Saving Private Ryan at 20

Saving Private Ryan came out twenty years ago today. For a long time this was my favorite film. It grew with me; I recall watching it for the first time in a while, after having had two years of German in college, and reacting with shock as I realized I could understand the German commands and insults shouted during the battle. 

I don't call it my favorite movie now, simply because I don't think I can narrow my favorites down to one any more and not because I've lost my appreciation for it or it hasn't aged well. Quite the contrary. 

This film came out in a different world. Bill Clinton was president and had two years left in his second term. This was nearly three years before September 11th; before the eight years of the Iraq War or the seventeen and counting in Afghanistan; before George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump; before the great recession and the bailouts; before not only Parkland or Sandy Hook, but before Columbine; ten years before the first Marvel MCU movie; before iTunes, Netflix, Facebook, and MySpace; before Twitter. There were five and a half million World War II veterans alive then. There are about half a million now.

In a smaller context, as a small measure of the changes that have happened in the intervening decades: I was fourteen when Saving Private Ryan came out and, since was rated R, I didn't see it until a few years later, when a teacher loaned me her VHS copy. I had to get my parents' permission, and I'm grateful that they gave it.

STEVEN SPIELBERG AND TOM HANKS ON THE OMAHA BEACH SET IN IRELAND

I was a Stephen Ambrose-devouring WWII geek, slowly establishing a serious interest that has lasted to the present, and had begun collecting World War II movies (again, on VHS), which I watched over and over again. I particularly liked A Bridge Too Far and The Longest Day, large-scale, top-down epics of major campaigns, and the narrower fictional stories in The Guns of Navarone and The Bridge on the River Kwai. I still like—or love—these movies to a greater or lesser degree, and appreciate them on a much deeper level as an adult.

But Saving Private Ryan was different. Saving Private Ryan changed me.

It changed movies, too. If you're wondering where the last twenty years of desaturation and handheld shaky cam came from, look no further. But Saving Private Ryan outshines its many imitators, and still shocks and thrills, because it wasn't aping another film's style. Far from it; Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, both of whom won Oscars for this film, were aping the combat camera footage of the war itself, where the shaking was an artifact that the cameramen sought to reduce as much as possible given the horrible conditions in which they filmed, at risk to their own lives. Another measure of the changed world: this movie was shot on film and photochemically desaturated. The digital intermediate, allowing computer-controlled fine-tuning of a film's color, was still two years off. And because Spielberg and Kaminski adopted the style they did purposefully, for a carefully calculated effect, it still works. It's organic to the picture, not a stylistic tic. 

This style was integral to the effect the film had on me as a kid. Saving Private Ryan was the first film to immerse me, to present to me not just meticulously staged action scenes with authentic period detail, but to show me what it was like to live through the events it depicts. I still remember the first time I watched it; during the lead up to the final battle, when the characters know the Germans are approaching and can only wait for the inevitable, I found myself desperately thinking up alternatives. I know the film backwards and forwards now, but it still involves me that much.

It also moves me, and often in unexpected ways. As a kid, my heart went out to Hanks's Captain Miller, especially as he dies fighting at the end, for a mission even he has struggled to believe in, or Vin Diesel's Caparzo, bleeding out in the rain. Jeremy Davies's Corporal Upham enraged me, as it doe so many viewers. Now my heart breaks for Mrs. Ryan, glimpsed only in one dialogue-free scene, or the French family Caparzo was trying to help, or Wade, begging for his mother as he dies. Even the cowardly Upham I can sympathize with, if only as a fellow human being who has also felt overpowering fear.

Spielberg is often criticized or outright mocked for his sentimentality or schmaltz, but I don't think Saving Private Ryan's ending detracts at all from the film. If the purpose of any war is simply to protect lives and ways of life, Private Ryan's humble, common man attempt to "earn this" was the point all along. So in addition to teaching me that war is not fun, that combat has consequences, that human lives are senselessly wasted even in worthwhile conflicts, and that the good guys will inevitably sin too, Saving Private Ryan reaffirmed something my parents had taught me from childhood: human life matters.

In an era of entertainment offering cynical, prurient depictions of violence and suffering, self-congratulatory political platitudes, or messaging that simply affirms us where we are without challenging our comfortable vision of the present, we could all stand to revisit this brutal war film.

Chesterton (and Orwell) on careless language

From "New Religion and New Irreligion," an April 4, 1908 piece in the Illustrated London News:

“It is difficult to believe that people who are obviously careless about language can really be very careful about anything else.”

In its fuller context: 

Our generation professes to be scientific and particular about the things it says; but unfortunately it is never scientific and particular about the words in which it says them. It is difficult to believe that people who are obviously careless about language can really be very careful about anything else. If an astronomer is careless about words, one cannot help fancying that he may be careless about stars. If a botanist is vague about words, he may be vague about plants. The modern man, regarding himself as a second Adam, has undertaken to give all the creatures new names; and when we discover that he is silly about the names, the thought will cross our minds that he may be silly about the creatures. And never before, I should imagine, in the intellectual history of the world have words been used with so idiotic an indifference to their actual meaning. A word has no loyalty; it can be betrayed into any service or twisted to any treason. 

Chesterton goes on to give examples, 110 years old now, of one of my least favorite moves in the political rhetoric playbook: claiming one's position is the truer form of one's opponents' position, e.g. this recent op-ed asserting that supporting abortion is more pro-life than opposing it. This is surely an iteration of "no true Scotsman," but if it's been named I'm unaware of it. "Of all the expressions of our current indifference to the meaning of the words," Chesterton writes later, "I think that the most irritating is this cool substitution of one kind of definition for another." That, as it happens, does have a name. 

Before moving on to the religious controversy surrounding the "New Theology" of R.J. Campbell, Chesterton concludes:

“The fact is, that all this evasive use of words is unworthy of our human intellect.”

"Mr. Campbell has excellent brains," Chesterton continues, "but thinks it more advanced and modern not to use them. . . . He is guided in his choice of phrases by mere aimless sentimentalism." We cheat ourselves when we cheat with our language. We were made for finer things. Our minds are precision instruments.

Chesterton here anticipates some of the arguments in Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" by almost forty years. Writing in 1946, Orwell argued that "if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought," and devoted the bulk of his essay to examples which he surgically dissects. Compare: 

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Slovenliness is a good word for it. Not chaos, not anarchy, but an utter "you know what I mean" indifference to good order–a linguistic dorm room. A pervasive slovenliness degrades not just political discourse but all communication today. I'm not talking about emojis, slang, and memes, but rather the intellectual path of least resistance onto which all of us route our thoughts, "gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug." The appeal, Orwell writes, is that this mode of communication, this way of thinking, is easy.

But will it lead us to truth?

Quick: What is the difference between a country and a nation? Between enhanced interrogation and torture? Between racism, prejudice, and bigotry? Between faith and a faith? What is love? What is violence? What does the word free mean in free speech, free country, free love, free will, free with any purchase?

Burke on Independence Day

Edmund Burke (1729-97) was an Irish-born politician, writer, and political philosopher. He served as a member of parliament for nearly thirty years, from 1766-94—three decades spanning the political crises that birthed the United States and the French Republic.

As MP, he urged Parliament to respect the rights and privileges of the American colonies, arguing that the British Empire should either leave them alone, as they had largely done up to that point, or let them go. Any other course threatened to poison Anglo-American relations. He also condemned the French Revolution, accurately predicting the Reign of Terror and the rise of a military dictator out of the chaos, and produced the founding tract of Conservatism, Reflections on the Revolution in France, a still-relevant denunciation of revolution for revolution's sake.

There are four quotations to which I often return and have special relevance for Independence Day.

Don't interfere with custom for the sake of expediency

From his "Speech on American Taxation," April 19, 1774, in which he argued for the full repeal of the Townshend Acts, which Parliament had passed to increase revenues from the colonies following the exorbitantly expensive Seven Years' War:

Be content to bind America by laws of trade: you have always done it. Let this be your reason for binding their trade. Do not burden them by taxes: you were not used to do so from the beginning. Let this be your reason for not taxing. . . . But if, intemperately, unwisely, fatally, you sophisticate and poison the very source of government, by urging subtle deductions, and consequences odious to those you govern, from the unlimited and illimitable nature of supreme sovereignty, you will teach them by these means to call that sovereignty itself in question. When you drive him hard, the boar will surely turn upon the hunters. If that sovereignty and their freedom cannot be reconciled, which will they take? They will cast your sovereignty in your face. Nobody will be argued into slavery.

The importance of unwritten laws to liberty

From his "Letter to a Member of the National Assembly," 1791, in which he developed a lengthy and damning argument against Rousseau, who valued ideological abstractions about liberty and license above concrete reality:

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites—in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity;—in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption;—in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there is without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

A warning about bad leaders

From his "Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the Affairs of America," 1777, warning of the kinds of people who may seek power and that one should always beware of, the kinds democracies are always in danger of encouraging:

But I cannot conceive any existence under Heaven, (which, in the depths of its wisdom, tolerates all sorts of things), that is more truly odious and disgusting, than an impotent helpless creature, without civil wisdom or military skill, without a consciousness of any other qualification for power but his servility to it, bloated with pride and arrogance, calling for battles which he is not to fight, contending for a violent dominion which he can never exercise, and satisfied to be himself mean and miserable, in order to render others contemptible and wretched.

Evergreen advice

From his "Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents," 1770:

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

A visit to Antietam

Bloody Lane, Antietam National Battlefield Park

Friday I got to visit Antietam National Battlefield Park for the first time. Despite my interests, studies, and profession, this is only the fourth Civil War battlefield I've been able to visit, after Gettysburg (twice), Kennesaw Mountain, and Griswoldville. (I could count Atlanta, but that battlefield is buried beneath Jimmy Carter Boulevard now.) 

The Battle of Sharpsburg, a.k.a. Antietam, occurred September 17, 1862 in the fields surrounding Sharpsburg, Maryland. Major General George McClellan, the Union commander of the Army of the Potomac, having accidentally acquired a copy of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's marching orders for his invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania, moved to confront Lee while his army was divided. Lee drew his army up around the town of Sharpsburg, where a few bends of the Potomac River created a defensible position. McClellan attacked, and his troops kept up pressure on Lee all day, but the battle proved indecisive. McClellan refrained from attacking the next day and Lee was able to escape across the river into Virginia. 

Two things make Antietam significant: First, it is the bloodiest single day in American military history. 23,000 men were killed and wounded in just twelve hours of combat. Second, as Antietam was the closest thing to a victory the Union had achieved in the east up to that point, the battle offered President Lincoln, hitherto an advocate of a limited war to preserve the union, an opportunity to expand the war's scope and put extra economic pressure on the Confederacy by announcing the Emancipation Proclamation, which would theoretically liberate all slaves in areas still under Confederate control if the war were not ended by January 1, 1863. This was not actually a popular move, especially since further disaster awaited the Union armies later that year.

I arrived before the visitors' center opened and the first spot I walked to was the western end of Bloody Lane, where the 24th Georgia Volunteer Infantry deployed in support of Colquitt's Brigade during the battle. Among the privates of the 24th's Company E, "Rabun Gap Rifles," was Abraham Lafayette Keener, an ancestor on my maternal grandfather's mother's side. Abraham has a small role to play in my forthcoming novel Griswoldville.

I walked the length of Bloody Lane to the park observation tower. Bloody Lane was a deeply rutted road at the time of the battle--natural entrenchments for the defending Confederates under D.H. Hill. Despite repeated assaults by much larger Union forces, Hill's men held out for nearly four hours. During that time, over 5,000 men were killed and wounded along that stretch of road. The Confederate dead lay three deep in a few places.

After climbing the observation tower I walked to Dunker Church, scene of some early fighting and maneuvering during the morning of the battle, and watched the excellent half-hour film available at the park visitors' center. I am, to be frank, usually underwhelmed by the films at national parks, but this one was produced to a high standard and featured dramatic and moving reenactments of some of the major events of the battle. I bought a DVD copy for use in the classroom.

From there I drove to Burnside's Bridge to complete my visit. 

If you haven't visited Antietam, do so. It's an important site for Civil War history and the park is well-maintained and beautiful. Strikingly so. Walking around on a sunny, cloudless June morning, I found it hard to imagine all the death that occurred there. But it's important to try.

A gallery of the photos I took. I forgot my Nikon before I got on the road, but I hope my phone's camera suffices.

The penalty for ignoring two thousand years

“The penalty for ignoring two thousand years is that you get stuck in the last hundred.”

The Paris Review has shared an interesting piece from their archives, an undated letter between Donald Hall, their first poetry editor, and founding editor George Plimpton. The subject is poetry, and while the discussion suggests the mid- to late-1950s very specifically, Hall makes points about art, sincerity, and fakery that are still timely. Most striking is his assertion that you can't produce good art without attending to the tradition you find yourself in. From near the end of the letter:

You must understand that art is nothing to these men, nor history. The penalty for ignoring two thousand years is that you get stuck in the last hundred. They have the specious present of the barbarian. Art in this century demands a sense of the tragic dignity of history. These poor bastards are stuck in the last third of the 19th century and I swear they don’t know that anything happened before that. 

Belong to a tradition. Embrace it. You'll produce better art and not "get stuck in the last hundred years," an eternal provincialism that will render you irrelevant faster than any particular subject matter could.

That line on "the penalty for ignoring two thousand years" is wonderful. But as far as penalties go, even being stuck in the last hundred years is probably optimistic now. Even my sincerest, hardest working students, who come to me so profoundly ignorant of the past, are often stuck in the last five. 

Naturally, C.S. Lewis's introduction to St. Athanasius's On the Incarnation came to mind, as it so often does when I try to encourage people to read the old stuff. Making a point broadly similar to Hall's, Lewis writes that

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook . . . The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.

See also my thoughts from a few weeks ago on the value of studying the past, complete with two thousand year-old references to Polybius and Cicero.

Hall died last week aged 89. 

The first Griswoldville proofs arrive

The first proof copies of Griswoldville arrived today! I'm thrilled with how they look and can't wait to complete the proofing and correction process to get these out to y'all. Enjoy the mini-gallery below as a bit of a sneak peek. More news to come!

A Map of the Heart: the Icelandic sagas on the CBC

On my drive back from Georgia this weekend I listened to a two-part podcast series from the CBC on the Icelandic sagas, "A Map of the Heart." Part I provided some background on the settlement of Iceland during the Viking Age and the culture of the people who lived there, as well as where the sagas came from and how well they reflect that culture. The second part recapped some points from the first and spent a lot of time on an in-depth look at Egils saga, the story of Egill Skallagrimsson, one of the greastest works in the saga literature and one of the inspirations for my novel No Snakes in Iceland. 

I hope there will be more, because there are so many other great sagas—among my other favorites are Gisli Sursson's Saga, The Saga of Grettir the Strong, and Njal's Saga—and these two episodes were excellent. The CBC being Canadian, I hope they're working their way toward covering the Vinland sagas; those are fascinating bits of history.

You can listen to Part I here and Part II here. They're worth your while, especially if you've not yet had an introduction to the sweeping, dramatic, but deeply local and personal world of the sagas.

Chesterton on arguing

From GKC's Illustrated London News column, March 9, 1929: 

“People generally quarrel because they cannot argue. And it is extraordinary to notice how few people in the modern world can argue. This is why there are so many quarrels, breaking out again and again, and never coming to any natural end.”

Chesterton relished debate, and enjoyed deep and lasting friendships with a number of people diametrically opposed to his beliefs. Unsurprisingly, the difference between argument and mere quarreling is a topic he returned to over and over again.

From What's Wrong with the World, published nearly two decades before the above quotation: "If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will have no answer except slanging or silence." From his Autobiography, published after his death in 1936, reflecting on his younger brother Cecil, who died in World War I: "I am glad to think that through all those years we never stopped arguing; and we never once quarreled." And, as an aside:

“Perhaps the principal objection to a quarrel is that it interrupts an argument.”

Food for thought. Chesterton, as usual, being relevant from beyond the grave.

A good visit with The Front Porch Show

Last week I had the pleasure of joining Aaron, Tombstone, and Just Jeff for two segments of their Front Porch Show, the weekly podcast about everything. Click through to listen at their website, or one of the several podcasting services they air on including Spotify and iTunes, or see the embedded Stitcher link below. We talked about historical movies—what makes them good, what makes them bad—my books, and especially what the life and death of Cicero can teach us about virtue in politics today (with all due caution, of course). Had a great time. Thanks for having me on the show!

Words of warning

From The Whig Interpretation of History, Butterfield's must-read 1931 historiographical essay:

“[T]he chief aim of the historian is the elucidation of the unlikenesses between past and present . . . It is not for him to stress and magnify the similarities between one age and another, and he is riding after a whole flock of misapprehensions if he goes to hunt for the present in the past.”

— Herbert Butterfield

Or, in the oft-repeated saw of L.P. Hartley, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." For an example of the "flock of misapprehensions" a present-minded investigator can run into, see my Historical Movie Monday post on Kingdom of Heaven.

Presenting: the cover of Griswoldville

This summer has proven unexpectedly busy. If you listened to my guest appearance on Impolitic Podcast last week, you'll remember that Historical Movie Monday has taken a bit of a hiatus. It will return, but each post is time consuming to research and write and in addition I'm teaching summer classes for the first time in four years, spending the weekends hustling back and forth on various family vacations, and—not insignificantly—I've been working hard to complete revisions on my latest novel.

And the revisions have been going well! So today I'm pleased to present the cover of my soon to be released novel Griswoldville. 

The story unfolds over the course of the Civil War, as a young boy and his family slowly adjust to the absences of fathers and uncles, the pinch of inflation and government requisition, and finally service in the militia. The description of the novel from the back cover: 

Madison Co., Georgia, 1864—14-year old Georgie Wax has spent the three years since his father left for the war looking after the family farm. WIth his mother and young brothers, Georgie and his grandfather Lafayette "Fate" Eschenbach have brought in the crops every fall, slaughtered the hogs every winter, and kept the farm running as the faraway war stretches on longer and longer and his father seems ever farther and farther away.

But when the enemy reaches their own state, Georgie and his grandfather are called up to the militia to protect Georgia against the invaders. Drilled mercilessly, mocked for lack of experience, and put to work at manual labor, Georgie finds war isn't the adventure he imagined it to be. Only with Atlanta fallen and the enemy on the move will Georgie,  Fate, and their fellow Georgia militiamen find a chance to prove themselves and save their homes from destruction—at a railside factory town called Griswoldville.

The novel should be available before the end of summer. I'm pretty excited about this one, and I hope y'all will be, too. Stay tuned for more announcements! 

A good visit with Impolitic Podcast

Last week I was honored to be invited onto my old classmate Paul Matzko's Impolitic Podcast. Paul's show offers up "friendly arguments" between a libertarian (himself) and a socialist (his co-host, Sean). Paul asked me (a conservative) to substitute for Sean this week and we had a fun, freewheeling conversation about my books, historical fiction, World War II as "the Good War," Charles Portis, conspiracism, the Babylon Bee, and the soft censorship of the internet age. 

You can listen by subscribing to Impolitic on iTunes, clicking through to the Impolitic blog, or listening via Stitcher below. Enjoy, and thanks again, Paul!