Archive for the 'Books' category

Bashing Bush, Matt Latimer, and Peggy Noonan

Sep 17 2009 Published by under Books, Operatives, Politics, Self-Promotion

So another “Bush bashing” book is out (at least in excerpt) and the Bushie loyalists are again charging the airwaves and the Internet to defend GWB. Just as we saw with Scott McClellan, they’ll define Latimer as a doofus, out of the loop, in over his head, not as important as he thinks. (Which, of course, begs the question why the Administration excelled at hiring the incompetent and the self-important. Didn’t they have a screening process?)

I have read the excerpts of Latimer’s book and frankly don’t find all that much wrong with it. I’ll likely buy the book and consume it all simply because I liked the way the excerpts were written. His publisher is right. He has an engaging style. Was he in the room or across the street at the EEOB? Who cares. He was clearly closer to the President than 99.9% of Americans will ever get in their life, so let him have his say. We might find it interesting.

The treatment Latimer has received in the last 36 hours, however, has left me perplexed. It reminded me a lot of McClellan’s welcoming reception and that reminded me of something Peggy Noonan wrote.

William Safire, himself a memoirist of the Nixon years, said to me, a future memoirist of the Reagan years: “The one thing history needs more of is first-person testimony.” History needs data, detail, portraits, information; it needs eyewitness. “I was there, this is what I saw.” History will sift through, consider and try in its own way to produce something approximating truth.In that sense one should always say of memoirs of those who hold or have held power: More, please.

Noonan, and by extension Safire, were spot on. I think that every White House staffer should not be discouraged, but rather should be required to write a book, and tell the story of their time there. Our history demands that those making it (whether the President or his secretary) should provide us with as much detail as possible. When these books are written we should not denounce the writer, we should simply ask for the next installment from the guy who sat next to Latimer so we could see how he remembered the events.

One of the most interesting conversations I have ever had was with the woman who sat next to Monica Lewinsky in the White House. She once gave me her take on the woman behind the blue dress and it meant more to me than any ABC News special report.

Do I buy the caricature of Latimer as an opportunist trying to parlay his brush with fame into a financial windfall? Absolutely. Do I also believe that much of what he says is probably exactly as he remembers it? Absolutely.

That’s why we need more of these books, not less. We need to be able to compare notes and make our own determination about what happened, who these people were, where they made mistakes and where they proved they were only human.

Now, the latest to weigh in against Latimer in protecting the Bush years is James Carville.

This little dweeb needs to be glove slapped… People that have the honor of working in the White House ought not be going out and publishing this…

I couldn’t disagree with Carville more.

The people that need to be glove slapped are Carville and his ilk for attempting to silence future tomes. If Dana Perino, Tony Fratto, or Ed Gillespie recall events differently, let them write a book and give us their take. By the time all the ink dries, we might have a semi-complete picture of life inside the GWB administration.

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Fast vs. Slow Zombies

Sep 16 2009 Published by under Books, Gaming, Movies, Pop Culture, Zombie Apocalypse

While I was at PAX, one of my fellow panelists turned me on to Max Brooks’ book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. It’s an excellent read if you’re into either the zombie genre or just really dark humor. After reading it, I have been recommending the book to anyone who will listen. It’s simply outstanding.

As with most topics I write about here, the subject of zombies has prompted some interesting discussions with friends and colleagues. In the case of World War Z, my only complaint about the book is its reliance on the slow moving, arms raised, schleppy zombie made famous by George Romero films. I, as a matter of preference, would much rather have seen the speedy, violent zombies of 28 Weeks Later / 28 Days Later or the Xbox 360 game Left 4 Dead.

I firmly believe that when the zombie apocalypse (ZA) finally comes, it will look more like the rage virus. Honestly, it would have to. The fact is a slow zombie is simply not that hard to defeat. They’re kind of like cows. You could hunt them with a dent mallet. Granted, if you were set upon by a pack, it may be harder to fight off. However, the spread of the contagion would either have to be immediate or a single mass event would have to hit most of the population at once.

In World War Z, the contagion is slow to spread. Brooks gives the impression that a year or two passes between the first outbreak and the pandemic. That’s simply too slow for a zombie virus to move unless the zombies themselves are so fast, and so hard to kill, that they can rapidly turn new zombies. Compare Brooks’ approach to that of 28 Days/Weeks Later or even the disaster of a film called Quarantine. (If you haven’t seen Quarantine, think of it as the Blair Witch Project of zombie movies – shaky handicam story telling that rapidly becomes painful to sit through.) The contagion in those movies spreads rapidly enough, and the zombies become fast and violent enough to quickly become a problem.

What has been interesting to me is the almost universal agreement on the topic of fast versus slow zombies. Just about everybody I have raised the issue with agrees that fast zombies are much scarier, much harder to kill, and much more likely when the ZA is upon us. I have to wonder, then, why franchises like Resident Evil or the remakes/knock-offs of Romero films generally portray the zombies as stupid and slow.

It seems to me that the future of zombie films has to lie with fast, violent zombies. Purists may disagree, but the only movies I can see remaining true to the schleppy zombies would be flicks like Shaun of the Dead that actually mock the speed.

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