booster films, and, I would suggest, continuing well into the postwar era in the attempt to maintain morale during austerity Britain. Having said that, of course, economic conditions in the United States post-war were much more favourable. In neither country, though, was there any real appetite to question the official narrative. Growing up in 1970s Britain, my childhood reading matter included Commando books, and the comics (comics!) Battle and Victor, reinforcing the idea that World War II was a just war. Certainly, that is a far more comforting story than the terrible moral quandaries of the Vietnam war unfolding prior to and during that era.

Certainly, I doubt Band of Brothers would have been possible without the legacy of movies about Vietnam, dealing with the shattering experience of war on US combatants (not so often the Vietnamese civilians, thoough; I will have to return to The Sorrow of War later) in that conflict.; the immediate message of the series is the toll inflicted on soldiers, regardless of whether they were injured or killed. But the idea of the just war is ever present, and episode nine - entitled "Why We Fight" - brings it to the forefront. The paratroops liberate a concentration camp, and are appalled at the vision which unfolds. What I find difficult here is not the liberties taken with the historical record - apparently Easy Company never liberated a camp - but the suggestion that the Allies could never do such a thing. Yet My Lai, Abu Ghrab and Guantanamo stain the conscience of the West, even if we do still purportedly, as victors, write the history.

The closest we come to facing Allied war crimes during World War II seems to be the Rape of Berlin. Let it not be forgotten that the legacy of the Cold War means many on "our side", not just the Nazis who saw Slavs as sub-human, fail to acknowledge the Russians Soviet citizens as people like everyone else: capable of great sacrifice and courage, capable equally of horrific acts of violence. There are rumours of Argentinian PoWs being shot out of hand in the Falklands... Towards the end of the war, an Easy Company lieutenant who freezes in combat is replaced by an officer who shot not only German PoWs, but one of his own men. The unit approves of this replacement... Episode Nine is, however, subtly undercut by the final episode, in which Major WInters hears the speech of a surrendering German officer to his men. The implication is that Winters would, had the tables been turned, have chosen very similar words. You put men into extreme situations, they behave in an extreme manner; it makes very little difference what they believe they are fighting for, if fighting is what you make them do.

I remain uneasy about the series, and I have scarcely touched on the issues that arise from it (it is notable, for instance, how many of the individuals featured in the series had been successful sportsmen prior to joining up - now what was it Wellington said about the playing fields of Eton? So why do we assume competitive sport is a good thing for our children?); indeed, I increasingly admire the ambiguity with which it approaches its subject matter. These men showed great courage according to the code of values that had been inculcated into them , but is this really the example we want to be holding up to our children? Where are the epic productions praising non-violent resistance? (*Update, later the same day: Gracchi coincidentally offers a potential candidate.*)

I think Band of Brothers comes closer than any similar production - by which I mean a mainstream western TV series or film - I know of to admitting the damage war inflicts on all participants. but it still stops short of saying what to me seems obvious, that any war is a failure of humanity: Even if you "win", you lose. We are invited to view these men as extraordinary in a good sense, that they could "professionally" set aside their fear and their compassion to do a job. Yet don't we all recognise the inadequacy of the "only following orders" defence? Gracchi posted a characteristically excellent article some time ago which could almost have been intended as a companion piece to this; surely true courage, the kind we should be offering as an example to our children, is the strength to act according to one's conscience.

There is always a choice.

You what?

Passengers at British airports to be fingerprinted - Telegraph

BAA, whose airports include Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted, has argued that scanners are needed so that all passengers can shop in its huge terminal shopping malls.

Working it out with a Pencil

One of the fascinating features of our multimedia existence is the way in which we feel blogging is somehow at the forefront of social change. It is arguably true that the 'sphere offers a far greater variety of voices and opinions than are to be heard in more traditional media, but by the same token the readership for these voices are, with a very few exceptions - who arguably do not fit the definition of genuine individual blogs as opposed to political projects of one or another kind - tiny. If one had the time, we could monitor a wide range of blogs, taking due account of their authors, to try and gauge a "bottom-up" trajectory of social and political views.

It should not be forgotten, however, that traditional media have a much greater reach; the interplay between media portrayal and individual opinion formation is debatable and controversial: do I read the Guardian because it reflects my existing prejudices, or are my prejudices shaped by my paper of choice? I actually doubt that the complexity of human mental processes can be entirely reduced to this simplistic dyad - indeed, there is a fascinating strain of work suggesting that one's intellectual views owe a lot more to the emotions than is commonly recognised - but for the purposes of the series of posts I am contemplating, it is enough to accept that for many players, the value of the media in propagandising particular outlooks is sufficiently high to make it worthwhile trying to shape opinion. Given the various costs, not just financial, of gaining access to the media mainstream, it is fairly safe to claim traditional media outlets represent vested establishment positions, while still acknowledging that these positions need not be identical. It follows that one can much more easily trace the "top-down" promotion of ideology by examining the output of traditional media.

Further, even when there is no explicit agenda to be pursued, all cultural artefacts are a product of the milieu in which they were created, whether in celebration of or reaction to the prevailing way of seeing the world. At the risk of stating the bleedin' obvious, a children's story can tell us an awful lot about that society's attitudes to its children. There is, then, always an implicit agenda, whether or not there is an explicit agenda developed any further than the idea "I've got a great story to tell you". It is, then, always worth trying to deconstruct a narrative to work out what in fact it is telling us, and whether that bears any resemblance to what it claims to be telling us.

Is this removing the magic from story telling? I don't think so: Surely it simply adds further levels of enjoyment, as the various allusions, homages, messages and morals are uncovered. Furthermore, I personally find a philosophical value simply in asking "Why this? What is driving you to say this?" Thinking, questioning and striving to understand can never be a bad thing, can it? I think this post makes explicit the implicit agenda in those posts of mine I feel most proud of, and to which I hope to devote more attention in future.