(Photo by Robin Holland)
In this week’s JOURNAL, Bill Moyers spoke with film director Oliver Stone about how his experience fighting in Vietnam has informed his work -- including his famous Vietnam trilogy in PLATOON, BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, and HEAVEN & EARTH -- and influenced his worldview. Stone, the recipient of a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, described how filmmaking helped him work out his feelings and move on to the next phase of his life.
“When you first see combat, it's like pro-football. It goes much faster than you think and more awkwardly than you think, and it's not particularly grand or anything. You try to save your life, and you see death, and you get used to it, and after a few engagements you get better at it... You crystallize the fear. You have to lose the fear. You have to get past it. Because otherwise you're gonna freeze up... You get angry and that's not a good emotion, either. But you get awfully pissed off... When I came back from Vietnam, I was an angry young man and had violent thoughts, and I went through a period of adjustment. I was very lucky in the sense that I went to NYU Film School, and I got a chance to make films. And that was a release, an artistic expression, and I did three Vietnam movies. So, I think over the course of those three movies, I learned a lot more. And I worked out some of my deepest feelings that I didn't even recognize at the time.”
What do you think?
Has artistic expression helped you work out issues in your life? Explain.
Is art a viable healing strategy? Why or why not?
(Photo by Robin Holland)
Below is an article by JOURNAL senior writer Michael Winship. We welcome your comments below.
"The Afghan Ambush"
By Michael Winship
The decision has been made. The months of meetings and briefings are over. Tuesday night, the President made it official: 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. Along with Friday’s announcement of an additional 7,000 from our NATO allies, after all those weeks of debate and consultation, the result’s pretty much exactly what our commander over there, General Stanley McChrystal, asked for in the first place.
As they used to say in the old war movies, we’re in it now, up to our necks. More than ever, this is Obama’s War. The mess he inherited from the previous administration is now his mess. And while many Republicans may don their helmets, rattle their empty rusty scabbards and shout that escalation is the only way to go, their temporary declarations of support are just that – temporary. Pats on the back are simply their way of finding the proper place to stick the knife.
Last week's Gallup Poll showed that while 65 percent of Republicans support sending all the troops McChrystal wants, only 17 percent of Obama's own Democrats do; 57 percent want a troop reduction. In other words, ignoring the entreaties of a majority in his own party Obama is going to war cheered on by the opposition that will do everything in its power next fall to bring him and his fellow Democrats down.
Continue reading "Michael Winship: The Afghan Ambush" »
(Photo by Robin Holland)
This week on the JOURNAL, Bill Moyers spoke with famed scientist Jane Goodall, best known for her groundbreaking work with Chimpanzees in Tanzania.
For the past two decades, Goodall has devoted much of her time to environmental advocacy, convincing audiences that saving the wilderness and wild creatures needs to be a priority for all of us, and that individual citizens can make a profound difference. She told Moyers:
“There have been extinctions. The dinosaurs are thought to have been [because of] a meteorite or something. And there've been gradual extinctions, because there have been fluctuations in climate that changes ecosystems and habitats. But since the industrial revolution, our human impact on the planet – our greenhouse gas emissions, our reckless damage to the natural world, the continual growth of our populations, have had a tremendously damaging effect... Wouldn't it be easy just to say, ‘Well, it's a trend and it's just happening. The pendulum is swinging. We just better sit back and let it swing. And maybe one day it'll swing back.’ If everybody stopped, [if] everybody gave up, then I wouldn't like to think of the world that my great-great-grandchildren would be born into.”
What do you think?
How are you and your community helping to preserve the environment?
Happy Thanksgiving from THE JOURNAL!
(Photo by Robin Holland)
Below is an article by JOURNAL senior writer Michael Winship. We welcome your comments below.
"A Jane Goodall Thanksgiving"
By Michael Winship
Give thanks. Because this isn’t one of those Thanksgiving lists of things for which we should be grateful -- although health, family, friends, laughter, etc., would certainly all be on mine.
And Jane Goodall.
Yes, that Jane Goodall, the woman we all grew up with watching those National Geographic specials on TV as she communed with the chimpanzees of Tanzania’s Gombe National Park in East Africa. Everyone I know seems especially to remember those scenes of chimps ingeniously utilizing straw and blades of grass to poke around in mounds hunting for termites, proof that they know how to make and use tools. I still have trouble opening a can of tuna.
Goodall was interviewed by my colleague Bill Moyers for this week’s edition of BILL MOYERS JOURNAL on PBS. She began her work in Africa in 1960 at the age of 26, spurred by the encouragement of her English mother and the great anthropologist Louis Leakey, as well as the African adventure books she read as a child. “I was in love with Tarzan,” she told Moyers. “I was so jealous of that wimpy Jane. I knew I would have been a better mate for Tarzan.”
I’m especially thankful to Jane Goodall after reading the passage in Sarah Palin’s GOING ROGUE in which the erstwhile vice presidential candidate and Governor of Alaska writes that she doesn’t “believe in the theory that human beings -- thinking, loving beings -- originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea. Or that human beings began as single-celled organisms that developed into monkeys who eventually swung down from trees.”
Continue reading "Michael Winship: A Jane Goodall Thanksgiving" »
This week on the JOURNAL, Bill Moyers looked back some four decades to his experience as a member of President Lyndon Johnson’s administration. At the time, Johnson made a series of fateful decisions to escalate the war in Vietnam, where eventually over two million American military personnel would serve. Estimates indicate that nearly 60,000 U.S. troops – and more than a million Vietnamese – were killed during the course of the conflict.
With an eye on President Obama’s deliberations on whether to deploy more U.S. troops in addition to the 68,000 already in Afghanistan, Moyers presented a montage of recorded conversations and his personal memories of President Lyndon Johnson’s decisions to escalate the war in Vietnam. He said:
“Our country wonders this weekend what is on President Obama’s mind. He is apparently about to bring months of deliberation to a close and answer General Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops in Afghanistan. When he finally announces how many, why, and at what cost, he will most likely have defined his presidency, for the consequences will be far-reaching and unpredictable. As I read and listen and wait with all of you for answers, I have been thinking about the mind of another President – Lyndon B. Johnson. I was 30 years old, a White House assistant, working on politics and domestic policy. I watched and listened as LBJ made his fateful decisions about Vietnam... Barack Obama is not Lyndon Johnson, Afghanistan is not Vietnam and this is now, not then. The situation is different. But listen – and you will hear echoes and refrains that resonate today.”
The nation is divided about America’s mission in Afghanistan. In a new WASHINGTON POST – ABC News poll, 55% of respondents expressed confidence that President Obama will pick a strategy that will work, but 52% said that the war in Afghanistan has not been worth fighting given the costs versus the benefits.
What do you think?
How does the history of the Vietnam War compare to the present situation in Afghanistan?
What decisions do you think Obama should make regarding Afghanistan? What do you think he's actually going to do? Explain.
(Photo by Robin Holland)
Below is an article by JOURNAL senior writer Michael Winship. We welcome your comments below.
"New York’s Tough Enough for Terrorist Trials"
By Michael Winship
If you want to royally tick off New Yorkers, try telling us what to do.
That’s probably why the police stopped trying to enforce the jaywalking laws here years ago (as opposed to Washington, DC, where I once got one too many tickets and was sent to pedestrian school).
And that’s why in the weeks after 9/11, my favorite sign was the one that appeared in the windows of Italian-American neighborhoods near where I live downtown. In bright red, white and blue, it read: “One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. You got a problem with that?”
So imagine how pleased many of us were when told by conservatives – most of them from out-of-town -- that we should be very afraid that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and some of his Al Qaeda henchmen will be put on trial here in New York City, just blocks from the scene of their horrific crime, the World Trade Center.
Continue reading "Michael Winship: New York's Tough Enough for Terrorist Trials" »
(Photo by Robin Holland)
Below is an article by JOURNAL senior writer Michael Winship. We welcome your comments below.
"In a Chilly London November, War and Remembrance"
By Michael Winship
In Great Britain, Remembrance Sunday falls on the second Sunday of November, the one closest to November 11th, the anniversary of the end of the First World War in 1918. Once, the world called November 11th Armistice Day. Now, here in the States at least, it is Veterans Day.
As coincidence and travel itineraries would have it, twice over the last four years I’ve been in London on Remembrance Sunday. This time, my girlfriend Pat and I were on our way home from Greece, stopping off for a couple of days to see old friends.
As we unpacked at the hotel, a recap of the Remembrance Sunday ceremonies was playing on TV – Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his wife laying a wreath at the Cenotaph (the UK equivalent of our Tomb of the Unknown Soldier), a stirring parade of veterans along Whitehall, the military bands playing “Rule, Britannia,” “God Save the Queen” and “O Valiant Hearts.”
Continue reading "Michael Winship: In a Chilly London November, War and Remembrance" »
(Photo by Robin Holland)
This week on the JOURNAL, Bill Moyers spoke with acclaimed actress-playwright Anna Deavere Smith about her latest production, LET ME DOWN EASY, in which she recreates the voices of 20 real people grappling with illness and mortality.
Smith explained what her production is about:
“LET ME DOWN EASY is about grace and kindness in a world that lacks that often, [but] not always. And a winner-takes-all world, where we don't think about the people who are losing. We don't think about the people who are abandoned by jobs or governments or lovers or mothers or fathers. [It’s] a call for that kind of grace and kindness and consideration and the metaphor, I think, of death as the ultimate form of loss, possibly our greatest fear – the ultimate form of abandonment. And that in this country we have a hard time looking at death and we have a hard time looking at loss and we have a hard time looking at losing. And I think that doesn't help us be the most caring environment.”
What do you think?
Do you agree with Smith’s view that Americans have trouble thinking about death and loss? Why or why not?
What are your personal stories about dealing with illness and mortality?
This week, the JOURNAL introduced viewers to Poets House in New York City, a space dedicated to celebrating the literary form that has been called “the queen of arts.”
At the grand reopening of the facility in a large new space in Manhattan, several writers shared their love of poetry. Lee Briccetti said:
“Language is central to our identity as human beings and poetry is central to language. Every culture has a poetry. And I believe that when people in the caves were blowing paint into the imprints of their hands, they were also chanting words to go with that. It goes very, very deep into the essence of what we are as human beings.”
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins said:
“Poetry fills me with joy and I rise like a feather in the wind. Poetry fills me with sorrow and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge. But mostly, poetry fills me with the urge to write poetry, to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the tip of my pencil.”
Do you have a passion for poetry? Please share your thoughts and poems in the space below.
(Photo by Robin Holland)
Below is an article by JOURNAL senior writer Michael Winship. We welcome your comments below.
"Don’t Believe Everything the Oracle Tells You"
By Michael Winship
ATHENS, GREECE – Last Sunday, we visited the ruins of ancient Delphi, two hours or so from here in the Greek capital, an extraordinary site at the base of Mount Parnassus overlooking the Pleistos Valley, almost half a mile below. You could see the acres of olive trees there. The Ionian Sea shimmered on the horizon.
Legend has it that Zeus released two eagles from the opposite ends of the earth. They met at Delphi, determining that it was the center, the so-called navel of the world.
Delphi and its temples were where the famous Oracle lived, uttering its often ambiguous and mysterious predictions through a priestess who spoke on its behalf – but, our guide claimed, only after inhaling sulfuric vapors from a hole in the earth and chewing laurel leaves to get into the proper psychotropic mood.
During the Persian Wars, the guide said, Athenians asked the Oracle how to protect themselves from being attacked by the enemy. The Oracle replied, “A wall of wood alone shall be uncaptured.” Many of the Athenians figured that meant they should seek protection behind a formidable wooden barricade. Makes sense, but the Persians seized the city anyway. Such is the price of being logical – in my experience, it’s always a mistake to take a priestess imbibing laurel leaves and sulfur too literally.
Continue reading "Michael Winship: Don’t Believe Everything the Oracle Tells You" »
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