While watching the evening newscast, I heard some good news and some bad news.
Bad news first: a quote from P.M. David Cameron on the brutal beheading by ISIS of British aid worker David Haines (quote verified in The Daily News):
“They [ISIS] boast of their brutality. They claim to do this in the name of Islam. That is nonsense. Islam is a religion of peace. They’re not Muslims; they’re monsters.”
Uh huh. Maybe if these pusillanimous politicians say it often enough, it will become true.
On a happier note, tonight is the premiere of Ken Burns’s new television documentary “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History“:
THE ROOSEVELTS: AN INTIMATE HISTORY chronicles the lives of Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, three members of the most prominent and influential family in American politics. It is the first time in a major documentary television series that their individual stories have been interwoven into a single narrative This seven-part, fourteen hour film follows the Roosevelts for more than a century, from Theodore’s birth in 1858 to Eleanor’s death in 1962.
I will definitely be watching this one as the exception to my usual regime of watching only the evening news and, on Sundays, “60 Minutes”. I’ve never seen a bad program by Burns, and I think that his first big venture, “The Civil War,” was the best television documentary ever made.
The Roosevelt show starts on Public Broadcasting Stations in the U.S. at 8 p.m., except for us lucky people in the central time zone, where it starts at 7. Check the link above to find the PBS station in your area.
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You had a posting titled, ” Obama and ISIS. Where is it? It appears to have disappeared.
I noticed that disappearing too, between me seeing the link on one page and coming back to the computer to try to find time to read it, there it wasn’t.
JAC’s website ; his Roolz ; his choice what to post – and un-post.
It is a post I’m going to write but I posted it when it was blank by hitting the wrong button. That happens sometimes. You didn’t miss anything, and I’ll write it within the next two days.
Any post that is posted and goes out in your feed but doesn’t appear on the site has been posted prematurely.
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Yes, Ken Burns has used a distinctive style through his career to turn out documentaries that are both riveting and smart. I recently saw his documentary on Mark Twain, and I was really taken by it.
Just watched half of the Roosevelt first episode. I’m especially interested in Teddy, being in the middle of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s wonderful The Bully Pulpit. I think that Ken Burns means well, but the narration is sooooo slow and the music so insipid (same banjo and ragtimeish music in all of them), and I have found this in all his work that I’ve watched so far (except for the fantastic one he did on the Central Park Five). I could not finish his series on the National Parks, and I am a huge NP fan. I will probably continue with this series, as the commentators are good, but his narration (not sure who the narrator is) reminds me of Bob and Ray’s Slow Talkers of America. Sorry to be a grinch about Ken Burns…
I don’t suppose he can get Sam Waterston anymore.
Hmmmm, I had mussed that Sam Waterson death hoax hews. Glad he’s alive and well. He’d be much better! Has he done some other Burns shows?
He did the Lincoln readings in ‘The Civil War’ and various bits in ‘National Parks’. I also completely missed recent (exaggerated) reports of his death, because I was sure we already lost him a couple of years ago. Oops! Now who was it I mistook for him?
He’s wonderful in the TV show Newsroom, too.
Nothing like a reliable dose of sadistic fanaticism and unparalleled traumatic imagery as we shift into the autumn season.
Maybe Ken Burns should do a documentary about ISIS on PBS.
Not on in the UK/Europe yet. I checked the PBS listings for the next 7 days.
Cameron actually did worse. He said something like “they’re not Muslims, they’re monsters” as if somehow the two things were mutually exclusive.
Indeed; I heard that and wrote it down and forgot to add it. It’s there now, and it’s also in the Daily News.
Also The Roosevelts is narrated by Peter Coyote. For some reason, like David Attenborough, his voice resonates with me. Calming but strangely authoritative.
Strange – Peter Coyote drives me nuts, he puts me to sleeo, but I really like David Attenborough.
VERY much looking forward to the Roosevelts. It starts here for me in an hour.
My other to favorite Ken Burns docs are Horatio’s Drive (2003), a more lighthearted affair, and Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery (1997).
I love Ken Burns’ work, of course.
Can I put in my two cents for his younger brother Ric? His comprehensive documentary on New York City is truly amazing, and his 1991 documentary about Coney Island is remarkable and a bit difficult to find (though I think it exists on YouTube). A hidden gem.
I’d like to ask these politicians one thing: What would they consider to be a religion of violence? If they can’t name one, why the need to qualify Islam in this way? I’ve never heard someone have to step up to defend Buddhism like this, for example. The PM doth protest too much, methinks.
I think it is said that politicians calculate that they must describe Islam this way, since they need to not alienate our mid-east partners.
Who’re they? I’ve worked with a good number of nationalities in the Middle East, and the attitude is (under the surface, disregarding the bullshit public face worn by everyone) uniformly one of doing one’s damnedest to screw the other “partner” for as much as one can possibly get. The number of people in that part of the world who’re actually interested in a genuine “partnership” can be counted on the fingers of one foot.
No, that’s not a typo.
Buddhism (at least the one practiced in real life, not what the Buddha preached) can get obnoxious when mixed with nationalism. See their behavior towards minorities in Myanmar and Sri Lanka for example. I am sure they have their apologists.
I don’t mean any disrespect, but how can you say The Civil War is the best TV documentary ever made if the only TV you watch is the evening news and 60 minutes?
There’s a lot of made-for-TV documentaries available on DVD, online etc, and Jerry’s posted links of that variety often enough to suggest that he does pick and choose sich things.
I suspect that he may have been typing the conventional pronunciation of “broadcast real-time and advertising-raddled TV” with a silent “broadcast real-time and advertising-raddled.”
Personally, I hardly ever watch “live” TV either, except for the news at breakfast time. I watch plenty of documentaries etc, but often days after broadcast, on the PVR, and with a finger poised over the Fast-Forward button to cut out the adverts. (That’s limited to about 12mins/hour here ; I gather that in the USA it goes up to as much as 20 minutes/ hour ; it certainly seemed longer when I had my brief exposures to that … “material”.)
There are executives in the TV world who would consider me a criminal – literally, not metaphorically – for doing that. Way to go guys – sue your customers as a route to success!
I note that to get a 7-part, 14 hour documentary series to broadcast takes a state-sponsored and (TTBOMK, which is not very far in respect of American TV) tax-payer-funded TV service ; which says something about the opinions that the advertising demographers hold concerning the attention span and interests of their mean audience member. It’s not a high opinion.
6 pm if you’re living in the Mountain Time Zone but your tv station is in the central time zone
Puh-leeze! I haven’t read the shared myths of these sects directly, but already Wikipedia tells me their mythical originator was what we would call today “a terrorist”. He attacked caravans during armed conflicts:
“In March 624, Muhammad led some three hundred warriors in a raid on a Meccan merchant caravan.” [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad#Isra_and_Mi.27raj ] Consequently it isn’t surprising that the first textual evidence of the religion is from a battle with outsiders: “This note appears to have been penned soon after the battle of Gabitha (636 CE) at which the Arabs inflicted crushing defeat of the Byzantines.” [Wikipedia]
And of course we all know from the tales of his marriages that this fabled persona would today be labeled “a pedophile”, which is but another form of violence.
ISIS actions is entirely consistent with the remit of their religious myths. Similarly, the Inquisition was catholic. And so is the catholics penchant for ‘sorcery’, the bigoted, dangerous enforced use onto psychological sufferers (exorcism) if it is done by male priests all the while these communities burn young, lone mothers under the accusation of ‘sorcery’ ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/07/kepari-leniata-young-mother-burned-alive-mob-sorcery-papua-new-guinea_n_2638431.html – warning for strong images; Papua New Guinea is 99 % catholic according to Wikipedia.)
Note that catholic (and protestant) communities historically burned many ‘witches’ and that this is practiced even today, with Papua New Guinea among the repeat offenders. (Happens every few years, see the article.) This torture to death of lone young mothers in peacetime catholic communities is more monstrous in my eyes than the wartime beheading of males by religiously motivated terrorists.
Yet I don’t see Cameron, or anybody else, stand up and claim that these poor, deluded villagers are ‘monsters’.*
*To be clear, they shouldn’t of course. It is the actions that are reprehensible. But Cameron has to play the “us humans vs them monsters” psychological war games.
I must admit I’ve never understood the admiration for Burns’ work, and agree with Merilee’s comment at 4 above.
The American Civil War one was shown over here, and I tried to watch it, but it just told us lots of things we already knew, very very very slowly. The relentlessly reverential tone was also deeply irksome, as though the war was fought by nothing but paragons of honour and heroism on both sides.
Mind you, I quite liked the first two eps of his one on Jazz, even though I loathe jazz, simply because it was mostly new to me.
I would say that Burns’s “Civil War” is definitely up there as one of the very best documentaries but I think it is pipped ( but only just) by ITV’s (UK]’s independent TV) “World at War”
Frankly I was a bit annoyed at the frequency with which we heard from George Will. At least we were spared his use of fifty-cent words. Both Teddy and Franklin were traitors to their economic class – but they had interesting back stories with a lot of trauma that may indeed go some distance in explaining their dynamic approach to government service.
Re: Peter Coyote: speaking of wooo
While still at Grinell College, Peter ingested peyote and had an hallucination in which he saw his footprints as coyote paw-prints. A few years later, he came across Coyote’s Journal, a poetry magazine and recognized their logo as the same paw-prints he has seen during his drug-induced experience. It was this that caused him to change his name to Coyote, after meeting Rolling Thunder (John Pope), a self-styled shaman, who felt that the experience was spiritually significant…( from Wikipedia)
I wonder how long it will be before some Republicans complain that PBS’s showing of “The Roosevelts” so soon before the Nov. elections is a liberal/Obama plot to help Democrats? TR, tho’ nominally a Republican, was as close to today’s Democrats as was FDR!
I happened upon a link to an article by someone called Raymond Ibrahim, who tried to show that the activities of ISIS can be understood as imitating what Mohammed and the first Muslims did in the early years of Islam.
He argues that it can be contextualised using the Sira and Hadith.
As in this:
“Thus we come to the following account concerning the slaughter of ‘Amr bin Hisham, a pagan Arab chieftain originally known as “Abu Hakim” (Father of Wisdom) until Muhammad dubbed him “Abu Jahl” (Father of Stupidity) for his staunch opposition to Islam.
After ‘Amr was mortally wounded by a new convert to Islam during the Battle of Badr, Abdullah ibn Mas‘ud, a close companion of Muhammad, saw the “infidel” chieftain collapsed on the ground. So he went to him and started abusing him. Among other things, Abdullah grabbed and pulled ‘Amr’s beard and stood in triumph on the dying man’s chest.
According to Al-Bidaya wa Al-Nihaya (“The Beginning and the End”), Ibn Kathir’s authoritiative history of Islam, “After that, he [Abdullah] slit his [‘Amr’s] head off and bore it till he placed it between the hands of the Prophet. Thus did Allah heal the hearts of the believers with it.”
This, then, is the true significance of Koran 9:14-15: “Fight them, Allah will torment them with your hands [mortally wounding and eventually decapitating ‘Amr], humiliate them [pulling his beard], empower you over them [standing atop him], and heal the hearts of the believers, removing the rage from their hearts [at the sight of his decapitated head].”
The then says that if this seems far-fetched, “…consider the following picture of a decapitated “infidel” from the Islamic State’s websites. The Arabic caption to the left says “healing for hearts”—a clear reference to the aforementioned Koran verse.”
Using these references he tries to show that the abuse of the ‘infidel’ carried out by IS is their following what the first Muslims did, with the full approval of Mohammed and even with the Angel Gabriel apparently joining in the exultation at the humiliating of the enemies.
I normally consider the source and am a little uncomfortable with the author’s association with very right-wing American organisations, but his arguments actually seem quite sound if he is truthfully presenting the original sources.
The original article is here. It does contain some horrific images of decapitated bodies/severed heads.
http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/beheading-infidels-how-allah-heals-the-hearts-of-believers/
It seems hard to deny that Mohammed was a brutal warlord, and that all Muslims are supposed to hold him as the example of a perfect Muslim. All this makes the Western leaders attempts to say this is somehow not the ‘real Islam’ ring quite hollow.