Is it so hard to understand why CT Rep. Joe Courtney is upset by this misrepresentation in LINCOLN?

Democrat Joe Courtney has represented CT's 2nd CD since 2007.

"I'll stick to my nice safe snakepit in Washington."

-- Rep. Joe Courtney (D-CT), reflecting on his
accidental immersion in the politics of Hollywood

by Ken

Here's another one for the "You Don't Know Whether to Laugh or Cry" file.

[Connecticut Dem Rep. Joe] Courtney told us Monday he was captivated by the movie until it came to that moment: How, he wondered, could a Connecticut congressman have voted that way? “Our state abolished slavery completely in 1848. Children of slaves were emancipated by 1784,” he said. “The Harriet Beecher Stowe house in Hartford is a shrine in Connecticut history.” Courtney checked and discovered that the movie was wrong: In fact, all four of the Nutmeg State’s delegates voted for the 13th amendment.

-- from WaPo's Reliable Source report, "Rep. Joe Courtney gets lesson in Oscar politics in debate over 'Lincoln" accuracy"

Let's back up a bit. Here's the start of the Reliable Source report (links onsite):

Rep. Joe Courtney says he had no idea he was wading into controversy when he questioned the accuracy of a key scene in “Lincoln.”

After all, he knows Washington politics, not Hollywood politics.

Last week, the Connecticut Democrat called on Steven Spielberg to “correct an historical inaccuracy” in the Oscar-nominated box-office hit -- a scene, at the film's climax, suggesting that two of his state's three representatives voted against outlawing slavery in 1865.

[Here's the Wall Street Journal's account. -- Ed.]

Then follows the paragraph I quoted at the top of this post. I don't know about you, but I really do get why Representative Courtney reacted the way he did, especially after he checked his assumption that the detail in the film couldn't be right and, no doubt much relieved, found that he was right. History matters, and relative to a lot of these United States, Connecticut has an OK record on the slavery question. Sure, the fact that it was legal until 1848 is nothing to brag about, but it counts for something that this blight had been corrected by 1848, when the Civil War was just a dark cloud on the distant horizon.

However, as the Reliable Source report notes, the congressman's grounding in DC politics didn't in any way prepare him for the political minefield he apparently inadvertently stepped into. If you or I were to write a letter to Steven Spielberg, that would be one thing. (Actually, it would probably be nothing, but never mind.) When a U.S. congressman writes a letter, though, well, it sets thoughtful -- or perhaps cuckoo -- minds a-thinking.

The timing of Courtney’s letter, three months after the movie’s release, set off alarms in showbiz circles: Ballots had just gone out to Oscar voters. Was the congressman trying to influence the Academy Awards in favor of another contender?

Don’t laugh: Oscar campaigns can be as multilayered and dirty as political races, with producers pushing whisper campaigns against rival films to complement the glowing ads and charming talk-show spots for their own. Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists noted, Courtney had a debt to Ben Affleck, whose “Argo” is up against “Lincoln” for Best Picture: The star briefly campaigned for him in his extremely close 2006 race.

Ah, so Representative Courtney is presumed to have been feigning concern about his state's reputation as part of a conspiracy to do his benefactor Ben Affleck a solid. Well, sure, look at the timing. The movie has been out for three months, and only now, during this cesspool of dirty dealing that is Oscar voting, has he piped up with his complaint. Here's the Reliable Source again:

Courtney has a simple explanation for why he dropped his bomb on "Lincoln" last week: He only just saw the movie.

"Between the campaign and the lame-duck session it was impossible to get out to see some movies," he told us. A week ago Saturday, he and his wife finally had a night off and found it playing at a second-run theater.

Naturally, Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner has answers too.

A couple days after Courtney raised his objections, screenwriter Tony Kushner acknowledged that he tweaked the scene -- not to defame Connecticut, but to highlight “the historical reality” that the vote indeed was very close -- and chided the congressman for taking it so literally. “I hope nobody is shocked to learn that I also made up dialogue and imagined encounters and invented characters,” he added in a letter reprinted by the Wall Street Journal.

This is one of the reasons I'm always uneasy when the line between nonfiction and fiction is blurred. It becomes OK to highlight historical reality by means of untruths.

“I get it,” Courtney told us. “Screenwriters are not obligated to present a documentary. But to me, the vote is so significant. . . And this will be a movie like ‘Schindler’s List,’ like ‘Amistad,’ that is going to be a teaching tool, and Spielberg is clearly creating this movie for this purpose.” (Courtney’s crusade played well back home in Connecticut, judging from a number of grateful.newspaper editorials.)

I suppose viewers of the movie know that they're not seeing a documentary. But amid all the pretensions to historical accuracy, do those viewers have any idea what in the movie is true and what isn't? Will non-Connecticut moviegoers have any reason to question the apparent "reality" that even from a state as anti-slavery by the outbreak of the Civil War as Connecticut, two-thirds of its congressmen voted against the 13th Amendment?

Sorry, but for me, it's just a little too convenient a piece of historical rewriting to stretch today's over-honored "two sides to every argument" proposition to an issue on which, at least in this case, there weren't two sides. I don't have any trouble getting why the congressman reacted the way he did.

I suppose there is something to be said for the idea that a congressman has to be careful about what he attaches his official standing to. After all, if, say, Mrs. Courtney had written the same letter on her personal stationery from her home address in Connecticut, nobody would have heard about it.

But that's the thing too: Nobody would have heard about it.

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Who's Worse, Fernando Wood Or Joe Crowley-- 2 Of The Worst NYC Democrats In History? Or Grover Norquist?

I'll never know, of course, but I doubt history will contradict me when I say there hasn't been an authentically "great" president in my lifetime. (I haven't given up hope, though, and I'm counting on Elizabeth Warren.) Since I was born, there have just been a series of mediocrities, some worse than others, like the two incredibly awful Bushes, not to mention the utterly clueless Ronald Reagan, all three happy to serve the breathtakingly selfish financial interests of the plutocracy. In retrospect-- severe retrospect-- I'd have to guess the best president we had since I was born was the first, Dwight Eisenhower-- and he wasn't someone beloved in my parents' household. In light of what's come since, he seems like a real paragon of civic virtue.

Saturday I went to see the new film Lincoln and I heartily recommend everyone go see it. All the villains in the film are Democrats-- and, starting with Tammany boss/New York City ex-mayor and Congressman Fernando Wood, villains is a polite way to describe them. Wood wasn't just a racist, he actually tried getting the City Council to secede from the Union during the Civil War. The good guys were the Republicans, particularly Pennsylvania Rep. Thaddeus Stevens, the father of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, which ended slavery, extended equal protection to all citizens, and granted all male citizens the right to vote. Today his old district is represented by Stevens' polar opposite, a bigoted and reactionary right-wing enemy of working families, Joe Pitts, also a Republican. Also... To make any sense out of Lincoln in terms of current politics, every time the word "Republican" is uttered, the viewer has to think "Democrat" and every time the word "Democrat" is uttered, the viewer has to think "Republican."

That said, there's nothing more that I would love-- as today's Democratic Party sells its soul to corporatism and sells out it's grassroots base in an orgy of shameless and corrupt careerism-- more than to see a transformation of the GOP back to the kind of political party it was when Thaddeus Stevens and Abraham Lincoln defined it. I don't expect to see that happen, but I'm always delighted when I see contemporary Republicans, like William Kristol, come face to face with a chilling reality that should push their party in that direction-- the direction of representing the people while leaving the corporate interests to the Democrats like Steny Hoyer, Steve Israel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Joe Crowley who pursue them so energetically and ruthlessly, while leaving working families to fend for themselves in the jungle the two parties have created. This week Bill Kristol was going through that kind of political self-examination for his tattered party in public.

Is the Grand Old Party in as much disarray as it seems? Yup. For one thing, Republicans are electorally shellshocked. For the past couple of years, they had been confident Barack Obama would lose in November. Many Republicans held that belief going into Election Day. This was the first time since 1948 that Republicans were confident they were going to win a presidential election-- and then lost it. The Republican psyche will take a while to recover from the shock of November 6.

It’s also gradually sunk in that the GOP has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, and that the GOP has been thumped in three of the last four national contests (2006, 2008, and 2012). Since the end of the Cold War, the Republican party has had only two really good election days, in 1994 and in 2010. Those were both off-year victories in reaction to the mistakes of first-term Democratic presidents, and in neither case proved harbingers of presidential victory two years later.

Well, if the electoral scene isn’t pretty, maybe the legislative one is better? It’s true Republicans still control the House. But this turns out to be at best a mixed blessing. Because they’re in control, House Republicans are supposed to negotiate with the president on the budget and taxes. They’re united in scorning President Obama’s opening proposal. But what’s the GOP proposal for averting the fiscal cliff? There doesn’t seem to be one.

He then blames the Republican disaster on Grover Norquist and, if you look closely enough, on the people who consider themselves bound by his ridiculous and entirely anti-American pledge. Kristol is certainly another on a growing list of Republicans who would very much like to drown Grover Norquist in a bathtub. "Will Republicans in Congress," he asks, "be successful at finding a way out of their current mess? Who knows. This year, the most well-funded Republican candidate in history, with the most professional campaign, supported by the most sophisticated super-PACs, proved unable to find a path to victory-- even though such a path was eminently findable. Republicans in Congress are equally capable of winding up on the losing side of the equation. So 2012 could end up a lost year for the GOP... [which] sure seems to be in a grand old mess. But messes can produce moments of opportunity, lemons can be turned into lemonade, and it’s always darkest before the dawn. Except when it turns pitch black."

Sunday Allen West was reminding his followers, that he's just like Abraham Lincoln. And it doesn't get more discouraging than that.

I need to say something about HBO's "The Pacific," but I'm not sure what

Historical Background, Part 8: Iwo Jima

by Ken

I keep thinking I ought to write something about the Steven Spielberg- and Tom Hanks-produced HBO series The Pacific, especially as tonight, finally, we reach a name that everybody knows, Iwo Jima. (Air time is Sundays at 9pm ET/PT, with innumerable repeats, but as always, check your local listings.)

This follows two episodes devoted to a battle that I suspect hardly any Americans have heard of: the incredibly bloody fight for the inconsequential island of Peleliu, in the Palau Islands, whose airstrip was seen as a gateway to the Philippines. Possession of that airstrip, the strategic thinking went, was "do or die" for any chance to retake the Philippines from Japanese control. But unfortunately U.S. intelligence had no inkling of the elaborate network of heavily fortified (and manned) caves and tunnels in the hills above the airstrip, and so the marines dispatched to take the island literally had no idea what they were going up against. The casualty figures are numbing. According to the Stamford Historical Society's account of the Battle of Peleliu (Sept. 15-Nov. 25, 1944):

The Americans suffered 2336 killed and 8450 wounded. The Japanese suffered 10,695 killed and 202 captured, only 19 of which were Japanese, the others were Korean and Okinawan laborers. The assault on Peleliu resulted in the highest casualty rate for any amphibious assault in the entire Pacific campaign.

For those who haven't been watching, the way The Pacific works, the opening minutes are devoted to some quick background on the historical moment, including pieces of interviews with marines who survived the action in question. I love this stuff. In the case of Peleliu, for example, it's impossible to describe the force of the quiet horror of those marines' recollection of an action expected to take two or three days which stretched to more than ten weeks. Of course the survivors remember the horrible losses. But there's something about the way they recall the absence of water, pointing out that the human body can go surprisingly long without food, but not that long at all without water.

You see the Palau Islands in the Central Pacific Area, north of New Guinea and east of the Philippine island of Mindanao? (You can click on the map to enlarge it.) That's the group that includes tiny, inconsequential Peleliu, the site of unimaginable carnage in the battle for its airstrip, which then went unused -- see update below.

I never heard of Peleliu, so I can say that The Pacific serves a useful educational function. (UPDATE: At the start of Part 8, we learn that Peleliu, once captured, was never used for any military purpose. Even in the planning for an invasion of Japan, General MacArthur decided on a different plan. Which perhaps explains why most of us have never heard of Peleliu. The battle might as well never have happened, except for the fact of the very real losses incurred there.)

Still, the series is able to present only such a tiny, selective portion of the War in the Pacific, and it does so with that always-nervous-making mix of fact and fiction in the dramatized depictions that fill out each episode, so that I never know quite where we're supposed to be going here. That war is hell really shouldn't be news to anyone, should it? And yet Spielberg seems to have gotten away with having nothing more on his mind than that in the making of Saving Private Ryan. But then, I'm the only person I know who thought that a decidedly dubious and largely un-educational undertaking.

Still, as I've gotten to know the characters (I think the producers of series like this forget how long it takes viewers to sort out the individual characters), I've found myself more compelled by the drama -- without enough personal knowledge of the events to know how well or badly I'm being informed historically. The shows have a feeling of authenticity, but that doesn't count for much.

I was surprised, rummaging around the show's page on the HBO website, to find that Eugene Sledge and Robert Leckie, two of our central characters, are real persons, who've written real books, Sledge's With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawaand Leckie's Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific, about the real war they observed and participated in, on which -- I now discover! -- the series is at least partly based. Maybe all of the characters are based on real people. As with so many other things about the show, I (and I suspect most viewers) just don't know.

When I mentioned to Howie that in tonight's episode (Part 8, as I recall) we get to Iwo Jima, he said he thought I was going to say that tonight we find out who won the war. And again, I can't tell you what function the series has set out to fill. I certainly have the feeling that, while there is a small subset of Americans who remain fascinated by World War II, by and large the war has receded into dim memory, and I guess I think this is a bad thing, though I can't tell you why exactly, beyond the ways in which ignorance of the past is a bad thing generally, and equips us poorly to make decisions about the present and future.

Howie also asked if the show has devoted much attention to the Japanese perspective, an issue he's had with a book on Afghanistan he's reading, Seth Jones's In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan,which devotes careful attention to the life background of many of the American servicepeople it chronicles while treating all the Afghans as interchangeable anonymities. I had to think. On the whole the portrayal of the Japanese in The Pacific has seemed to me limited to the incarnation-of-evil image in the minds of most of the American fighting forces. But then, is there any other way to fight a war? If you're sending soldiers, or sailors or marines, into battle, can they fight with any attitude other than, "It's them or us"? Is there a "nuanced" way to fight a war? (One of the hellish things about war is that it reduces us to beings who think about geopolitical issues and other people in such cartoonish terms.)

Of course nuance is desperately important when it comes to the people who get us into wars and then strategize them. I think an awful lot of us have long had the feeling that we got into both Iraq and Afghanistan without even the most rudimentary knowledge of what was at stake in either region or how it's seen from local perspectives, and this is a singularly terrible way to run a war machine. In addition, in prosecuting any war it's certainly important for all concerned to have given detailed thought to what is and what isn't permissible behavior.

Those issues don't come up in The Pacific, and I'm not sure they should. I know that I will come away from the series knowing more about the War in the Pacific than I knew. What I'm not so sure about is how much of what I need to know about the Pacific war I'll come away knowing. I'm really curious to know what other people's experience of the series has been -- including those who chose to give it a pass, as I almost did.

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