Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayitsworldwouldfallapart

"If tomorrow the Vietnamese are communists, they will be Vietnamese communists! And this is something you never understood, you Americans."
Hubert de Marais, Apocalypse Now Redux (1979)

Defaced Great Seal of the United States, Wikipedia, 2004

This year marked the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, and also the 40th anniversary of the capitulation of South Vietnam. A scant thirty year period in which the United States of America went from being unstoppable in the Western hemisphere to crumbling world power. The Vietnam debacle was one of a string of events (the energy crisis, Watergate, stagflation, etc) in the lead up to the US Bicentennial celebrations that put America on much the same stagnant footing as the Soviet Union under Brezhnev. The only reason history is more interested in the Soviet experience is because that state did eventually fall, and in doing so left the US placed for assuming the role of hyperpower. Explaining the decline of American power in the second half of the 20th Century is critically linked to the tumultuous years in South-East Asia.

Palace Posy

Fourteen months later I finally follow-up on my short review of Threads with the promised discussion on the Cold War. This seems as good a time as any; it recently being the 70th anniversary of the nuclear attacks on Japan, and, therefore concurrently, the 10th anniversary of this blog. A good way to mark a decade of blogging might be to write something on the blog for the first time in months.

Cuevas de las Manos, Wikipedia, 2005

Threads depicts the almost total obliteration of a functioning state - it really was the end. The Day After (the American analogue, produced in the same era) on the other hand seems very tame, and deliberately so. It even includes a Presidential address, coming across on the radio without any hint of interference, which clearly indicates that for all the immense damage incurred the federal government appears to be intact - the future possibility of the cessation of existence of the USA like every other power in history being inconceivable to the majority of the citizenry (in my experience) and so probably too much for the casual public to swallow alongside their TV movie of the week popcorn. The softer depiction is of course the result of network pressure (can't keep the proles down if you make them start to think, after all), but it raises a serious problem in the logic of nuclear strategy: it almost implies nuclear war is winnable. The title is supposed to make you think about what happens after both sides' missiles have flown. By depicting what looks like a survivable exchange, it then begs the question what will the day after the day after be like.

Frigid Spring

El juicio de Paris, Enrique de Simonet, 1904

It's a title that works on so many levels. After writing the longest string of words I've ever put together, well beyond my Buffy retrospective and edging out my criticism of Star Trek Into Damnation, part one of my Scarlett Johansson indulgence left me a bit listless. And more than a little irritated that the review's been on the front page for exactly two months and garnered precisely one view - I feel like Rivers Cuomo after Pinkerton, which I haven't heard, or Bill Murray after The Razor's Edge, which I haven't seen. Er, point made. Having readers might help. All I need is a little discourage, or perhaps as with Donnie Darko over a decade ago I'm waiting for other people to discover it so that I can refresh the tree of smugness with the blood of latecomers. I haven't been as single-minded about a film since I saw Battle Royale - I've got the Under The Skin soundtrack on vinyl, a promo ad cut out of The Guardian I read on the day I saw it, and my DVD pre-order date stamped over a month ago. Despite that, I'm still far more restrained than the individual on IMDB who declared of Ms Johansson that he would happily "drink her bathwater". People like that make fans look like obsessives and ruin my chances of ever having children with her. It's spring after all - a time of fertility and flourishing of the quick.

Music: Response

Some favourites, me on flickr

It's been a bit of a paradox that I'm most productive on this blog when I'm not having the best time at work. 2008 and 2009 were the lowest points in my time blogging when I was close to ditching it even though I had so much spare time from finishing work early from the latter half of 08. I got moved in 2010 to a much more physically challenging duty and yet turned the blog right around with a prolonged burst of activity. Now I'm back to being shafted and yet I've let the blog slide for the past month. Truth is, I've been busy in another medium. I usually think of writing as my hobby, and the various other interests I have more as on-off projects which wax and wane in my focus. I'm sure they're all tied together as creative outlets, probably all stemming from my love of building with Lego many many years ago. I mean, it's easy to use a hammer to wreck things, but wasn't there underlying symbolism in Jesus being a carpenter? Amongst the projects on the go are occasional dips into programming (or scripting, strictly); and, of course, my long-running conlang efforts which comes and goes depending on how much I've exhausted myself in completing some aspect. So as I mentioned in my end of year post, I've dipped into making music in the past two months.

Wake Up Maggie, I Think I've Got Something to Say to You

(C) Agence France-Presse

Originally I was going to write back in April about Margaret Thatcher on account of her recent cessation of life, but the saturation of media coverage covered most of what could be said. I put the post back to November and planned to use some of the non-domestic events of her premiership as jumping off points for some discussion. That schedule slipped as per the pattern of neglecting to write when work is easy, so here I am in the midst of the Christmas workload (you know, that company that even Thatcher wouldn't privatise) writing two posts back to back. Fortuitously (and this is going to sound terrible), Nelson Mandela died last week. Perhaps this is a good time to follow on from my comparison of Zimbabwe and South Africa, Mugabe and Mandela.

The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

Police and Thieves

GTA San Andreas, promo artwork, 2004

It would be hard not to notice the landing of a new instalment of Grand Theft Auto if only because the media becomes saturated with moral panic articles on each launch. Not that this bothers Rockstar or Take 2 Interactive who make millions either way. As they say, any publicity is good publicity and it all feeds into the hype. However, in this day and age of aggressive promotion of entertainment products in which the first act of the script of an upcoming episode of an animated show is read by the voice artists at Comic-con and blockbuster films have almost year long mysterious viral marketing campaigns to engage fans, sometimes the meal is overcooked (see Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises, et al). The first trailer for GTA V was released way back in November 2011 - almost two years before release - and since then we've been drip fed screenshots and cryptic twitter feeds with the expectation that the pressure will have risen so much that people will necessarily cream their pants the moment they so much as touch their copy. It might sound like I'm setting up for a scathing review. That is not the case - let's just not pretend this is the perfect game. Spoilers follow.

Threnody

US poster, public domain, 1945

But you must remember there was never a war when crimes weren't committed, and there never will be.
-Rochus Misch

All too often alternative history fiction revolves around the concept of the Axis forces winning the Second World War. Robert Harris' Fatherland used it as the setting for an Orwellian murder-mystery, yet it's largely a cliché of the genre. Likely because alternative history often hinges on decisive military actions, and the most over-used conflict in popular media is the centrepiece struggle of the 20th century against the unambiguously evil enemy in the form of the Nazis. Germany is made to bear the responsibility alone while the other axis members are often overlooked (especially any other than the following two); the armed forces of Fascist Italy are always seen as something of a joke, and Imperial Japan's conduct of the war was downplayed with the emergence of the Cold War and maintained with its rise as an economic superpower. Japan was, however, the scene of the spectacular conclusion of the conflict. You need only mention the cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki - I don't even need to implicitly state what happened in 1945. As someone who has dabbled in alternative history, it's struck me for a number of years that far more interesting than a world in which the axis triumphed would be a history like our own where they were defeated, with the key exception that nuclear weapons were not available and the invasion of Japan was necessitated. The debate about the use of those weapons started before they were even dropped, and for me it's a subject that I've wished to write about since the very first post on this blog.

The Drift of Air

DeLorean DMC-12, foshie, 2007

Is there anything I haven't said about Gran Turismo 5 yet? I know it's an open-ended game, but you'd think with the impending arrival of the sixth instalment of the series I wouldn't be approaching ten thousand words about playing this game. It has been six months, though, since I last waffled on about activities prolonging my interest in the game beyond the core of beating A-Spec mode. I've gone through several phases of losing interest only to buy a new car and bring life back into using the wheel and pedals: I didn't play much after beating the 24 Hours of Le Mans until I dabbled with muscle cars last November and continued along with the novelty of the wheel and pedals, then designing eight custom tracks. After that, GT5 lost out to other concerns for a number of weeks. My interest came round again when I decided to try out some rides amongst Gran Turismo's copious garages. Perhaps you can guess.

We Broke Free

Still going strong, Jez Page, 2010

Jack: Well, we're here. We're sitting on the most perfect beach in the world, and all we can think about is-...
Angela: "Where I can hook up my modem?"
-The Net, 1995

I hate phones. I've long disliked taking phone calls, particularly from relatives in the US because of that slight audio delay stepping on everyone's cues. Around the turn of the millennium everyone in school started getting mobile phones. Call me a contrarian and, paradoxically, I'll agree. Amongst those age-groups and in that time, the phones were status symbols and displays of affluence. I've always eschewed those things - for example, I don't wear any type of jewellery. Just before I finished school I went out with friends for an entire day and didn't come home till 1am. My parents threatened to buy me a phone which I vehemently refused. There is nothing I find more annoying than having to drop what I'm doing to answer the home landline, except maybe people paying more attention to an incoming message on their phone than my half of the conversation. I like remaining un-contactable. Here comes the however. However, when I was down in London last year I was away from my desktop computer for four and a half days. I had to rely on that other thing I hate, television, to remain informed about events and it never asked 'Would you like to know more?'.

Rapid Racer

The Duel: Test Drive II, 1989

After I finished the Le Mans 24 Hours in May I considered Gran Turismo 5 done and dusted. When I picked it back up in November last year I started messing around in arcade mode trying out different handicaps. Traction control and anti-lock braking are driving aids and are supposed to be disabled eventually like training wheels, but the majority of players seem to race with them enabled - disabling them, especially online, effectively make them handicaps. This wasn't enough to perpetuate the novelty and once I received the G27 racing wheel I had to learn how to use a clutch and H-pattern gearbox. I mastered that quickly and moved onto heel-toe shifting which, again in time, I mastered. I ditched racing tyres for slippery sports tyres when driving street cars and adjusted to that. Everything can be adapted to. You could argue the Ferrari F40 in all its jolting twitchy instability is a car that could be tamed in a way. While you can certainly learn the F40's behaviour and catch the back drifting out before spinning, it can never become a boring car. It can be frustrating. I quit the Nürburgring 4 Hours last year because it was just too demanding to constantly reign it in on the Nordschleife while trying to create a lead over the second place runner. You have to be hyper-vigilant on a roller-coaster track that sends it in any combination of directions and that's why making it through a lap is rewarding. It's a shame the F40's rival, the Porsche 959, is contractually absent along with the rest of the Porsche stable. It's also a shame the 911 GT1 isn't able to go up against the CLK-GTR, but then they never made a classic game about those two. The Nordschleife, too, is just another sequence of turns you can memorise given enough practice. Hence I've been delving into the Course Maker again to produce another four circuits. I still vacillate between desiring high-speed straight and narrow tracks and twisty rural roads of the variety that might have been seen in Test Drive II. I realise describing corners can be repetitive given the limited vocabulary which is why I've been thinking about buying a video capture device so I can upload the best lap replays to YouTube. It certainly would help interested downloaders to see them in action, or rather to see them as the scene of the action.

The Glass Road

DUNLOP Corner Le mans Sarthe, julien.reboulet, 2011

It's been years since I watched Formula One. I stumbled across it at the age of nine one Sunday morning and saw Martin Brundle do a barrel-roll at the start of the 1996 Australian Grand Prix. From then on I tuned in every race weekend supporting Damon Hill's championship run against the evil Darth Vader Michael Schumacher, even getting up at 5am for final race in Japan. I stayed with the sport through to about 2002 when my interest waned concurrent with Schumacher's domination. Contrast that with my favourite season of 1999 when Schumacher was absent with injury for several months and it looked like (almost) anyone could win - even the scrappy underdogs, Jordan. I was rooting for Heinz-Harald Frentzen that year. The era was also the last days of the privateer teams before they were all seemingly bought up by factory teams, or at least their grid spots were to avoid the costly registration process with the FIA (hence, Tyrrell became BAR became Honda became Brawn GP became Mercedes GP within the space of twelve years). Of the private teams, only McLaren and Williams have survived largely because Mercedes and BMW, respectively, turned them into semi-factory teams in the recent past. Interestingly, 1999 was also the year of the first Malaysian Grand Prix at the Sepang International Circuit designed by one Herman Tilke.

Martinis, Girls, and Guns

SIS (MI6) Building, radim99, 2007

It seems these days that blockbusters don't just sink or swim anymore, but get stuck in a critical limbo. This year alone there have been three films that come to mind that have had mixed reception: (the pretentious and insubstantial) Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises, and most recently Skyfall. I cannot discuss the new Bond film without first covering a little bit of (personal) history of the series. A little bit, or maybe seven hundred words...

Risky Ride

Peugeot 908 on Ligne Droite des Hunaudières

Last summer I was busy catching up with Gran Turismo 4 and wrote that the endurance races offered there represented the apex of the racing simulation. Well now I've caught up to Gran Turismo 5 and there's a new apex. I'd actually been waiting for the price to drop but the PS3 was sitting idle for weeks at a time and I had a week off coming up, so I decided £15 wasn't really that much - the original GT cost me (read, parents) £40.

A Design For Life / The Messerschmitt Twins

Electron micrograph of Bacteriophages, Public Domain

Today is exactly a decade since I finished my first play of Metal Gear Solid 2. Or it would have been if I had finished this for the 17th of March.

To begin with, we're not quite what you'd call human.

Back in the 90s I had a lot of shareware and (unbeknownst to me) pirated games. When the PS/1 was replaced with an Aptiva in 1998, I set about porting my stuff via floppy disk. The instant A Drive engaged the screen cut to a blue and red DOS prompt warning me that a virus had been detected. To put it mildly, this was not the most encouraging thing to happen with the brand new computer, as I had a legacy of breaking the old one. This was my first experience with an anti-virus programme and I had never even considered that all those dodgy floppies might be riddled with anything other than the files I put on it. The particular viruses that were detected by Norton (of cross-armed fame) are long forgotten, but in the following years I was captivated by the idea that there's something almost alive in the digital world - unseen technological analogues to our organic processes.

The Street Parade (Rock The Casbah)

PART ONE OF A SERIES.

President John F. Kennedy, The COM Library, 2009

Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793, but regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty for ever.
- Albert Camus, The Rebel, 1951

2011 was by all accounts the most unpredictable year since 1989. A revolutionary wave began sweeping away the Western puppets, just as the Eastern Europeans sent the Soviet puppets to the ash-heap of history. Stability for stability's sake was once the mantra that subjugated the Middle East until the suicide of one man seemingly instigated what neither international free trade nor exiles or internal opposition could persuade. I originally intended to examine the preconditions of these revolutions, but that continues to be a work in progress if not a mystery for future historians. What I have noted, however, is that this wave that has rippled through the Middle East, and other regions to varying degrees, has for the most part been leaderless. When I last wrote a political post in November 2010, the eve of events in Tunisia, I specifically rejected cadres as essential or desirable to revolution. The absence of commanding individuals in Tahrir Square or elsewhere appears to have shown spontaneous and leaderless movements are possible - though the effectiveness of these versus the militarised rebellion in Libya or Syria is yet to be settled.

Ask (GA-Slag FAQ)

Two years ago in the GA-Slag Retrospective I wrote about the genesis and development of said site. In this second background feature I've collected some questions about the GA-Slag, addressed some issues, and provided a little background to events depicted in prominent editions.

You Won't Have to Follow Me, Only You Can Set You Free

PART TWO OF A PROLOGUE TO A SERIES.

Nelson Mandela, Frames-of-Mind, 2007

The Marxism essay for politics class was a by-the-numbers 'name the core aspects of theory-x' test like most class assignments. There were a few reasons I bothered to finish and hand in that particular essay - setting it apart from all the others due at the same time. I really enjoyed the politics class - the lecturer, the free flow of the classes (compare the rigidly planned psychology class, which I hated) and the subject matter.

The essay was also an opportunity to coherently express my knowledge and ideas on the subject and perhaps gain a greater understanding through arranging it on paper. Though discussing Leninism and identifying the Russian Revolution as a keystone event of the movement were explicit requirements of the essay, I can't recall whether determining an initial cause for the eventual failure of the Soviet Union was part or something I threw in to show off. Based on the conclusion I reached, that the implementation and continuation of War Communism undermined the revolution's own internal support and led to increased centralisation of power, I wonder whether the latter was true. Having stated that Imperial Russia was still a largely feudal state, only to then dismiss the idea that this was why the Soviet Union could not make the transition to socialism by leap-frogging the capitalist epoch, I perhaps wrote myself into a corner and then wrote back out of it in order to increase the word count. The essay also got a straight A!

I'll Wonder Why We Didn't Try To Do or Die

Porsche Carrera Che Guevara, f650biker, 2008

As Royal Mail heads toward becoming another target of the new depression, I recall where I was when it became apparent we wouldn't be able to afford the future. Funnily enough, I was out on delivery with my pocket radio listening to the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2. The big news of the week was the ongoing collapse of Northern Rock and the bank runs on their highstreet branches - something out of the past and decidedly out of the ordinary.

However, plenty saw it coming. It was just a matter of time before another big crash. What market goes up must come down. The good times do not continue forever, yet something like the fact that infinite economic growth is impossible is met with Wealth of Nations being thrown at you - as if Adam Smith was a proponent of magic. There are only so many resources on this planet and only so much of them.

Foreign 9: Trans-Europe Express

It happened again. The restaurant last night played an excellent Greek pop/rock song, somewhat reminiscent of indie-Natalie Imbruglia, and I have no idea what it was called. Last time that happened I was in the duty-free shop in the airport on Gran Canaria and they kept playing this catchy song. A few months later Las Ketchup topped the charts across Europe. I can only hope the same happens again. I'll recognise it if that happens, but until such a time I'll keep almost remembering how the chorus goes.