the cretinization process: The President is Missing, exhibit 1 million

No weak men in the books at home
The strong men who have made the world
History lives on the books at home
The books at home
Gang of Four

Poor Anthony Lane, the NY-er movie critic. He used to be an interesting mind to take to the movies. But I've noticed in the last couple of years definite signs of burnout - which have now flashed red with his spineless review of the Clinton-Patterson powerwank fiesta, The President is Missing. Itis written as though by a Clintonite who was still overawed by Bill Clinton'swankitude - Rolling Stones, 1992 - rather than appalled by Bill Clinton'slifestyle, friends, vanity, etc., etc. Lane is one of those people - probably alarge segment of the New Yorker readership - who actually bought Clinton'sautobiography. One born every second, as someone said.

Compare this very cool essay on the site, Fellow Travelers, a lefty foreign policy blog by Greg Mercer.

It is precisely 100 times better than the Lane tossoff.

Lane could have done with this kind of research:

"In a recent paper for International Studies Quarterly, J. Furman Daniel, III, and Paul Musgrave examine the genuine impact that military fiction can have on policymakers and military leaders. This is a somewhat controversial approach—Daniel and Musgrave note that a sizable portion of the political science field is devoted to “respectable” sources: scholarly writing, certainly not fiction. When examining political actors’ motivations, those in this school argue, resources like pop history and fiction have far less explanatory power than journal articles and vetted reports. This is a comforting idea. After all, we’d like to believe that the secretary of defense puts more faith in intelligence reports than paperback novels. Popular fiction in political science is mostly relegated to serving as a mirror of culture, not an explanatory factor. The technothriller, however, enjoys the position of being frequently cited by pundits and military influencers alongside policy papers and live reporting."

You cannot understand American foreign policy if you don't understand the enormous influence of Tom Clancy. It would be like trying to understand Athens without knowing about the Greek myths. To understand the thinking of right-center Dems like Lieberman, who was pathetically influential in the 00s, you have to go to the story - reported somewhere, I'll look it up later - in a portrait of the mook which depicted his excitement coming out of an action movie, one of those in which Arabs are casually blasted into the smithereens they deserve, since they are all evil.

Or there is this, from Mercer's article:

"Daniel and Musgrave present some well-known examples. Bill Clinton became interested in bioterrorism not from dry briefings but after reading Richard Preston’s The Cobra Event. While experts have decried to bioterrorism scenario in the novel as highly unrealistic, Clinton’s interest was nonetheless piqued. He ordered the government to invest more in bioterrorism preparedness. Ronald Reagan famously inquired about American strategic cybersecurity after watching WarGames, in which Matthew Broderick hacks into NORAD and narrowly averts a nuclear war."

Myself, I think this genre has had a sort of epidemic effect in that it has been a carrier of the mass cultural illiteracy that effects college educated white males. Historians will miss a trick if they don't examine the cretinizing process in the U.S., circa 1980 - 2018. Patterson and Clinton could be faces on the totem pole commemorating that cretinization.