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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

almarst2003 - 05:51am Mar 25, 2003 EST (# 10463 of 10476)

Cont:

As someone caught up by chance in this year's oddly timed festivities - I wrote the screenplay of The Hours - it has been bewildering to see how quickly opinions have changed and then just as quickly changed back again. Uncertainty about how to proceed with the Oscars has been, on some small scale, a reflection of how hard it is to think lucidly about the war.

When Harvey Weinstein announced on Saturday night at a Miramax reception that "the show must go on, but with more discretion than before", then we knew he was talking nonsense. But the interesting thing is what kind of nonsense it was.

It is as if a good many Americans are still not actually quite sure what expressions they ought to be wearing at a time when their troops are engaging in such a brutally uneven encounter, and for purposes that remain, after nine months of ineffective propaganda, substantially in doubt.

If we were really at war, really at risk in an action that the people of both Britain and America truly believed in, then the question of how to behave in public would resolve itself effortlessly. Need, heroism and grief would take over unforced from the trouble, confusion and bad conscience that are currently more widely on show.

When the Administration's media spaniels attack Hollywood for its selfishness and excess, then what they are really doing is struggling to reassert control of the narrative. Don de Lillo argues in his novel Underworld that, every 10 years, politicians deliberately stage an international crisis in order to remind the world that it is they who are in charge of mankind's destiny.

These events, like the Cuban missile crisis or the Falklands war, are, essentially, acts of ownership, staged by a hyper-professional political class to bring home to ordinary people an overwhelming sense of their own powerlessness. You march to Hyde Park in your hundreds of thousands, but you do so in the knowledge that you will be ignored. Your views count for nothing.

Thus, Washington resents Hollywood not because Hollywood has any real power, but because politicians see all too clearly in the sometimes cringe-making doubts and hesitations of actors and film-makers the very same doubts and hesitations that they know are haunting whole sections of society.

Underneath the politicians' hostility to the manufacturers of fiction is the alarming possibility that mere actors, gathered together for a hapless gong show, may, in their repeated willingness to allude, however incoherently, to the wellspring of their own craft be closer to the everyday feelings of the general public than they are themselves.

People who enjoy the idle pleasure of getting worked up about actors exploiting their celebrity to express political views should remember George Bernard Shaw, who knew the exact currency of his own profession: "I shall never have any real influence, because I have never killed anybody and don't want to."

By Shaw's salutary yardstick the truly influential people of our time remain who they have always been: Pinochet, Kissinger, Saddam Hussein and Milosevic. Not Martin Sheen, for goodness' sake. Nor Susan Sarandon.

almarst2003 - 05:57am Mar 25, 2003 EST (# 10464 of 10476)

"geographically inept"

Well, some nations made sure to exterminated enough native inhabitans to become geographically fit.

lchic - 06:09am Mar 25, 2003 EST (# 10465 of 10476)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

location location location

Postion Position Position

In terms of global real estate Yugoslavia was a crossing point - From Europe through to East Asia - The Silk Road ... always busy with traffic -- passing through en route to 'elsewhere'

almarst2003 - 07:06am Mar 25, 2003 EST (# 10466 of 10476)

"Yugoslavia was a crossing point"

The Old-to-New morphing night road thieves put it into a hair-crossing point.

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