When Michele asked me to fisk this person I blithely agreed, but I've been sitting here for an hour or so wondering just how to properly approach this particular example of idiocy. First, some background:
Michele commented on a post on Merde in France about some buttmunch by the name of Frédéric Beigbeder who has written one of those "controversial" novels the French are so (in)famous for. (In this case "controversial" means "lots of people having sex while babbling on pretentiously about the meaning of life. The word "voluptuous" is a staple, as is the scene where someone cries "The meaning of life is nothing!" -- which sounds so sexy in French. Kind of like one of those Zalman King movies in novelette format.) This time the setting of the "controversial" novel is not the coast of France in the off-season or Algeria during one of its civil wars but the restaurant that was at the top of the World Trade Center on the day that complex was destroyed by the sort of people who would gladly put a bullet through the clever, postmodern brainettes of pseudo-artistes like this monkey. The conceit of Beigbeder is that the people in the restaurant met their fate not, as is well known, by calling their loved ones on cell phones to say goodbye and then either dying by jumping out of the windows or when the towers collapsed, but by having "furious sex." No doubt this will be interspersed by a great deal of psychotically abstruse and pointless philosophizing.
Once France was known, and deservedly so, for being home to the culture of reason and civilization. What they seemed to lack in strength and innovation they at least made up for by having the most exquisite society, cuisine, and literature in Europe. But by all reports this reputation has not been deserved for some time. I suppose the rot started after World War 2, or maybe it was the Sixties that ruined the country. But the French seem (or at least their artistic, intellectual, and political elite seems) to have backslid to their French-Revolutionary-era crudity.
But enough of this fellow. The reaction of most people in Michele's comments, unsurprisingly, has been distaste and anger. September 11th was not some happening back in the mists of time; it occurred less than two years ago. We know what the people in the towers were really doing in their last moments, and it wasn't having "furious sex." That this novel was written merely to attract attention to yet another overgrown toddler in grownup clothes who wants praise for the painting he has made with shit pulled out of his own diapers is obvious. If this does become a bestseller, even for a brief time due to the curiosity of the crowd, it only means that people are crass all over, not in the US.
Lilli Marleen, however, has had a reaction to this that is bizarre, bizarre. For some reason she has decided that it is "self-centered" of Americans to be upset about what happened on September 11th and to take umbrage about some foreigner trashing the event for his own aggrandization because -- get this -- we made tv series like Hogan's Heroes and something called "Cowboy Comedies" that "made fun of Native Americans."
Now I am not going to defend that tacky tv show -- though I will note that it was made about forty years ago and people today can hardly be blamed for its existence. As for the movie genre she refers to; from her comment about Little Big Horn, she seems to be referring to Little Big Man, which if she were not so -- I was going to say stupid, but I realize that she is foreign, (she's German) so I will say if she were not so unused to American humor -- would realize is a satire attacking the stereotypical Good-Cowboy/Bad-Indian western, and far from a vehicle meant to "make fun" of Native Americans. It even used real Native American actors to play the Native American roles, unlike many standard Westerns of the old school. But all this is to say, what the fuck do old movies and tv shows have to do with the continued trashing by foreign so-called "artists" of the events of September 11th? Is she actually trying to imply that the horror of bad American tv and movies outweighs the actual deaths of real living people that this cretin is making light of with his tarted-up trash novel? Is she indignant over the admittedly silly stereotypes of Germans perpetuated by Hogan's Heroes? Does her indignation weigh more, or equally, than what a wife, husband, or child of one of the people who died on September 11th 2001 will feel when they find out what M. Beigbeder has done to the memory of their dead relatives? I don't fucking think so.
Incidentally, this is not the first time Lilli Marleen has displayed evidence that all she knows about America is what she gets from exported tv series and movies. I learned about Germany and other cultures the old fashioned way -- by studying its history in school, taking the language, reading reports, and so on. I have seen more than a few German movies. But if I were to base my knowledge of Germany on just what I had seen on the screen, I'd think they were all Vampires with red-dyed hair running as fast as they can to stop their boyfriends from holding up a factory in which the workers all had to turn a giant dial and then there was a female robot who danced and the cellars flooded and everyone lived in a submarine which really sucked. Fortunately, I can tell the difference between fiction and non-fiction.
PS: here is the list of September 11th victims. Unlike certain French "novelists" I try not to get my jollies -- oh, excuse me, make "important philosophical and cultural statements" -- about an atrocity by making up scenarios in which the victims have an orgy. I guess I'm selfish that way.
Update: because of constant harrassment by some pathetic, small-penised fool (IP addresses used so far: 208.184.25.41, 64.124.162.136, 210.50.201.45, 210.50.112.64, 210.50.216.165, 210.50.203.245, 216.110.36.120, 66.150.0.245, 210.50.112.64) comments on this post are now closed.
Posted by Andrea Harris at August 3, 2003 10:31 PMVery well said Andrea. And thanks for the victim list link. I hadn't seen it, or the listing Larry. It's the same picture that sits over my nephew's play area, watching him grow up like he should have been able to.
Posted by: Faith at August 4, 2003 at 12:40 AMThere's also something about a respectful amount of time passing before joking about things.
Hogan's Heroes was, what? 20 years after the end of World War II? Even then, there were people who were offended by the show and wouldn't watch it--nor do I blame them for feeling that way. Especially anyone who was actually in a prison camp, or knew someone who was.
Two years after a massive earthquake killed tens of thousands of people in Mexico, I would be rather offended by a movie that desecrated those folks' memories. Maybe 20 years from now, if there was some comedy that was set during that earthquake, I might laugh--or not. Probably not.
But really, honestly, the only thing that bothered me about Fraulein Marleen's rant was her presumption that I would not have thought of the things she said before, or that Michele wouldn't have. Has it occurred to her that, just perhaps, a rational person might have had those thoughts, and might still be offended?
Posted by: Dean Esmay at August 4, 2003 at 05:15 AMMy father was one of those people who hated the show and refused to watch it for the reasons you cited. He didn't stop us kids from watching it. There was a block of syndicated sitcoms (this one, Gilligans Island, I Love Lucy, and -- I think -- I Dream of Jeanie, or maybe it was Bewitched, that my sister and I had to watch. It was a kind of ritual. I blame, or credit these shows for my later teenage aversion to television. (I spent most of my teen years in my room with my books and radio. I can't say I missed much.)
Faith: my condolences for your loss.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at August 4, 2003 at 06:32 AMI never did like Hogan's Heros. Even as a kid I knew it was stipid and unrealistic - BUT, I recently caught part of a documentary on PBS about a German prisoner of war camp and when they were telling about some of the stuff that the prisoners were able to get away with right under their German guards' noses (getting messages in and out and such) I couldn't help but think "Damn, they really were as stupid as they showed them in Hogan's Heros!" The difference of course is that HH didn't show the real suffering of the prisoners but they apparently weren't too far off in their portrayal of the Germans.
Posted by: Lynn S at August 4, 2003 at 08:32 AMEven then, there were people who were offended by the show and wouldn't watch it--nor do I blame them for feeling that way. Especially anyone who was actually in a prison camp, or knew someone who was.
You mean like Robert Clary (born Robert Max Wideman, survived three years of incarceration in Nazi camps, and lost his parents and two sisters)? Or John Banner (filed Austria with his family in the wake of the Nazi invasion)? Or Werner Klemperer (I think the Klemperer family is sufficiently famous not to be recapped)?
Portraying the Nazi functionaries as idiots at best was immensely fulfilling to these men who lost family and freedom to the Nazis. Not everyone reacts to everything the same way.
This is not to defend M. Beigbeder's book, which is certain to be a big pile of merde. Nor Ms. Marleen, who is clearly an idiot.
Posted by: Phil at August 4, 2003 at 09:08 AMAs I just posted on her blog, perhaps we were trying to think of Germans as like Klink and Shultz, rather than Johann Baptist Eichelsdorfer, the Commandant of Schwabmunchen/KauferingIV.
Posted by: Chuck at August 4, 2003 at 09:23 AMSomething to remember about Hogan's Heroes: Two of the regular actors were survivors of the Holocaust and a third escaped Germany after the Nazis began trying to kill his father. One of them (Robert Clary -- LeBeau) still has his concentration camp tattoo.
Hogan's Heroes was as much about making jokes out of our enemies as anything else, and some of the people turning the Nazis into jokes were some of its victims. Mel Brook's did the same thing with The Producers and To Be or Not To Be.
Posted by: Robert Crawford at August 4, 2003 at 09:44 AMMaybe that's what the author of this "Windows on the World" is trying to do -- make jokes out of his enemies.
...Us.
Posted by: McGehee at August 4, 2003 at 09:51 AMFrom Chuck’s ‘Memories of Germans’:
“The new flavor of Holocaust denial is not to deny that it happened, but to deny it significance, to reduce 6 million dead Jews to a mere blip on the bloody radar of human history. "Bad things have happened to people all through history" goes the logic. "Besides, everyone does it." It's an argument that demands the perfection of human character before allowing action against evil while simultaneously denying that such perfection can possibly exist.”
“It's a neat rhetorical trick, an excuse for inaction in the face of evil.”
…
After such a long history of making up excuses for inaction in the face of evil, you’d think the average German could come up with a better excuse for the utter lack of sympathy towards the victims of the worst terror attack in history than blaming bad American TV. One of many indications that old Europe is in decline...
Posted by: mary at August 4, 2003 at 10:32 AMMcGehee: I think you have it exactly right.
Posted by: Robert Crawford at August 4, 2003 at 11:15 AMI have a more fundamental question:
Who were the "victims" in Hogan's Heroes?
In a Stalag, it would be the airmen, presumably. Yet, here, they pull off the most amazing things in the face of the camp commandant and guards.
Or is Lilli suggesting that it is the GUARDS that are the victims?
Moreover, it IS a Stalag that is the focus---NOT a concentration camp, much less a death camp. I don't think there'd be a single defender of "Hogan's Heroes," if it had been set at Treblinka or Auschwitz.
But this novel (which, I confess, I've not read), is not a comedy AFAICT, and its topic is about genuine victims, not people pulling off amazing feats under others' noses, but who are facing death in a horrible way (KNOWING, frex, that you're trapped).
One wonders whether a novel depicting Joan of Arc f**king the brains out of her gaolers, or de Gaulle screwing Reynaud's mistress while the Germans march in, or Napoleon losing at Waterloo because he was being buggered by Ney would be considered cutting-edge?
Posted by: Dean at August 4, 2003 at 11:15 AMI am blessed by large numbers of European-dwelling relatives who often feel the need to comment about "How do you stand living in the intellectual wasteland that is the USA?"
It is at this point that I observe that the per capita consumption of classical music, opera and high-brow theater is far greater in the USA than in Old Europe. I add that not only does the USA win most of the Nibel Prizes, we win them with "converts", foreign-born scientists who have moved to the USA. I also point out that European popular TV shows are even MORE brain-dead and low-brow than their American counterparts [as impossible as it seems].
I mention to them that I know the REAL reason they proport to despise McDonald's: previously, only the elite classes could afford to regularly take their lunches at a restaurant - now everybody does. It is nothing less than snobbery.
On the other hand, I readliy admit that the quality of brothels in the Olde World IS far superior to the tawdry imitations found in most American cities [NOTE: I do not disparage the Chicken Ranch in Nevada - it is fully on par with the best on the continent.]
I usually finish the conversation by pointing out that only "The DEAN of the College of Idiots" gets his view of a culture from movies and TV. But I do admit that a larger percentage of Americans wear cowboy boots every day than Germans wear 'lederhosen'.
So what.
Posted by: OldFan at August 5, 2003 at 05:50 PM