Dr. Strangelove v. Jihadi John

Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz (1969) was based on a Leon Uris novel about the Cuban missile crisis. There’s a famous scene in the Hotel Theresa an iconic Harlem waterhole and home to legends like Sugar Ray Robinson and Castro himself even makes a cameo appearance, by way of newsreel footage from a Havana demonstration. It’s all water under the bridge, with the Cold War, the Bay of Pigs invasion and Russia’s bold act of trying to place armaments 90 miles from the US shores all consigned to history. Now the action is in a totally different part of the world where Japan, China and South Korea wait to see what horrors the petulant North Korean leader Disney enthusiast and some time film critic (who threated retaliation for The Interview, 2014), Kim Jong-un, will unleash next. It’s true that Kim Jong-un has established a new gold standard for critics, who like politicians are always being accused of doing nothing (at the very least his actions as an auteur  challenge the notion  that “those who do, do and those who can’t do criticize”). But the real question is, are we more afraid today than we were during the Cold War? Kim Jong-un’s threats of producing an ICBM with a nuclear warhead that could hit the US shores seem about as dangerous as the drawings of the vacuum cleaner qua atomic reactor that Alec Guinness furnished in the film adaptation of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana (1959 and Donald Trump has even offered to sit down with him for a tete a tete. Jihad is the hottest act under the big top and with 9/11, it proved itself to be more than just posturing of the kind that Mr. Kim specializes in. But remember On the Beach (1959) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), two films made from books about the Cold War era? And remember Dr. Strangelove (1964) and the uneasy laugher it produced, in particular since Kubrick’s central comic figure was such a neat cross-breeding of Hitler and Henry Kissinger? And remember fallout shelters? Now with snipers taking fire in Cineplex’s and Paris becoming the city of the wrong kind of light (that produced by explosives), we may think the world has become a dangerous place, but is it more threatening than the Cold War when we all lived in constant fear of oblivion?

Writers Invite Increased Surveillance of Their Work

“Surveillance Leaves Writers Wary,” read the headline (NYT, 11/11/13) It’s an innocent enough statement and one that almost precludes further examination. This is precisely the kind of article that begs the equivalent of prolepsis in conversation. One can easily anticipate the follow up which would have to do with sincere sounding authors worrying about whether the NSA is intruding into their poems, their essays, their short stories and their novels. And sure enough the article had to do with an on line survey of 528 PEN members. The Times piece went on to state “The findings show that writers consider freedom of expression under threat in the United States with 73 per cent of respondents saying they have ‘never been as worried about privacy rights and freedom of the press as they are today.’” The problem is that when a writer is given too much privacy he runs the danger of having his works fade into oblivion. What the survey doesn’t deal with is all the writers who aren’t in PEN and who might take NSA surveillance as the less of the evils. Sure it’s bad having the government snooping down your neck, but what’s worse for the writer who hasn’t been able to publish enough to get accepted into PEN, is getting no attention at all. This also ties into the famed public relations koan that “no publicity is bad publicity.” But let’s play out a worst possible scenario. Let’s say you’re a writer and you’re doing a latter day Our Man in Havana—the famed Carol Reed movie based upon the Graham Greene novel, where a would be spy uses drawings of vacuum cleaners as the model for enemy encampments. And let’s say the NSA calls you in for an interview. Well, by George you’ve got it made in the shade. It’s a PR bonanza. Not only are you a victim whose freedoms being jeopardized, but your narrative obviously has enough plausibility to give Homeland Security pause. Before you know it you’re on CNN with publishers banging on your door. No for the average writer the headline should more aptly read, “Writers Invite Increased Surveillance of Their Work.”

Our Man in Peking

In an article entitled “Hackers in China Attacked The Times for Last 4 Months,” (NYT, 1/30/13), Nicole Perlroth describes a new universe which reads like a bestselling computer game. “Based on a forensic analysis going back months,” Perlroth writes, “it appears the hackers broke into The Times computers on September 13 when the reporting for the Wen articles was nearing completion. They set up at least three back doors into users’ machines that they used as a digital base camp. From there they snooped around The Times’s systems for a least two weeks before they identified the domain controller that contains user names and hashed, or scrambled, passwords for every Times employee.” One mustn’t make light of a situation in which the attacks occurred as reprisals for memorable and exhaustive reporting on October 25^th “that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings." However, the description does recall a 21^st century version of the harum scarum that went on in Graham Greene’s Our Man In Havana. In the novel, (the movie version starred Alec Guinness), vacuum cleaner parts are used as the MacGuffin, drawings of which are meant to outline an enemy base. Here Perlroth’s description of a cyber attack reads like an actual war, though no lives are lost. The fact of America being vulnerable to a cyber attack is no small matter. On the other hand, what would you prefer, nuclear Armageddon with the loss of millions of lives, or the loss of trillions of bytes of data and millions of passwords?