Make the call

How are we getting out of here?

1) Submarine
2) Experimental teleporter
3) Let's leave by the front door.

The smartest show on television

10:35 PM V: Homeland is the smartest show on television

10:37 PM V: I'm actually too tired right now to go into why this show is so offensive

  Not just intellectually offensive

  I'll just give you an example

10:38 PM The first few episodes are all about this is-he-or-isn't-he-a-terrorist for Damien Lewis's character.

  This is a Showtime show, so it's hour-long episodes forming a season-long arc.

10:39 PM Viewership is driven by cliffhangers.

  So the cliffhanger at the end of one of this episodes is that Lewis's character, a recently returned POW whose motives are suspect, goes into his garage, takes out a prayer mat... and prays to Allah.

10:40 PM How offensive is that?

  OMG, he's a MUSLIM... THAT answers it: he MUST be a terrorist

10:41 PM Additionally, the season-long arc is that there is this incredibly detailed and complex terrorist plot to target senior political figures.

  Now, recall that this show is trying to be `The Wire' of the technothriller terrorism genre

  So we, as an audience, are supposed to believe that what we're seeing is real

10:42 PM So the aesthetics are out of `The Wire' but the sensibilities are straight out of `24'

  Again, extremely offensive (intellectually)

  In the newest episode, it turns out that Damien Lewis (who we now know to be a repentant terrorist) has become a congressman is being put on the vice presidential ticket

10:44 PM I can't tell if this is intellectually offensive (lazily ripping of `Manchurian Candidate') or offensive to our sensibilities (I seem to recall a certain political figure subject to such accusations as a result of little more than peurile racism)

10:46 PM Even the political scenes are like watching CNN political coverage

10:48 PM The writers are way too impressed with their ability to present thoughts that would be controversial and counterintuitive if they weren't already so mundane and so hackneyed

  `Veep' is a better look into the political process than `Homeland' and it's a comedy!

10:49 PM You should watch this show to see modern, post-colonial racialism at work

10:50 PM The entire cast is this supposedly hyper-competent white CIA analysts who are experts on intelligence and the middle east

10:51 PM Also, what a bad actress, Claire Danes

6 minutes

10:58 PM V: Her only acting mode is bitchy high school girl

17 minutes

11:15 PM V: hahahaha

  So Damian Lewis's character, candidate for vice president, is a secret muslim

  hmm

  Not quite offensive enough yet

From myths to national self-appraisal

I nearly broke down altogether when I entered the lofty gallery where the blessed goddess of beauty, Our Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. I lay prostrate at her feet for a long time, and I wept so bitterly that it would have melted a heart of stone. And indeed the goddess did look down pitifully upon me, yet at the same time so hopelessly as if she were trying to say: But don’t you see that I have no arms and that therefore I cannot help you.

Hölderlin ‘grew up in the arms of the gods’; Heine’s goddess didn’t have any. The Greeks, Heine said, were of no use to Europe’s revolutions; genuine political reform required a much more mundane form of national self-appraisal.

Thomas Meaney: Germany Imagines Hellas

R.I.P. E.J.H

Eric Hobsbawm 1917-2012