"Paths of Glory"........Act II:

[KoKo]

Paths of Glory, Act II: The Health Care Bill
By: Jane Hamsher Sunday March 14, 2010 8:30 am

I went to dinner Saturday night at a popular DC political watering hole. I’d never been there before. The atmosphere was so heavy and the mood of the room so strange it was hard to concentrate.

I had no idea what that meant.

“You know, Stanley Kubrick, World War I — the generals know it’s a suicide mission but they don’t care. They think they might get a promotion so they send the troops in anyway. But the troops won’t go, so the generals start firing on their own men in the trenches.”

Yep, that was it was it: fear. Icy cold fingers up your back, smell-of-death fear.

“You mean over the health care bill? I said. “Because they’re forcing everyone to sacrifice themselves and take the vote.”

“Yep.”

I’d had dinner with another Democratic operative the night before who referred to it as “sati” (where the widow of a deceased Hindu would throw herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, either voluntarily or by force).



“That’s funny,” I said, “I’ve been calling it ‘Jonestown.’ But “Paths of Glory” — the generals — much more apt.”

As I recall, in the movie they wind up shooting one soldier for his “cowardice” as a lesson to them all.

“It’s Paths of Glory, and these are the trenches,” said my dinner companion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DHhTjiVlF4&feature=player_embedded


http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/03/13/paths-of-glory-act-ii-the-health-care-bill/

[Tesha]

1. Well, I see by the fact that my recommendation didn't "take" that you're getting negative recs...

...but I think your analysis has some real merit.

Paths of Glory is a very powerful movie and not nearly
well-enough known.

Tesha

[90-percent]

2. Made in 1957

The cast includes actor Timothy Carey, who wrote and produced and starred in "The Worlds Greatest Sinner", which was scored by none other than my lifelong hero Frank Zappa, back in 1962 before he got famous.

I do run into people acquainted with servicemen damaged by Iraq from time to time. What a needless waste for so many of our young people. To be used and and spit out by their country for a War based entirely on lies!

-jim

[KoKo]

4. I remember reading Erich Maria Remarque's, "Alls Quiet on the Western Front" way back..!

..and being blown over.. But, my uncle here in the US was only 18 when he was sent over by US as the Americans came In...and he only was in France a couple of months but he said to me how terrible it was and how he was glad he wasn't British or French to get into the FIRST HORRIBLE SLAUGHTERS! He was there for the "Clean Up" and he told me about it. He felt lucky that American Boys weren't sent over there for that British FIASCO. He had bad memories of getting there after the "Killing" had taken place. The American troops were called back soon enough that he didn't have to spend much time there. It was good for him (according to his account) to have been called back.

Some Intersting Background about WWI fro this site...and his book which I read many years ago but has stayed with me.

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Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970) - pseudonym for Erich Paul Remark



German writer, who became famous with his novel IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES (tr. All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929), which depicted the horrors of war from the point of view of the ordinary soldiers. In his works Remarque focused largely on the collapse of the old European world and values. Although his later novels also were successful, Remarque lived in the shadow of his "big" first book.

"It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hour's bombardment unscratched. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck." (from All Quiet on the Western Front)

Erich Maria Remarque was born in Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, into modest circumstances. His ancestors were French, the family name was 'Germanized' early in the nineteeth century. Peter Franz Remark, Remarque's father, was a poorly paid bookbinder. Although Franz Remark did not show much interest in intellectual activities, except his interest in the occult, the family had a piano, and at one point in his life Remarque planned a musical career. In 1904, at the age of six, Remarque entered the Domschule (cathedral school), and four years later he moved to the Johannisschle. Remarque was "always the best in class", as one of his closest school friends later recalled.

For a time Remarque studied at the University of Münster, but had to enlist in the German army at the age of 18. Remarque fought on the Western Front and was wounded several times. After his discharge Remarque had taken a teacher's course offered to veterans by the government. He taught for a year in a school, and tried also his hand as a stonecutter and a test-cardriver for a Berlin tire company.

Remarque began his writing career as a sporting journalist, eventually becoming the assistant editor of Sportbild. Among his friends was Leni Riefenstahl, who later made the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935), and the two-part Olympia (1938), about the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Remarque's wife, Jutta Zambona, "tall, slender as a fashion model, and strikingly dressed", as Riefenstahl described Jutta in her book of memoir later inspired heroines in his books. The marriage was stormy, and they both had extra-marital activities. His longest, intercontinental affair Remarque had with Marlene Dietrich; they met first time in Venice in the late 1930s.

Fame came with Remarque's first novel, All Quiet on the Westerns Front, which touched a nerve of the time, and sparkled off a storm of political controversy. The book, which first had been rejected by one publisher, sold 1.2 million copies in its first year. H.L. Mencken called it "unquestionably the best story of the World War." Its sequel, DER WEG ZURÜCK (The Way Back), appeared in 1931. It dealt with the collapse of the German Army after the war, and the fate of the surviving heroes, Ernst and his friends.

All Quiet on the Western Front is the most famous novel dealing with World War I. The book starts in 1917 after a battle, in which half of Paul Bäumer's company has been killed. Bäumer is mostly the narrator and Remarque goes through his life in flashbacks. Paul and his classmates have been encouraged by their teacher, Kantorek, to enlist the German army. Bäumer's group includes some school fellows, and Katczinsky, an older man. The group goes through basic training and go to the front. Bäumer tries to understand what is going on. He realizes that back home "no one had the vaguest idea what we were in for. The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas those who were better off, and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be, were beside themselves with joy." Paul visits home on leave, returns to the trenches, is wounded and sent to a military hospital. In the summer of 1918 German front is pushed back, and the soldiers are waiting for the end of the war. In October, when there is nothing much to report on the western front, Paul is killed, a week or so before the armistice. - The story is narrated in first person in a cool style, a contrast to patriotic rhetoric. Remarque records the daily horrors in the trenches, where machine guns killed millions, in laconic understatement. - "At the next war let all the Kaisers, Presidents and Generals and diplomats go into a big field and fight it out first among themselves. That will satisfy us and keep us home." (Katzinsky) Lewis Milestone's film (1930), based on the novel, is a landmark of American cinema. One of the best scenes is when Paul (Lew Ayres) returns to his school and tells new students the truth. "When it comes to dying for your country, it's better not to die at all." The film was denounced by Goebbels as anti-German, but the Poles banned it for being pro-German. Particularly effective were the tracking shots of soldiers attacking enemy lines. In France it was prohibited until 1962. The close-up of Paul's hand reaching for the butterfly at the end, is actually the hand of the director Milestone. - A sequel, The Road Back, was made in 1937.

With All Quiet on the Western Front Remarque became a spokesman of "a generation that was destroyed by war, even though it might have escaped its shells," as he said himself. The German defeat inspired two major war films of the year 1930 - G.W. Pabst's Westfront 1918, adapted from a novel by Ernest Johannsen and Lewis Milestone's film based on Remarque's novel. Milestone was unhappy with the original script - he saw it changed the point of the book, and he hired his friend Del Andrews and George Abbott, a stage director, the shape the final script. The producer Carl Laemmle Junior and Milestone both hated the original ending of the book, in which Paul Baumer dies heroically. Karl Freund, the cameraman, put forward the idea of the hand stretching out toward the butterfly.

In the 1930s Remarque's books were banned in Germany by the government. All Quiet on the Western Front and The Road Back were among the works consigned to be publicly burnt in 1933 by the Nazis. Stores were ordered to stop selling his books. The film's premiere was disrupted by Nazi gangs; Remarque was accused of pacifism. It was not until the 1950s the film was shown again in West Germany. In 1938 Remarque lost his citizenship. He had moved to Switzerland in 1932 and in 1939 he emigrated to the United States, where in 1947 he became a citizen. In New York he spent much time at the Stork Club and at 21. In Hollywood he made friends with stars, including the actress Paulette Goddard (1911-1990), whom he married in 1958. Remarque had been married twice before, and to the same woman, Jutta Ilse Ingeborg Ellen Zambona, in 1925 and again in 1938. After the war Remarque settled eventually back in Switzerland, where he made his residence at Porto Ronco on the Seiss shore of Lake Maggiore. His play, DIE LETZTE STATION, about the fall of the Third Reich, was produced in Berlin in 1956. Remarque died at the Sant Agnese clinic at Locarno, on September 25, 1970. He had suffered for months from aneurysm.

"If things went according to the death notices, man would be absolutely perfect. There you find only first-class fathers, immaculate husbands, model children, unselfish, self-sacrificing mothers, grandparents mourned by all, businessmen in contrast with whom Francis of Assisi would seem an infinite egoist, generals dripping with kindness, humane prosecuting attorneys, almost holy munitions makers - in short, the earth seems to have been populated by a horde of wingless angels without one's having been aware of it." (from The Black Obelisk, 1956)

[KoKo]

3. I thought these were some interesting Comments from Hamsher's Post..good to read...

mar2371 March 14th, 2010 at 10:24 am
109

The current situation is even sadder and more poignant than in Paths of Glory. In the film, the troops were part of a suicide mission. In our case, it was our leaders themselves who turned a successful mission into murder of their own troops.

President Obama campaigned on a platform of change and hope. The people responded strongly and produced wins in the White House, Senate and Congress. There is no doubt in my mind that if the President had included the public option in his plan, it would have passed. That one omission said it all to me – the man I voted for betrayed the people who worked hardest for him during the election. Given the opportunity to produce change we could believe in, he killed it. And along with it, he killed the hope that was supposed to change our nation.

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In response to PJEvans @ 56

Nate Silver doesn’t think much of Kucinich, either: he really doesn’t seem to have done much in the time that he’s been in Congress.

non-specific criticisms from a detailed numbers guys. swell. if nate has a real case, then imo he needs to make it with some real evidence.

kucinich is a pol who actually stood up to the banksters (i was in cleveland at the time). wish we had more of them right now. from wikipedia:

Kucinich was elected Mayor of Cleveland in 1977 and served in that position until 1979.<15> At thirty-one years of age, he was the youngest mayor of a major city in the United States,<5> earning him the nickname “the boy mayor of Cleveland”.<16> Kucinich’s tenure as mayor is often regarded as one of the most tumultuous in Cleveland’s history.<16><17> After Kucinich refused to sell Muni Light, Cleveland’s publicly owned electric utility, the Cleveland mafia put out a hit on Kucinich. A hit man from Maryland planned to shoot him in the head during the Columbus Day Parade, but the plot fell apart when Kucinich was hospitalized and missed the event. When the city fell into default shortly thereafter, the mafia leaders called off the contract killer.<18>

In the book Best and Worst of the Big-City Leaders, 1820–1993, Melvin G. Holli, in consultation with a panel of selected experts, claimed Kucinich to be among the ten worst big-city mayors of all time. Kucinich’s supporters argue that Kucinich kept his campaign promise of refusing to sell Muni Light to CEI and was brave in not giving in to big business. Specifically, it was the Cleveland Trust Company that suddenly required all of the city’s debts be paid in full, which forced the city into default, after news of Kucinich’s refusal to sell the city utility. For years, these debts were routinely rolled over, pending future payment, until Kucinich’s announcement was made public. In 1998 the council honored him for having the “courage and foresight” to stand up to the banks and saving the city an estimated $195 million between 1985 and 1995.<19>

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jawbone March 14th, 2010 at 11:59 am
150
In response to selise @ 28

A two-fer: Threat to a principled Dem (of the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party, as Paul Wellstone used to say) gives pause to other liberals and progressives and it moves the Overton Window ever rightward.

Now, this would seem to be a Repub type move, but perhaps a Dem who channels St. Ronnie finds it appropriate as well.

Avedon ended one of her posts commenting on why the Obama health insurance BAILOUT is NOT a “huge progressive victory” (from Seth Ackerman at Tiny Revolution) this way:

Barack Obama, slamming the Overton Window shut, right down on your broken fingers.

I added:

And broken dreams, broken hopes.


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earlofhuntingdon March 14th, 2010 at 12:04 pm
152
In response to selise @ 146
powwow March 14th, 2010 at 12:33 pm
159
In response to digifyouwill @ 7



This, from the Cleveland Plain Dealer article @ 28 that selise tracked down, underlines something for me that I think the opponents of the public option-free Senate health care bill may be missing, and ought to work to formulate, as part of a renewed campaign to pressure Congress:

“This bill represents a giveaway to the insurance industry, $70 billion a year, and no guarantees of any control over premiums, forcing people to buy private insurance, five consecutive years of double-digit premium increases,” told host Lawrence O’Donnell. “I’m sorry. I just don’t see that this bill is a solution.”

In short, Dennis Kucinich should not now be left out there almost on his own to explain the Senate bill’s flaws, in an effort to justify his opposition to it, while the pressure on him to shut up is at its most intense, however much those flaws may have been discussed and carefully dissected here and elsewhere before this week.

That is, I think that what’s needed now is a concise, but substantively detailed, Fact Sheet, contrasting side by side the most widespread claims of the bill’s proponents (such as those voiced by digifyouwill @ 7) with the bill’s actual language and expert analysis proving those claims to be false (such as that summarized by the responses of duncan, BooRadley and PhoenixWoman). All in a printable, easily-grasped format, for future reference. <"Talking points" in a way, that is, except points that let the evidence do most of the talking. Perhaps modeled on the excellent, large New York Times anti-FISA Amendments Act ad that Jane and Glenn and others put together.>

Those blogwriters opposing this bill’s passage can also then immediately point to and stand on a list of substantive reasons for their opposition, which expose the claims of the proponents as pie-in-the-sky, as those proponents resort only to namecalling and taunts in response.

Those who have long tracked the pros and cons of the debate have managed to pick up over the months a few key points about the major provisions of the Senate bill to enable them to make their own judgements, but at this time a clear pro/con summary is needed for those who haven’t been able to so closely track the debate, and who are thus now wide open and vulnerable to the propaganda of the Party (and the media) about its legislation.

Such a clear explanation would also help expose the forthcoming lies or mischaracterizations of Members of Congress about the bill and their vote(s) for it while, perhaps most importantly, supporting Dennis Kucinich, and any colleagues who join him, in his lonely public effort to exercise his own independent best judgement as a Member of Congress about what will most benefit, or hurt, his constituents and the nation as a whole. Supporting, in other words, those in Congress actually doing their duty as self-governing federal representatives and legislators, in the teeth of public and private pressures to silently conform to the will of others – pressures that implicitly or explicitly threaten uninformed and misleading public ridicule like that which Kos so shamefully doled out to Kucinich on behalf of the corrupt status quo the other day.
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