A thousand words

Back in the last century, when I found myself riveted by a feature story in WaPo, inevitably when I looked back at the byline, it was by Ken Ringle. That guy could write the living daylights out of a story. They sent him to cover the 50^th anniversary of the D-Day landings and he wrote about the aging airborne soldiers who had to fast-talk their way through military concerns in order to reenact their jump into Normandy.

I loved every story he wrote, and was desolated when he took early retirement in one of WaPo’s pre-Bezos cost-cutting sweeps.

Recently, I’ve noticed that every time there’s an utterly transfixing photo of Cadet Bonespurs, it’s been taken by Jabin Botsford. That guy gets the money shot with staggering regularity—a perfect angle at exactly the right moment to capture the seething bile under that gravelly orange skin. We have been blessed to have him assigned to the White House to document this corrupt presence.

I’m not posting any of his Bonespurs shots because I will not give that grifter the Klout. 

Oh, okay: one:

But here’s one of Botsford’s latest photos from the White House. I love that he submitted it to his editor, and that the editor ran it, in a story about post-presidential Kleptolandia in Florida:

This just says it all.

 

 

Altered reality

I’ve noticed this odd business model on a lot of Internet “media” sites. Before you can see what their reportage is like, they want you to remove your ad blocking browser extension.

Dudes—that’s like asking me to lower my shields as the Klingon warbird approaches. Not happening.

But at the very same time that they block all view of their web page, they expect you to sign up for notifications.

Dudes—I have enough spam from companies I once bought a pound of coffee from. I’m not adding your nonsense to the blitz.

It’s been my experience, on the occasion that I fire up Edge to take an unprotected look at the site, that their notion of “journalism” is to repurpose a CNN report, so I’m not missing anything. But I’m gobsmacked that they at a single stroke block your view and ask, “Hey—you want more?”

I wonder how often that actually works?

Reprisals start at dawn

You know, with all the money that Jeff Bezos has to support the work of The Washington Post, you’d think that some of it could be spent on copy editors. But—as evidenced by their online presence once or twice a week—you’d be wrong.

Viz:

And if they’re not going to cough up a few bob for copy editors, perhaps they could hold lunch ‘n learns to teach reporters the difference between reprise and reprisals.

Frozen surprise

On Wednesdays, the Washington Post’s food writers moderate an online chat session (called Free Range) with readers. They typically invite questions/comments on stories that have run either that day or recently, and take general cookery-related questions.

So, you’ll find exchanges around how to adapt to modern food availability:

Or recommendations on cooking equipment:

Or even the occasional…outlier:

Yesterday there were comments and questions about freezer management—inventory, safety, decluttering, etc.—with helpful responses.

And then there was this:

Landing the scoop

One thing you may not know about the D-Day invasions is that one of the reporting scoops was scored by someone who had been denied accreditation. But Martha Gellhorn was not the sort of journalist to be deterred by that sort of thing; she sneaked aboard a hospital ship in England, then hid in the head until the morning of the 6^th, and she went ashore disguised as a stretcher bearer to get her story.

I suppose that her years of being in a relationship with that blowhard Ernest Hemingway gave her the kind of experience needed to pull off that kind of coup. They’d met during the Spanish Civil War and married in 1940, but by 1944 their relationship had soured. He’d refused to help her get a press pass that would have enabled her to fly to England, so instead she went over on a ship laden with explosives. Gellhorn, a long-time correspondent for Collier’s magazine, had been set to cover the story, but Hemingway’s ego couldn’t bear that. He himself got accredited by Collier’s, which meant that Gellhorn was off the story.

Ergo the subterfuge. She filed her story, which pissed off the command structure, but it also got up Hemingway’s nose. (Although he filed copy that starred himself as the sole reason for the days success, in fact he never went ashore at all on the 6^th, and his “head wound” was from a pre-embarkation car crash. By nightfall he was back at his “headquarters” at the Dorchester hotel, regaling all the barflies with his bravado.)

War reporting was in Gellhorn’s blood—she covered wars right up to the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989. Prior to D-Day, she’d reported on the war in China and from Czechoslovakia, Finland and Italy. Following D-Day she was one of the first correspondents to cover the liberation of Dachau. I’m not a rabid fan of her writing style, but she had extraordinary courage and did know how to find the humanity in her stories.

In 1961, she spent time in the Middle East and gave this prescient analysis of the Palestinians:

“The unique misfortune of the Palestinian refugees is that they are a weapon in what seems to be a permanent war… Today, in the Middle East, you get a repeated sinking sensation about the Palestinian refugees: they are only a beginning, not an end. Their function is to hang around and be constantly useful as a goad. The ultimate aim is not such humane small potatoes as repatriating refugees.”

She also reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1962, and then revisited Germany two years later. Again, her story sliced open the heart of the matter with surgical precision:

“The adults of Germany, who knew Nazism and in their millions cheered and adored Hitler until he started losing, have performed a nation-wide act of amnesia; no one individually had a thing to do with the Hitlerian regime and its horrors… The young realize this cannot be true, yet one by one, each explains how guiltless his father was; somebody else’s father must have been doing the dirty work.”

(Had she filed her report five years later, after the student revolutions of 1968, she’d probably have revised her conclusion. And were she to be writing in 2017, this sentence would have been entirely different: “Germans trained in obedience and dedicated to moral whitewashing are not a new people, nor are they reliable partners for anyone else.”)

The nation was lucky to have had correspondents like Gellhorn covering the big events of the 20^th Century.

Minority report

I’m one of 372 people outside the ballroom of the Washington Hilton who watched Hasan Minhaj’s speech at the White House Correspondents Association’s annual dinner this weekend. It’s usually a cross between a high school talent show and a Friars Club roast, all centered around the occupant of the White House. But the occupant of the White House has usually had an actual sense of humor plus a thick skin, and of course that’s not the case this year.

In fact, the Kleptocrat announced with extended lower lip in February that he would not be attending the WHCD, the first president since Ronald Reagan to skip the event. (Reagan was recovering from an assassination attempt, and even then he phoned in to make a couple of jokes and take his lumps from the journos.) Then the Cheeto-in-Chief directed his Gauleiters to also abstain. Because these people literally cannot take a joke.

Instead the Kleptocrat went to Harrisburg, Penn., to hold a party rally (yes), where he told porkies about how large the crowd was there. The guy really doesn’t understand how the whole smartphone camera, connectivity and social media thing works:

Also—what is it about this guy and size?

The rally was his platform for lying about all his accomplishments during his first hundred days in office. He filled in the space between lies with pouting about the people who are so unfair to him—the press—who he would have us believe were secretly wishing they were up in Pennsylvania instead of at the dinner.

Okay, but back to Minhaj. He said a few things that I thought were dead on target—not directly to do with the Kleptocrat, but with the absolutely critical role the press—the free press—has to play in not only combating the rising tide of fascism, but in the fundamental survival of democracy. He started with a jokey survey of the various media outlets in attendance, before getting around to CNN, the USA Today of broadcast news. (Actually, earlier he took on USA Today, and was pretty funny.)

“CNN is here, baby. Now you guys got some really weird trust issues going on with the public. I’m not going to call you fake news, but everything isn’t breaking news. You can’t go to DEFCON 1 just because Sanjay Gupta found a new moisturizer.”

And this is true—the media in some ways are their own worst enemies, rushing all over the place trying to get something out there before it appears on some blog in Dubuque. Also, leaving aside the failure to confirm the veracity of their stories, they dilute their impact when every story is slapped up as a stop-the-presses kind of breaking news jobber.

Minhaj also calls it correctly when he talks about it being a trust issue. It’s not just the Kelptocrat and the Gauleiters and the Repugnants muddying the waters with their screeches about fake news every time someone reports what they’ve said and done. Although Lord knows, they are muddying the waters. But he goes on to nail it:

“I know I’m busting balls. I don’t have a solution on how to win back trust. I don’t. But in the age of [the Kleptocrat], I know that you guys have to be more perfect now more than ever. Because you are how the president gets his news. Not from advisers, not from experts, not from intelligence agencies, you guys. So that’s why you gotta be on your A-game. You gotta be twice as good. You can’t make any mistakes. Because when one of you messes up, he blames your entire group. And now you know what it feels like to be a minority.”

I don’t much give a toss about the media being accurate reporters because they’re how the Kleptocrat gets his information—he’s going to cherry pick whatever fact or fiction suits his notional reality, whatever gets him what he wants in any given moment. I do care that the news media be able to demonstrate integrity and rigor in publishing or broadcasting because I need to trust them. And because all thoughtful, truth-seeking people need to trust them. And because somewhere along the line, the courts of justice and of history are going to need to be able to trust them as a source of facts about this administration and our society.

I also think he called it when he categorized the press as a minority—both collectively and individually held responsible for the actions of the worst among them. You screw up—everyone with a press pass (and their editors and their publishers) takes the hit. One reporter from the not-failing New York Times elides a statue in the Oval Office (subsequently correcting the mistake), and the second-rate Goebbels starts screaming how every news story is massively fake. And he’s believed.

That’s exactly how minorities are viewed in this society, and I think it would be really good for the news industry to consider that—both as it applies to themselves and to how they report on other minorities. If a reporter from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel misspells some Gauleiter’s wife’s name, the entire US Press Association should not have to file affidavits abjuring misspelling Gauleiters’ wives’ names. Ditto seeking statements from black, or Muslim, or Asian community leaders when one of their members goes postal.

(Although, of course we do want to encourage all reporters to verify the spelling of Gauleiters’ wives’ names—and everyone else’s names, as well as all other facts in their stories that they can cram in and still meet their deadlines. Because see above about being the trusted source of news about the world we live in and will leave to our descendants. When the Kleptocrat, his Gauleiters and the Repugnants in Congress can lie about things they have been recorded saying and doing—those records are all that stand between us and a Buñuel film.)

Like Minhaj, I don’t have any solution, just a suggestion—that they do not debase their journalistic coinage and turn out crap like Breitbart or the Drudge Report. And that they hold fast against the threats that the Kleptocrat is thinking about changing libel laws, making it easier to sue publications. Because the hometown paper absolutely has it right:

Arrgh!

I did not watch what the media are calling “the debate” last night. My life is too short and there is not enough alcohol to get me through something like that.

Particularly since I am sick to death of how the media (with the possible exception of The Washington Post) have done nothing but play by the GOP candidate’s reality TV rules that basically revolve around this simple declaration:

“I can do and say whatever I damn well please and you’ll run around like a pack of hounds trying to get the fox’s scent in the middle of a sausage factory. And then you’ll come back to repeat the exercise.”

The quintessential example of this was his ginning up the press a couple of weeks ago for “a big announcement” to be made at the opening of his made-in-China hotel in downtown DC. As you’ll recall, he pulled them by the nose through a tour of the hotel, then mumbled, “Obama was born in the U.S.” and walked away.

There were a bunch of howls, but at that point I kind of lost sympathy (not to mention respect) for them. Because do they not recall their basic Peanuts?

  

How can they not see that Trump is Lucy and they (and the electorate) are Charlie Brown. And their foot is never going to connect with that ball. Never.

Sheesh.

And now for a word...

There’s no escaping the promoted tweet these days, so on my way to blocking everyone who sticks one of their annoying ads into my timeline, I occasionally check to see what kind of responses they’re eliciting.

So when I saw this one asking people for “feedback”, I knew that the response probably wouldn’t be useful for concept validation:

And I have to say that it was pretty funny to me to see this promo:

Because the first thing I did was block the account.

Foot in mouth

If you live anywhere there is any type of media, you’ll no doubt have heard of the NBC News anchor Brian Williams, whose career has crashed and burned through self-inflicted RPG fire.

In case you haven’t heard, Williams claimed he was in a helicopter that was shot down by RPG fire while covering the war in Iraq in 2003. As it turns out, this was completely a figment of his imagination—the chopper he was flying in during that incident may or may not have taken small arms fire, but it was not shot down. He might in fact have arrived on the scene up to an hour after a chopper was taken out by an RPG; it’s hard to know at this point.

It’s not clear to me when Williams started telling this particular story, but he’s repeated it over the course of years, and it seems like in every telling the danger to his person magnifies. It’s mildly interesting to me that a man who makes his living by reporting news, and who ought to be aware of how easily such fabrications can burn and crash once a spark ignites the surface (think Hindenburg here) would walk on this particular wild side. But Williams told the porky, and because he got away with it, he kept on telling it.

The story broke last week, and as of this writing, Williams has apologized and, when that didn’t stem the tide, he announced he’s taking a “hiatus” from his anchor duties. He may be trying to find a cave somewhere that has no Internet connectivity and no cell reception.

But that’s not why I’m here today. No, I’m here because the Twitterverse just went to town on Williams, just as it did on Nicolas Sarkosy horning in on the A-list participants in the unity march against Islamist terrorists in Paris, and on that Fox News self-proclaimed “terror expert” who assured us that no non-Muslim dares to enter the UK’s second-largest city, Birmingham. The hashtags #BrianWilliamsMemories and #BrianWilliamsMisremembers were trending like the Left Shark at Superbowl.

Viz:

Everyone with Photoshop gave Williams just that little bit more of a hold on immortality. 

Helping OJ:

Hanging with JC:

Advising Macarthur:

Or just:

And, in fact, his combat experience predates even WWII:

But you didn't need graphics software to get in on the fun:

But then there were the corrections:

And these are only representative of the Twitter tsunami that has swept the planet several times since late last week.

This is one of the things I really love about social media: while pols and pundits flap their hands about and bemoan this and that, the Twitterati just get stuck in, skewering the perps. It—alongside Death—is truly the Great Leveler.

As for Williams, he gives new meaning to the expression "shooting yourself in the foot".

Mag trade

Dunno whether they’re still referred to by the trade as this, but back in the 1940s, when Lee Miller was working for them, the British edition of Vogue was known as Brogue, while the French edition was Frogue.

I thought those were mildly amusing wordplays, but this one takes the (dog) biscuit:

 

Someone definitely needs to publish this.

Don't drive like my brother

Like millions of NPR listeners, I was truly saddened to hear of the death Monday of Tom Magliozzi, half of Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers of Car Talk. He was 77.

How do I explain Car Talk to those who’ve never heard it? It’s kind of a call-in radio show, mostly about motor vehicles (sort of), but laced with a lot of commentary on life and massive infusions of laughter. Tom and his brother Ray had been doing a version of the program from WBUR in Boston since 1977.

I’ve been listening to it since the 80s, and I don’t like call-in programming and I don’t care much about cars. But I loved Tom and Ray, who had laughs that would cure the common cold.

You can read about the Magliozzis and Car Talk in several stories on NPR. What’s interesting about them is the comments: This is the first time I think I’ve ever seen any online content, no matter how seemingly innocuous (dog reunited with family, flowers planted along a highway, man emerges from 40-year coma) that didn’t engender at least 15% of mean, political or just plain crack-brained contributions by those with Internet access and a keyboard.

But take a look at any of NPR’s stories, and every single comment (as of time of writing) is about how much Tom (and Ray) brightened our weekend days, year after year. People proudly proclaim that they don’t drive and don’t give a toss about cars, but they tuned in regularly because Tom and Ray just sucked us in to a better world, where there was a solution to your problems—mostly car-related—even if it might involve a Viking funeral. Even commenters who regularly spew ideological bile and political vituperation on those innocuous stories here post nothing but sadness at Tom’s loss and happy memories of his broadcasts.

If you never heard them, I’m truly sorry for you. Go stream some of the shows—although the best way to listen to Click and Clack is to be driving around on your weekend errands, laughing and slapping your steering column like a demented seal, and be forced to park somewhere so you can hear out the program to the very end of their wacky credits.

Car Talk stopped original broadcasts two years ago, but NPR has been airing older shows since then. Because it’s not really so much about calling in to sort your 1998 Nissan Sentra’s whoop-whoop-whoop noise it makes when you turn left at 35 MPH as it is listening to these guys…well, just listening to them.

In such an unexpected way, the Magliozzis spread joy, with the pretext of diagnosing and solving mechanical problems. There’s so little of that around these days, so I’m glad that they’ve been part of my weekends for nearly 30 years.

Spitting images

This is an interesting project: photographer Sandro Miller and actor John Malkovich teamed up to recreate some iconic portraits of the past 80 years. The original is lined up side-by-side with the new take.

I’m not wild about the “Migrant Mother”, but the one of Dalí is really fascinating.

I also really like the Picasso.

Ideas for free, just for free

My first ever “paycheck” job was with the Pasadena Public Library, shelving books when I was in high school.

(You know—a paycheck job, where you got paid with an actual check, not cash from mowing lawns or babysitting. It had taxes taken out, and stuff. It was real.)

Even before that, I was a big user of PPL—I mean, you had access to all these books on all sorts of different subjects…for free. What’s not to love?

And wherever I’ve lived, I’ve always been proud to get a library card of whatever system was on offer—university, city, county, whatever.

Libraries are part of the foundation of a democracy—you need an informed electorate to make informed choices about who should enact the will of the people. Education is a cornerstone of this principle, and that’s why we have public schools open to all children in this country. (Yeah—I’m not going to go into the quality of the education here.)

But free access to ideas is also crucial, and that’s why we have all kinds of library systems in our country. They’re rethinking how they carry out their mandate in these days of e-books, videogames and DVDs, but they still are absolute wonderlands as far as I’m concerned.

(How easy or difficult a civic entity makes getting a library card says a lot about the society. In both Maidenhead and Putney (England), I had to show proof that I paid (actually extortionate) council (property) taxes in those specific jurisdictions before they’d grudgingly hand over a card. Here in Santa Clara County, all I needed was a photo ID—not even showing a local address. I got cards to six different library systems off the back of my Washington state driver’s license and me saying I lived here.)

So, I was interested to come across this compilation of libraries that changed the world. (The title claims 25, but I only count 22 listed. Um.)

What’s sad is that many of them have been destroyed—an awful lot of political and religious leaders seem to be afraid of collections of books and the ideas they represent.

What’s heartening is that four of the 22 shown are in the US, starting with the Library of Congress. When the invading British troops burned the initial library along with much of Washington, D.C., in 1812, Thomas Jefferson sold his entire collection of nearly 6500 volumes to begin the rebuilding of the national treasure.

I also love that Room to Read is taking the glorious opportunities of literacy and access to books to children in Asia and Africa.

Following Newt: no human involvement

This should come as no surprise to any human with three synapses firing in sequence:  it’s been reported that 92% of Newt Gingrich’s followers on Twitter are not human.

No, we’re not talking Tea Partiers here; a search company has determined that only 8% of little Newtie’s followers are verifiably humanoid. The rest are spambots.

The report goes on to say that an unnamed Gingrich staffer has admitted that he’s paid for followers. I suppose that’s less slimy than paying for sex; but just as sad.

Mashable has produced a chart tracking the human-vs.-bot Twitter-follower ratio for a number of Republican presidential hopefuls. What I am finding hard to believe is that Michele Bachman’s is as high as 28%.

A question of beauty

We live in a strange, strange world, when such icons of drop-dead beauty as Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington aren’t “pretty enough” for the cosmetics company they represent in advertising. No, the photos for L’Oréal’s campaigns for Lancôme (Roberts) and Mabelline (Turlington) apparently required air-brushing and Photoshopping to “perfect” the women’s faces.

I know this because Britain’s Advertising Standards Agency (and isn’t that a concept all on its lonesome?) has banned the adverts in question at the behest of an MP for precisely that reason.

Now, here’s the thing: the products being advertised were foundations—you know, the stuff women are supposed to glop onto their faces to even out skin tone and provide the backdrop for the rest of the crap they’re supposed to apply, like blush, eye shadow and whatnot. (Look, I had a traumatic experience with greasepaint as a child; I’ve never liked gunk on my face since.) 

I.e., the agency geniuses not only thought that Roberts’ and Turlington’s mugs needed a boost; but also that Roberts and Turlington wearing L’Oréal’s products needed work.

Think about that.

If the Pretty Woman herself and a supermodel aren’t “beautiful” enough to be presented without digital alteration, what the hell kind of standards of beauty are we supposed to be held to?

And what the hell hope do ordinary women have of getting within the same time zone as those standards?

Oh, and BTW—who the hell is setting those standards?

Ferreting out the, er, ferrets

Further to the ongoing story of the Dark Lord of Yellow Journalism (Rupert Murdoch, in case you’re in some sort of paperless, broadcast-free Internet void), we have something positive that has emerged, a new phrase to seize upon and use on every conceivable occasion: “reverse ferret!”

The Christian Science Monitor reports that Kelvin Mackenzie, while editor of The Sun (a News Corp rag most famous for photos of bare-breasted women on Page 3 of every issue), goaded his reporters to “put a ferret up the trousers” of personages of high station—meaning, take actions that caused the sort of consternation you might experience were a small, long, wiggly weasel turned loose in your knickers. You know what I mean.

Once the target started sputtering and doing that ferrety dance, then there was well and truly something to report.

However, Mackenzie was apparently sensitive to the reactions of the tab’s audience. Whenever the ferret-induced story caused a ruction amongst the readers (or threatened to land the paper in court), he would order reporters to “reverse ferret”.

As the Monitor reports, this was “a signal to his furry troops to exit the victim’s pants-leg, post-haste.”

Okay, you just can’t make this stuff up. But you certainly can exploit the hell out of it. So I fully intend to find ways to insert the phrase “reverse ferret” into every conversation I can.

Join the revolution, folks. Weasels of the world unite! Charge the chinos!

Who's your daddy?

One thing that strikes me about the latest on News Corp. No, not the allegations of “illegal phone hacking” (implying there’s legal hacking) against The News of the World. Or the spread of scandal to other NC rags in Britain.

It’s Rupert Murdoch himself.

Take a look at any recent photo of the spiritual heir to William Randolph Hearst. Then compare to any pic of the Emperor Palpatine, ruler of the Evil Empire.

If they are not one and the same person then they were at the very least separated at birth.

Noticias del sud

So, word comes that the host of a “true crime” show in Brazil is under suspicion of having hired hit men to commit murders.

Evidently Wallace Souza was killing the proverbial two birds: knocking off rival drug dealers and jacking up the ratings for his “Canal Livre” show.

Both his TV competitors and the cops began to get suspicious when Souza’s crews kept showing up at murder scenes before anyone else. Sometimes even before the cops.

In addition to being a “reality” show host, Souza is an ex-cop and a state legislator. You just can’t make this stuff up.

And, lest you think this is just too whacky to happen here, I’m sure that FoxNews is even now trying to figure out how they can go Souza one (or five) better. Probably by knocking off NPR reporters.

For your viewing pleasure...

For some reason I can’t now recall I recently took it into my head that I wanted to see Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary record of the Nazi party’s annual conference of 1934. This is a film that, like the Constitution, a lot of people talk about without having actually, you know, ingested it.

I’d heard about it for a number of years, but never had a chance to see it—it’s not the sort of thing that would appear on a double bill at the art houses with Double Indemnity, Sons of the Desert or Singing in the Rain. But having the inclination, I found a video of it through the King County Public Library and sat down to watch.

It’s a remarkable piece. And I’m talking mostly about the cinematography and filmic philosophy—the way it was conceived, shot, edited and presented—a far, far cry from what we see down at the multiplex. But also about what was deemed appealing to the public at the time. Here are some thoughts:

First, you have to actually watch it. The first 20-some minutes are nothing but images and music. There is a prologue—written, not spoken—to set the stage, and then the aerial approach of Hitler over the medieval city of Nürnberg and lengthy shots of party members preparing for the highly choreographed activities.

This is followed by excerpts from speeches by various alpha Nazis—Hess, Schirach, Goebbels, Goering, Hitler and others—interspersed with rallies of Hitlerjugend, military reviews, torchlight parades, and masses of uniformed laborers of various stripes.

But no voice-overs telling you what’s happening or how you should think about it. In fact, the only spoken words are the various speeches. So you have to concentrate. (If you understand German you could possibly go fix a salad or something, but if you did you’d miss the physical appearance of these guys as they spoke.)

Second, it’s black and white. Yes, most films were in the 30s, but Riefenstahl was commissioned specifically by Hitler and she had access to all the resources in the Reich. If she’d wanted color, she could have got it—and those red-black-and-white Nazi flags look stunning against seas of brown shirts.

But again, black and white means you have to pay attention.

Third—no smash cuts every 3.7 seconds. You’re actually able to follow an image and process it. The camera stays on speakers without “commenting” by moving around.

Fourth, there’s the music—what a blessed respite from the docus you see produced today that not only add sound effects (marching feet, airplane motors, crowds murmuring), which actually detract from the authenticity of what you’re seeing (kind of like the mirror image of “reality TV”) but also splice in completely extraneous canned music loops to “fill” the space not taken by the fake sounds. Riefenstahl chooses this as carefully as she does her camera angles: opening segment is Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which segues into the Horst Wessel Lied. The film closes out with Götterdämerung fading into Horst Wessel.

One Nazi standard into another. Worth more than all the irrelevant incidental music in all the stock houses in the world.

Then there’s how the main characters are presented. No attempt whatsoever to make them look prettier than they are. Frankly, Hitler’s inner circle was remarkably ugly—Goebbels, Himmler, Hess, Bormann, Streicher, Goering… There’s not a one of them you’d want to take to a Manhattan after-party. The only looker in the bunch was Reinhard Heydrich. But there’s clearly no makeup on them. Plus they’re obviously and unashamedly sweating.

Now, this is fascinating given the recent trend in US politics: from the Nixon-Kennedy debates we’ve been on a downward trend where how you look counts more than what you stand for. Try to imagine anyone without even features, good hair, a svelte figure and designer clothes getting elected to national office. Not going to happen.

Can you say Ralph Nader?

(I imagine that was a good deal of Sarah Palin’s appeal to the RNC handlers who picked her as John McCain’s running mate. If she’d held the same views and looked like a youthful Bella Abzug, she’d never have made the short list.)

BTW—you don’t see this crowd together again on film until they’re in the dock at the Nuremburg war crimes trials in 1946. Minus, of course, those who’d committed suicide.

There are reviews and demonstrations and mass protestations of hope, belief and loyalty. When I say “mass” I mean an entire stadium of serried ranks of organizations swearing undying fealty to the party. Of particular interest were the labor brigades—uniformed and wielding their shovels like rifles.

(Really—it’s clear that you weren’t much of a Nazi unless you had a uniform.)

I also was fascinated by the cavalry demonstration: soldiers in the feldgrau uniforms and that distinctive helmet wheeling and cantering—with modern rifles with fixed bayonets. There was also horse artillery. Remember—this was only 16 months after the Nazis took over; they hadn’t started mass producing their Panzers yet.

Although you’d see a lot of these horses in service in the retreat from the Soviet Union and the defense of Western Europe, 1943-45.

The closing images are of the “blood flag” ritual—Hitler consecrating new party banners by touching them with the flag allegedly splattered with the blood of the fallen from the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch attempt. There’s also an interesting reconciliation with the SA—referring to the Night of the Long Knives that took place less than three months before, when Hitler had his old street fighting buddies eradicated.

Finally, there’s an endless parade of troops through the old heart of the city, and Hitler proclaims “All loyal Germans will become National Socialists. Only the best National Socialists are party comrades!”

Presumably all the cheering masses considered themselves as part of that elite.

Now, Triumph is a highly controversial film precisely because of its subject matter—and because it’s so good at presenting it. I’m not going to comment on that except to say that anyone outside of Germany who saw this film should not have been surprised in the least at the train of events that led to September 1939. Starting with the prologue, it was patently clear that the Nazi regime was all about doing a better job of putting Germany on top of the world than the Kaiser had. Viz.:

“On September 5, 1934, ... 20 years after the outbreak of the World War ... 16 years after the beginning of our suffering ... 19 months after the beginning of the German renaissance ... Adolf Hitler flew again to Nuremberg to review the columns of his faithful followers…”

The “beginning of our suffering” refers to the Versailles Treaty, and the “renaissance” is Hitler’s accession to power.

There’s also a clear indication of Goebbels’s philosophy of propaganda: in order to make it work, you have to tell a big lie, and you have to keep on repeating it, in the face of any questions you’re asked. If you try little lies, you're sunk; and if you waver at all, you’re gone. Him talking about the free and open press in Nazi Germany alone is worth the price of admission.

There’s a historic touch to the finale that I find telling: that parade passes the Frauenkirche square, which is beautiful and quaint in a Grimm Brothers kind of way. Every year the great Christkindlmarkt is held right there—stalls of traditional (and, these days, Chinese) Christmas decorations, goodies and gifts, bratwurst and glüwein to keep the damp cold outside of you. These markets have been there for hundreds of years.

That area used to be the Jewish ghetto of Nuremberg. Until the good citizens petitioned the Holy Roman Emperor (don’t get me started on that one) Karl IV to cleanse their fair city of the aliens—who were also business competitors. The emperor graciously granted the town a pogrom; the Jews were gathered into the synagogue, which was set afire.

The beautiful Frauenkirche was built on that spot and has anchored city rites from holiday fairs to Nazi rallies ever since.

And you should definitely watch Triumph of the Will.