Your Ignorance Is an Eyesore

Ah, yes, children, it's time again to do one of those "reality check" things. Don't really have many this time around, but since my usual output is...loquacious, shall we say...I doubt you mind very much.

• First off, Ebert's at it again, saying "video games can never be art." It's admittedly his interlocutor's fault, since her examples of how they can be art are, well, bad. Know how we know video games can be art? Three words.
  
  Legend of Zelda.
  
  Seriously, it's as moving as the Iliad. If that story, in any of its iterations—if the iterations themselves, involving as they do a chosen hero perennially reborn to vanquish evil—do not stir your blood, you have no blood to stir. Also no tears. If some part of you does not leap with the urge to heroism at the phrase "Blade of Evil's Bane," I for one decline to know you—I don't know that I could trust the lizard-thing that looks out of your eyes from where a man should be.
  
  God I've gotta stop reading Tycho's newsposts before I write these things.


• Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials (the "Golden Compass" series) concludes with the death of the most-powerful-existent-thing "God" (apart from Hume, not a single Anglo atheist, not even Bertrand Russell, knows that that's not what the Christian God is—"Guy with beard on cloud" is as far as they ever get). And then they abolish the Kingdom of Heaven and replace it with the Republic of Heaven. Now, aside from the overwhelming, banal bathos of the ending—the highest spiritual truth is Western liberalism!—there's a more amusing significance.
  
  "Republic" is just Latin for Aristocracy (if you think different, that's cute). And the aristocracy of the Church is the bishops—a religious reform that replaces the spiritual monarchy with the spiritual aristocracy, would be, well, episcopalian. So the best Pullman can come up with, in his little book, is reenacting the English Reformation. He's not really an atheist at all, just a non-practicing Anglican.
  
  One is reminded of Hilaire Belloc's observation that English internationalism, that sees beyond petty local differences, always seems to involve afternoon tea and the diction of the Jacobean translation.


• Why is it that the French appear to have decided, after the War, to learn about themselves from English propaganda about them? I mean, they actually seem to think they're not warlike!
  
  I've honestly met French people who think their Revolution was accomplished without a war, unlike the American one. Um...try six. Six wars. You call them the Revolutionary Wars, your opponents call them the Wars of the Coalition. You both call the last three or four of them the Napoleonic Wars. Didn't it ever seem odd to you that you made this guy Emperor? Where do you think he got famous? He was a damn war-hero, that's what!
  
  Seriously, the Anglo world (especially America, since we only exist because of the French military helping out with our revolution) doesn't get to look down on the French as a Power. At least not till we do what they did, which was:
  1. Fight nearly every other world power of the time simultaneously
  2. while being the poorest power in the conflict
  3. with the fewest allies
  4. while constantly suffering domestic political turmoil
  5. and still win 2/3 of the time.


• So I've discovered that it's actually possible, at least in Latin America, to think of Henry Kissinger as a monster. No, I know—maybe a bit of an apparatchik, certainly far too fond of realpolitik, but a "monster"? Really?
  
  The charge seems to be that he destroyed "democracies" in Latin America. Now leaving to one side that nobody is a democracy (a republic isn't the same thing), or that Kissinger had far less influence than seems to be implied, is this in reference to "democratically" elected Communist governments? 'Cause I'm sorry, it'd be worth interfering in the sacred political process of Weimar Germany to prevent the election of Hitler, and Communism is, by any objective standard, even worse than Nazism.
  
  The worst you can say about Kissinger is he wasn't a neo-con, that is, he didn't want to enact Trotsky's global revolution, except for liberalism/capitalism instead of against it. He, or rather the administrations he served, were far too tolerant of reactionary governments, though for the legitimate reason that the guys trying to overthrow them were much, much worse. Give me the Mafia over unrestrained rape and pillage any day; that doesn't make the Mafia the good guys. He, or rather we, could've stood to be pushier with our allies about their abuses, but being over-tolerant of sub-optimal governments doesn't make him, or America, a monster. Is that actually a hard concept for anyone over eight? Apparently it is.


• Late addendum: Anyone who thinks medieval war was bad, is simply announcing they have no basis for comparison. For instance, the Hundred Years War from 1337 to 1453—which was an utterly monstrous conflict that threw out all contemporary rules of engagement—probably killed about 3.3 million people (there was a bigger population drop at the time, but the Plague was happening). Toyotomi Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea in 1592, for comparison, killed about 1.1 million on both sides (most of the deaths on the left of the decimal were Koreans). Why's that demonstrate medieval war wasn't that bad? Hideyoshi's invasion only lasted 6 years. That is, in 19 times the length, and even after throwing out all their rules, the Europeans killed only 3 times as many people—which means they killed only 1/6 as many people.