Note: It’s worth reiterating that I’m commenting on the film in its own right here. The interwebs tell me it’s based loosely on Doyle’s Holmes installment The Final Problem, but I haven’t read that so I can’t speak to the literary integrity of the film or the historicity of the text. I’ll break up my discussion into a few categories, moving from technology to weapons to politics.

Technology

These films fetishize technology, to their credit. It might be subtle pandering to the “steampunk” subculture, but it gives an interesting depth to the settings in the film and provides lots of opportunities for understanding the historical context of the events of the film. It would not be inaccurate to suggest that Holmes’ historical contemporaries fetishized technology themselves – the stock piece of evidence for this occurs as early as 1851 with The Great Exhibition of the Works and Industry of All Nations, commonly known as the “Crystal Palace.” This and other exhibitions were designed to show off manufacturing and industrial progress on a grand scale. By 1900 attitudes toward technology were peaking – many had high expectations that tech development would deliver a complete understanding of the workings of the universe, and ever-climbing standards of living for humankind. All the same, critiques of technology and especially industrialization (from Karl Marx to William Blake) were already a century old by this point, at least in Britain. However, it wasn’t until the First World War that most of the world realized the downside of tech was not simply smog and social alienation, but the possible annihilation of the human race.

It’s clear that Mr. Holmes has no such anxieties. His technological exploits range from the merely ingenious (“urban camouflage”) to the bombastic (an automobile). As for the auto, which Sherlock and Watson tool around in to and fro the latter’s bachelor party and wedding, it would need to be a German import. The film is set in 1891, just a couple years after Karl Benz’s successful invention of a gas-powered internal combustion engine. The first domestically-produced British version would not emerge until 1895, when Frederick William Lanchester started Lanchester Motor Company.

The first Lanchester

Holmes and Watson chug merrily through the streets of London

Perhaps my largest quarrel with the film’s motoring, though, is its effect on the extras in the driving scene. Even if Holmes had managed to make his own auto, or import one from Herr Benz in Germany (of which there would have been only a handful in production at the time), his 2.5 mile journey from Baker Street to Trafalgar Square (the location of Watson’s bachelor party eludes me) would have freaked people out. I mapped out the route here. The people in London’s streets are unlikely to have seen a “horseless carriage” at this time, and Guy Ritchie may have missed an opportunity to get some comedic value out of this. Even more perplexing is how Mycroft’s butler found petrol to top it up for the trip to the church after the night’s drinking/fighting had concluded.

To carry on the theme of motive technology, the protagonists putter past an under-construction London Underground on their journey as well. I don’t have as many clues as to which it is, though Baker Street Station is a likely candidate. It, and the original London Underground, were completed some 30 years prior to the movie. In fact, Holmes and Watson could have taken an underground train to their party instead of their motorcar, though it seems Ritchie calculated that would get WTFs from his viewers. Perhaps the intent was to portray a renovation of the station, as the process of electrifying London’s railway lines was beginning around the time of the film. In any case, the present-day Baker Street Station features an homage to Holmes:

No deerstalker hats in the film...

As an aside, a notable tidbit in the film is Watson’s choice of Brighton as his honeymoon location. The late nineteenth century saw a development of mass leisure in Britain (that is, the ability of middle and even working-class people to take holidays), and Brighton as an epicenter for this development, along with Blackpool. Brighton was linked to London by rail in 1840, making it readily accessible for day trips. It’s also worth noting from an infrastructural standpoint that the first of Ritchie’s Holmes films heavily featured an under-construction Tower Bridge:

The timing here is pretty accurate.

Weapons and War

And then there’s the weapons technology. Midway through the film, when the major characters head for Germany, persistent references are made to a sort of military-industrial complex, the extent of which Holmes and Watson gradually discover. In the warehouse/factory at Heilbronn, Holmes and Moran briefly chat in a room full of artillery shells before Holmes gets meat-hooked. Moran appears to show him an “automatic pistol.” I don’t recall whether the gun was described very deeply, but fully-automatic mobile assault weapons were not developed until WWI. In the early 1890s, machine guns were still fixed, defensive weapons. Hiram Maxim’s famous machine gun was only 8 years old. One way of fitting the weapon in the movie into history would be if it was meant to be a semi-automatic pistol, which was just beginning mass production around the time of the film.

The Borchart C-93

The Borchart was developed in Germany, so that seems to fit. What made it unique is the motion of the action, which was harnessed to eject spent magazines and load fresh ones. This is called “blowback.” Automatic loading was already in action with larger weapons, such as the rotary style of Gatling guns, but this brought it to a hand-held weapon. In any case, the pistol in the movie didn’t look much like the Borchart, and appeared to have some kind of extended clip in it, a bit like the Mauser C-96 which came about a few years later.

Holmes also stumbles upon a laboratory for producing chemical weapons in the Heilbronn factory. The dubious honor of developing a delivery method like the one in the film belongs to Fritz Haber, a brilliant Nobel Prize-winning German who oversaw the making of chemical weapons during WWI (which, by the way, violated an international treaty banning them in 1900). Though Haber was patriotic and proud of his contribution, his wife and son both committed suicide in shame over Haber’s role in chemical warfare.

The artillery shells depicted in the film look fairly legit – gas weapons were loaded in the ordinance as liquid and dispersed as gas upon impact, as seen in the little vial of yellow liquid inside the shell. However, it’s a bit much to believe the Germans would be using this design in the early 1890s. Although chemical weapons existed before WWI, delivering them effectively via artillery did not emerge until mid-war. Early efforts often involved simply releasing cylinders of chlorine gas and using the wind direction to send it towards the enemy.

Finally, various extremely large guns are used during the German portion of the film. Set in the city of Heilbronn, near the border with France, the environment looks more like that of Essen, the company-town of the Krupp Ironworks. Krupp in the 1890s would have been the largest company in Europe and largely responsible for the rise of Germany as an industrial power. Essen’s massive factory complex and railyard resembled the setting in the film when the protagonists discover the weapons factory and then flee into the forest, where they are rather ridiculously shelled by a variety of field artillery.

Krupp Factory in Essen, 1860s

The giant gun affectionately dubbed “Little Hansel” by Moriarty’s German lackeys that is brought to bear on the fleeing heroes appears to be styled as a sort of Big Bertha howitzer. Notwithstanding that such a weapon is probably the worst possible method of killing a small group of people who are fleeing into the forest, it makes for an interesting reference to some of the massive weapons that were being made at the time, almost all by the Krupp weapons factory.

A Dicke Bertha gun, or "Big Bertha"

While we’re on that topic, it’s also worth pointing out that there were even bigger options available to hyperbolically gigantic artillery enthusiasts, such as the Paris Geschütz or Kaiser Wilhelm Geschütz (“Paris Gun” or “Kaiser Wilhelm Gun”) which the Germans designed in order to shell Paris from within their own territory. When put into use during WWI the Parisians believed they were being bombed by unseen/camouflaged zeppelins. Seriously. The barrel was friggin’ 91 feet long and was assembled 75 miles from the city in Crépy. When the Germans did targeting calculations for it, they had to take into account THE ROTATION OF THE EARTH.

Punkin' Chunkin', anyone?

Politics and Diplomacy

Scholars of the First World War will be pleased to learn from Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows that the real cause of the war was a conspiracy by evil professor-cum-plutocrat(s). We’ve been agonizing over precisely why it happened for years. Not to mention how it may have happened some twenty years earlier.

In seriousness, this implication in the film is mixed with some useful bits: the aggressive industrialization of military materiel, the climate of diplomatic suspicion, and the anarchist bombings, to name a few. The decades around the turn of the century were one wherein the society, culture, and diplomatic system of the West was beginning to break down. The film does a good job of conveying this sense: the late-Victorian splendor of Stephen Fry’s hilariously-executed Mycroft Holmes stands in contrast with the soot, bombings, and chemical weapons of the scenes in Germany, giving the viewer a taste of the tension and transitional nature of the historical moment.

Diplomatically, the story is much the same. By this time, Europe was still dealing with an essentially post-Napoleonic system of international relations in which major powers engaged in bi- or multi-lateral negotiations to tackle issues (such as the 1884 Berlin Conference on colonialism in Africa or the 1900 conference that attempted to ban chemical weapons). Balance of power was the order of the day. However, this system began to work less and less effectively down to 1914 and the outbreak of World War I. “Secret” diplomacy and treatymaking, the full extent of which was not discernible to the broader international community (exemplified by Germany’s “blank check” to Austria at the beginning of WWI), undermined it from within. We get a taste of this in the film with the largely farcical diplomatic summit at Reichenbach, at which most of the characters believe the real action is going on in secret and the official proceedings are inconsequential. By the way, Reichenbach is a real and quite lovely waterfall, and while it apparently features in Conan Doyle’s writing as the place where [SPOILER] Holmes and Moriarty plummet to their supposed deaths, it does not feature a badass castle-fortress as seen in the film. Sorry.

Holmes and Moriarty struggle at Reichenbach Falls, by Sidney Paget

If that diplomatic system was collapsing, the film may also foreshadow the one that would replace it much later. The subplot of bombings undermining the dialog between France and Germany at the early and middle parts of the film seemed to be subtle nods to the European Union for me. When the German official (?) is holding the meeting in Paris (before being assassinated/bombed), he makes a comment to the effect of “business binding us together.” I couldn’t help but think of “Merkozy” and the contemporary salvage-attempts at keeping Europe together, spearheaded by France and Germany. Insert joke about a rogue British assassin wrecking all of it.

As a final aside, I was intrigued by the repeated mentions that the evil Professor Moriarty was a close friend of the Prime Minister. In 1891, the premiership was held by Lord Robert Cecil, the Marquess of Salisbury. Salisbury is a criminally underrated Prime Minister, and is usually unfairly overshadowed in Victorian politics by his Tory counterpart Benjamin Disraeli. Anyway, the coding here is not so subtle. We get it, Mr. Ritchie. Evil professor-cum-plutocrat mastermind is a Tory.

In any case, this film is manifestly worth seeing, especially if you liked Ritchie’s first adaptation. It’s obviously not a 100% accurate historical representation of its time, but it does give viewers interested in history a taste of some trends in technology, weapons, politics, and so forth, if seemingly 15 years ahead of their proper time. Not to mention the excellent costuming. If you like a chuckle and some historical action-mystery, go check it out.

I’ve been known to pump the Christmas tunes as background music on a daily basis during my designated time window. I have a specially tailored playlist of Christmas tunes from the likes of Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and a Christmas Pandora station I’ve spent four years carefully cultivating to my taste. Some, like my brother, have a casual disliking of Christmas music full-stop. But whether you love or hate the genre, there are always a few tunes that grate on your ear and transform the jolliest of elves into the surliest of Grinches.

Here’s my list of Christmas and holiday-oriented songs that have struck me with their festive awesomeness or crapitude this season. These picks will refer to the songs as essential entities, not specific versions, unless otherwise specified:

Bring out the Who Hash & Roast Beast: Songs Trending Up

1. The Gloucestershire Wassail

This already jaunt-sodden medieval tune has been heated up and supersaturated with jaunt. The lyrics are about drinking and doing questionable stuff in public, so this is truly an everyman’s tune. It’s actually dangerous to listen to this track when you’re over-caffeinated or already in a cheery mood, because it will raise your jaunt levels to critical mass. That’s what this song is bringing to the table: it’s like snorting a line of pure, uncut Christmas.

2. Coventry Carol

Pretty vanilla choice, hmm? This song is insidious. It’s mellow, almost soporific vibe and minor-key tonality lull the listener to sleep. But there’s more. The lyrics of this song are just raw. They read like Black Sabbath’s eponymous track or something from Slayer. The gist is that a mother is trying to lull her baby son to sleep as well as tell him goodbye because he’s about to be killed along with all other male children in Bethlehem on the orders of Herod. If The Gloucestershire Wassail had a polar opposite, it would be this. Raw.

3. Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel (warning: metal version)

There is one simple reason I’m big on this song this season: the lyrics. They satisfy 2 critical thematic affinities of mine: allusions to the “Rod of Jesse” and persistent references to the devil. Moreover, the actual writing is just gorgeous. Take for example this verse:

O come, O come, Thou Lord of Might,
Who to Thy tribes on Sinai’s height
In ancient times didst give the law
In cloud, and majesty, and awe.

Gold.

My Heart Shrank Three Sizes: Trending Down

1. Hey Santa

This song makes me want to pour acid in my ears and never celebrate Christmas again. Its chotchy, saccharine, and repetitive drone is everything that’s wrong with generic, overproduced Christmas pop. Whoever wrote this song should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. Apparently, the fault belongs with the spawn of Beachboy Brian Wilson.

2. Baby, It’s Cold Outside

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this song. In some ways, it’s catchy and enjoyable. The problem is, it’s perfect for being re-recorded endlessly as overwrought duets ranging from the insufferable (Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson) to the slightly creepy (Norah Jones and Willy Nelson) to the inexplicable (Bette Midler and James Caan) to the simply repugnant (Glee - no, not because it’s two dudes, that’s commendably original. Because it’s Glee).

3. Happy Birthday, Jesus!

This song is the perpetual #1 awfulest dross in the Christmas universe. The concept of “pandering” was a hollow, empty husk of its present self until some asshole wrote this song a few years back. It’s like it was specially engineered by quantum physicists in a laboratory in hell. It’s not that I mind the idea of re-emphasizing the presence of Christ in Christmas, it’s just that this song is a nauseatingly repugnant attempt (acknowledging the attempt may be too far) at doing that. I could do 2,000 words about why, but the simplest way of putting it is that the point of Jesus-centered celebration at Christmas is to emphasize charitable themes versus empty commercialism, not to focus on a shabbily reductive version of a birthday celebration that the historical Jesus certainly never had and that the spiritual Jesus wouldn’t have wanted. That is all. Ban this song.

Epilogue

Which songs are on your trending report this year? Merry Christmas and a happy New Year, folks.

Coptic Christians rally in Egypt

The “Arab Spring” continues to be evoked continuously in the global media. The phenomenon, nearing a year old, has been instrumentalized as a way of commenting on disparate political issues. I have been consistently skeptical about this from the beginning – not the magnitude of the events or their potential to improve (or worsen) lives – but in the discourse that surrounds them. Briefly, I’ll recap those thoughts:

1. Social media as a force for social change has been overrated in this discussion, primarily because it’s the primary medium of the people creating the discussion. Like any other historical application of technology, social media is and (will increasingly) be used by both sides of a conflict. It is a tool, not a singular volitional creative entity. At present we lack the historical distance and perspective to assess its impact reliably.

2. The term “Arab Spring” is borderline insufferable. Much of the saga in the Middle East is taking place outside the Arabian Peninsula (Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria) by people who are not ethnically identifiable as Arabs. This sloppy conflation has vaguely racist antecedents that I don’t want to overemphasize but which are clearly relevant. “Spring” is no better. As I wrote previously, it was chosen to mimic “Prague Spring,” Czechoslovakia’s unsuccessful late-1960s liberalization in defiance of Soviet power that was brutally suppressed.

3. Despite being discussed virtually in the past-tense, it is not yet apparent that the Arab Spring is a success in the way Westerners would like it to be. Revolutions take a long time to reach fruition; they create sociopolitical instability which is not easily stabilized. It is too early for serious people to have appraised them.

Recap aside, we have reached somewhat of a turning point in both the events on the ground and the discourse surrounding them that calls for deeper consideration. The killing of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya and the holding of elections in Tunisia mark what are hopefully milestones in the freedom and prosperity in both states. (A wonkish analysis of the processes of the Arab Spring can be had here.) But the news isn’t all good and the ongoing discussion of it isn’t much better.

Some have decried the apparent summary execution of Qaddafi after he was captured alive, as well as the apparent execution of large numbers of loyalists as human rights violations. True enough, but the lack of “due process” in these matters is testament to the limited transferability of Western-style law and order to North Africa and/or the level of internecine feuding at the heart of Libya’s war which NATO has perceived as cleanly divided between an “isolated” Qaddafi and “the Libyan people.” Perhaps more troubling was the recent announcement of Libyan National Transitional Council interim leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil that the new Libya would be grounded in Islam’s Sharia Law and, accordingly, would tolerate polygamy and outlaw usury (the collection of financial interest). Let me be clear: there is nothing inherently wrong, as some would have you believe, with Sharia Law or the running of communities based on its principles. There are facets of it which are clearly antimodern, but the same is true of the Judeo-Christian law (in a looser sense) on which the ideals of Western democracy purport to be built. What is alarming here is the possibility that it could be used to enforce a more repressive society and a more economically backward state than the one it replaces, insofar as you think banning polygamy and interest as a financial tool are critical to modern life.

Meanwhile, Egypt, one of the earliest areas to attract significant attention in the “Arab Spring” may be backsliding rapidly. The country is still under the ostensibly temporary control of the Egyptian military, which many considered the best short-term bet for moderation and political impartiality in Egypt. Now, it seems the military regime is taking an active role in brutally suppressing Egypt’s millennia-old Coptic Christian community, which has been subjected to ongoing pogroms since the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and which represents an important moderate voice in Egyptian politics. This situation has been underreported in Western media, not least because it is highly worrying and inconvenient. Reports have suggested that others who escaped death have been subjected to torture and forced migration.

Talk is Cheap

Meanwhile, Westerners and especially Americans chatter happily away about the Arab Spring as if it were completed, positive, abstract concept suitably pliable for other political ends. The idiocy swings both ways. On the Right, there is talk that intervention has been proven successful at fairly low cost, even extending back to vindicate the Bush doctrine on transforming the Middle East. This is both a premature judgment and a false connection between Bush’s overwrought plans for intervention without development and Barack Obama’s underdeveloped non-strategy (or willfully occluded strategy, depending on how you spin it) of reacting to events noncommittally and imbuing them with meaning in retrospect.

On the Left, the burgeoning protest movements taking shape in global urban centers are expressing solidarity and continuity with the Arab Spring. The two movements are fundamentally different and struggle to endure even meaningful comparison. One is responding the denial of basic human rights, the other is reviving class war to denounce policies that reinforce the shortcomings of modern finance in immoral ways. If the “Occupy” protesters think college loan debt is bad, they should book a flight to Syria and try their hand at tweeting against the Assad regime.

Anyone making either of those arguments is either willfully deluded or purposely deceptive. We need to elevate our discussion about the social movements in the Middle East and North Africa. In what ways can or should the United States and others be involved there? Is it possible that our present policies are working against positive developments there? Given the possibility that things could turn out worse and not better, how do we plan for either outcome? How do we understand the hopeful development of democracy in these states with regard to the volatility of important regional players Iran (which is plotting to murder Saudi diplomats on our soil) and Saudi Arabia (which is undergoing uncertainty because its aged ruling oligarchy is dying off)? What of our impending withdrawal from Iraq and (wishfully) Afghanistan? How does our increasingly fraught relationship with Pakistan (who today announced it would side with Afghanistan in hypothetical war against the U.S.) affect our plans?

These are the questions we should be asking, not grasping for ways we can use the struggles of Middle Easterners and North Africans to reinforce our own political narratives. It’s still muddy season as far as the Arab Spring is concerned.

Hair-stylists and dentists are notorious for engaging you with random and occasionally baffling conversation topics. It’s hard to blame them – in what other scenario does a stranger sit there making physical contact with your body for significant lengths of time? It seems like you should at least be genial. (Massages don’t count, there’s an emphasis on being quiet and relaxed). I took advantage of the holiday to get my hair cut this morning, and I considered preemptively engaging the cute Spanish girl named Fernanda who was wielding the scissors in conversation about her name, and the fact that it was Columbus Day, and that she was directly or indirectly named for the monarch who chose to finance Columbus’s fateful voyage across the Ocean Blue. I didn’t though. People tend to zone out when you bring up arcane historical miscellanea, and I needed her on her game to make sure I ended up with even sideburns. I recognize that opening with this anecdote is, thus, ironic.

Columbus Day is a tough call. Once unthinkingly accepted as an excuse to have a holiday, it has become fashionable to reject Columbus as a megalomaniacal génocidaire and use this day to champion Native American rights or similar causes. Champions of indigenous peoples Rage Against the Machine call attention to Columbus’ bad reputation in their song “Sleep Now in the Fire”:

I am the Nina The Pinta The Santa Maria
The noose and the rapist
The fields overseer
The agents of orange
The priests of Hiroshima
The cost of my desire
Sleep now in the fire

This is all fair enough. Columbus was a straight-up asshole at best; he treated the indigenous people of the various Caribbean islands he terrorized discovered like small children when he was having a good day and like animals when he was having a bad day. His landing in the New World, while historically momentous to be sure, had the immediate effect of essentially wiping out the existing population of Hispaniola and other islands, partly through intentional slaughter and partly through unintentional transmission of epidemics. It’s probably not on to applaud the historical Columbus (who took the name Christopher because it literally means “Christ-bearer” in Greek and this is how he characterized himself to his contemporaries, as a missionary), except in the sense that he was a driven guy who recognized a solid investment when he saw it.

Walter Russell Mead makes a good point in this blog post, that the story of Columbus Day as a holiday has more to do with the rise of Italian immigrants (with their newly-minted fraternal organization the Knights of Columbus) taking their place along the Irish as an integrated part of American society. It was the Knights who successfully lobbied Congress to make it a national holiday in 1937.

Another historical perspective that is appropriate is to remember that while Columbus himself was Genoese, he was funded by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. This fact encapsulates several historical trends: F&I pioneering an early-modern model of state building by aggressively funding overseas exploration and later resource-extraction (paving the way for a near-century of Spanish dominance), the decline of Genoa and the Italian merchant city-states vis-a-vis continental Europe but also the Ottoman Empire (it was the Ottomans whose expansion blocked the Italians’ traditional trade networks eastward into Asia in the 16th century), and the advent of trans-Atlantic, soon-to-be triangular trade. Columbus’ landing is worth remembering for these reasons.

Vikings are Cooler

Personally, I prefer to celebrate Leif Eriksson on this day. If you care about such things as the first whitefolks to visit the New World, then you should check out Leif, who arrived in present-day Newfoundland around 1004 AD, only a half millennium before Columbus. Of course, we’d probably talk much more about Leif and his fellow Norsemen if their colony in Vinland had actually survived, but for various reasons (including hostility from the not-so-prostrate indigenous people) he and his folks returned to Iceland after a few seasons of hacking at seals and trying to use bulls as war-animals against the natives (seriously).

I leave you with a relevant sampling of heavy metal, Saxon’s “Sailing to America,” which is actually about later English colonization.

Eleventy-one years is far too short a time to live among such excellent and admirable Gentlehobbits.

This is a festive day. Tomorrow is the equinox: the first day of autumn. Scientifically, this means the ecliptic – the path in the Earth’s sky taken by the sun – has intersected with the celestial equator – the imaginary plane in space that is perpendicular to the rotation of the earth – going south. Yeah, read that again. I looked this up from my college astronomy notes, and I really can’t believe I managed to get a good grade in that class. Here’s the diagram I drew that day in class:

I used a tablet PC. It was cool at the time.

Funnily enough, this complicated astrophysical explanation is in crucial way just as simplistic as the old folklorish ways of understanding the equinox: both are inappropriately geocentric. Our planet is moving relative to the sun, and that’s what is really changing here. Practically, the equinoxes are equilibrium points (hence the similarly-derived words). Today there should be exactly as much light as there is darkness, but in the Northern Hemisphere we’ve crossed the threshold and the nights are now officially longer than the days, and we haven’t even screwed with the clocks yet.

Pre-Christian Europeans observed a holiday on this equinox, having realized it was a transitional moment for light and darkness. This was a prime time for harvest festivals, either held on this day for sun-centered observances or on the closest full moon, the “harvest moon” for moon-centered cultures. Christian analogs aren’t perfect as they are with other holidays. Nearby St. Matthew’s Day, September 21, never really caught on with people, probably because Matthew was the patron saint of tax-collectors.

Party Time

"Proud-FEET!"

More importantly, September 22 is Hobbit Day. In Middle Earth, it is the birthday of both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, albeit 78 years apart. Much later and after their extensive journeys across Middle Earth are over, both hobbits leave forever from the Grey Havens on 22 September. Bilbo’s “Long-Expected Party” kicks off the Lord of the Rings with his mysterious disappearance during his speech. The holiday is one of the oldest real-world days for Tolkien fans to celebrate his work with feasting and readings. I encourage everyone to hit up the old copies of his books you know you have stashed somewhere and read a bit. Alternatively, the miracle of technology has provided new and exciting ways to get a Tolkien fix, such as the outstanding Tolkien Professor website, which features a multitude of podcasts on various topics. I’m celebrating by having ribs for dinner.

In conclusion:

I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

You’re in the right place. This is still Jesse writing. As you can see, the blog has undergone some changes. The site design and site concept have both changed substantially. The type of content I post will not change substantially, though I hope to post more frequently, even if this requires greater brevity. The changes have come down for a variety of reasons.

The most important was that I wanted to migrate the blog to its own domain. While there is nothing inherently problematic about a wordpress domain, the sleekness and relative affordability of personal hosting are very attractive and a goal of mine over the summer was to initiate a more robust web presence by diving into the business of running personal domains. I have another running right now at http://jessetumblin.com if you care to look. To this point, registering a domain required me to rename and redesign the blog. I also made the mistake of trying to screw about with the site’s CSS, which was a big mistake and required another couple weeks while I learned enough about CSS to fix what I’d broken. As for URLs, anything and everything to do with ravens is completely taken up in 2011, and this was even a problem with WordPress hosting – I had to resort to Anglo-Saxon for my URL, and even the spelling there was pretty strained. It should have properly been hræfn, not “hraefen.” I digress.

Conceptually, the new site has much more coherence with my personal tastes, views, and content than before. Apart from liking Poe and having taken numerous snapshots of seemingly ubiquitous ravens while living in Ireland that seemed like good header images, there was no deeper reasoning behind the old site concept. You’re probably wondering how “The Fall of Albion” is any more relevant or sensible. I’m glad you asked. What do I do here if not expound on esoteric miscellanea? So here you are: an exegesis of the new site concept that brutishly leaves nothing to the imagination.

A Matryushka Doll of Metaphors

If you know a thing or two about Britain, you may have realized that “Albion” is one of its old-school names. In fact, it’s the oldest one for which we have record – the Romans were using it before “Britannia” came into use. The word’s root means “white” (as seen in the word “albino”) and may have come about thanks to Britain’s southern shores, the white cliffs of Dover.

Paging Matthew Arnold...

So on it’s face, I’m running a blog about the downfall of Britain. Not so fast – I harbor no ill will for ‘ol Blighty. However, part of my professional work in studying the British Empire of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries involves asking questions about Britain’s decline from global preeminence; whether and to what extent it was happening. From time to time I discuss issues of global hegemony, though hopefully not often enough to alienate readers, so you could indeed make a connection there. But that’s only one layer, and there are several more layers.

Blake's rendering of Urizen, one of the four primordial spirits that emanate from Albion

William Blake is one of my favorite men-of-letters. The early-nineteenth century Englishman scoffed at his contemporaries’ cultural and moral norms, building a corpus of his own aphorisms and even his own synthetic mythology (apparently this is the key to my heart, judging from Messrs. Blake and Tolkien) to explicate his worldview. Blake delved into the intricacies of human nature in a way that was both profoundly realistic and profoundly mystical, making his work resonant with everyone from heavy metal lyricists like Bruce Dickinson to Yeats and Huxley. I’ve written on Blake here before, in my eulogy for Ronnie James Dio and my chronicle of last year’s harsh winter. In Blake’s mythology, Albion represents the primordial essence from which the ancillary world spirits take form – Albion’s fall from grace and the spiritual realm is the pretext for their manifestation in the world. Albion allegorically represents Britain, and is also an analog to Milton’s Lucifer. It’s all a bit complicated and definitely not the most accessible point of entry to Blake’s work, but the point is his Albion character connects many of the points I find most compelling in his work and those works inspired by it. If you’re interested, check out Blake’s Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion in its original watercolor plates. I’d recommend his short and provocative “Proverbs of Hell” for those unfamiliar with his work and looking for a taste of what it’s like.

Segueing from Blake into another literary-historical figure of which I’m a fanboy, the “fall of Albion” trope also shows up in the works of William Butler Yeats. Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” which vies with Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and a platoon of Heaney for the title of My Favorite Poem (I’m sorry if these are too mainstream for popular taste) borrows Blake’s words to describe the terrifying beast that is ushering in a new age:

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The “stony sleep” here alludes to Urizen, the old-looking dude from the image above, and his hunkering down in a stone hideout after he falls from heavenly combat while the elementals he aroused duke it out. In the process he is reforged as a man, and later becomes the Sphynx, much like the creature in “The Second Coming.” Yeats believed that the world of his time was approaching the dawn of a new age, an age that like Urizen would be represented incarnate by a Messiah-figure (as Christ had begun the previous age, for Yeats).

Finally, to explain the new image badge in the top-right corner of the site (aside: my brother Cody did the work for the image and also helped me through some of my site-design woes, as he did with the former site. Thanks to him and his design expertise for whatever degree of polish you perceive) both Blake and Yeats were writing in dialog with John Milton, who personally invented about 75% of the modern conception of Satan in his classic Paradise Lost. The notion of spiritual warfare followed by a “fall” and an incarnation as a parable for humanity’s convoluted nature comes straight from Milton’s Lucifer. Accordingly, I’m using a famous illustration of Lucifer’s fall done by nineteenth-century French engraver Gustave Doré. I find this particular engraving very compelling and you could accuse me of being minorly obsessed with it. I included it in a previous blog piece on St. Lucy’s Day, one of my favorite bands, Black Sabbath, used it on some of their merchandise, and I own a t-shirt with the same stylized image. So it was a natural choice here.

I think that will do for convoluted personal exegesis. I hope you like the site; feel free to use the newly streamlined commenting engine to pass judgment on it and me. A few things that are on my radar for the blog right now are an amateur sociology of the intersections between rap and metal and some thoughts on the birthday of Frodo and  Bilbo Baggins.

You can dig on Part I of this series here, in which I go through some of the recent developments that have made this topic newsworthy.

I’d like to preface this by saying how easy it is to find comical or interesting images of Obama with various facial expressions and/or body language. Google Image is the Matrix.

Anyway. How do we describe Barack Obama’s foreign policy orientation? What about his overall strategy for foreign policy events? I’m sort of using these interchangeably here, both are rather abstract and the lines between then tend to blur.

The most general way of approaching this question is to reiterate the importance of George W. Bush to Barack Obama’s Presidency. So much of Obama’s political identity, so much of what he capitalized upon to secure election in 2008, rests on drawing distinctions with W. With this in mind, I think that George W. Bush explains why we’re having this conversation in the first place. Bush was sure. About everything. At least, that’s what he projected to the American people. We knew Bush, and we knew what we would get from him. That he seemed doctrinaire and predictable was one of the things people came to tire most of by the end of W’s Presidency. As such, Obama has calculated that he must be a pragmatist. He must seek consensus, cooperation; he must be seen to consider many options and make a logical choice when it comes to tough issues. Obama realized, and continues to believe, that these traits are essential to his political brand. This is why we have to ask ourselves what his foreign policy looks like in the first place – if he was following a clear, concrete program, he would be Bush’s proximate other from a methodological if not a political standpoint.

The Economist’s Britain correspondent Bagehot said of David Cameron (whose affinities to the Obama Political Brand I mentioned before) in a recent article about his own foreign policy that it “looks like realism but which is on closer inspection a low-ambition variety of optimism.” If D-Cam is the Right-wing doppelganger of Obama, you might invert this and say that Obama’s foreign policy “looks like idealism but on closer examination is a high-ambition variety of realism.”

Unfortunately, this predisposes both men to incoherence – either within or between strategy and policy.

Strained Analogies

Ideologically, Barack Obama skews toward Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, for the historically rusty, was a Princeton academic who believed that he could, using a bit of politico-moral technocracy, engineer a new settlement for international politics from the ruin of the First World War. His concept was “national self-determination” (choice), his machinery was the League of Nations (predecessor to the UN), and his delivery method was insanely fastidious political treatymaking, speech-stumping, and pince-nez spectacles. He is often used as the exemplar of “idealist” foreign policy – like Kevin Garnett, ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.

In the interests of space, I offer this from Obama’s most recent speech on Afghan troop withdrawal: “We stand not for empire, but for self-determination.” For this reason, then, we have a stake in, and will intervene in, the “Arab Spring” (disdain for this term already noted) – we mean to enforce the right of nations to choose their mode of government. And for self-determination, we mean for those nations that are choosing freedom the way we see it. From his speech at Westminster: “Let there be no doubt: The United States and United Kingdom stand squarely on the side of those who long to be free. And now, we must show that we will back up those words with deeds. That means investing in the future of those nations that transition to democracy, starting with Tunisia and Egypt…” No word on what happens if these nations emerge with Islamist regimes.

Wilson took a similar line toward Latin America in the 1910s: “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.” The United States intervened on numerous occasions during his presidency to assert stability and pro-American regimes. Few of these, not to mention the disastrous intervention to support the anti-Bolshevik faction in Russia, turned out well.

But

Barack Obama isn’t Woodrow Wilson. For one thing, he doesn’t intervene enough. We aren’t going to put troops on the ground to support Tibet in a bid to weaken China (as Wilson meant to do against the Soviets). When things started rapidly escalating on the Korean peninsula this winter, cooler heads prevailed. Don’t forget that this administration took its time in endorsing and encouraging the Arab unrest, and then in calling for the departure of dictators like Muammar Qaddafi or Hosni Mubarak. France, among others including Britain, took the lead there. We’re showing signs of realism here: the United States will deal with oppressive regimes when necessary, because doing otherwise could be counterproductive or dangerous.

That brings me to my next point: Obama has none of the “insanely fastidious” that Wilson had – despite his anointment as a transcendent President in the domestic sphere, and his premature anointment as leader of the free world in Europe and in the Nobel franchise, he is not an ideological torchbearer on the global scene. Wilson crusaded for his causes, from the League of Nations to the Treaty of Versailles, to extreme lengths and at the cost of his personal life and health – he basically worked himself to death. You’re not going to get this from Obama. It doesn’t fit his personality (if it does fit his academic training), and it doesn’t fit his style of politics. As much as he wants to be a visionary, he’s too pragmatic for it to work. George W. Bush was a visionary, if a misguided one. Few visionaries aren’t misguided in some way.

Analogy Spinoffs

Speaking of Woodrow Wilson, his life’s work was more or less torpedoed by a very organized, isolationist Right in the United States. Led by Henry Cabot Lodge (whose views were actually more nuanced) and Frank Kellogg, this group was very opposed to an active American role in the world. You might say, as Obama did in his recent speech that they wanted to “stop focusing on nation-building abroad and start focusing on nation-building at home.”

Recently, it’s become common to characterize present-day Republicans as isolationists, because they have criticized Obama’s intervention in Libya. Just as he is no Wilson, they are no 1920s Republicans featuring no Frank Kelloggs. Rather than committed philosophical isolationism, Republican sniping at Obama is little more than political opportunism. It is too out of sync with the neo-conservative sympathies of the Republican voting base, and many have already started to backpedal from the implications. Ironically, Kellogg and Obama are peers: Kellogg won the 1929 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which banned war as in international policy instrument. You read that right.

Enigma

And here we are. We’re going to carry on getting “high-ambition realism” from Obama, even if this does not produce predictable results. In essence, Barack Obama is doing what we expected him to do. We elected him to be pragmatic and conciliatory and most of all, not George W. Bush. So he’s going to keep doing the unexpected.

Barack Obama isn’t easy to explain. At least, his over-arching ideology and policies aren’t. Perhaps he wants it that way – styling himself as a sort of enlightened pragmatist, he predisposes himself to avoid classification. Obama’s personal brand in terms of foreign policy doesn’t look the same as it did two months ago. You could argue continuity vs. change in various degrees, but the fact is that he’s produced some unexpected outcomes recently. I feel compelled to try to make sense of them here not least because I’ve already tried a couple of times in the past, but also because there are useful points of comparison with those pieces as well. I’ll bring them up as we go.

Briefly, a list of things that have changed Obama’s foreign policy landscape recently:

• The “Arab Spring” began*
• Osama bin Laden ended up here
• A startlingly chummy state visit to the United Kingdom occurred

*This term is somewhere between problematic and plain-ole stupid. For one thing, it implies that the events unfolding in the Middle East will have beneficial durable outcomes, and that is not yet apparent. Also, for those that actually pay attention to history, naming something after Prague Spring, a Czech liberalization that was brutally crushed by the Soviets, is a sort of head-scratcher. Freudian slip?

First Impressions

Early on, some expected Barack Obama to be a left-leaning, war-averse President who would mark a sharp departure from his predecessor, George W. Bush. They were very quickly disappointed. One of his most important early foreign policy decisions was to commit to the war in Afghanistan, and authorize a surge of over 3o,000 troops there from the winter of 2009. I feel compelled to pause a moment and comment on the brilliance of using “surge” to classify these specific war plans. How different would the reception be if the administration had said “We plan to escalate – temporarily of course – the war to gain an advantage over our enemies.” “Surge,” meanwhile, conveys both temporality and overwhelming power (like an electrical surge). Props to whichever staffer suggested that one. I’d like to think I would do well at that if I was a White House staffer. “Jesse suggested we phrase it as ‘unbuilding’ Tripoli until Qaddafi surrenders.”

Zombie Bush aside, anti-war types can give up on their hopes of having less war under Obama’s first term than we did with W. Which made it all the more perplexing that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize in autumn 2009, without having done much of anything in the foreign sphere since taking office, much less achieve international peace. Obama acknowledged as much in his acceptance speech when he said “I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek…” In other words, we’re stopping the one that is our fault and reluctantly carrying on with the one that isn’t our fault. Keep in mind that Senator Obama voted against the “surge” that happened in Iraq before it turned out to be largely successful, so this move on Afghanistan, even though it was supported by most of the Cabinet and military higher-ups, was not entirely expectable.

Strategically, the President looked cool on our relationship with Britain, arguably the most important to our geostrategic position in the world. Around a year ago, I wondered whether our “Special Relationship” wasn’t losing its specialness. With the Left out of power in Britain and Obama, as Newt Gingrich never tires of pointing out, holding an “anti-colonial worldview,” the oily waters of Louisiana looked like the burial-at-sea for the alliance forged by Roosevelt and Churchill.

Afghanistan: Empire’s Graveyard

If Afghanistan was a professional wrestler, it would specialize in taking out the Luchadores that are empires: it lulls them into a false sense of security, writhing on the mat and waiting for the inevitable high-flying, top-of-the-turnbuckle slam. It bides its time, and at the last second it rolls away and BAM! Luchador lands face first. It was always going to be a headache for this President in terms of policy. When Obama authorized the surge, insofar as we can discern his intentions, it said that he believed a military resolution to the Afghan conflict was possible.

It didn’t help that last summer, Obama had to fire commanding General Stanley McChrystal after the general gave an off-color interview to Rolling Stone. McChrystal, who seems to have been generally well-liked by the military establishment, was making progress in Afghanistan implementing the Petraeus brand of counterinsurgency. When asked about Vice President Joe Biden, outspokenly against military escalation there, McChrystal and his boys were openly disparaging. Coming from a Special-Ops background which thrives on an elite, insular mindset, this is not surprising, but in the form of a national magazine article, it was unacceptable. The firing was a huge headache for the administration, as not only did it expose its strategic schism, it provoked a redistribution of talent: Petraeus, instead of mopping up in Iraq, had to take over in Afghanistan (with the impending departure of SecDef Bob Gates and promotion of CIA Director Leon Panetta to replace him, Petraeus is moving to Langley, meaning we will need to replace his military command yet again.)

Fast-forward to today: Obama’s speech on the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan is being widely hailed as a victory for the Biden Camp. In basic terms, it calls for removing around 10k troops by the end of the year, and a total of 30k by the end of 2012 (we have around 100k on the ground right now). You could critique this from both sides: with 70k troops remaining, the withdrawal hardly signals the end of our major military ops in Afghanistan. However, does 30k less soldiers make an operational difference on the ground? Fuckin’-a-right it does. We might surmise from this that the decision was not made with military criteria in mind. Foreign Policy’s Kori Schake rightly points out that Obama criticized Bush II for “under-resourcing” the war in Afghanistan. The hawkish-Right, especially McCain, have attacked Obama’s decision as contravening the wishes of General Petraeus (who at this point enjoys an assumed 100% trust on military matters) for only a token drawdown. The Economist’s Lexington sees an electoral motive behind all of this, and that’s certainly the most logical hypothesis. It raises questions about our democracy: our leadership changes, our democratic short-termism, and so forth. Americans find it healthy to politicize everything (if not to capitalize everything), but this sentiment is far from common in the rest of the world or in history.

Game Changer

And then there’s this. I don’t mean the complicity of puppets with terrorism, at least, not only that. So long as we’re talking about electoral issues, Obama gave himself a gigantic boost last month when the SEALs managed to bag bin Laden and provoke a night of nationwide jubilation. As great a domestic political windfall as it was, on the international level it delivered mixed results. The news that ole’ OBL was chillaxing in the outskirts of Pakistan’s most important military city, Abbottabad, was easily the most electric detail of OBL’s exeunt. As a sort of note on Pakistan’s “military cities,” the British turned the entire region into a network of military installations back in the nineteenth century, as evidenced by the fact that Abbottabad got its name from British General Sir James Abbott. Needless to say, some questions needed answering.

In reality, it’s rather daft to think of this conflict as exclusively concerning Afghanistan (or Pakistan). The problem in the first place is that there are regions spanning both states that neither can control because they’re in the hands of intractable Islamist tribal authorities. In fact, you might recall from the 2008 elections that Obama insisted he would enter Pakistan and pursue high-opportunity targets if he thought it was a good idea. Mark that down as one promise he kept. While we occupy one of these countries, one does not simply walk into nuclear-armed Pakistan. Sure, there were never enough Pakistanis that poll approval of the United States to change a lightbulb, but fewer of them support their own government intervening against the Taliban since we started flying crazy alien helicopters into their territory without consent. Another problem with alienating Pakistan is that it’s accelerating the rise of China as a rival world hegemon, as the Pakistanis increasingly view them as an alternative sponsor in security matters.

It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity

The sequence of events in North Africa and the Middle East is in many ways more surprising and less predictable. The President’s response – to hang back for a month on Libya while France and Britain dragged us reluctantly along on a NATO bombing campaign – again leaves him vulnerable to criticism from both sides. I broke it down here. While many accuse him of dragging us into yet another war, in comparison to the mission’s allies he’s acted cool on the idea from the start, but with Americans running NATO’s military ops, we have to lie in the bed we made. Oh, and did I mention that we’re also running a secret war in Yemen?

Clearly, the Obama administration thinks we have a stake in the outcomes of the conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa. Between the strategic resources in the area and our key allies in Israel and Saudi Arabia, it’s not hard to see why. Furthermore, with perennial humanitarian-liberal-interventionist Samantha Power on Obama’s team from the beginning, it’s not surprising to see us dropping in on potential cases of mass-killing. Getting Muammar Qaddafi is also a way of dealing with some outstanding tensions over Lockerbie that I also discussed in my post on Anglo-American relations. Speaking of which…

Reunited and it feels so good

It was a huge Spring for enthusiasts of British culture. Apart from the Royal Wedding(!), Obama went on a whirlwind tour of Britain and Ireland, first stopping in to milk his Irish heritage and chug Guinness, then continuing on to London for bilateral talks with David Cameron, and the first ever official state visit by an American President to Britain. Yep, you heard that right. He played up, played up, and played the game (of table tennis) with Cameron. He pranced about with the Queen. He delivered a brilliant and rousing speech on our shared Anglo-American values in Westminster Hall before both Houses of Parliament. I watched the whole thing in a kind of disbelieving haze. All the animosity and mutual suspicion I discussed in my previous post seemed lightyears away. Well, except for the whole “Falklands-Monroe-Doctrine-Eff-You” thing I also covered, which is still going strong.

So much for the whole “anti-colonial” Anglophobic psychology. Supposedly, from a standpoint of policy, Cameron’s people love Obama, which should tell you something about the present jankiness of the political spectrum in both countries. At any rate, this escapade of symbolic Anglo-American revelry might have “chuffed me to bits,” but as before, it was in no way expectable at this point last year.

In Part II I’ll look at some of the implications of these unexpected outcomes, and try to nail down what Obama’s strategic foreign policy identity really is.

In this post we’ll take a look at one of the great stories of the Bible/Torah, that of the Israelite exodus from Egypt. This past week is both the Jewish celebration of Pesach, or Passover, and the Christian Holy Week, between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. It’s a big week for Abrahamic religions. In order to access this rich and thoroughly badass material, we need look no further than heavy metal icons Metallica. Using their face-melting track “Creeping Death,” we’ll do a bit of exegesis on the Scriptures.

The Old Testament gets underrated and overlooked by almost all mainstream Christians. It’s not difficult to see why: we have to share it with the Jews, and all the stuff about Jesus in the New Testament is distracting. The deeper reasons, though, are the ones that are more compelling to me. See, the Old Testament is downright inconvenient. How? I’m glad you asked.

1. It’s freakin’ violent.

Samson, the original Hebrew Hammer, takes a donkey’s jawbone and bludgeons 1,000 Philistines to death with it. Stone-cold badass Gideon, with his righteous and all-conquering Sword, slays over a hundred thousand Midianites with just 300 men. And by the way, God commanded him to. This is straight-up Slayer-quality material. “Raining Blood” ain’t got shit on this.

2. God doesn’t mess around

The Old Testament God isn’t a nice guy. He’s vengeful and full of wrath. There are strict-ass rules, and if you don’t follow them, BOOM. God don’t tell you twice. Case in point: the Israelites were specifically commanded never to touch the Ark of the Covenant. They used poles to carry it along on their journey. Once, when it slipped and was going to fall into the mud, a hapless Ark-bearer named Uzzah grabbed it to keep it off the ground. Did God give a damn that he had good intentions? Nah. Rules are rules. God struck Uzzah dead on the spot.

3. Peace, Love, and Equality = Bullshit

When liberals say that Jesus was liberal, they’re pretty much right. Jesus preached love above all else (“on this hang all the law and the prophets”), compassion, empathy, and the notion that we are all equally sinful and equally redeemable under God’s grace. Apart from a couple episodes, Jesus is generally inclusive and ultimately pacifistic. He’s also basically the opposite of Old Testament religious values. Equality? Lol. The Israelites have a King. He has a harem and tons of gold. Displease him at your peril. Race? Totally at play here. Much of the Old Testament is effectively an Israelite Reconquista of Canaan, involving along the way either the mass slaughter or enthrallment of a host of other tribes (-ites). The poor bastards were just minding their own business, but God had some plans…and they were on the wrong end of them. How would you like to spend your entire life building and defending the most impressive defensive walls in the known world, only to have them disintegrate one shitty afternoon because of some dudes with trumpets? Tough luck. This story has winners and losers.

At any rate, the story of the Israelites’ journey out of Egypt is nothing short of epic. We know this for a fact, because Charlton Heston made an entire movie out of it, and because Metallica more or less effortlessly adapted the story into the lyrical content of a titanic thrash-metal classic, “Creeping Death,” from their 1984 Ride the Lightning album. The two aren’t unrelated. While Metallica may have had no problem adapting biblical material for their tracks, they are certainly not biblical scholars, and the members have at best ambivalent attitudes toward religion. They encountered the Exodus story, in fact, through Charlton Heston’s The Ten Commandments film.

So let’s get to it. The following clip nicely cuts scenes from the film with the song and the lyrics. Heston plays Moses – he’s the one with the red headdress in the beginning, alongside the outstanding Yul Brenner, who plays Ramses. At the time, you may recall, Moses is an adoptive member of Pharaoh’s family, having been discovered in the Nile in his basket as a baby. It’s only later that he grows a beard and embraces his heritage, leading the Israelites away.

CREEPING DEATH–THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

Immediately: crushing riffs from James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett. The opening riff is in half-time, the slowness conveying a sense of foreboding. In general, Lars Ulrich is not my favorite metal drummer. In particular, the way he tunes his drums is like nails on a chalkboard to me. However, I will say that one of his real strengths is his impeccable management of impact moments in Metallica’s tracks. The Dane’s habit of standing upright and smashing his cymbals during big impacts really seals the heaviness of the band’s songs. Another good example of Lars’ touch in this respect is the iconic intro to “Master of Puppets,” which is not only heavy but also crucially crisp and precise.

After 8 bars of the intro riff and a breakdown, the groove of the song transitions into normal time (cut time if you take the opening tempo as the true tempo of the song). This riff is fast and frenetic, it feels chaotic and dangerous. The clip editor did a good job with the shots of crowds of Israelite slaves working here – the peril of hoisting huge obelisks into place painfully obvious as debris falls on helpless laborers.

Verse 1 begins: James Hetfield’s unmistakable, menacing voice opens with a scream:

Slaves!

Hebrews born to serve, to the Pharaoh.

Heed!

To his every word – live in fear.

The stage is set with the subjugation of the Israelites to what was then the mightiest empire the world had ever seen. The images from the clip point out the curious fact that for all the wonders of Egyptian civilization, some of which survive to this day, many were built by Israelite slaves, the engine-room of Egypt’s empire. Most versions of the Exodus story feature Ramses II as the reigning Pharaoh, though the Torah does not name him. At the time of the story, Pharaoh is newly acceded – while his father was conciliatory to the Israelites and may or may not have been more tolerant of monotheism, the new pharaoh was not as accommodating, hence the strife with Moses. The beginning of the story marks a low point in the Israelites’ trials in Egypt.

Faith!

Of the Unknown One, the deliverer.

Wait!

Something must be done – 400 years.

This stanza notes the source of the tension. Pharaoh was supposed to be an incarnate god. In addition to being ethnically and culturally distinct from their Egyptian masters, the Israelites’ monotheistic religion undermined the central pillar of Egyptian social cohesion: declaring spiritual fealty to Pharaoh, the head of state and living deity. Jews and Christians would run into the same problem a millennium later with the Romans.

The chorus takes a more interesting turn:

So let it be written.

So let it be done.

I’m sent here by the Chosen One.

So let it be written

So let it be done –

To kill the firstborn, Pharaoh’s son.

I’m creeping death.

Here we see the actual narrative voice of the song: it’s written from the perspective of the Angel of Death itself. The lines “So let it be written – so let it be done” are a paraphrase of Yul Brenner’s lines in The Ten Commandments. Baka, the master builder played by Vincent Price, asks Ramses “Will you lose a throne because Moses builds a city?” and Ramses replies “The city that he builds will bear my name, the woman that he loves shall bear my child. So let it be written, so shall it be done.”

These lines are posed, almost ironically, against the voice of the Angel of Death, foreshadowing the final plague sent to punish Egypt. The implication is that Pharaoh’s decrees, sealed by his phrase, are not a mark of his power but actually a mark of his doom. There is even more irony in Pharaoh’s extended line, because what he’s essentially saying is that while Moses may have favor in the short term, he, Pharaoh, will have the final victory because history will bear his name and his legacy (both in achievement and genetics). The Angel of Death’s errand is thus shown as all the more significant, as the killing of firstborn is in fact a direct attack on the legacy and historical continuity of the royal line by severing the chain of succession.

The riffs open up in the chorus to long notes on beat 1 but maintaining a syncopated feel coming back on 4e. The drum fill closing the stanza transitions into four crashes, each emphasizing a syllable of “I’m creeping death.” You can see in the clip Moses’ transformation from (to use modern terminology) collaborator with the Egyptian regime to subversive liberator. Note also the sartorial transition from Egyptian to Israelite, complete with bushy beard rather than clean shaven or meticulously groomed goatee.  This visual transformation is key in marking the shift in Moses’ identity and mission.  It is reminiscent of the modern example of Mohandas Gandhi, mastermind of Indian independence, who began as a Middle Temple-trained barrister at University College, London, emigrated within the empire to begin his practice in South Africa.  Gandhi then inverted the implications of his education and career, traded his three-piece suit for the Indian dhoti and no shoes, and returned to India to take an active role in the independence movements.

Now!

Let my people go, Land of Goshen.

Go!

I will be with thee – bush of fire.

Moses’/Heston’s famous line “let my people go” sets off the chain reaction of plagues against Egypt. The Land of Goshen refers vaguely to a region in the eastern Nile delta, through which the Israelites were forced to travel on their exodus to the Levant. The “bush of fire” probably has a dual meaning in these lyrics, both to the burning bush through which Yahweh spoke to Moses and commanded him to free the Israelites, and to the pillar of cloud and fire by which God led the Israelites on their journey.

Blood!

Running red and strong down the Nile.

Plague!

Darkness three days long, hail to fire.

This stanza initiates the plagues, the first of which was the Nile turning to blood. That sequence from the movie is particularly iconic. Despite the stench and the lack of potable water, the blood did not sway Pharaoh.  Neither did frogs, lice, flies, a livestock pandemic, a human pandemic of boils, hail, locusts, and finally three days of night. With each successive plague the pressure on Egyptian society and also on Pharaoh ratchets up, and several times he agrees to free the Israelites only to change his mind. The plague of night is especially significant, as it signifies the defeat of the heliocentric religion of the Egyptians, namely Ra, the sun-god. After this plague, Moses is threatened with execution if he appears before Pharaoh again. The relentless, smoking pace of Kirk Hammett’s solo through this part of the story builds tension for the moment of truth – when the negotiating phase of the story, and the song itself, break down into a horrible, final conclusion for Egypt.

The interlude of the song transitions back to the plodding tempo, and is actually an excerpt from another song, by Hammett’s former band, called “Die by the Sword.” That band’s name? Exodus.

Die!

By my hand, I creep across the land,

Killing firstborn man.

This is a great moment in Metallica’s live shows as well, as the crowd emphasizes the foreboding tempo by chanting “Die! Die! Die! Die!” on the halfnote as the lyrics are sung. This point in the song signifies the advent of the Angel of Death, the final plague against Egypt after the first nine don’t have the desired impact. In the clip you can feel the sense of dread building as Lars plays a toms-only beat and the Israelites smear the blood of sacrificed lambs on their doorways while the crowd chants “Die!” The Angel of Death, now narrating the song again, appears in the film as a sinuous green effervescence, seemingly appearing as a withered hand clinching around the moon and then stretching out its fingers to deal death among the Egyptians, reiterated by the line “Die! by my hand.”

When the interlude section ends, the tempo shifts back and the frenetic riff begins again. Now, the Angel of Death is doing its work. 

I!

Rule the midnight air. The destroyer.

Born!

I shall soon be there – deadly mass.

I!

Creep the steps and floor, final darkness

Blood!

Lamb’s blood painted door, I shall pass.

The Angel of Death, now triumphant, announces its coming to Egypt. In the film, a mist oozes in through the windows and doors into the homes of Egyptians and of Pharaoh. This stanza also introduces the literal concept of the “passover,” in which the Angel spares the Israelites from the fate of their masters because of the sacrifice they had made to God. As the clip ends, the riff transitions back into the half-time, dread-inducing sequence that began the song. As Pharaoh’s wife carries their dead son to him, her footsteps fall on the beat. When Pharaoh takes up his body to lay him on the idol of Anubis in futility, he walks off-screen even more slowly, his footsteps again falling on the beat as the song enters its final ritard.

So there’s your guide to the biblical Exodus and the movie The Ten Commandments, all packaged conveniently in some ass-kicking, high voltage heavy metal. I should note that this song is but one of a family of outstanding metal songs about the Angel of Death, including Slayer’s “Angel of Death” (which is actually about Josef Mengele) and Thin Lizzy’s “Angel of Death” (which is actually about Nostradamus). Happy Easter/Passover!

SO LET IT BE WRITTEN – SO LET IT BE DONE.

***Update: as of this morning, Financial Times is reporting that the Arab League intends to approve a potential UN-backed no fly zone over Libya. This is a big step toward making it a reality.***

The situation in North Africa and the Middle East defies simple explanation.  Much has been made of the role of technology in aiding popular unrest – Wikileaks may now have a serious competitor for the Nobel Peace Prize in Twitter.  Not exactly surprising when you remember that I, Jesse, was TIME’s Man of the Year in 2006.  It looks like the internet does have some role to play in democratic struggle these days, mainly in that it makes it nearly impossible to conceal atrocities from the international audience.  But, just like any other revolutionary tool from newsprint to guns, it only works as far as the state apparatus fails to control it: see Iran and China.  Furthermore, even publicizing atrocities doesn’t inherently lead to action, nor is it a particularly new phenomenon.  Just weeks ago my students were reading a book called King Leopold’s Ghost in which one our main discussion points was “why did the international community apparently ignore the accounts of brutality coming from the Congo?”  The main reasons: a cocktail of racism, skepticism, apathy, and artificial feelings of helplessness – are quite historically durable and stifle action whether it’s prompted by an article in The Times or 140 characters from @thatoppressedguy.  #iamslain[exeunt].

But enough on the internet and revolutionary theory, before I start ranting on the irrational comparisons between Middle Eastern events and various American/First-World political causes.  What I want to discuss specifically is the international hand-wringing over Libya and the reasons for it.  Some of the difficulty Westerners have had with these conflagrations is a failure to properly appraise the autocrats that are being challenged, for instance, the Obama administration’s somewhat naïve failure to realize that Hosni Mubarak was old, politically weak, and potentially unstable.  None of us has such an excuse for Muammar Qaddafi.  (Quick aside: the media’s inability to agree to a standard spelling for Qaddafi is infuriating, and reminds me of 2002’s “al-Qaeda/al-Kaeda/al-Qaida” shenanigans.  See an excellent piece by Economist language blogger “Johnson” here).  As the great Dennis Green said, “Qaddafi is who we thought he was.”  Sure, you might say that the West has softened on Qaddafi in the past couple decades, lifting sanctions, encouraging his participation in international institutions, and what have you, but this is bold-faced realpolitik.  As I touched on when I wrote about the Lockerbie debacle in Britain (in which I was part of the problem by using the more demotic “Gaddafi”…hey, in the end I always prefer uvular consonants), Libya’s oil and potential to help in curtailing terrorism made it expedient to work with Qaddafi regardless of his past or treatment of his people.  Especially when he was pumping money into institutions ranging from the LSE to Usher.

No one seems to be able to agree on what to do about Libya.  Western leaders like Barack Obama and David Cameron were quick to announce that Qaddafi should relinquish power – partly because they were learning from Egypt and partly because they, again, already had informed opinions about him.  Just how far to get involved in his ouster, though, is another question entirely.  Reports at the time of writing are suggesting that Qaddafi is gaining the upper hand in the conflict and will most likely win out against the rebels.  If he’s such a bad guy and his ouster is such a no-brainer, why don’t we take his ass down while international opinion and pressing humanitarian need are on our side?

Behind Door #1…

The international community has three main options for dealing with Qaddafi.  Let’s take a look at some of their pros and cons and the likelihood they will happen.

1. Sanctions/Asset Freezes, a.k.a. “Do Nothing”:  This is, at present, the de-facto position of the EU and US.  Cutting off Libya’s resources in theory should curtail its ability to wage war for long periods of time, but there is speculation that Qaddafi has so much cash stockpiled at home that he can afford to carry on paying the African mercs that are currently doing most of his fighting for months.  The advantage of uber-caution is that it minimizes some of the uncertainties of the Qaddafi problem.  Could international forces be drawn into a costly and protracted “peacekeeping” mission in Libya?  Could supporting the rebels fail anyway and result in a triumphant Qaddafi with newfound support from his people, galvanized by foreign intervention?  Could supporting the rebels succeed, but result in a new regime more violent than Qaddafi and armed with free weapons, or a new regime that imposes repressive Islamism?  We don’t know enough about the Libyan opposition to rule those scenarios out.  Doing nothing allows us to avoid them altogether.
2. No-Fly Zone:  This has been the most likely next step discussed.  On the surface it amounts to an ultimatum that any unauthorized (read: Qaddafi-aligned) aircraft in Libyan airspace will be shot out of the sky.  The idea is to remove Qaddafi’s ability to inflict mass-destruction on his own people by neutralizing his air force.  This seems pretty straightforward, but it’s far more complicated than it sounds, as we’ll see.  Specifically, enforcing one under present circumstances would require the enforcing party (most likely NATO) to cooperatively use airfields in Egypt and Tatooine Tunisia.  That was the sound of a can of worms opening.  It requires aggressive monitoring to recon anything in Libyan airspace and determine whether it’s permitted to be there.  Then, it requires a carefully-crafted rules of engagement system.  If Libyan rockets shoot down American planes as they enforce the no-fly zone, are we now at war with Libya?  The lines begin to blur.  White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley accused proponents of a no-fly zone of thinking about it like it’s “a video game or something.”
3. Full-Scale Invasion:  This is highly unlikely, but the all-time, best-case, pie-in-the-sky scenario would look something like the following: The UN Security Council, Arab League, and African Union pass resolutions condoning international invasion to stop Qaddafi from mass-murdering Libyans.  A NATO-dominated force with lots of French troops storms Libya using the bases and support of friendly Arab neighboring states.  Qaddafi is captured immediately (not like Saddam or, *gulp* Bin Laden), and hauled off to The Hague where he is convicted of war crimes and sentenced to life in prison (no uncomfortable cell phone vids of a hanging).  Meanwhile, the coalition hands over power to a waiting group of Libyan secular democrats who have the support of the Libyan rebel militias.  The new government/military organizes elections, and the foreign troops roll out.  Mission accomplished.  If only regime change was that easy.  Suffice to say circumstances would have to change drastically for this option to become viable – the risk of blood and treasure is too great.

“Pop had Genco, look what I got.”

Sonny Corleone’s repeated whining about not having a “wartime consiglieri” in Tom Hagen epitomized his act-first, think-later approach to leadership.  Here are some of the myriad factors that are putting the brakes on action in Libya.  “Just consider this…”

• Overlapping systems of legitimacy:  In the postwar world, military action by responsible nations has to take place within the framework of a complicated system of international law.  The United Nations, the European Union (insofar as it acts as a coherent unit in international affairs), and NATO to name a few, all have procedural hurdles that must be crossed before intervention can take place, and when you consider the decisions of individual states, you end up with difficult and sometimes contradictory policy choices.  For instance, if the United States wants to invade Libya, it has to decide whether it means to do so solely of its own volition (that is, unilaterally), with the approval of NATO Supreme Command, with an ad-hoc coalition of several nations or treaty-blocs (as Iraq/Afghanistan), or with the approval of the UN Security Council.  Making that decision and then putting it into practice is, for better or worse, slow as molasses.  Add to this that approvals from the essentially toothless but symbolically important Arab League and African Union are seen as necessary for any international intervention to occur.
• Political opposition:  On the international level, states with an interest in hosing Mr. Qaddafi are running into opposition from states with some kind of interest in letting Libya be.  For NATO, member-state Turkey isn’t interested in having more Western-led regime change in its neck of the woods, especially when Recep Tayyip Erdogan is busy crafting a “Greater Turkey” and what he hopes will be a resurrection of the Ottoman sphere-of-influence in southeast Europe and northeast Africa.  Despite hawkish NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen (whose appointment Turkey opposed) trying to keep NATO’s options open, Erdogan called the alliance’s intervention “unthinkable.”  Meanwhile, at the UN level, a Security Council resolution on a no-fly zone seems impossible due to the likes of Russia and China, who are rejecting such prospects for a variety of reasons that include an historic duty to thwart the West whenever possible.
• Overstretch:  There isn’t a hell of a lot of excess military power to go around in the liberal democratic world right now, because most of it is already tied up.  While expected first-responders Britain and the United States are still furiously treading water in Iraq and Afghanistan, other states are either unwilling or incapable of action.  Moving forces into the southern Mediterranean to prepare for possible action in Libya has exposed another volatile security front: piracy in the Indian Ocean.  If you didn’t realize that this was a serious security issue, consider this incident in which 4 Americans were murdered, this incident in which a Danish family was taken hostage by pirates, who killed five soldiers in a botched rescue attempt and may yet execute the Danes, and this incident in which the vessel Maersk Alabama, already famous for being rescued from pirates in a badass Navy SEALs operation, was attacked again.  All within the last couple of weeks.  At present, security off the Somali coast depends mostly on the willing but similarly underprepared Indians.  It’s a fucking problem.
• The Economy:  The blowback from the global recession is putting its mark on this.  In the short term, Libya’s share of the global oil market has been threatened by the turmoil, causing price shocks.  Despite the fact that Libya’s market share is only 2%, it’s really only poor, poor Ireland and karma-stricken Italy that are being hit by decreased production.  The Saudis can make up the deficit, but that hasn’t stopped price rises and market anxiety, causing Obama to consider tapping the United States’ strategic oil reserve.  Don’t forget that more expensive oil makes it more expensive to carry out military maneuvers.  Taking a longer view, sovereign debt crises have caused most states to decrease military spending in the past two years.  This may sound superficial, but it’s had very real consequences for battle-ready Britain and France.  Last November, the Old Enemies agreed to a cost-saving defense pact that involves sharing aircraft carriers, satellite defense networks, nuclear technology, and a 10,000-strong joint expeditionary force (WWI, anyone?).  The broader implications are that Britain could ease strain on the Exchequer by halting production on two planned aircraft carriers.  It is supremely ironic and historically depressing for the British that not only do they cease to rule the waves, but the waves they do happen to rule are only ruled in joint cooperation with hated France.  Given Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ warning that a no-fly zone would require more jets than a single aircraft carrier could carry and Britain’s comically botched evac of its nationals from Libya, those unbuilt ships look pretty tasty right now.  Now I should qualify: those scrapped aircraft carriers would not have been ready by now, and you don’t evac civilians on Harrier jets, as Foreign Secretary William Hague rightly pointed out in the Commons on Wednesday, but the issues are interrelated nonetheless – financial constraints have reduced the West’s capability to carry out abrupt and complicated maneuvers in foreign areas.  With more money diverted domestically, the gaps in international security are multiplying.
• Fear:  To those states involved in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even those that aren’t, the overwhelming priority is to not repeat the same mistakes.  What Reagan called “Vietnam Syndrome” – the fear of botching military operations – has taken hold in Washington.  Consider our willingness to bomb the shit out of Libya in 1986 in response to a German nightclub attack, or Clinton’s willingness to lead NATO strikes in the Balkans throughout the late 90s: looking back to Desert Storm, we were self-assured in our ability to carry out such operations.  Not so much these days.
• Strategic Incoherence:  I’ll stop short of Niall Ferguson’s brute force attack on the Obama administration’s inability to strategize (though I will admit chortling at how thoroughly he facializes the crew of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in this clip), but it’s safe to say that like many other issues, and very unlike George W. Bush, Obama has yet to tell the American people what his policy is regarding democracy and state sovereignty.  Since the crises in the Middle East kicked into high gear, the President and Hillary Clinton have seemingly been invisible to each other, judging by the fact that they give conflicting information day to day about America’s stance, especially on Egypt.  Obama’s all-too-recent speech in Cairo reflects a deeper-seated lack of strategic foresight.  Are we going to support the forces of democracy no matter what the political (and even human) costs are?  Will we opt instead for stability, and engage with autocrats in the hope that it will save larger bloodshed and disruption?  At present, no one knows.  If tension rises in Saudi Arabia, this question will get much worse because of our far-greater strategic dependence on their oil and military.  Speaking of worse, strategic incoherence is a worse problem for Britain.  Their odd-couple alliance with France has produced some unexpected developments.  See, Nicholas Sarkozy is most certainly NOT le tired…more like “shit guys…fire our shit!” While the Chunnel Coalition has taken the most aggressive line in the EU, urging a no-fly zone and a nothing-off-the-table approach, Sarkozy is outright calling for air strikes on Qaddafi’s assets and the arming of Libyan rebels, whom he has diplomatically recognized.  We’ve come a long way since renaming Freedom Fries.  David Cameron is now in the awkward position of trying to coax along a hesitant EU, reign in an aggressive France, understand the unclear and reluctant intentions of its “Special” ally the United States, all without breaking Britain’s already perilously stretched resources.  Keep calm and carry on, Prime Minister.

Muammar Qaddafi has a decades-long track record of being a douchebag.  His most recent slap in the face to the international community over Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was just the most recent chapter.  It remains to be seen what he’s capable of within Libya, and how much more of his antics the international community will tolerate, especially if he manages to militarily crush his opposition, as some expect.  If that happens, we may be having this conversation again sometime in the future.  Like the Black Knight, Qaddafi’s had worse.